Authors: Scott V. Duff
“So we’re ready?” Richard asked, going back to his wards.
“Yep,” I said. “Here, let me take that.” Going to the trunk, I moved to pick it up as Richard made moves to retrieve his briefcase and wards off the top, then I shifted it directly to the foyer of Peter’s suite of apartments. “What’d you have in there, a sedan?”
Richard grinned while he fumbled slightly with his case and wards, snapping the lid on the stone and scroll combination that I could see a little better now. The wards ebbed away as Richard closed his briefcase.
The first tickle I felt when I came into the apartment over ninety minutes ago rushed through me again, much stronger this time. The Night Sword surged forward into my left hand, humming in warning. The Stone pushed a shield out in front of me and something at the base of my spine told me that rush was
wrong
, just
wrong.
My senses expanded outward from the apartment. I felt Peter, not saw but felt, push Jimmy against the wall and tell him to stay down, then he sent his own searching magic out along side of mine. Solid walls disappeared as my sight changed to see energy patterns, plunging into the foam of reality rather than its solidity. Glomming onto the wrongness, I followed it back to its source, across the parking lot, into another building, another apartment. It was shielded against magic, warded. Weak wards, though, I could break them. The problem was, I didn’t know if I wanted to, yet.
“Someone’s spying on you, Richard,” I said calmly, still staring at the apartment through the walls. “Your wards were holding them off.”
“Guess that puts you on the ‘Not Without Backup’ list, too,” Peter said, looking at his father imperiously.
“It’s definitely making the keys a higher priority,” I muttered.
“Can you tell where?” Richard asked nervously.
“Yes,” I answered, moving to the front window and using the Night to point. “That building, second floor, nearest right. It’s warded, but I don’t want to break it until I can get close enough to see inside.”
“Well, they couldn’t have seen much beyond coming and going,” Richard said, staring out the window. He sent several different searching spells out as I watched, mumbling under his breath in Latin and ancient Greek, twisting his hands into odd shapes and making weird gestures. Well, odd and weird to me, anyway. He came back as empty of information as I had.
“The rental company can pick up the car from here,” Peter said.
“Good,” I responded, still in rapt attention on our neighbors. “Jimmy, take my keys and stay with my car. Be ready to leave at a shout.”
I had to give Jimmy credit. He was taking this well, being bounced around the country, tripped over a couch, seeing things disappear, and now the Night Sword’s appearance with the three of us freaking out over it. I’d be surprised if he didn’t steal my car and run. He might be too scared of me to do that, though, or too hopeful I could help him. He snatched the keys and scurried out the door as quickly as he could without a word.
“There’s someone in the apartment,” Peter said, catching the flicker of movement in the curtains as Jimmy ran to the car. “Dad, wait in the car with Jimmy, please.”
“Not a chance,” Richard growled and headed for the door, scowling back at Peter. I had a feeling I’d have a similar face-off with my own father at some point and decided to stay out of this one completely. Watch and learn.
“Dad, we can handle this and Jimmy needs protection,” Peter growled back.
“They weren’t spying on you, Peter,” Richard said, stopping at the door, his hand poised to turn the handle. “And quit trying to protect me. I didn’t get to be over one-eighty by sitting on my ass.”
“Impressive,” I told him. “You don’t look a day over thirty-five.”
“Thank you, Seth,” Richard said proudly and opened the door. The dirty look Peter gave me told me I stepped in it pretty deep. So much for staying out of it. I thought it was an innocuous comment. We followed him out hurriedly.
The Night didn’t object as Peter pushed a chameleon spell over the three of us to mask our approach. It was one of Ethan’s spells, wrapping the environment around us more completely than a simple glamour. It was still detectable but harder to see in general, like all of our magic. None of the curtains twitched in the least and faint auras began to show through the ward, two of them. The first aura was a person. The second was too small, an object then.
This complex was on a hill, so as we stood on the sidewalk looking into the window, we were actually even in height with the second story bedroom. From the slight opening in the curtains, we could make out three lenses aimed at slightly different targets in Richard’s direction. Nothing else showed through the darkness, even to my doubly enhanced eyes. The ward had to come down first.
“Peter, you take the side,” I said, pointing off to the right of the building. “Richard, you stay here and keep the front boxed in. I’ll flush out the other side. If nothing comes out, y’all can join me inside in a minute.” I walked the distance to the front door, foregoing the steps down the hill and back up to the second floor by using a Stone-built bridge instead. Peter was in place before I was, at the corner of the building and checking out the neighboring buildings for similar situations. Richard was pulling power from a ley line behind him and juggling several different spells in his mind. He knew some scary stuff, but I staved off peeking in. The flash I saw was enough for me.
When I got to the door, I pushed Peter’s chameleon off and knocked. When the peephole darkened, I smiled broadly at the door. “Are you prepared for the coming of the Lord?” I asked loudly, then surged through the door and into the apartment, throwing the man back down the hallway. The door followed him part way into the living room, careening off a wall and driving one corner into another wall.
I walked into the apartment and looked around briefly. All the walls were covered with sigils of protection and illusion. In the corners were small packets of something that gave me the sense of forgetfulness and ignorance. This was fairly minor magic, by the feel of it. My pause gave the man time to regain some of his senses and he scurried away, backward and crab-like, further down the hall for the bedroom. I ripped the sigil magic to shreds as I followed him back.
With the Night at the ready, I stepped cautiously into the room just as the man shoved his hand through a plate glass container holding a simple black-handled knife, the blade a mere four inches long. He pulled it out and waved it at me menacingly. I smiled at him and looked around the room. All the room contained was a table with two laptops. At the window were a video camera, an electronic still camera, and a telescope. I looked back to the man to see him staring at the knife in his hand oddly. When I looked at it, I saw nothing but a knife.
Until the blood from the many cuts on his hand reached the metal. He froze in an instant rigor as the blade flared into life. It was an athame, not a simple knife, a ritual blade, and spelled for a purpose. This guy had no idea of what that was. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have used it if he had. It fed on the blood on his hands, but it wanted more and it knew where to get it.
I moved to strike with the Night Sword but I was too far away. The man jumped back, still under the knife’s control. Turning the knife in his hand and shouting hysterically, he shoved the blade hard with both hands between his ribs into his heart. He exploded. White-hot fire erupted from him, melting the knife in his chest, blowing out the windows and pummeling my shield, throwing me back into the wall of the hall. Neither the Stone nor the blade had seen that coming. None of the three of us would make that mistake again.
Little Brother!
Peter called.
I’m okay, Pete
, I answered.
The Night started eating away at the blood magic trying so desperately to destroy me but kept at bay by the Stone’s shield. The damage was done here, though. The man was gone and the fire was into the walls already. The computers and camera equipment were useless even as doorstops. I went back out the front door. I pulled the fire alarm in the hall as I invoked the chameleon spell then took the stairs out, three at a time. Smoke billowed out of the blown-out windows and flames were already reaching above the trees.
“Seth!” Richard yelled from the sidewalk. He couldn’t see me under the spell. “Where are you? Seth!”
Peter was running up the hill. “He should be coming out now!” He was looking into the apartment building for my aura.
“I’m here!” I hollered to him, keeping the chameleon active. A loud crash in the building announced the fire spread farther and the noise increased dramatically as the fire destroyed with ferocious intensity. The hateful magic helped it.
We all heard the squeal of tires on asphalt as I topped the concrete steps. And we all turned, ready to send seriously heavy offensive spells at whatever was coming. Thankfully, we recognized the black streak as it wove in reverse through the parking lot at us, screeching to a halt directly opposite us. Jimmy threw the door open and jumped out, yelling, “Seth! Peter! Richard! Seth!” He was panicked, tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t see us standing five feet in front of him.
I sent the Night home and braced myself for the collision, then dropped the chameleon, too. “We’re all right, Jimmy,” I said loudly, knowing it was too late. He crashed into me hard.
Surprisingly, we didn’t go down and he turned it into an embrace, hugging me tight and muttering, “You’re all right! Oh, God, thank you!” several times before letting me go. We began hearing sirens in the distance. When I looked for Peter and Richard, I found them rifling through the only other car in the lot.
“Come on, Jimmy, get in. We have to go,” I said urgently. “Pete, gotta go. Now!” Jimmy climbed in the back seat. I wouldn’t have argued if he’d drive, though. By the time, I got in and shut the door, Peter was climbing in the back and Richard was standing behind him.
“Stop at the rental car!” Peter shouted as Richard rolled the window down. I didn’t ask, I just did, slamming on the brakes from the heavy acceleration we were in. Peter sent a massive wave of disassociating magic over the car and the apartment containing the sense of anything human. If there had been a person in that building, that person would have been ill for weeks, hospitalized, without a clue to the cause. Thankfully, Peter wasn’t that careless. The wave sank into the earth just past the building’s confines. We pealed out of the parking lot, passing the first police car within a half of a block. The fire engines were behind them by two blocks, their heavier loads taking longer to get up the hills.
Jimmy was the first to ask, “What the hell happened back there?”
“The place was booby-trapped,” I said. “Dead Man’s Switch, with a real-live, create-your-own dead man.” I was still on the adrenaline rush, blood pumping hard. Controlling my breathing wasn’t hard, but my heart was another matter. I pulled the car to the side of the road as police and fire vehicles flooded past us, then pulled out again, staying right at the speed limit.
“Let’s get away from the scene first, Jimmy,” Peter said, calmly. Not that he was calm, but he could appear that way. Another few turns through the neighborhood put us on a main road, Sparkman Drive. I lost us in traffic, driving away from Richard’s TDY and his now-noisy neighbors. Once we were at least five miles away, I pulled into a convenience store and we all piled out of the car, nervous and jittery.
Peter handed Jimmy two twenties and asked him get us all two bottles of water and a couple of dark chocolate bars each. He thought Peter was trying to get rid of him but went anyway. All we did while he was gone was trade “You all right?” back and forth and walk in circles around the car a few times. We jumped on him like jackals on a wildebeest when he got back. The three of us guzzled the first three-quarters of a bottle of water before stopping to breathe.
“Now, tell us what happened, step by step,” Richard said slapping one of the chocolate bars into my hand.
“I screwed up is what happened,” I said, exhaling slowly. “I knocked on the door. When the peephole went dark and he was behind the door, I shoved my way in hard. It threw him and the door back down the hall. The layout was close to yours. The door flew back and lodged into the wall in the living room. The man fell into the hall. I should have held him down on the floor there, but instead I looked around for the second aura we saw. The walls were covered in protection sigils. While I was reading them, the man scurried to the back room, shoved his hand through a glass display case, and grabbed a knife. I followed him back and saw him but I wasn’t fast enough to stop him.
“The knife had some sort of spell on it,” I said, beginning to stammer some, having a hard time explaining what I had seen. “It wasn’t visible beforehand, but when the blood from his hands hit it, the magic flared like sodium on water. He seized; his whole body completely seized. I was already thrusting forward with the Night but he suddenly jumped back, out of my reach and flipping the knife around in his hand. Then he shoved it directly into his heart and, boom, flash fire.” I was shaking now, just remembering it. “It was just so
wrong
. The explosion from him sent me flying. The Night ate most of the energy and the Stone diverted most of the kinetics, but I wasn’t anchored to anything so I hit the wall.”