Authors: Edward Lazellari
“I’m leaving you a lot of money,” he said bluntly. “And I mean
you,
not your mommy.”
Caitlin’s mouth created the perfect little O. “Nuh-uh,” she said, disbelieving.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He pulled out copies of the financial paperwork. “The money is in both our names. I set up an account called a trust, and you’re going to get a little bit every month to help pay for food, clothes, and rent. And when you turn eighteen, what’s left is going to be all yours to do what you want. That means you can go to college or buy a house or whatever.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Mommy’s going to take it all for drugs!” she said.
“Nuh-uh,” he said, mimicking her. “Mommy’s going to this place.” He handed Caitlin a pamphlet for the best drug rehab center in Westchester. Stapled to it was a receipt for a three-month program—paid in full. “We’re going to get her there. It’s a special place for people with problems like your mom. They go in and detox, and come out better. You’re going to live with your grandma in Queens until Darcy’s done. And after she’s better, we’re going to ask Sister Gladys to help you manage your monthly stipend until we’re sure your mom won’t shoot it up her arm.”
“But why are you doing this?” Caitlin took it all in with the wonderment only a child could bring to such an unbelievable boon. Seth couldn’t help but think she should be more skeptical … it would help defend herself against the bad people of the world … against men like him. Caitlin was her mother’s daughter through and through—raised to believe in princes and magical moments—that someone someday was going to come along and make all your dreams come true. He wanted Caitlin to have the money, but he also wanted her to know what was out there.
“Your mom was my first girlfriend,” Seth said. “And I’m the reason she started drinking and doing drugs. I’m the reason…” Seth welled up. The realizations of his actions and their effect on the lives of others fell on him like a jumbo jet. “… why your life isn’t as good as it should be,” he finished. “I’m very sorry, Caitlin.”
The dam broke.
Seth wiped away tears with his sleeve. He expected her to call him stupid—to curse him for destroying her mother, for wrecking her life. But Caitlin handed him a paper towel and patted his shoulder instead. She was a seven-year-old wonder.
Cal was waiting—their business with Dorn was not yet done. But he didn’t want to leave Caitlin at this time. She took his hand and led him to the loveseat in the living room where she curled up next to him.
“Tell me about my moms when she was a girl, Mr. Picture Man—before drugs.”
“My name is Seth,” he told her. Caitlin nodded, but made no other gesture toward the revelation. She was waiting to hear about Darcy—about the woman who would be her mother after the rehab. He called up everything good about Darcy he could remember and was not surprised that it was too much to hold in his head all at once. “Your mom was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met…,” he began.
CHAPTER 38
INCOMING
The sidewalk below the hotel was empty of pedestrians. A dozen creatures, white, bearlike, feral raged in frustration as they were locked out of the building by an invisible force. The police cordoned off a two-block radius around the Waldorf. Cal wished they’d make it ten blocks. They were outclassed; he didn’t want any of his brothers in blue to get hurt over Aandor’s affairs.
The hotel’s fire alarms whooped and flashed. Hallway speakers told the guests not to be alarmed and to stay in their rooms. All the outer doors had been locked. The police had been called and were looking into the matter of the escaped animals outside the hotel.
“They can’t get in,” said Mal’s head of security, Tom Dunning. “They’ve surrounded the building but it’s the same everywhere.”
“Lelani, will your shield hold?” Cal asked.
“Not certain,” she said. “I erected it to protect against an energy or mind-control attack. I’ve never seen beasts affected like this. They must be saturated with magic.”
“Was hoping for something more definitive,” Cal said.
“Hey! Two of those things are climbing up the side!” Daniel shouted.
Lelani’s eyes widened. “My lord, the shield is not a perfect envelope—it was not intended to repel a physical threat. It is a series of sheets, like umbrellas, and where they overlap…”
“… there may be openings,” Cal finished. “Where?”
“The roof. Several overlaps.”
“I’ve got it,” said Dunning, and he sent three of his armed men up the stairwell. Outside the suite Dunning’s remaining squad set up to repel invaders from every entrance point on the floor. Cal shut the door behind him and ordered Timian and Reverend Grey to barricade it with the couch.
“Bree! Where’s Bree?” Cal barked.
Clarisse came forward with the girl in her arms. She was frightened but not crying. Cal was proud of his brave little girl. “You stay with this lady,” Cal told his daughter. To Clarisse he said, “You stay with this lady,” pointing to Lelani. “And you protect my daughter with your life,” he told Lelani. “Get her out of here if you can. I have the prince. He’s the one those things are set upon, so stay on the opposite end of the room wherever he is.”
“What do you mean ‘set upon’?” Daniel asked. The boy’s eyes were wide, his lip quivered. The most powerful wizard in the world wanted him dead. He looked scared and confused as to why this was happening to him. The boy acted so mature for his age, Cal had to remind himself that the lad was just shy of fourteen, and that all of this was new to him.
“They’re homing in on you, kid,” Malcolm said. “Anywhere in the world you run, they will track you down.”
Cal didn’t approve of Malcolm’s gruff tone. The kid was already scared enough.
Cal unzipped his duffel bag. He pulled out nonstandard-issue equipment that he one day had hoped to wear in the field as a member of the NYPD’s elite Hercules unit: body armor with ballistic plates, Kevlar helmet with visor, M-4 carbine assault rifle, combat boots, Smith & Wesson 9 mm with fifteen rounds in the clip and one in the chamber. Cal put on his modern armor … grateful it wasn’t the head-to-toe steel suit he wore in battles back home. That one was fifty pounds heavier and far less flexible. He had a black lightweight ballistic shield with viewport that was more durable than any steel shield he ever carried back in Aandor. On his back he strapped Bòid Géard.
“Call the idiot!” he barked at Lelani. “Tell him we need his help now.” Progress was made around the room. The barricade was up, Timian joined Clarisse and Bree, Reverend Grey stood beside Daniel, Malcolm next to them wearing a state-of-the-art military-issue special forces plate vest and wielding a fire ax in one hand and a larger, two-sided silver ax with a six-inch Kaiser spike sticking up between them in the other—everyone had a role … everyone except Balzac. Where was the jester?
Thunderous crashes at the room’s windows, and the flying shattered glass that resulted, scared the crap out of everyone. The creatures—a mutated mingling of man and beast roared with spit-riddled breath at the inhabitants just out of their reach—they couldn’t get in and their failure to attack their prey deranged them further. Sniffing at the windows, they both set their sights on the prince, but the massive paws couldn’t penetrate the perimeter of the room. Their howls reverberated across the New York skyline.
Colby drew his pistol and emptied his clip into the closest monster. One of Mal’s security men did the same.
“Save your bullets,” Cal ordered. “Lelani, how long will this shield last?” Cal asked.
“At this level of strain, about one day. Then the battery plates run dry.”
A marksman in a police copter outside their room opened fire on the creatures with a rifle. The beasts yowled, but otherwise shrugged off the attack. A third beast that they hadn’t been aware of leaped upward from the corner of the building onto the windshield of the copter.
Damn,
Cal thought. He couldn’t see the other two sides of this building, and therefore could not account for all the creatures.
The beast on the copter smashed through the windshield, mangling the pilot with its massive jaws, and continued into the copter after the marksman. The helicopter spiraled downward, its tail smashing into the offices across the street, taking creature and crew down with it in a fiery burst. Streamers of hot metal and burning fuel covered Park Avenue like a miniature nova.
The NYPD on the ground retreated, backing their units farther from the hotel. They’d eventually muster enough manpower, but hundreds of cops might die before then.
“We need a plan to get Daniel out of the building and out of the city, possibly upstate New York or Pennsylvania,” Cal said. “Mal, can you get two copters to land on the roof? Let’s hope these things aren’t bright and just keep up what they’ve been…”
The creatures at the window looked up toward the roof—then began to climb.
“Crap,” Cal whispered under his breath.
CHAPTER 39
FROM A VIEW TO A KILL
Dorn and his remaining entourage walked into the lobby of the Chrysler Building on Forty-second Street and Lexington Avenue carrying large duffel bags filled with weapons and magical paraphernalia. People were distracted, talking animatedly about a terrorist attack at the Waldorf Astoria several blocks uptown. A mildly drugged Catherine MacDonnell barely stood on her feet by her own power—Lhars had his arm around her in an intimate embrace, looking to the few patrons in the lobby like a tired, loving couple.
The building was beautiful. Metal eagles gleaming from the corners of the sixtieth floor as they approached the building beckoned to Dorn. They reminded him of the aeries in the highlands of Farrenheil, where his father would take him eagle hunting. The lobby was a masterful execution of art deco design, and one of the few structures in this universe that impressed Dorn’s aesthetics. Marble, metal, and light conspired to produce a palette of golden sheen against deep black trim. The artwork on the ceiling was simply breathtaking. As they walked, Symian proudly explained how he had found this source of magic.
“In my research to find where magic enters this world, I discovered that wherever it runs it inspires great feats,” he said. “Where magic manifests there is evidence of it: the pyramids of Giza, Stonehenge in England. This building was once the tallest in the world and is still considered one of the most beautiful. It was closest to the Plaza, so I came here on a hunch and was rewarded for my insight … the entire building is a conductor. The lay line emerges here and pools into the building.”
A security man in his fifties with graying hair and a well-tailored suit that hid his paunch stopped them before the elevator banks to the top floors. “What’s your business?” he asked.
“The topmost floor,” said Dorn, truthfully.
“That’s just storage these days,” the security man said. “We haven’t had an observatory deck since the forties.”
“Splendid,” responded Dorn. “That will do.”
“No, you don’t understa—”
“Run,” Cat mumbled. “Call … police.”
The man reached for his radio too late. Hesz snapped his neck and caught him before he fell. He held the security man in such a way as to appear that he was a friend giving them a tour. They walked calmly to the elevator and headed up to the seventy-first floor.
The space was cavernous and mostly empty, the floor a mix of dark and light marble. A long wide hallway stretched from the north to the south side of the building like the cross bar on the letter H, with the elevator, stairwell, and some closets in the center on either side. On the north and south ends, the room turned west and east giving access to all four vistas. Unlike some observation decks with balconies, this one was entirely enclosed.
The ceiling on the corners tapered in following the form of the famous crown on the outside. On the walls and ceiling were painted the stars and planets of the solar system. The windows on all sides were triangular, pointed at angles outward like prongs of a crown radiating toward the heavens. A heavenly atmosphere appropriately permeated the room, perfect for Dorn’s aerie of power. The magic saturated this place. Dorn drank it into himself like a man come out of the desert. He’d forgotten what it was to be continuously charged. It stayed the headache and the voices. This was what was needed, not pills. Power!
“This will do,” he said to Symian.
They placed the security man’s body in a storage closet and placed their oversized duffel bags within easy reach around the floor. Dorn looked down. Flashing red lights like glowing ants traveled north and east and west, converging on the Waldorf-Astoria a few blocks north. Through his link to the golems, Dorn knew of the shield the centaur had erected, but now flushed with power, he prepared to remove this final obstacle.
Dorn opened one of the triangular windows and stepped out into the open air. He floated down under his own power to the sixtieth floor and landed upon one of the eagles that guarded the northwest corner of the building. Dorn drew in the mana from the building; Symian had been right, the building was a conduit—the flow of energy was concentrated … richer and more plentiful than anywhere in Farrenheil.
He cast his spell and pushed the power outward in a violent thrust toward the Waldorf. The centaur’s shield buckled but held. Dorn smiled and readied another spell. He would throw the world at that dwelling until Daniel was dead, dead, dead.
CHAPTER 40
MINSTREL’S LUCK
1
The building shook.
Spell upon spell mercilessly pounded against Lelani’s wards. The attack went unnoticed by all except for Lelani and the cleric. Prelate Grey looked to the centaur for an explanation but quickly surmised what was happening.
“The shields are under attack!” the prelate shouted to everyone.
The protections, which Lelani had erected to ward off nonphysical attacks, had turned out to be vital in repelling the golems. They would have been dead in no time otherwise.
Lelani had read about golems, used in wars a thousand years past. Dorn had used forbidden magic to create these creatures; that was why they could not cross the protective barriers—the magic was supercharged by radioactive elements, but it was the magic that animated them that could not cross the threshold. Uncontrollable and erratic—these spells of mass destruction had been unleashed by a sociopathic madman.