Unlatching the window, I pulled on it gently, hoping I could raise it without making too much noise. No such luck—it was stuck. Taking a deep breath, I put some muscle into it and pushed it. The window slid up with a screech and a thump.
I drew my knife and slashed the screen. Courtney started pounding on the door, shouting Susan’s name. A quick glance down showed a twenty-foot drop to the garden, but at least there weren’t any rose bushes below.
Plunging through the window, I grabbed the sill and hung for a moment before I let go, and landed hard just as an explosion sounded from the room. Light flashed from the window. Courtney was a storm mage, and it sounded as though she had blasted the door with a lightning bolt.
I took off running, vaulting the low garden wall, and fell to the ground on the other side. Sure, I had the cloaking device and the airshield device, but I had little faith in their ability to withstand Courtney’s magik. Anyone who could call a tornado from a clear sky had power to burn.
For a few moments, I debated with myself as to whether I should simply hide and hope things would blow over, or make a break for it. But as I reviewed what might go wrong, I realized that all of Osiris’s security procedures were probably still in place. Staying close to the wall, I started crawling in the direction of the peach orchard.
I had made about fifty feet of progress when the alarms went off, followed quickly by high-intensity lights turning the night into a nightmare scene brighter than daylight. Even cloaked, I was still solid and would still cast a shadow. Continuing to hug the wall, I crawled faster. Eventually, I made it to the orchard and slipped in among the trees. The shadows there helped to hide me and break up my silhouette, so I rose to my feet and ran in a crouch toward the guardians’ barracks.
It was a calculated risk that the guardians would all be running in the opposite direction, but I had to get to a place where I could get over the wall and out of the compound.
My luck held, and I was able to reach the barracks, then slip around to the back of the building. There was an open space between the barracks and the gardener’s garage that I had to chance. No one was in sight, but of course that had nothing to do with what the monitors could see from all the CCTV cameras set up all over the area.
I could use my magik to disable the cameras, but that would be like setting off fireworks, not only telling the guardians where I was but also who I was. I took the chance and crossed the opening, gritting my teeth as I saw my shadow. For anyone watching on TV, they would see a shadow but not the person casting it. I realized I should have killed the cloaking device, trusting to hope that I wouldn’t be identified, but it was too late.
A door to the garage was ajar, and I slid inside to darkness partially illuminated by flashes of light through the windows. Donning my night goggles, I looked around and assured myself that I was alone.
The place was filled with strange shapes—lawn mowers, electric carts, a ditch digger. At the far end, parked in front of a large garage door, was a bulldozer. I needed to get past a two-foot thick brick wall. Would a bulldozer break through the wall? I honestly didn’t know. My only other options were to go over the wall the way I came in, punch a hole in it using the concentrator weapon I had in my pocket, or hide out until I could slip out through one of the gates.
The problem with the concentrator was that I wasn’t sure if it would penetrate the wards set on the walls. Whittaker’s mercenaries had repeatedly assaulted the compound and failed to penetrate its defenses. Modern warfare in the age of magik had moved past most of the explosive weapons of previous centuries. Artillery and aerial bombardment were considered anachronisms.
I trotted over to the bulldozer and looked it over. When people tell a girl she should study engineering, they shouldn’t be surprised when she makes it her business to play with every engine she comes across. That bulldozer was newer than the one I had learned to drive twenty years before, but not that much different. I checked the hydrogen tanks and discovered that they were full.
Another thing about being an engineer was that I could easily envision what would happen when the bulldozer hit the wall. The garage door was about twelve feet high, and the wall was twenty feet high. The driver’s seat was open to the air, and while the airshield might keep me from getting my skull crushed, it wouldn’t keep me from being buried under an avalanche of bricks.
The earplugs brought the sound of voices outside the garage, not close, but coming nearer. It wouldn’t be long before someone decided to check the garage.
Wanting to increase my chances of success, I attached a magitek converter and an enhancer to the engine. Then I locked the steering controls so the machine would go only in a straight line. I switched off the cloaking device and the airshield, then used my magik to start the bulldozer’s engine. Once it was humming, I triggered the mechanism to open the garage door, and put the big machine in gear. It lurched forward.
When it cleared the door, I kicked in the converter, then the enhancer. The machine accelerated and leaped toward the wall a hundred feet away. Satisfied that I’d done as much as I could, I triggered my airshield and cloaking devices and followed the bulldozer.
As soon as I was outside, I hugged the wall of the garage and watched. Shouts from the other side of the garage were followed by gunfire. Explosive bullets hit the bulldozer, but it lumbered on.
The gunfire, voices, and everything else were drowned out by the crash of the bulldozer hitting the wall. My earbuds, designed for use in combat, cut out, so I watched the show in silence. The wall bulged, the blade on the front of the bulldozer bent, and the wall above the machine shook. Then the machine pushed through the hole. As if in slow motion, the bricks above the hole collapsed, raining down on the driver’s seat and controls in a cloud of dust.
The caterpillar treads kept moving. The engine’s power transferred from speed to torque, and the bulldozer climbed over the rubble, down the other side, and sped up toward the woods.
Men ran by me, and my hearing returned. They shouted, cursed, and fired at the machine as it crawled away. And then a bolt of lightning, far larger than the machine, lanced from the sky. The bulldozer froze, sparked, and burned. The hydrogen fuel tanks exploded. The sound and the concussion from the blast leveled every man in sight, and more of the wall collapsed.
From my vantage point, with my back against the garage wall, I felt the pressure push on me, but the airshield held. Figuring I would never have a better chance, I raced toward the wall, through the gaping hole, and into the woods.
Chapter 26
By my reckoning, I was about half a mile, maybe a little more, from where I’d left my motorcycle. The people nearest me weren’t a concern, as it would take them some time to recover from their proximity to the lightning bolt and subsequent explosions.
But they weren’t the only people who would be hunting me, and the bulldozer gave them a location to focus on. I made my way through the woods as quietly as I could while still moving quickly. Although the people hunting me lived on the estate, I doubted any of them knew the grounds as well as I did. Exploring the woods had always been my preferred choice compared to spending time with my family.
Two or three times, I heard someone crashing around in the undergrowth and changed course to avoid them. Once I almost ran headlong into a deer escaping my hunters. One of my fears was that if I took too long, they might discover the motorcycle.
I could hear vehicles on the roads, and about fifteen minutes after I escaped through the wall, a helicopter passed overhead, training a searchlight on the ground. That was something that would become more worrisome after I retrieved my bike. I had flown over the area many times and wasn’t concerned that while on foot I could be seen through the trees from above, even in winter.
It took me about half an hour to reach where I stashed the bike. I had never checked to see if the cloaking device would render both me and the motorcycle invisible. If it didn’t, then it would be pretty silly to continue using it.
I circled around, m
aking sure there wasn’t anyone lying in wait. No one was close, and I could tell the bike hadn’t been tampered with because there weren’t any electrocuted bodies lying near it. I jumped on, started it, and turned onto the road going south, away from the compound. I switched off the cloaking device but kept the airshield on. Thankfully, the motorcycle’s electric motor was almost silent.
It was half a mile to the main road, and another fifteen miles to Mom’s house. I had to slow down for a hard curve just before reaching the main road and heard a gunshot. Something ricocheted off my airshield, and I gunned the throttle, putting my foot down as the bike slid around the corner.
More gunshots sounded as I took the next corner, then I goosed the bike while lying down on the battery casing to reduce both air resistance and my silhouette as a target. I was concerned about a bullet disabling the bike. If that happened, they’d have me.
The road had two long curves, then ran essentially straight for several miles. I kicked the bike up to one hundred twenty miles an hour and concentrated on not hitting any cars.
I triggered my phone and called Mom. When she answered, I told her, “I’m on my way to your place with a bunch of Courtney’s goons following me. Can you help me out with an ambush?”
“Come in from the south,” she said. “Are you in a car?”
“On my bike.”
“How long until you get here?”
“Ten minutes maybe?”
“We’ll cover you. Drive carefully.”
Of course, she’d say that.
I passed a car that was doing less than half my speed, then wove between a car in front of me and one coming toward me. It was getting late, and there wasn’t much traffic, but there was still a lot more of it than I was comfortable with. Thankfully, the bike was more maneuverable than the armored personnel carriers that Courtney’s people were probably driving. That was one of the reasons I’d taken the bike.
I hadn’t counted on Courtney’s people using lights and sirens, in addition to blithely running cars off the road. They couldn’t match my speed, but I didn’t lose them, either. I knew their APCs—or at least the ones Courtney inherited from Findlay—were equipped with magikally enhanced telescopes, because I had designed them.
When I reached the freeway, I really cut loose, pushing the bike as fast as it was capable of going. That didn’t last long as I soon reached a traffic jam. Checking on my police band, I discovered there was a wreck ahead. Slowing down and driving on the shoulder, I managed to make it to the next exit. The cars following me had a much more difficult time. They could also drive on the shoulder, but only until they reached the first idiot who was blocking it, while I was able to take the bike between cars.
The helicopter caught up with me, however, and followed me along the off-ramp. I wouldn’t have minded that so much, but they started shooting at me, seemingly indifferent whether they hit innocent bystanders or not.
Weaving and zig-zagging, I managed to avoid a catastrophe through the copter’s first two passes. When I reached a park on my right side, the copter pilot decided to use the open space to come in low and bring a machinegun into play. I hit the brakes, fish-tailing and fighting to stay upright, and he passed in front of me. As he flew over the road, I keyed the third setting on my lightning box, launching a lethal hundred-thousand-volt lightning bolt at the copter.
Helicopters don’t glide, and when their electrical system burns out, the engine stops and they drop like a rock. Which was what that helicopter did. The hard landing, incorporating an unfortunate collision with a tree, solved my aerial problem.
But it had radioed my position before it went down and slowed me enough that the ground pursuit gained on me. I took off again but could see the lights of an APC behind me.
The next few miles were harrowing, and I left the main road to try and ditch pursuit by going through a couple of residential neighborhoods. It didn’t work, but the people behind me didn’t gain on me, either.
My phone rang. My mother. “Where are you? Are you all right?”
I gave her my location and hung up. I didn’t need the distraction.
When I finally reached Loch Raven drive and turned onto it, I had at least three APCs behind me, and they were almost in shooting range. I hit the first bend in the road about the time the APCs turned onto Loch Raven behind me. I breathed a sigh of relief. Almost home.
I knew when I passed through the veil the elves had cast around the reservoir, and backed off on the throttle. I pulled into Mom’s place, drove the bike into her garage, and plugged it in.
But when I tried to walk, I discovered my legs were barely strong enough to hold me up. I leaned against the wall, and as the adrenaline bled out of me, I found myself shaking. At least some of that was from the cold. My hands had been wrapped around the handlebars, and I couldn’t straighten my fingers. I wondered how bad it would have been without the airshield.
Mom came out, gave me a shoulder to lean on, and helped me into the house.
“Would you like something warm to drink?” she asked.
“Hot chocolate with spearmint schnapps?”
“I think I can do that. You sit over there by the heater.”
She brought me the hot chocolate, and it warmed me all the way down. I felt my body start to relax.
“So, what inspired you to visit your Aunt Courtney?” she asked.
“I’m going to have to tell this all over again when Joren comes in, aren’t I? Let’s just say that Courtney wasn’t the reason I went over there.”
“But she was the reason you left in such a hurry?”
“That’s pretty accurate.”
Joren came in about forty minutes later, poured himself a drink, and sat down with us. “You need to find a better class of boyfriend,” he said. “A nice elf boy who takes no for an answer.”
“You dissuaded them?” I asked.
“Hell of a mess out there. You need to call your government or Council, or whoever, to come clear the road.”
Cautiously, I asked, “What happened?”
“The lead APC ran into a rock, and the two behind it were going too fast and following too close.”
Something didn’t make sense. The road and the area around it were perfectly flat. “What rock?”
“The one we dropped in the middle of the road right after you passed. Just past that first curve. One hell of a crash.”
“Uh, how big a rock?” I asked.
“Oh, about the size of one of those APCs.” Joren chuckled. “If the driver had been quick enough, he could have chosen one of the trees on the side of the road instead. Why were they driving so fast?”
I told them about Susan, giving them a brief history of the woman, the HLA, and how she managed to become the drug boss of the Mid-Atlantic.
“So she was the one responsible for all those poisonings you’ve been investigating?” Mom asked.
“Yeah. Her idea, and she was a master at manipulating people to commit murder. We found out she wormed her way into Findlay House. Heaven knows how she met Courtney, or managed to make friends, but as I said, she was a manipulator.”
I went on to tell them about our crackdown on the HLA and the drug trade, and Susan’s reaction to it.
“I just decided that enough was enough,” I said. “I went out there, snuck into the house, and killed her. Sometimes justice and the law have issues coming together.”
“And you got caught,” Mom said.
“Yeah. No sooner did I kill the witch than Courtney came knocking on her door. Just bad luck.”
Joren shook his head. “I’m not sure I’d call it that. Some people think luck is a magikal talent. If that’s true, then you’ve got more of it than anyone I’ve ever met.”
Chapter 27
I stayed the night at Mom’s and drove back into the city around noon. I dropped by Enchantments and agreed to go out to dinner with Kirsten. Aleks was in Atlanta again, and Mychal had a Family function to attend.
Then I went to th
e office and told Whittaker and Carmelita that I’d heard a rumor that Susan Reed had been assassinated. Whittaker gave me a raised eyebrow but didn’t challenge my story.
The sun was just setting as I stepped out of Police Headquarters and started off toward Kristen’s shop. And ran head-on into Besevial.
“This is getting tiresome,” I said, laying my hand on my Raider. “Can’t you call and make a date like all the other boys?”
The demon grinned, a sight I wished I had missed.
“Akashrian has agreed to your terms,” he said.
“My father is alive?” I blurted out.
“Of course. I assumed you knew that. Where is the avatar?”
“Oh, no. She gets the statuette when she returns my father, and you pull your minions out of the battle lines with the Council’s troops.”
His grin turned into an ugly scowl. “How can we trust you to keep your end of the bargain?”
I barked out a laugh. “That’s rich. I’m supposed to trust a demon? The concept, let alone the word, doesn’t exist in your language. What surety do I have that you won’t just kill me and grab the statuette? No, first you pull back your troops. When you do that, we’ll arrange a place of my choosing to exchange your avatar for my father.”
He seemed to mull that over, then said, “In four days’ time. Where?”
I thought furiously, then the perfect place hit me. “Gunpowder Falls. It’s north of the city, and there’s a turnout from the road. At sunset.” It was just outside the veil the elves had drawn around Loch Raven. Any chances of demon treachery could be covered by surrounding the exchange location with elven warriors.
“Done. You do realize that I have to use the avatar to bring him over,” he said.
“I figured as much.”
He nodded and disappeared.
I walked on until I reached Enchantments. The shop was still open for business, and I had to wait for Kirsten to finish helping several customers. When she was done, we walked back to get my car and then drove to the Kitchen Witch. On the way, I told her about my meeting with Besevial.
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 14
