Until then . . .
It felt as if I’d been sitting, waiting, for hours. The darkness made time expand, stretching out into an infinity of fatigue before and ahead of me. I might have blacked out again, but I had no way of telling in the unchanging environment.
Then an explosion of light washed the world with blinding whiteness. The light slammed into my eyes like a blow, grinding my retinas into the back of my skull. I blinked and turned away from the fluorescent that had come on.
I turned the chair toward the direction the elevator had been. I couldn’t see the doors; my night vision had been assassinated by the light. But I could hear the whir of the elevator’s motor starting up.
I could feel the pulse in my neck as I straightened in my seat. My fatigue was forgotten for the moment.
It seemed another hour after the motor started before the doors slid open, spilling light into the darkened corner of the chamber. The light backlit three silhouettes, just as before. With one exception: these silhouettes were different.
These silhouettes were also
wrong.
None of them was short enough to be Nesmith’s. Two were so tall and angular that they could only be elves.
The round one in the center was the most wrong of the bunch. The trio stepped forward and Adrian Phillips walked into the circle of light thrown by the fluorescent. Behind him, the elevator doors slid slowly shut.
“It’s almost a shame to have to kill you,” he said by way of greeting.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I
WAS so drained that I couldn’t even muster up a decent response. Somehow, Phillips had caught wind of the plan and had beat Nesmith here. I should have been shocked, afraid, at least a little pissed off. There was only an empty hollow inside me where my emotions should have been. I squinted at Phillips’ sweaty, pudgy face , and all I could think of was at least it was over.
“No comment?” he inquired. “That’s ironic, don’t you think?”
“Nesmith?” I asked. I don’t even know why I said it. Reflex, I think. I was in some sort of psychic free fall, and I wasn’t really aware of the meaning of the word until after I spoke it.
“I regret she wasn’t able to make it. Fortunately, I was able to intercept your contact with her.”
Obviously.
I looked at his escort. The elves were familiar to me. Caledvwlch looked a little more gaunt, and the one I knew only as Elf Three had his Glock out.
What’s going through your mind, Caledvwlch?
“Where is she?” I asked, closing my eyes.
Phillips’ words washed over me, leaving little of themselves behind. “Mr. Maxwell, since you’ve obviously become an agent of Faust’s, or at least you’re under his influence, it is only prudent that the Safety Director send trained officers of the SPU to bring you to her.”
I shook my head, smiling. “At your suggestion?”
“You’re a smart man, Maxwell.” He shook his head and turned away.
His turning away pulled me out of my stupor, at least to the point where I could feel my own anger. “Why are you here?” I sputtered. My jaw ached and the muscles felt slack on my face, slurring my words. “Let your boys do the dirty work.” I pushed myself upright, and the chair slid aside and upended.
Phillips turned around.
“You get off on it, don’t you?”
“Maxwell—”
“The idea you can order someone killed gives you a raging hard-on, doesn’t it?”
Phillips’ hand was white and pudgy, and came at the end of a flabby swing that had more inertia than muscle behind it. It still managed to cave in my nose and make me topple backward. I sprawled at the foot of Phillips’ bulk, his gray eyes glaring down on me.
If he expected the blow to shut me up, he was disappointed. Somehow the shock of the impact seemed to shake the remains of the stupor from my brain. “That’s why you had to be on that boat. You had to see the dragon burn—”
Phillips shook his head. “
No.
”
“Bone Daddy—you look at the autopsy photos? You get a rush when you realize you did that?”
His foot connected with the most sensitive part of my lower anatomy, and that did shut me up. It wasn’t pain so much as a burning numbness and a paralyzing clenching of the muscles that bent me double. I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, or even if there was some kernel of strategy in it.
I think I might have just stopped giving a shit.
“You don’t
know.
” He leaned over and I could smell alcohol on his breath. “I was given the responsibility for this thing. A trust. To manage it, to support the mayor, to benefit the city. I could not let them do this thing.
Could not!
” I must have turned away, because a pudgy hand grabbed my jaw and forced my face toward his. My nose had swollen shut now, and I was forced to breathe through my mouth.
“God forbid we have any competition,” I whispered between ragged breaths.
“You naïve bastard. You think that was it? No, Aloeus brought the Portal here for one reason. If he had achieved his goal, it wouldn’t be competition, it would be the end. The end of economic recovery, the end of Mayor Rayburn’s administration.” His hand clamped on my jaw as he leaned forward. “It would be the end of the Portal. He had the power to shut it down, and once another existed, nothing would prevent him from doing so.”
“You’re trying to justify murder,” I said.
“Aloeus was a traitor to the city, a realm that he helped create.” Phillips shook his head and let my chin go. My head slammed back onto the concrete floor. “The mage was a traitor.” He stood back up, wiping his hands on his suit. “So are you.”
“So is anyone who threatens your private fiefdom—”
He shook his head. “This is Mayor Rayburn’s city, not mine.”
“He knows what you’re dong?”
“The mayor’s constrained by politics. It would prevent him from acting in his own, or the city’s best interest.” Phillips shook his head. “No, Maxwell, I do not like the necessities of the past few days. My responsibilities forced them on me and I would not be worthy of that trust if I did not act.”
“A power trip, and you get to pretend to be noble at the same time,” I spat. “You’re living a fascist wet dream.”
“Enough. Despite your accusations, I’m not here to relish the violence. I’m simply present to make certain that,” he looked at the elves, “
this time,
the job isn’t botched.”
“Your whole world view is botched.” I said, even though Phillips didn’t seem to be listening anymore. “You think that killing me will accomplish anything? You’ve gone so far over the top that you’ll never be able to keep it quiet.”
“If you would finish the job here,” Phillips turned to the elf with the Glock.
This was not how I’d planned things. For all my romantic notions about the press, I never saw dying for my profession as a particularly glamorous way to go. Several thoughts ran through my mind. First was a nice little daydream about me overpowering the elf with the gun, a slight possibility when I was in perfect shape. Then I thought about the consequences of killing someone in this inner sanctum. Bone Daddy had been concerned about it disrupting his magical environment. Would this place’s more permanent nature make it more or less disruptive? I also idly wondered who Bea would get to replace me on my beat. It’d be ironic if Morgan could land the job.
My musings lasted long enough for me to realize that the fatal bullet wasn’t immediately forthcoming.
Caledvwlch held his hand on top of the other elf’s Glock. “I am afraid we cannot, Mr. Phillips.”
Okay, what’s happening here?
“What do you mean? You took an oath to serve this city. That’s supposed to mean something to you.”
His posture and tone didn’t change, but somehow I could tell that Caledvwlch didn’t like the implication. “Do not fault our honor, sir. We serve the mayor and the city. We follow the commands of our liege.”
Phillips waved toward me. “Your ‘liege,’ O’Malley, one of the most faithful cops in this city, is dead because of him—”
“There is no honor in killing an unarmed man.”
I chuckled and Phillips whipped around to face me.
“I guess you get to do it yourself—”
Phillips grabbed the Glock from Elf Three, and aimed it toward me with a shaking hand. I tensed as he squeezed the trigger, even though nothing much happened. He didn’t know enough to switch off the safety. He grimaced in frustration, and I was halfway between pissing my pants and busting up in laughter.
“Sir,” Caledvwlch said quietly.
“Goddamn gun.”
“Sir.”
“How’re you supposed to—”
“
Sir!
” The act of raising his voice erased every other sound from Caledvwlch’s presence. It was a sound of such clear crystalline fury that it felt as if the concrete walls should crack just from hearing it. Caledvwlch held his own weapon on Phillips. His arm was arrow straight, and his hand was not shaking.
Phillips turned to face him, shock and anger rolling across his face like waves over a breakwater. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Put the gun down.”
The sound of Caledvwlch’s voice dried my mouth and made me push away from Phillips, the focus of it. Phillips sounded truly amazed. “He’s the enemy. You know that. You serve—”
“We serve the Honorable Mayor David Theodore Rayburn. Our honor, our service, our duty became his when his servant, our liege, was taken from this life.”
Phillips nodded.
I got it, what Caledvwlch was saying. Phillips didn’t
“You see, then,” Phillips said. “He’s a threat to the mayor. To the city. He has to be stopped.” He turned toward me and steadied his own gun.
“Put the gun down, Mr. Phillips.”
Phillips shook his head. “We’re serving the mayor here. You can’t interfere.” He found the safety at last, and cocked the weapon.
The gunshot was like a cannon going off in the enclosed space.
I could smell it, an acrid burning, as a hole erupted in Phillips’ forehead. Phillips collapsed as if his body had turned into a sack of so much wet cement. He fell across my legs as blood sprayed from the hole in his skull.
“Shit,” I pushed away from the corpse, pulling my legs back and trying to get clear of the spreading pool of blood. For a moment, everything was still except the blood. Even the gun smoke seemed to hang suspended in the air, frozen as if in anticipation.
The hair on my arms began standing on end.
Magic is a fluid thing, I’ve been told. It has eddies and currents. It follows the curve of reality, finding gravity in points of complexity, order, and ritual. It can concentrate in places, objects, even people. While we manufacture our own rituals to manipulate it, ultimately it is its own master.
I could feel the potential filling the air, like a static charge, like the hum of an overcharged transformer. There was even a smell to it, a slightly sour, tinny odor. The elves were stepping back from the body.
Phillips had fallen inside the central circle. The perimeter was etched in gold, embedded in the concrete. The blood spread across the concrete until it touched the circle.
The warning from Bone Daddy crossed my mind,
“The mojo’s been building here a couple hours. You break the pattern, boy, and it’ll be like someone shoved a stick of dynamite up your ass.”
There was an arc when the blood touched the circle. The sound was somewhere between an electrical sizzle and a relay being thrown. A blue-green light began to radiate from the metal of the circle, sweeping around it in pulsing waves from where Phillips’ blood touched it. The greenish light spread to the glyphs etched in the floor, in the wall, and from details I had never seen before in the ceiling.
The fluorescent light exploded in a cloud of sparks and dropped, sputtering, onto the meeting table. By that time there was enough of the glow to see.
I tried to push myself up, but Caledvwlch shook his head, “No.” He may have said something, but the room was filled with the sound of electrical sizzling. Arcs leaped from the circle to the inscriptions, and back. Tendrils of blue-green energy erupted from the concrete walls, like lightning, but smooth, curved, and slow. The energy had a terrible feeling of potential. Just looking at the glowing snakes gave me an impression of energies an order of magnitude above what had passed through me when we cast the spell that had brought me here.
Caledvwlch was warning me to stay in the circle. Inside the glowing ring, free of the display that tore the air apart outside. We seemed to be in a bubble that didn’t quite reach the ceiling. Arcs and tendrils slid over an invisible dome around us, sometimes making slow-motion splashes against it.
Closer to me, Phillips’ blood was sizzling. The pool of blood had turned black and was charring. Where the blood had touched the circle, the gold wasn’t glowing. I could see green filaments of energy, slipping across that dead-black break, like probing roots.