Authors: Scott V. Duff
“You’re thinking too hard about this, Ryan,” I said mildly. “You’re putting too much symbolism and convention into it. I’ve had very little training in any kind of magic especially druidism. Only found out about that yesterday. And I doubt you’ll find the binding I used in any almanac or grimoire.” Reaching around him, I clasped the necklace and let it drape loosely in place. I asked the brownies, “What do you think, guys? Too low?”
“Only if Mr. Davis suggests it, Lord,” Ellorn said immediately, always intent on me. “The simple design complements his skin drawings nicely.”
“Aye, milord,” Braeford trilled, beaming at us, ecstatic at being asked. “An’ he might need the extra room with age. Y’might brush the surface to make it easier t’veil.”
“Good idea, Braedon, thank you,” I answered and raised an irregular fractal pattern on the surface to serve. That brought my mind close enough to his aura to feel the attention he was giving me, specifically the
type
of attention. If he was a faery, it would almost be a communion and that wasn’t far from his state of mind. Druids are priests, after all, and I just gave him a spyglass to god, if he can figure it out. “Ryan, now or never.”
“I—, I—can’t think of anything appropriate, Seth,” Ryan stammered uncomfortably, flushing from embarrassment, knowing his man-crush was showing.
“’Kay,” I muttered and began tempering the metal magically to strengthen it. Ryan felt my power moving swiftly through his aura when I bound the necklace to it. It was all he was getting from me, though. Anything else was too creepy. “Simple is not bad. All done. You can get dressed now. And thank Master Braedon for his invaluable assistance. You would have gotten it with a string wrapped around it without him.” Stepping around Ellorn and Braedon, I touched each of them across the shoulders as I passed, providing them with exactly the communion with Daybreak that Ryan craved. The difference was they needed it to survive away from Gilán.
There was a burst of activity in the Guard’s geas as Leonard Muldoon’s home in Eugene was located and isolated. They stayed out of sight and outside of conventional security systems as three-man teams were currently breaking into telephone, cable, and electrical systems from a safe distance. It was all happening at fantastically fast speeds as information was shared and re-sourced through the geas with teams in the Situation room in the Garrison. It was a fantastic collaboration. The men tapping the phone lines didn’t need to know what they were doing as long as the team in the Situation room did, almost a hive mind. It took over an hour to find the place, but less than five minutes to surround it.
“Ryan, finish buying my house, please,” I said still watching the Guard work. “We’ll need an office in town next. Gimme a call when the paperwork is ready to sign.” Then I shoved him through a portal back to his hotel room. “First, time to go to Oregon.”
“’Bout time,” Jimmy muttered and vaulted from the ground over the railing to the patio. “Can we change into our working clothes first? These are a little bright.”
Gawking at him, I asked, “How is blue brighter than blue?”
“It’s a principle,” he said, sticking his jaw out. I sputtered a laugh and dropped us through holes halfway around the world.
~ ~ ~
Muldoon’s “house” wasn’t quite a house so much a deluxe apartment amid crap. Settled in the urban sprawl of the city, the apartment itself looked nice from a distance, hidden behind the stained windows of some sort of failed packing plant. A major trucking firm sat two blocks over, providing a close and constant shipping option and coverage for vehicles moving around him. And he was within a block of two banks and four major computer networks all connected directly to the Internet backbone. And that’s not mentioning the twelve satellite dishes on the roof of the four-story warehouse, all aimed in different directions and camouflaged from view of the neighboring buildings.
“They learned a new trick,” Jimmy said quietly as I took in the information from the Situation room.
“Yeah, once Tom and Brick figured it was possible, they were driven,” I replied. “They’re good enough to mess with the elves, I think.”
The Guard managed to force the appearance of their uniforms into other forms, like the black “FirstGuard Security” jumpers that they wore at the London house. Those Guardsmen very adept at such manipulations could make adjustments fast enough and clever enough to be nearly as good as a brownie’s camouflage. Motion, like running, would likely show and the armor would, definitely.
All right, guys, stealth for as long as possible. Keep killing to necessity only. Once we’re discovered, they will destroy computer equipment so move as quickly as possible. Lock down and call me immediately on anything that could be blood magic. We have three goals. Take the computer equipment. Detain and question Leonard Muldoon and his employees. Go home safe and sound
.
Jimmy grinned widely as the men shifted attitudes and excitement filled the geas. The men were entering their element again: the battlefield. The Guard wasn’t just out of basic training. To a man, they were battle-hardened, mostly terrorized in some way. They reveled in violence and this was their first chance at leveling any. And they were going in weaponless against armed guards. Ten men plus Jimmy and me against thirty-five, according to the computer team’s records on the building. That seemed oddly high to me. Forty men on support surrounding the building, ready to replace anyone as needed. And the Garrison itself was ready to pounce at a second’s notice.
We started for the building to join our crew. Jimmy tugged on his aspect, disappearing just as Shrank did at the Arena, a perfect camouflage that he could maintain through any movement. He started running at the corner for the north end of the building as I headed for the main entrance. As soon as Jimmy left my side, two Guardsmen, nearly invisible, sidled up beside me, crouching low to the ground and constantly scanning the building front. The whirring of hydraulic camera adjustments echoed dimly inside the vast interior as we approached the doors. Another Guard hunkered nearby waiting, while two more on either side tried to peer through the dirty windows. I tried the door, but it was locked. Beating on it and yelling for somebody’s attention, I slowly sank my senses in behind the door, carefully searching for any equipment that magic might damage unintentionally. Just because I hadn’t fried the laptops or my cellphones yet didn’t mean everything was impervious to my magic. Care was indicated if I wanted the Russian’s computers.
I found four security cameras off the lobby before my beating and yelling at the door was answered. Not the black and white, twenty-pictures-a-minute cameras either, these were high-speed, high-definition cameras with a wide angle of control that covered every aspect of the long, tall, but shallow lobby.
“What!” a shadow barked behind the door.
“Um, hi,” I shouted. “I’m looking for Ivan Petro—, Petr—, Petronovich. The owner of this building, please.” The name was one of Muldoon’s alias’ and I pronounced it poorly intentionally.
“Fuck off, kid,” the man said and ambled away. Three more shadows moved behind the glass, not retreating.
Banging on the door again, I yelled, “C’mon, mister! I just want to talk to the man about renting this place for a night!”
“I said fuck off, kid!” he yelled from a distance.
Playing for the cameras, I beat and kicked at the door angrily, shouting, “C’mon, man! It took us two months of sorting through city records to find out who owned this place! Just let me talk to him, damn it!” I kept kicking and beating as the man came back, mostly to cover the noise of my team’s snickers at my ‘temper tantrum.’ “Finally!” I said, stepping back when he started unlocking the door and making entirely too much noise doing it. He flung the door open wide when he was done.
“I said fuck… off… kid,” the man growled, shoving a twelve-gauge shotgun at me. The Day Sword hummed lightly, drawing my attention to his trigger finger while the Crossbow thrummed and marked his three companions through the dirty glass. I choked and gurgled, staring at the end of the gun, wide-eyed.
“Yes, sir,” I squeaked meekly and started backing off slowly. My men gave him sharp glares as they eased past him and into the lobby. My well-spoken opponent with a twelve-gauge was dressed in gray dress slacks and a wife-beater. The T-shirt showed his left arm was full-sleeve with Russian and Turkish prison tattoos. He was far too young and far too American to have gotten those honestly. I was halfway into the street before I turned and ran down the street with the man’s heady laughter at my back. With the hatred coming from behind him, I don’t think he’d live to see dusk. Maybe not even noon.
Slowing, I shifted against the veil, rolling on it the same way Jimmy does, and stepped into the lobby silently, right behind the receding shotgun-toting, fake-Russian. Our environment was my first priority, so I looked south and started filling in the map officer in the Sit-room. The Crossbow thrummed and identified fourteen targets in addition to the four in front of us. I counted seventy-three cameras in the front half of this weirdly designed building. The front quarter was four stories of air. The back three-quarters were steel stairs, railings, and concrete, divided into various rooms for manufacture of unknown things well past commercial viability. The floor of the open-air area was littered with bones and carcasses of computers and other equipment that I couldn’t begin to recognize. It had obviously been collecting for some time, as one end had vacuum tubes, then slowly got smaller.
Muldoon’s “house” was built into part of the second and third floors. It was a whole lot nicer than its surroundings, even the stairs up to it. It still had an industrial look and feel, but it was cleaner with bright curtains on windows and patio furniture on the walkway to make really depressing balconies. Everything I could see from the ground was state of the art technologically, ultramodern stylistically, and, frankly, ugly. Individually excellent pieces but crudely put together. It just shouted, “I have a tiny dick and a lot of money.”
From everything I saw, I was safe around all of this equipment, so I took a chance and pushed a mild sensing out, then fully opened the block up to us. This should be a cakewalk. Jimmy and his team jumped into action just as the power went out. The support crews cut the building off from the outside world. It was my turn.
“C’mon, dude, I just wanna talk to ‘im,” I whined, trotting up behind them. In unison, all four men whirled around raising their weapons—an assortment of rifles and shotguns. There wasn’t any style to my defense, just speed, brute force, and the Day. With an amazingly bright flare of light as I shoved the Day into each of their guns, slicing through the firing mechanisms. The Day was home again before the first gun fell apart in their hands, throwing each man off-balance. Comically, the scene took on a Seventies’ martial arts movie feel for me. One man against four in darkened warehouse with them grunting and yelling in confusion and anger, that surreal second when they realize they’ve been had by
something
but they don’t have a clue what it is.
Wife-beater tried to lunge forward and grab me. I was faster, taking his elbows and driving a knee into his solar plexus. Falling to the ground and rolling back, I threw him back over my shoulders, dislocating his arms from his shoulders as I squeezed in, then popped back up immediately. Taking a step forward, I popped Thing 1 and Thing 2 in the sternum hard, throwing them both backwards several yards, stealing their breath and snapping many of their ribs simultaneously. They fell in a heap. That left Thing 3. He saw the three seconds it took for this to occur, drew in a deep breath, his chest muscles taut with tension as he readied his shout for help. His shout turned to a brief whelp of muffled pain before he passed out and I extracted my fist, taking with me six bleeding front teeth.
My team broke up into pairs and we dragged the unconscious men and dumped them quickly amid the cannibalized computers on the floor. My count showed forty-three people in the building to the computer team’s estimate of thirty-five, though from their position in the apartment, I think the additional eight were Muldoon and his entourage. We started south to our first target on the main floor. I didn’t see any action after the first four men. My team always seemed to get there before me by a few seconds and the target was unconscious, either on the floor or hanging in something, tangled harmlessly. By the time we met up with Jimmy and his team, there were nine people left, four in the apartment, three in the computer lab and two more in an office near the computer lab.
Gently turning the handle on the front door, I quietly slipped into the living room with Jimmy right behind me, keeping the door nearly shut against any outside noise. Jimmy’s team was staged just outside the computer rooms while mine waited just outside the door for us to move on. The four in the apartment were in a heavy sleep that I had not seen before, so we just walked in brazenly but quietly. My team followed quickly. We found them in a large bedroom, one of five.
The room had five occupants; the fifth was deceased. He’d been tossed carelessly into a corner of the room after having been beaten repeatedly, in part or whole after death—I didn’t want to know how much was which. There were several drugs involved. They were still sitting on the table in front of the small couch and chairs, in syringes, free-basing pipes and little silver spoons. I pushed the information aside as it floated up through the geas, identifying each and every implement, each grain of man-made chemical poison. Didn’t really need it right then. Neither did the kid in the corner. One of the women’s eyes blinked open, suddenly awake and aware, remembering. She stared off into space blindly, trying to forget the night before.