“Thanks for backing me up,” I said.
“No problem. I can wait to wash my hair until tomorrow.”
As I pulled back out of the parking lot, he said, “Dani, your dad disappeared. Right after he did what he had to do at the dam. He took an APC and drove off.”
I processed that, then said, “I shouldn’t be surprised. I think he’s headed to the same place we are, with the same goal in mind.”
“I wondered about that.”
As we drew close to Worthington Ridge—the wooded hill on which the Findlay estate was built—we saw flashes of light and a lot of aircraft flying over. It started to rain. Pretty soon we began to hear the sounds of fighting—explosions, lightning flashes, rolling thunder. The rain came down harder.
“Crappy weather,” Aleks said.
“Probably courtesy of my Aunt Courtney. Keep an eye out for tornadoes.”
“She’s that powerful?”
“Unfortunately, yes. I’m probably lucky that she doesn’t like to get her hands dirty. She always hired halfwits to kill me instead of doing the job properly herself.”
I chose a different place to park the car from where I had hidden my motorcycle. I had anticipated the storm, so I pulled out two rain ponchos from the back seat.
Aleks chuckled. “I’ll just shield to stay dry.”
“Jerk.” I pulled the poncho over my head.
“Good genes.”
“How’s your sight in pitch dark?” I asked holding out a pair of night-vision goggles. “You operate them like a magitek light switch. On and off.”
He took them and we set off through the woods. The trail was a soggy mess, and the leafless trees did nothing to alleviate the downpour. Sounds of battle were louder, and the flashes of light and lightning made it easier to see where we were going but gave the woods a surreal feeling.
“How far?” Aleks asked.
“About fifteen hundred yards—fourteen hundred meters—to the wall. We’re on the estate now. There’s an escape tunnel outside the wall, but it supposedly can’t be opened from this side. It’s going to be a bitch to find, though.”
“Supposedly can’t be opened?”
“I wouldn’t be much of a magitek if I couldn’t operate a simple latch my daddy designed, now would I?”
“Do you think that’s how he plans to get in?”
“I’d bet on it. But he has more than an hour’s head start on us. He’s probably inside already.”
We slogged on. When lightning flashes illuminated the scene, Aleks looked disgustingly dry. I, on the other hand, was soaked to my knees. The rain poncho kept my body and head dry, but I was still uncomfortable.
After we had walked about twenty minutes, I said, “Slow down. We’re getting close, and I don’t want to miss it.”
A couple of times, I thought I spied the rock I was looking for, but I was wrong. Finally, off through the trees, I saw it. Twenty feet off the trail, a large rock jutted up from the forest floor. It was about five feet in diameter and stuck up as high as my chest.
“This way,” I told Aleks, and walked to the rock. I directed my magik at it and felt the latch trigger. “Now, hurry,” I said. “It won’t stay open long.”
I dashed through the trees until I reached a fallen log. On the other side of the log was a small hollow under it.
“Follow me,” I said, lying down on my stomach and sliding into the hollow. I had entered the space before me from outside only once, when Dad showed me the secret. I had snuck out that way a dozen times or more. Its disadvantage over the wall crossing I’d used when I killed Susan Reed was that it brought me into the tunnels under the estate. We would have to travel through almost the entire house to get to our target.
Aleks followed me. He kindled a dim light and looked around. “Where are we?” he asked.
“Still about five hundred meters from the wall. Come on.”
From the room we were in, a steel ladder took us down into a larger tunnel, which was dimly lit by mage lights. I shrugged out of the poncho and struck out toward the mansion, wincing as my boots squished.
“Surely Courtney knows about these tunnels,” Aleks said.
“She knows of the tunnels, but I doubt she’s ever been down here. Courtney’s a girly girl, and this is a long way to walk in high heels. If there was ever an emergency where she had to evacuate, she’d depend on her guardians to get her out. The problem is, all the Findlay guardians who were worth their salt are gone. They either died defending Olivia’s retreat, or Courtney purged them because she didn’t trust them, or they melted into the night. A lot of those have been my eyes and ears the past few months.”
“Kirsten said that you snuck in here recently. Is this how you got in?”
“Nope. It’s not how I got out, either. This is going to bring us right under the main family wing. From there we can either use the servants’ passages or the escape stairs that will take us right into Granduncle George’s suite. I’m betting that Grandaunt Denise is still living there, not Courtney. I’m going to depend on you to disable Denise without harming her in any way. You can do that, can’t you?”
“Probably. What’s her magik?”
“She’s a hydromancer. A Butler. Aeromancy is her secondary talent, but she’s not that strong. From the reports I’ve received, she’s also not doing very well mentally. Uncle George’s death had hit her hard, and she was never the sharpest knife in the drawer.”
We passed through a place where the walls and the ceiling had an arched support brace.
“The wall is directly over us,” I said. “Another four hundred meters to the house.”
“How far down are we? I don’t hear a thing from outside.”
“About twenty feet from the surface to the top of the tunnel, and the tunnel walls are about three feet thick. This was supposed to be a bomb shelter, and a radiation fallout shelter as well.”
“Okay, so, when we get inside, what’s the plan?”
“Find Courtney and kill her.”
Chapter 48
A staircase upward ended at a locked door. I used my magik to open the lock, and we stepped out into one of the servants’ corridors. It was completely dark, as I knew it would be. Who wastes mage lights on the hired help?
We followed it for a couple of hundred feet. “All the locks in the mansion itself and in the main outbuildings are electronic keypads,” I said. “When the electricity went out, they all opened. It’s a safety feature.”
We reached a door, and I cautiously pulled it open to reveal a mage light glowing in the ceiling. We passed through, and I led Aleks down a short hallway to the kitchen.
I was on familiar ground, but the deeper we got into the mansion, the more problems my self-confidence was having. A niggling little voice in the back of my head was telling me that what we were doing was crazy.
I sent out a call via my implant. Dad, where are you?
Busy, was the response. I hoped for more, but that was it.
We were faced with crossing through half of the building’s ground floor to reach the main staircase in the entranceway or taking the servants’ back stairs, where we were very likely liable to run into someone who didn’t think we should be there. And even though the fighting was going on outside, I knew the guardians mostly used the servants’ corridors to move around inside the house. There were definitely fighters on the roof using the magitek devices and heavy weaponry installed there.
I put the question to Aleks.
“In those servants’ hallways,” he said, “you’d have to be totally incompetent to miss someone, either with a bullet or with magik. And if they’re even half-trained, they know enough to have an aeromancer lead a patrol. Escaping that kind of encounter won’t be easy. Let’s take the path that gives us the most freedom of movement.”
To get to the main stairway, we had to go through the main butler’s pantry into the family dining room. From there, I had a choice of the men’s or women’s parlors, although I figured it proba
bly didn’t matter. Both connected to the formal dining room.
Our luck didn’t hold. The instant I set foot into the women’s parlor, I heard a shout. Across the room from me in a chair sat a man with a rifle. He started to his feet, raising the gun to his shoulder. A bolt of energy buzzed past me and caught the guardian. He tottered, a gaping hole in his chest, and fell across the chair. From the room beyond, I heard voices raised and coming closer.
I motioned, and Aleks moved to the right and around a corner into an alcove the maids used when they were serving. I moved to the left. In the men’s parlor, there was a bar I could have hidden behind. In the women’s parlor, there was only a sideboard pushed up against the wall and much too heavy to move easily. My only choice was to hug the wall next to the door the sounds were coming through, and hope I could pull the trigger faster than the guards could.
The first guy who came in wasn’t one for hesitation. He saw his buddy’s body and sprayed the room with automatic weapon fire. He was two feet away from me, and I shot him. He staggered away and fell. Another rifle barrel poked into the room, and a bolt of energy from the maid’s alcove hit the doorway.
“Shield!” I yelled and extended my electrical box into the doorway. When I triggered the fourth of its functions, it blanketed a twenty-foot radius around me with a sustained hundred thousand volts. I thought that Aleks was out of range but not by much. I let it run for a few seconds, then stepped through the door, and dashed for the protection of the sideboard in the formal dining room. It had an open shelf underneath it. I dived under and sprayed bullets from my Raider around the room. A couple more of Aleks’s energy bolts shot into the room.
Cautiously, I switched off the lightning box. No one shot at me. In fact, there was no nearby sound.
Aleks crept in from the other room and moved to the wall on the other side of the door.
“I have the shield,” he said, and I nodded, kneeling down.
He whipped around the corner, and I poked my pistol out behind him. When I didn’t hear anything, I followed him. The reception area and the main staircase were empty of life. I nodded to Aleks and gestured toward the stairs. He leaped up and took them two at a time. He was halfway up when a guardian appeared at the top, aiming an assault rifle at him.
The explosive bullet from my Raider took out the guardian and part of the bannister in front of him. Aleks didn’t slow down. When he reached the top, he looked both ways, then motioned for me to go up.
“Where now?” he asked when I joined him.
I went to the first doorway in front of me and slipped inside. Wending my way through the empty suite, I found the hidden panel next to the fireplace and triggered it. We went through, into a narrow hallway with a staircase leading up in one direction, and a narrow hallway leading to my left. We took it and came to a narrow doorway with a sliding panel set at eye level. I slid it aside and looked through the slit that was revealed.
The room beyond held a large bed, and I could see the closed door leading out into the rest of the suite. From the way it was decorated, I assumed it was a man’s bedroom. The bed was made, and the room had an unused quality about it. The top of the dresser was almost bare except for a couple of pictures and an ornate box.
I pushed the door open and moved into the room, my Raider drawn and my concentrator in my other hand. A quick check showed there was no one in the bathroom, then I crossed to one of the three other doors. I opened it slowly until I could peek through into the next room, which turned out to be a butler’s pantry that included a small kitchen and a bar. That was connected to what appeared to be a valet’s room, and through it a dressing room. A second door in that led back to the main bedroom.
The third door opened into an alcove, beyond which was a large parlor. Considering there was a battle going on outside, I wasn’t surprised there wasn’t anyone in the room.
“Check out the other rooms in the suite,” I whispered to Aleks. Motioning to one alcove on the other side of the room, I said, “That’s Lady Denise’s room. I’ll check that.”
Chapter 49
My Grandaunt Denise, wearing a nightgown, sat in a chair by the French doors leading to the terrace. A decanter and a snifter with brown liquid sat on a small table next to her. Magelights lit the room. As I watched, she reached out and picked up the glass.
“Come in, Dani,” she said.
That was a little unsettling, since her back was to me and I couldn’t see her face.
Denise chuckled. “You’re not the only one with magik. Come in. There’s a spectacular fireworks display going on outside.”
I circled around until I could see her.
“You’re looking well,” she said. “Come sit down and have a drink with me.”
“Thank you, no,” I said. “I’m on duty.”
“Ah. Come to arrest my daughter?” She sighed deeply. “I’m afraid she won’t take that very well. Do be careful, Dani. She’ll try to kill you. That’s what she does to everyone who gets in her way.”
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
Denise waved in the direction of the door I had just come through. “On the far side of the parlor, there’s a door. The staircase leads to the weather room on the roof.” She chuckled. “Weather room. That’s what George always called it. That’s where storm mages do their magik.”
Through the window in front of her, I saw tracer bullets arc across the estate wall toward the house. Lightning from a magitek generator arced back in response. With only glass separating us from the outside, the explosions and thunder were so loud I could hear her only in between them.
“Dani, can you do me a favor?” she asked.
“I think it depends, Aunt Denise.”
“Make it quick. I don’t want her to suffer.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will. You were always such a good girl. Olivia bragged about you all the time. Even when you got in trouble, it was never very bad. She would tell me about it, and we would laugh. Is she all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. She’s doing well. I don’t know if you’re aware, but she escaped to Ireland.”
“I knew she got away. If you see her, give her my best.”
My eyes got a little teary. “Are you all right?”
“Oh, yes. I miss George, of course, and I’m sad that Courtney turned out the way she did, but hopefully, when this is all over, I can get out of here. George and I bought a little place on Lake Como years ago. I think I’d like to live out my time there. I’m tired, Dani. It’s time for a new generation. Tell Olivia I said that. Tell her that she should turn it all over to Lucas. Our time is past.”
My ears perked up. “Lucas? Have you seen him?”
“Yes, he was here a little while ago. I’m so glad he’s back. I’m sure you and Oliva and your mother are very relieved.”
“Did you tell him about the weather room?”
She chuckled. “No, but I’m sure I didn’t have to. Lucas knows this house like the back of his hand.”
I spun around and raced for the door.
“Aleks! This way,” I called to him as I crossed the parlor. I yanked open the door Denise had indicated and found a spiral staircase. I started up, but my boots rang on the metal treads, so I had to slow down to a quieter pace. Aleks was right behind me.
The roof was three floors above us, and there weren’t any exits from the staircase. By the time we reached the top, we had climbed seven stories from the tunnel, and my thighs had a greater appreciation for Findlay’s servants.
We emerged into a large, round, glass-walled and glass-ceilinged room held together by metal framing. From that vantage point, I knew that in daylight—without the storm clouds—I would be able to see the Chesapeake Bay coastline twenty miles away.
Courtney stood on the far side of the room from us—the northwest side. My dad, Lucas James, faced her with about fifty feet separating them. Neither even glanced our way. Her face showed cruel rage. Dad’s expression was one of de
termination.
Courtney lashed out with a bolt of lightning. My heart leaped into my throat, and I thought I would faint as the lightning seemed sure to hit Dad. But he waved his hand, and the bolt ricocheted to his left and up, striking the roof. I expected the roof to shatter, but it didn’t, seeming to absorb the energy. The whole room—walls and ceiling—lit up, and then the light faded away.
A miniature tornado sprang up and rushed toward my father. The peripheral blast of wind knocked me off my feet. Using his concentrator, Dad carved the whirlwind up, and it fell apart.
Aleks and I watched for about a minute as they tossed magik at each other that would have destroyed a small city. I had no idea how long they had been at it, but neither of them showed any signs of damage or hesitation.
Courtney sent a strong gust of wind, and Dad staggered. It wasn’t even aimed at Aleks or me, but we were buffeted by it and pushed back. She followed up her advantage with another lightning bolt. He managed to deflect it, but his response wasn’t as strong.
She followed up by hurling a sharp spear of ice at him. His concentrator vaporized it. Another gust of wind kept him off balance, and then she launched another tornado. I huddled on the ground, feeling as though I was being beaten.
Rising to my knees, I shouted, “Courtney!” She half-turned toward me, and lightning shot out of the hand she extended in my direction. I dove to the floor and rolled, but the bolt of energy splashed harmlessly against a shield Aleks threw up in front of us.
Without thinking, I aimed and fired my Raider. The explosive bullet hit Courtney in the upper abdomen, practically blowing her in half. She was dead before she hit the floor.
All the wind and noise in the weather room ceased. The fighting outside and the storm continued.
Aleks slowly walked over to me and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me up.
“I don’t understand why she wasn’t shielded,” he said.
“She couldn’t,” Dad answered as he walked toward us. “She could shield when she used water or air, elements that were external to her. But she couldn’t launch those lightning bolts from inside an airshield.” He shook his head. “Why she kept using lightning, I don’t know.”
Soul Harvest (The Rift Chronicles Book 3) Page 23
