Power Game

by Brad Magnarella

  Holding fast, I gathered all the energy I could, straining until the ley lines themselves began to bend. Power thrummed through my casting prism, my body. Though my capacity had grown, I was pushing the limits of what I could handle.

  But I can’t afford to come up short…

  When spots began to dance across my vision, I bellowed, “Disfare!”

  The discharge of energy felt like a bomb going off. I stumbled backwards as an oily black fountain erupted into the air. I gained my footing to find that the creature hadn’t been dispersed, but blown through the middle. To one side, its legs flopped as if trying to stand independently of each other. Off to the other side, arms jerked from its severed torso, while its mouth released a weak series of croaks.

  “Stay back,” I warned the others.

  But the creature’s two halves were melting, turning to vapor. Though I hadn’t dispersed the forces holding the entire creature together, the discharge of energy had disrupted them enough, apparently.

  I quickly pulled out the vial that had contained the sleeping potion, scooped up some of the creature’s oily discharge, and capped it so that the vial was airtight. I even cast a small invocation to ensure nothing escaped. If I could determine where the creature had come from, I would have a better sense of our conjurer. I would also be better prepared the next time a frog-beast or something like it showed up.

  “You all right?” Vega asked, coming up beside me.

  “Yeah.” I slid the vial into a pocket. “Nice shooting.”

  “You didn’t do so bad yourself.” She watched the still-dissolving creature warily. Though it had stopped croaking, its legs continued to twitch. “What in the hell was that?”

  “Don’t know yet, but it was resistant to my magic.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Wouldn’t listen to me, either,” Mae said, joining us.

  Vega slid a fresh mag into her weapon. “At least we know silver hurts it.”

  I nodded. Silver had the power to damage manifested form and slow its regeneration. Good to know the creature hadn’t been resistant to that too.

  Vega turned to the officers behind us and pointed out the panoramic security cameras studding the ceiling. The officers nodded and moved off to review the hotel footage for anyone entering the room the creature had appeared from.

  Vega cocked her head toward the room. “Shall we?”

  “Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure what I would do if another one were back there. I was completely spent—so much so that if Thelonious had been in any shape, he’d be tearing through the conference right now, going absolutely bonkers at all of the idealized expressions of the female form.

  “My baby’s still excited,” Mae said of Buster. “I’m going to get him a soda to calm him down.”

  “Be sure to thank him for alerting us to the creature,” I said. I didn’t even want to think what would’ve happened had the frog-beast emerged onto the crowded floor and we hadn’t been there. With its size, speed, and frigging meat hooks, there was no telling how many attendees it would have skewered before we arrived.

  “Oh, and can you join up with Bree-Yark when you finish?” I added, still not comfortable with the temperamental goblin doing recon on his own.

  “Way ahead of you,” Mae said, smiling and bouncing an eyebrow.

  As she waddled away, I looked at Vega. “Wait, does she have a thing for—?”

  “Not now,” Vega said, and tugged me toward the room.

  I led the way, sword in hand. Vega followed, aiming her weapon into the room’s corners. The storage space was empty. In the center, someone had drawn a symbol much like the ones I’d seen in the basement. Though I was tempted, it was still too risky to attempt a reveal spell.

  “This must be how the perp is moving.”

  I raised my head to find Vega standing in a doorway in the back of the room. An electric sign above it—the one whose light I’d seen through the viewing portal—read EXIT.

  “The corridor leads to a staircase,” Vega said. “I’m betting it connects every level.”

  I joined her, and we accessed the staircase. A little exploration didn’t turn up any clues, but it confirmed her suspicions. The staircase ran the vertical length of the hotel, top to bottom. As we returned to the conjuring room, I said, “The perp did their homework. No cameras back here or in the stairwell.”

  “There could be for the access points, though,” Vega pointed out.

  “Yeah, but all the conjurer would have to do is disable the camera over the one he or she is using.”

  “Which might point to what floor they’re staying on,” Vega said. “I’ll have the team check to see if any cameras are dark.”

  As Vega communicated the request, I hunkered at the edge of the circle to examine it more closely. An anomaly on its far side caught my attention. I rose and walked around for a better look.

  Vega ended her call. “What is it?” she asked.

  “The casting circles in the basement were intact. But do you see this break in the circle? Looks like the result of a timing sigil, set to activate sometime after the creature was summoned. It broke the circle. Someone meant for that thing to get out.” Probably also explained why the door hadn’t been warded.

  “So you think the perp intended to target the conference?” she asked.

  “Looks that way,” I replied with a sigh. “Which means it’s time to shut it down.”

  Damn. That was going to mean losing the caster and this Sefu, who I was beginning to suspect were one and the same. But I wasn’t going to place ten thousand lives at risk. Though we had managed to foil the conjurer this time, we still had no idea who they were or what their end game was.

  Vega squeezed my shoulder.

  “It’s the right call.”

  17

  As Vega and I emerged back onto the cleared-out third floor, I said, “Would you mind if I took a quick look around the neighborhood?”

  “Shouldn’t you be asking me that?” Tabitha said, emerging from under the table where I’d left her.

  “What for?” Vega asked as I began undoing Tabitha’s leash.

  “Well, I’m the one who has to go with him,” Tabitha said.

  “She’s talking to me.” I turned back to Vega. “When that frog thing came into the world, it discharged an energy. The wards that triangulate for this area should have picked it up and alerted me, but I got nothing. Just like with the lizards earlier. The conjurer’s being careful. I’m starting to wonder if they didn’t disable more than a camera.”

  “You think they took out a ward?”

  “A quick check will tell me.”

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’ll break the news to the organizers and help with the evacuation.”

  The last thing I wanted was to leave Vega here, but with working wards, we could get a major jump on the perp. As it stood now, we could only react. “I won’t be long. If anything else turns up, clear out first, let me know second.”

  “Be safe yourself,” she said.

  As the cab pulled up to the site of the first ward, I shook Tabitha awake. She looked over at me and closed her eyes again.

  “C’mon,” I urged, opening the door.

  “I’ll stay in—”

  I clamped a hand over her mouth and coughed. The cabbie’s eyebrows furrowed in the rearview mirror. “Did your cat just speak?” he asked in a thick accent.

  “No,” I said, without elaborating. “Hey, could you keep the meter running? I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  Still covering Tabitha’s mouth, I hefted her from the car and set her on the sidewalk. Tabitha hissed when I removed my hand. “If you’re going to have him wait, why can’t I stay in the cab? It’s fucking frigid out here.”

  “Because I saw the way you looked at him when we got in,” I replied.

  Tabitha scowled and averted her eyes. “I didn’t look at him in any way.”

  “If I didn’t know
better, I’d say someone’s rediscovering her appetite.”

  “Well, you don’t. And even if that were true, it’s only because you haven’t fed me since last night.”

  “We’ll grab something on the way back.”

  “Sure, after we walk to one end of the city and back.”

  Distracted by our exchange, Tabitha had been trudging along beside me as I weaved through pedestrian traffic, everyone either on a phone or in too much of a hurry to notice our conversation. In Tabitha’s defense, the wind blowing down Madison Avenue was stinging cold. The late-morning sun showed as a smudge beyond a thick ceiling of gray clouds, suggesting it would remain like this all day, maybe even snow.

  I stopped in front of a green wooden door in the side of a building.

  “Well, look at that,” I said, pulling out my keychain. “We must be to one end of the city already.” I grinned at Tabitha and inserted an odd-shaped key into the lock. The door opened with a creak. Beyond, a short flight of steps descended into darkness.

  Tabitha peered past my legs. “What is this place?”

  “An early pump station,” I said. “The Order has a ward here.”

  “It smells horrid.”

  I couldn’t argue with her there. It was also underground, which I cared for even less. I cast a ball of light ahead of us and closed and sealed the door behind us. Though my magic was coming back online, I still felt shaky. I’d expended a ton of power against the frog-beast.

  Tabitha and I descended the steps until we were standing in a room snaked through with elephantine plumbing and lined with bolted-down tanks in various states of corrosion. I examined the dust-covered floor, but there were no signs anyone had been down here recently.

  “Over here,” I said, already feeling the humming ward.

  I led Tabitha to the back wall, where an elaborate sigil had been etched into the stone. Vast amounts of energy, invisible to human eyes, coursed through it. Placed at the intersections of major currents of ley energy, the ward grid was originally the work of Chicory, later revealed to be Lich. He employed the system as much to detect intrusions from the nether places as to spy on fellow magic-users. Following Lich’s death, the Order in exile cleaned the wards of his influence and updated them.

  “I don’t like it,” Tabitha stated flatly.

  When I looked down, I saw her hair poofing out in reaction to the energy. I’m not sure she knew it was happening. I shifted fully to my wizard’s senses until I could see the fibers of ley coursing through the ward, could see the ward itself collecting and interpreting ambient energy for blocks and then communicating that information through lines to the adjacent wards. The ward seemed to take a brief interest in Tabitha’s and my proximity before something in the network’s central brain informed it we were harmless.

  In any case, it hadn’t been tampered with, as far as I could tell.

  “Well, everything here seems to be working,” I said.

  “Good, can we eat now?”

  “Yeah, after we check out the other two.”

  “There are two more?”

  “You say it as if I’d told you there were twenty or thirty.”

  Tabitha’s expression changed suddenly. “Everson, demon.”

  “What?”

  “Demon!”

  I wheeled as a bald man in a suit charged toward us, a pipe in his grip.

  “Protezione!” I shouted.

  The shield crackled into shape around us an instant before the pipe descended. Sparks rained over us on impact. Though our protection held, I felt the superhuman blow down to my bones. My next spoken invocation had become a reflex by now: “Respingere!”

  Energy pulsed from the shield, knocking the demon back several feet and sending the pipe clanging across the room.

  Have to keep him on his heels.

  I reached into a pocket and jerked out a glass vial of holy water.

  “Vigore!” I shouted. The force invocation snatched the vial from my upturned hand and slung it like a bullet. The vial exploded against the demon’s chest. He screamed as the blessed water tore bloody holes in his skin.

  “Where did he even come from?” Tabitha asked, hustling to keep me between her and the demon. I remembered seeing the man on the street now, the one person not conforming to the flow of human traffic. I should have recognized the break in the pattern. Should have paid closer attention.

  Just finish him, I urged.

  With my depleted power, I only had a few more invocations in me before I was tapped. I summoned another force invocation, this one meant to pull him into my drawn sword. But the demon dove behind the thick bend in a pipe. My force grabbed the steam trailing from his wounded body and sent it back at me in a humid gust.

  “Wait!” the demon hissed. “I’ve come to make an offer.”

  “Oh, is that what you call trying to brain me with a pipe?”

  “A protection offer.”

  “Even funnier.” I craned my neck in search of him.

  It was clear he was moving, darting silently from cover to cover. That coupled with the pump house’s odd acoustics was making him hard to pinpoint.

  “What kind of protection?” I asked to keep him talking.

  “Protection from me, for one,” he said. “But I’m not the only demon here. Perhaps you’ve heard—there are others. I can ensure they don’t harm you. Or your loved ones,” he added with what sounded like a grin.

  I stiffened at the insinuation.

  “One, I don’t make deals with demons,” I said. “And two, you don’t have that kind of power.” Still peering past my humming shield, I began stepping around, trying to get a better look behind the network of pipes.

  “I don’t have the power yet,” the demon said, his honesty surprising me. “That’s where your side of the agreement comes in.”

  “I can’t wait to hear it.”

  “Tell me where Sefu is,” he hissed.

  I played dumb. “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You move in the same circles.”

  “And what circles would those be?”

  “Magical ones.”

  That’s why the demon had attacked, I realized. He’d wanted to possess me long enough to discover what I knew about this Sefu. I could either keep playing dumb, or I could try to tease out more info from the demon.

  “How did you learn about Sefu?” I asked.

  “So you do know.” He chuckled. “Sefu’s arrival is the hottest news on the street.”

  Arrival?

  “So, here’s my offer,” he went on. “A demon will find Sefu. A demon will make Sefu their host. And that will become the portal by which the demon’s master enters your world.”

  I remembered Arianna’s warning about events escalating.

  “Do you know that for a fact, or is this more news from the street?” I asked.

  “And once the demon master enters your world,” he continued, “that master will become unstoppable.”

  “Well, I’m not seeing where that helps me.”

  Still moving behind the pipes, the demon chuckled. “If the master in question is mine, I’ll ensure you’re compensated for your assistance. As I said, protection for you and your loved ones. You’ll get no such offer from the others. You’ll never need to worry about them again, in fact. My master will smite them from existence.”

  Two protection offers in twenty-four hours. How often did that happen?

  But mention of the other demons shook me, even if what this one was describing sounded nothing like cooperation. And if they also had the idea I knew something about Sefu, I could be looking at a lot of company. As dangerous as Arnaud was, these demons appeared to be further along too, already possessing hosts.

  “How did you even find me?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

  The demon laughed again, the wheezy sound whistling in and out of him. “I can’t tell you all my secrets,” he replied. “Let’s just say I have connections.”

  Thelonious? I wondered.


  “Remember, Everson, a demon’s pact is binding. Once we exchange our words, it will be so.”

  What he neglected to mention was that demons were notorious for exploiting loopholes.

  “Well?” he prompted.

  I could feel the demon watching me from the darkness, muscles tensed, waiting for an opening to make another attempt on my body and soul. If I agreed to the pact, all the better for him, but he wasn’t counting on it.

  Like me, he was buying time to recover.

  Tabitha tugged my pant leg. When I looked down, I was surprised to find her indicating the back wall with her eyes. And here I’d thought the demon had been making his way to our left. I gave her a subtle nod. I continued to move to the left, pretending now that I had no idea where he was.

  “Well, there’s a lot to think about,” I said.

  “Take your time.” His voice still seemed to be coming from elsewhere.

  I began aligning my mind with the ward, establishing a connection to it. When I felt the demon creep in front of it, I whispered a Word. Energy discharged in a crackling boom. I wheeled to find the shrieking demon being blasted from the ward and rocketing toward me. I drove my sword forward, impaling him through the gut.

  “Disfare!” I shouted.

  The topmost sigil on my blade glowed white. The demon’s essence blasted from his host in a screaming wave of black energy that quickly dispersed. A successful banishment. Healing energy collapsed around the blade as I drew it from the man’s body, sealing his wound again. He fell onto his back and lay perfectly still.

  Tabitha walked up and nudged his leg with a paw. “Is he dead?”

  It was a good question. I’d never used the blade to banish a demon from a human host. Gretchen had assured me the enchantment would spare the human in question, and because my father had designed the blade, I believed her. But now my heart began to pound sickly. Had I killed him? I was about to kneel beside the man when he heaved himself upright.