Wolf in Shadow-eARC (52 page)

“Can’t it wait until morning?” Rhian asked.

“Nope, the phones have dialed in. They have a fix, little witch.”

“I thought you needed six operating, and we have only placed three.”

“Six is optimum, but three will do to triangulate, especially when the energy release is off the scale. The magic source has fired up again and it is going for the big one, a permanent gate to the Land of the Sith.”

Rhian went cold, remembering that terrible, perfect couple.

“Hold on, I’ll wake Frankie.”

She dragged on a T-shirt and jeans and banged on Frankie’s bedroom door, eliciting a muffled squawk from inside.

“Max is outside and he needs us to smash the magic engine.”

Another squawk.

“Can’t hear you properly, look, I’ll come in.”

Rhian opened the door and flicked the light switch down. Frankie and Gary sat bolt upright in her bed, blinking at the sudden glare. A trail of discarded clothes, both male and female, marked the path from the bedroom door.

“Well,” Rhian said, “how long has this been going on?”

“I can explain,” Frankie said.

“I’m waiting,” Rhian replied.

“It’s not like it looks,” Gary said.

Rhian raised an eyebrow.

“Frankie and I went out last night for a quiet drink, and she invited me in for a nightcap and . . .”

“One thing led to another?” Rhian asked.

“Yes . . . No, it was late and with all the excitement around this manor lately, she thought it would be safer for me if I slept here.”

“I see,” Rhian said deadpan, trying not to laugh at Frankie’s hot flush and Gary’s guilty face. “But was she safer with you sleeping here?”

“It’s not like it looks,” Gary said feebly, reduced to repeating himself.

“Bollocks, it’s exactly like it looks,” Frankie exploded. “Can’t you see the little minx is winding you up. She’s got us making stupid explanations like a couple of teenagers caught in the dorm after lights out.”

Rhian couldn’t contain herself anymore and burst out laughing until she cried. Truth to tell, she felt pleased for them. It couldn’t be easy finding companionship at their age. She was pleased and perhaps just a little jealous.

“Go and make yourself useful in the kitchen with a pot of tea while we get dressed,” Frankie said, trying to reestablish some dignity as the senior partner in their relationship.

“Okay, but get your kit on as quickly as you got it off, because Max is without,” Rhian replied, slipping out and shutting the door behind her.

A thud suggested that she had been just in time to avoid whatever Frankie had thrown.

They assembled outside on the street ten minutes later. Frankie was adamant about not letting Max into her home, muttering something about bloody Karla being daemonic enough for one lifetime. Max outlined the situation.

“Okay, we need to stop by my lock-up so I can put a kit together and fetch my car,” Frankie said.

“And we’ll have to drop ‘round the pub so I can pick something up,” Gary said.

“There’s no point you coming, Gary,” Rhian said. “It will be dangerous and there’s nothing you can do.”

Gary’s lips set in a tight line.

“Rhian’s right,” Frankie said.

“I’m not discussing it. I’m telling you. I am going to keep an eye on you two and that’s the end of the matter.”

“Yes, Gary,” Frankie said meekly.

Dear God, Rhian thought, it must be lurve.

“And the ladies’ fee is twenty thousand up front, with a bonus of a further twenty on successful completion,” Gary said. “The terms are nonnegotiable, but I come free.”

“If you’ve quite finished pratting around, can we get on?” Max said. “Apocalypse, death and destruction, end of life as we know it.”

Rhian jumped into the front passenger seat of the BMW, leaving the back to Gary and Frankie. She pretended she hadn’t noticed they were holding hands like lovestruck teenagers. Max squeezed her knee.

On arriving at the lock-up he took one look at Mildred and decided that they would all go in the BMW. Frankie hummed and hawed, selecting various herbs and artifacts until Max nearly lost it. Fortunately, Gary was in and out the Black Swan in two shakes of a dirty duck’s tail. He chucked something in the car boot that Rhian didn’t see, but from the noise it was probably his baseball bat. She didn’t tell Max who might go ballistic at being diverted to fetch a stick.

Max set a new speed record through the empty streets down into the docklands, and Rhian soon began to recognize landmarks.

“You haven’t told us where we are going,” she said.

“You won’t know it. The magic source is in an old boarded-up house . . .”

“I bet it’s the Admiral of the Royal Dockyards’ grace-and-favor home,” Rhian said. She watched the illuminated campus of Whitechapel University slide by. It looked even weirder at night.

“Yes, how did you know that?” Max asked, shooting her a look.

“One gets to hear things,” Rhian said, casually.

It wouldn’t hurt to let him wonder.

“You are always full of surprises, Snow White,” Max said patronizingly. “I’m so glad I decided to keep you.”

Bloody man had an answer to everything and knew just how to wind her up. She searched for a suitable reply.

“Stop and turn round,” Frankie suddenly said, interrupting her thought processes. “Go back to that garage.”

Such was the urgency in her voice that Max did as he was bid without argument. The petrol station was an unmanned all-nighter. A single large black people carrier with darkened windows waited in the shadows by the closed shop. Max pulled in behind it.

“We have company,” he said.

Rhian turned around to see a Jaguar sports car stop behind them, boxing in the BMW.

“Oh great, Tweedledum and bloody Tweedledee,” Frankie said as Karla and Jameson got out.

Men in dark combat suits with guns on slings debussed from a sliding door in the side of the van and took up a position in front of the BMW. They didn’t point the guns at anyone but held them purposefully, like a plumber holds a wrench when examining some dodgy pipework. When they got out of the BMW, Rhian noticed that Max had his right hand in his pocket. She prayed that he wouldn’t start anything. He might be bulletproof, but the other three weren’t.

“Karla,” Max said. “I see you brought your people to the party after all. Well, the more the merrier.”

“What are you doing here, Max?” Karla asked.

“Trying to protect our flock from Otherworld wolves, same as you, I expect,” Max replied.

“Never thought I’d see the day that you’d stoop to working for a sucker,” Jameson said to Frankie.

“You’re in no position to cast the first stone,” Frankie said, nodding at Karla.

“Can it, the lot of you,” Rhian said, rather surprising herself at her assertiveness. “We don’t have time for all these petty feuds. You all keep telling me how dangerous and impossible it is to stop . . . whatever’s going on.” She paused because she wasn’t sure she did know what was going on, “so why don’t you start behaving like adults and cooperate.”

“The young lady makes admirable sense, unlike the rest of you idiots.”

“Miss Arnoux,” Frankie said. “Surely you are not their magic support?”

Unnoticed by Rhian, an old woman had alighted from the carrier.

“Thank you for your vote of confidence, my dear,” Miss Arnoux said. “I realise that my life force is not what it was thirty years ago, but I have not yet found a witch of a suitable talent to train as your replacement. Perforce I must do the job myself.”

“Not tonight,” Frankie said, shaking her head.

“I hoped you’d say that, Francesca. I’ve a spell prepared that you can use. Come with me and I’ll teach it to you.”

Gary wandered over to Jameson and was soon deep in conversation. Rhian edged towards them to eavesdrop but was intercepted.

“Hello, girl on the train,” one of the armed men said to Rhian, pushing his visor up so she could see his face.

“The fake ticket inspector!” Rhian said. “So you’re not an SAS man.”

Gaston laughed.

“Parachute regiment and then The Commission,” he said. “You weren’t far out.”

“The last time we met you were having a panic attack. You never did ring me,” Gaston said accusingly.

“It’s complicated,” Rhian replied. “I did keep your number.”

“By Abbadon’s left testicle, can’t you humans keep your mind on the job for more than a second?” Max said.

“I rather think I did have my mind on the job,” Gaston said with an innocent smile that made Rhian blush.

The loosely aligned combat teams ditched the vehicles on the carriageway. Rhian examined the old house in the glow cast by the streetlights. It was one of the strangest buildings she had ever seen. It had always stood independently, never part of a typical London terrace. It was roughly square, with four tall windows on each side now boarded up. The lower half was typical London red brick, but the upper was covered in red slate. The grey-tiled roof sloped steeply to a point as high as a third story. The building’s strangest feature was the hexagonal three-story tower with its own pointed roof sunk into one corner of the main building like a medieval alchemist’s laboratory. Large windows circled the top of the tower so the presiding admiral would have had a grand view over the docks and river.

Elaborately carved wooden posts supported a wooden balcony around the middle story of the tower. There presumably had once been rails around the edge, but now it held only rolls of barbed wire to keep out intruders. It must have been such an elegant working home once.

They vaulted the crash bars at the edge of the road and walked cautiously towards the house on ground uneven and poorly lit. Rhian was tempted to call the wolf to enjoy the advantage of four legs and better night vision, but she was reluctant to activate it except in dire need. She stumbled, but a hand gripped her elbow.

“Do you need a hand?” Gaston said. “We have low-light cameras built into our visors.”

“Lucky you,” Rhian replied, tetchily.

Gary stayed close to the women, carrying a double-barreled shotgun.

“I didn’t know you had a gun in the pub,” Rhian said, sidling up to him.

“It’s for sport, really, not a weapon,” Gary said. “I find a baseball bat far more useful in an East End boozer. Guns up the ante and can lead to unfortunate results and recriminations, especially with the police. A smack from a bat is not considered worth getting worked up about, let alone reporting to the gendarmes. They probably would officially ignore the complaint anyway. Guns, though, guns are heavy metal.”

“What do you shoot with it?” Rhian asked.

“Clay pigeons, I’ve never been into killing things,” Gary replied.

“Neither was I,” Rhian answered obliquely.

The door to the property was solidly wooden with an impressive lock. Max’s team stood back to let The Commission boys do the biz. Karla declared it free of magical defenses, so one of Gaston’s boys tried an electronic scan.

He shook his head. “Nothing, guv, must be purely mechanical.”

“Okay, boys, use the universal key,” Jameson said.

Two of the gamekeepers smashed at the door with a metal battering ram swung between them. The lock splintered but the door held, indicating some heavyweight antiburglar protection, probably iron bars that slid into the masonry when the door locked.

“What do you expect to find inside?” Frankie asked Jameson.

“The source of the magic is a powerful computer system called a Beowulf cluster. No real idea what that is, but it’s some sort of way of linking computers together into a single device.”

“You tried cutting the electricity supply to the building?” Frankie asked.

“Obviously, but that had no effect. The system will be possessed. It probably can draw energy from entropic potential differences between different universes.”

Rhian, who was listening, translated that as “magic.”

The door crashed in. It had resisted to the last, but the masonry on each side was made of weaker stuff.

“Okay, let’s go,” Jameson said, leading the way.

CHAPTER 27
ISLE OF HARTY

Rhian was not sure what she was expecting, but it was not a windswept marsh in winter with light levels barely above twilight. The wind howled in buffets that hit like a succession of boulders in an avalanche. It was cold, very, very cold. Low black clouds scudded across the sky at a crazy speed. Behind her was a doorway to normality, positioned ten centimeters off the ground. Ahead, the track was as straight as a die for three or four hundred meters to an embankment.

The air smelled of salt water laced with an accent of decaying mud and seaweed. Drainage channels ran along each side of the track. Feeder streams wound through pools and tufts of coarse marsh grasses until they lost themselves in a main ditch. A low head of twisted, wind-swept bushes marked the edge of the path.

High-pitched cries sounded in the lulls between wind blasts, although Rhian had to strain to see any wading birds. A seagull balanced on the wind, wings half retracted into upturned V’s. It flicked sharply from bank to bank to maintain stability. The bird dropped towards the ground and was lost to view. A head, covered in long, shaggy brown hair and armed with wicked curved horns, lifted to stare at Rhian.

“A hairy cow with horns—where are we, Scotland?” Rhian asked, yelling to be heard over the wind.

“Can’t be,” Frankie replied, shaking her head. “We must be somewhere in the shadow cast by the Thames Estuary into the Otherworld.”

“Have you any idea of the trope?” Jameson asked.

Frankie shook her head again, sparing her voice from an unequal contest with the wind.

They moved down the track. The Commission gamekeepers adopted a combat formation. They walked well-spaced, three at the front, one on the left, and two on the right, avoiding the center of the path. The fourth took up the rear, repeatedly walking backwards to watch behind them.

There was a sucking noise, loud enough to carry over the wind. A grey hoop pushed into the sky from a pool several hundred meters away. It slowly unfurled into a tentacle. The size was difficult to judge against the grey sky, but it must be attached to something truly enormous. The tentacle probed the marsh gently, dipping in like a sonar buoy from a helicopter searching for submarines.