Power Game

by Brad Magnarella

  “Yes,” Arnaud continued, slipping more power into his words. “I’m looking for a man.”

  At last his opponent’s grip on his mind slipped. The focus in his eyes dissolved. “A man?” he repeated.

  “Yes, and what is your name?”

  “Carlos.”

  “I believe it’s someone you know, Carlos. A Mr. Everson Croft.”

  “Everson,” the man repeated, and began to nod.

  The cab driver, who had dozed off, jerked when Arnaud slammed the door and slid to the center of the backseat.

  “I have another address for you,” Arnaud said eagerly. “A hotel in Midtown.”

  The driver nodded, coughed the sleep from his throat, and put the cab into drive. As they rolled past the house, Arnaud saw that Carlos had started back down the walkway to the front door, but now he stopped and turned around. Perhaps for the man’s high intelligence, clarity was already returning to his eyes.

  The eyes had been so reminiscent to Arnaud, and then he had it. They were the same eyes as the detective’s.

  Like brother, like sister, Zarko.

  According to Carlos, both his sister and Croft were at the Centre Hotel, on some sort of work assignment. At last he would have tabs on Croft, who, according to Malphas, would lead him to the powerful vessel. If things turned thorny, he could use the detective as leverage. After all, she’d given her protection to her son.

  Arnaud smiled and raised a hand to Carlos in thanks.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Carlos waved back.

  24

  A light snow had begun to fall by the time we reached Midtown. Bree-Yark smashed the Hummer through an unmanned police barricade that had been blocking off the parade route and peeled onto Forty-sixth Street.

  The Centre Hotel rose ahead. We blew through a low wall of smoke and into a fiery scene of chaos: overturned cars, flashing police lights, strewn costume parts, and occasional conference-goers fleeing whatever temporary refuge they’d taken, terror stretching their faces.

  “Watch out!” I cried.

  Someone in a lizard-man costume wearing red heels stumbled into our path.

  Bree-Yark veered, narrowly missing him, but we had bigger problems. Emerging from the smoke ahead was what appeared to be an army of trees. They looked fearsome, even in silhouette, several rising three and four stories tall. They stalked toward us on massive rooted feet that tore up sections of asphalt. Their bowed arms and knotted fingers looked capable of twisting human heads off like bottle caps. Some of the trees fisted chunks of masonry—ripped from God knew where—which they began to hurl at us.

  “Aren’t those—?”

  “Shamblers,” Bree-Yark finished for me as he steered deftly, the masonry flying and tumbling past. “Straight from the Birnam Forest from the looks of them. Lost a battalion in there once.” He shook his head. “Cranky bastards.”

  Indeed, as they began to clear the smoke, I could see their craggy faces. They all looked like they’d sucked on the same giant lemon.

  It seemed that whoever had conjured the lizards and frog-beast had decided to throw open the gates. And judging by the new arrivals, our perp was someone with access to the faerie realm. Possibly the lunar fae Bree-Yark had been tailing before they shook him. I still didn’t know their objective, but terror seemed to play a role.

  I flinched as another stone projectile narrowly missed us.

  My plan for us had been to enter the hotel through the front and beeline to the conference room where Vega and the others were trapped. But the shamblers were almost to the promenade. We weren’t going to get past them without a fight. As fun as it would have been to tell my grandkids about the time I took on a gang of trees, it wasn’t time we could afford.

  “Has to be a loading entrance…” I muttered, squinting through the smoke. “There!”

  Tires squealed as Bree-Yark followed my pointed finger toward a side street and throttled the hand accelerator. The lead shambler kicked an overturned car. I spun around. The busted vehicle came within inches of the rear bumper as it rocketed past.

  My gaze dropped to Tabitha. She was wide awake, claws buried in the leather upholstery as she tried to peer out both windows simultaneously. She stopped long enough to shoot me a panicked what the fuck? look.

  “Hold on, we’re almost there,” I said.

  “Can you do anything about that?” Bree-Yark asked.

  I turned back around as he bounced the Hummer onto a down ramp for service vehicles. He’d asked so casually I was shocked to find an accordion steel door rushing up on us.

  “Vigore!” I shouted.

  My force invocation seized the side of the door with more power than I’d intended and slammed it to the side, leaving behind a scattering of lock pieces. The Hummer plunged through the dark opening barely having slowed.

  “Bit of a gamble I’d get it open in time,” I said in a trembling voice.

  Bree-Yark snapped on the headlights. “I had this baby modified with an off-road steel bumper over the summer. Figured we’d get through one way or another.”

  The ramp deposited us into the hotel’s loading area, an enormous space with boxes stacked along the walls. A few fluorescent lights flickered overhead. I noticed that the smoke had spread down here, washing out everything in a thin gray mist. Bree-Yark steered past several parked cargo vans and came to a stop in front of a service elevator.

  “Do you want to stay in the car?” I asked Tabitha.

  “And wait for one of those tree things to punt it like a football?” she asked.

  “Good point. But you’re going to have to keep close.”

  I got out, helped Tabitha from the backseat, and hustled to the closed elevator door. It had been almost fifteen minutes since Vega’s call, and I hadn’t been able to reach her since. Anything could have happened in that time.

  The service elevator was key operated. Thankfully, someone’s elevator key was already in the panel, the rest of the keychain hanging beneath it. I twisted the key and hit the button, setting the elevator’s mechanisms into motion. When I looked back, the Hummer’s rear door was open, and Bree-Yark was rifling through the trunk.

  “What are you doing?” I called.

  “Grabbing a couple weapons.”

  I saw him fasten a sheath to his belt into which he slid a nasty-looking blade.

  “Hurry up, elevator’s almost here.” The words were barely out of my mouth when the elevator stopped and the door rattled open. I staggered back. Tabitha grunted in disgust. It took me a moment to fully understand what I was looking at, but they were rats. Giant ones, the size of fattened pigs. With piercing screeches, the dozen-odd rats launched themselves from the elevator car.

  “Protezione!” I managed. The shield crackled to life around us moments before the first rats arrived, heads butting into our protection. In a flash, they were crawling over one another to get to us, yellow teeth scraping at the hardened air inches from my face.

  “Get them off,” Tabitha insisted.

  “Respingere!” I cried.

  With a flashing pulse from the shield, the rats were hurled every which way. But before they’d even come to a rest, they were kicking themselves upright and coming in again. I pointed my sword at the lead one. Before I could shout another invocation, gunfire cracked. The rat screeched as it was knocked into a side skid.

  Bree-Yark moved in front of us, an M16 rifle at his shoulder.

  “Into the elevator,” he barked. “I’ve got you covered.”

  Tabitha and I backed into the elevator as Bree-Yark released another series of shots. The charging rats flipped off as if they were being flicked. Good thing, because I didn’t want to expend magic that could short our ride up.

  I hammered the button for the first floor. Nothing moved.

  Or had my magic already shorted our ride up?

  No, I needed the elevator key that was still outside. Bree-Yark stepped forward and waved a hand behind him: a signal for me to go. As I ducked out of the el
evator, the loading level shook. Something was lumbering down the ramp at a run. I grabbed the keys from the panel and pulled them free, not peeking back until I was in the elevator again.

  Beyond the giant rats, an ogre was descending into view. The minor giant slowed to a stop, then looked around to orient himself. It didn’t take him long to spot the three of us. The fluorescent lights flickered over a dull gray eye in the center of the creature’s forehead. Not an ogre, I realized. A cyclops.

  Yeah, time to go.

  It wasn’t just that the thing was unclothed and every time it took a step its gargantuan appendage jiggled in a way that made it impossible not to look at. Cyclopes were just plain violent.

  I struggled to insert the key into the panel.

  Bree-Yark adjusted his aim and opened fire on the cyclops. Shots flashed off the monster’s hairy body and head, sending him into a stagger. When he gained his footing, he released a savage roar and charged.

  At last the key slotted home.

  I turned it and punched the button for the first floor again. The door closed off our view of the looming cyclops and all of his parts. As we lifted off, a heavy pounding sounded, sending shockwaves through the car.

  Soon, though, the sound fell beneath us.

  “Good God,” Tabitha breathed. “Why did I ever decide to come?”

  I pulled in my power as tightly as I could to preclude any mechanical mishaps.

  Bree-Yark lifted his M16 and swapped out his spent mag for a fresh one.

  “What kind of ammo are you using?” I asked.

  “Iron. What else?”

  “Shouldn’t that have taken him down?”

  “Must be protected.”

  Great, so not only were we dealing with a fae strong enough to summon shamblers, giant rats, owlbears, cyclopes, and who knew what else, we were dealing with one who could cover them in defensive magic. And once we got Vega and everyone to safety, it was going to be my job to find and neutralize that fae.

  Anger broke through my fear. Where in the hell was Gretchen?

  Gathering myself, I pulled the conference program from my pocket and showed Bree-Yark the hotel map. “The elevator will drop us here. We’re heading to here, the Magenta Room. That’s where Vega called from.” I traced the route with a finger. “I’ll wrap us in a one-way shield so we can still attack, but we’ll need to stay close. That goes for you too,” I told Tabitha.

  But she didn’t need reminding. Still traumatized from the action in the loading area, she was pressing all forty pounds of her body into my legs. The battle-hardened goblin only sniffed and nodded.

  As I returned the program to my pocket, I patted my other pockets to double-check the location of my iron amulet and all my potions.

  My thoughts jagged to Grandpa’s coin pendant. When I’d accessed it on the drive here, I hadn’t felt its aura around Vega, but her son. Meaning Vega was now defenseless against Arnaud and much of faedom.

  The elevator rattled to a stop. When the door opened, I poked my head out. The plain corridor was empty. Isolated shouts and screams sounded from the hotel. I waved Bree-Yark and Tabitha out. The air shimmered into a shield around us as we ran down the corridor, Tabitha loping to keep up. I hit a locked door with a force invocation, and we burst onto the second floor’s large hall. I pulled up hard.

  “Fuck, darling,” Tabitha said, taking in the scene from floor level.

  The convention had become a horror show. Trolls, owl bears, and large humanoid creatures whose forms were composed of writhing vines lumbered through the smoky mist that had reached the hall. But more horrible were the victims littering the floor. There had to be hundreds, many torn to pieces.

  I swallowed hard. No.

  My eyes moved to the Magenta Room. The doors were flung wide.

  I ran toward it, my mind already screaming at what I was going to find. With grunts and low moans, the monstrosities began swinging themselves toward us, several dropping the bloodied bodies they’d been dragging—or gnawing.

  “Vigore!” I shouted, nailing them with one explosive force invocation after another. Bree-Yark came up to my side squeezing off bursts of automatic fire. Though the monsters staggered from our attack, we didn’t seem to be dealing much damage. But my goal right now was to clear a path to the conference room, and in that we were succeeding. I planned to save my iron amulet attacks and potions for getting us out.

  And for dealing with the person behind this.

  I reached the door, hoping beyond all reason that somehow, someway…

  But among the dispersion of mangled bodies, I couldn’t see any survivors.

  As though pulled by a magnetic force, my gaze moved to a victim on her side, facing away from me. Her midnight hair was plastered to the back of a black jacket. Where the jacket’s right side had hiked up, I recognized the holster at her waist. Her bloodied sidearm was several feet away, knocked from her grip during the massacre.

  Even as Bree-Yark’s M16 popped behind me, a roaring silence filled my head.

  It can’t be her, I started repeating, despite all evidence to the contrary. It can’t be her.

  I felt myself move forward. Felt my knees on the floor behind her. Felt my arm reach forward, my hand grip her stiff shoulder.

  It was her.

  I stopped, unable to roll Vega toward me.

  I could already feel her absence, and the thought of seeing an empty pair of eyes…

  I straightened the side of her jacket instead, barely aware Tabitha had come up beside me. I had dropped her leash at some point. My cat’s breath caught as she realized who I was kneeling beside. She looked from Vega’s body to me.

  “Can’t hold them off much longer,” Bree-Yark barked behind us.

  I drew out a neutralizing potion, activated it in a monotone, and chugged it down my raw throat.

  It was time to find the dead bastard responsible.

  25

  I pressed my hand to the familiar curve of Vega’s back before rising on hollow legs and turning. My shocked mind cast everything in an aura of unreality: the dead around me, the monsters crowding the doorway, the rounds exploding into them, the misty drift of smoke, the fallen woman behind me.

  I stood for a moment unable to command a body I felt so detached from.

  It was the potion’s movement through me that brought me back to myself. Identical to the potion I’d used the night before against Seay the Fae, it would protect me from direct attacks by a fae caster.

  A fae caster I would stop at nothing to track down and kill.

  I aimed my sword at the host of screeching, snarling faces crowding the doorway.

  “Keep ’em back,” Bree-Yark barked at me. “I’ve gotta reload.”

  The popping of his M16 stopped as he ejected the magazine. But instead of invoking, I slowly lowered my sword.

  “The hell are you doing?” the goblin demanded, working double time now to slot his new mag. “They’re coming in!”

  “No,” I said. “They’re not.”

  He looked from the doorway to me in alarm. “You enchanted or something?”

  “Past tense,” I replied, reality and reason rushing back into me. “We all were. See the smoke? We drove through a wall of it to reach the hotel, remember? But it’s not smoke. It’s an enchantment mist.”

  I followed Bree-Yark’s eyes back to the door. The door was indeed open, but for me, the monsters were thinning and disappearing as the elaborate multi-sensory illusion lost its grip on my mind. Bree-Yark swore as he fumbled his mag to the floor. When he tried to retrieve it, I stepped on it.

  “What are you doing?” he barked.

  “Drink about three quarters,” I said, activating another neutralizing potion and holding it toward him. “Give the rest to Tabitha.”

  I could see his mind resisting, but a lifetime in the goblin army had taught him to follow orders. Flinching from the illusory monsters, he snatched the vial and jammed it to his lips. While he sucked it down, I turned, a part of me terri
fied that everything would prove to have been an illusion except for Vega’s death.

  But the body I’d knelt beside in agony just moments before was gone.

  They all were. I spotted their living, breathing counterparts hunkered in a corner beside the stage. With the illusion releasing my ears, the grunts and growls of monsters were being replaced by sobbing and wails. Mae’s voice rose in prayer above the others. She was in a prostrate position, her pet carrier hugged to her side.

  The only one standing was Vega. She had positioned herself between the group and the imagined monsters, eyes wide, the sidearm she gripped in both hands pivoting from one imagined creature to the next. She must have spent her ammo, because she wasn’t firing. But I kept my shield up anyway.

  “Stay back,” she warned in her take-no-crap voice.

  Relief and love dumped through me as I ran toward her.

  “Ricki!” I shouted. “There are no monsters! It’s an illusion!”

  “Croft!” she shouted back, but hers was a call of alarm. “Watch out!”

  I looked around, heart in my throat. The room was just as it had been, though. No danger. When Vega grimaced, I understood she’d just seen me meet a terrible end. She began moving forward, maybe to try to reach me.

  “Stay the fuck back!” she warned, thrusting her pistol toward my left, then my right.

  “Ricki, I’m fine!” I shouted, but she didn’t even blink.

  I stopped when we reached each other. If I touched her, chances were she’d either feel nothing, or the illusion would distort the sensation such that she would believe one of the monsters was attacking her.

  In her fractured eyes, I was dead or dying, just as she’d been in mine moments before. The enchantment was as adaptive as it was powerful, playing on individual and collective fears. I hadn’t been able to pierce the enchantment with my wizard’s senses. Meaning even if Vega could hear me, I wouldn’t be able to talk her out of experiencing what wasn’t there. I needed to get my final neutralizing potion into her.