Victoria Marmot- The Complete Series

by Virginia McClain

  “Why issss that?” asked a sibilant voice from behind us.

  We turned to see that General Aira, and all of the various commanders who had shown up to complain, demand, and wait, had gone silent and turned to look at us.

  “Respectfully, General Aira, if we don’t remove the Technetium before Dryer knows she’s under attack, she’ll just make sure we never find it. If she does that, we’ll never be able to neutralize it, and this fight will go on forever.”

  “Are you saying you can neutralize the Technetium?” I asked, my voice flat with the shock of it.

  Mom and Dad both nodded, looking around at the assembled group.

  “It’s why we disappeared, the whole reason we faked our own deaths. We’ve been looking for a way to neutralize Technetium for decades, but we finally realized that the answer didn’t exist in this realm. Once we realized that we needed to go to the Realm of the Dead to finish our research, we knew we would have to fake our deaths and have everyone believe it.”

  Mom and Dad both turned to look regretfully at me, and I stamped down hard on the anger that started to surge up inside me. I could be angry with them later—right now I was going to have to listen to what they had to say, so that we could all live long enough to be moody with each other tomorrow.

  “We do not have time for thissss,” said General Aira. “We musssst ready our attack before word of our preparationssss reachessss the Minisssstry of Magical Entitiessss.”

  Mom nodded, but kept talking, “Right. So we won’t go into how we figured out how to neutralize Technetium, we’ll just tell you that we did, and that we’ve brought enough serum to neutralize what we hope is the entirety of MOME’s stock.”

  “Even if we neutralize all the Technetium they have, what’s to stop them from just making more?” asked Trev, looking skeptical.

  It was Dad who answered.

  “How about a bunch of dragons completely destroying their labs and all of their research?”

  A gleam appeared in General Aira’s enormous eyes as she said, “Indeed, that may jussst do the trick.”

  “As long as we can find all of their research and storage facilities,” I said, trying to rein in the hope that was starting to surge through me. Could we really do this? Could it be this easy?

  “We already know where they are,” said Mom.

  OF COURSE, WHEN Mom said they knew where the Technetium stores were, what she really meant was that she had a highly educated guess as to where they were, because, of course, she had been trapped in the Realm of the Dead for the last year (at least according to our timeline—according to their timeline, Mom and Dad had been in the Realm of the dead for more like five years, a number that didn’t match up exactly with my own experience of time there, but at least was similarly distorted) and thus they hadn’t been able to confirm their hypothesis.

  Still, as I stood in the dank tunnel leading down to my “favorite” dungeon, breathing in the unfortunately familiar scent of stale water, moss, and burning torches, I couldn’t fault their reasoning. Technetium was deadly, if given half a chance to mix with dark matter, and dark matter was damned near everywhere, so the only safe place to store it was in a place that suppressed dark matter. And MOME had access to a handful of such places, namely the dungeons beneath all of their major headquarters. (I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that an organization that claimed responsibility for policing all magical entities would have a bunch of dark matter suppressing dungeons, but it still seemed like a weird architectural quirk to me.)

  The trick, of course, was getting to all of those places, as well as the research facilities, and Dryer, all at the same time. It didn’t have to be down to the second, since we figured it was unlikely that Dryer was so well prepared that a single second of notice would ruin our attempts, but by our best calculations we couldn’t allow for more than a minute of lag between all of the attacks, or else we ran the risk of one location warning all the others and giving them time to clear out before we could do what we came to do. Which was why I had zipped back to Flagstaff as soon as General Aira had agreed to the wait, and thankfully caught Albert and Torrence right after they’d finished the blood magic ceremony that would allow them to track Dryer. I’d told them just enough to make sure our timing would work out, and then I’d gone straight to MOME’s Phoenix HQ dungeons. Trev and Rhelia insisted that now that they had a device inside of the security system (they’d confirmed it was still there after our adventure rescuing Siara), they could make the system ignore the breach my shifting in would cause. They could turn the alarm trigger into an error message, buying me enough time to get past the security feeds before we started blowing shit up.

  It was an intense plan, and I hated the fact that it required all of us splitting up. I’d been tempted to transport everyone into position by using my newly supercharged powers. I still wasn’t feeling any noticeable drain, despite all the shifting I’d done today already, but my parents had, rather sensibly, insisted that I should save whatever stores I had for the mission, rather than wasting it all on setup. After all, we were lining up attacks in seven major cities around the world, all of which we suspected held sufficient stores of Technetium to blow up the world several times over, and I was probably going to need my A-game just to get through this. We had other mages that could shift people, and dragons that could fly, and one or two magical objects that rendered folks invisible. It would be unnecessary for me to take all of my friends to the places they were needed.

  Fair enough.

  I was in position, keeping an eye on my phone for timing while simultaneously working on calming the panic that threatened to well up inside me as I contemplated the last time that I’d been here.

  A few deep breaths helped, as did imagining what Sol, Seamus, Trev, and Rhelia would be doing. They should each be reaching their targets about now. Seamus had been given the task of tackling the now “abandoned” Bolivian HQ, on the assumption that it would be the least heavily guarded. Even still, he’d been given a few weredragons for backup. Sol, meanwhile, had been placed at the European HQ, in the hope that her intricate knowledge of MOME’s workings might get her well into the facility without attracting notice before she drew attention by wrecking the place. Trev and Rhelia had been sent together to take on the MOME HQ in Shanghai, because Rhelia thought she had a contact there, but none of us were sure enough about that to risk her going without backup. Albert had been sent with Torrence (who we were referring to as “the compass” in front of General Aira, until further notice) to go after Rebecca Dryer, wherever she wound up being, and Azrael and General Aira were both coordinating troops to attack the research facilities as soon as we cleared the Technetium stores. Because, of course, most of the research facilities were in the same compounds as the storage facilities for Technetium, since they all required dark matter suppression to function without blowing everyone up.‘Cause my life has never been easy enough that we wouldn’t have to worry about roasting me and all of my friends alive, after we neutralized the Technetium, if we didn’t get things exactly right.

  The timing was going to be delicate, to say the least.

  I, for one, had been all in favor of just blowing up the Technetium stores, along with everything else, but it had quickly been pointed out to me that doing so risked exposing the Technetium stores to dark matter, thus causing the very giant, world-ending explosions that we’d been worried about to begin with.

  Nothing’s ever easy, is it?

  So, now, after checking my watch and seeing my start time tick by with my heart in my damned mouth, I was sneaking my way down into the dungeons on foot, hoping that I didn’t run into enough guards to set off the alarms before I got to wherever the Technetium was hidden. I couldn’t rely on Trev and Rhelia to help, now that the start time had passed. They had remote access on their phones, but there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t be busy with their own problems, or lose signal.

  The first guard was pretty easy.

  She didn’t se
e me coming. She was busy wrestling with her keys, and didn’t even have her footing properly when I hit her in the back of the head. I managed to catch her before she collapsed, and then I very carefully and respectfully took her out of her uniform (thankfully she was wearing shorts and a T-shirt underneath, so I didn’t feel like too much of a creeper—even still, I laid my clothes on top of her out of a weird sense of “fairness”), and then I donned the stolen jumpsuit, complete with belt, keys, and baton, before tucking her into the first empty cell I could find. And ok, just because I did it respectfully doesn’t mean it was cool, because obviously I didn’t have her consent, but I was trying to save the world, and we were both going to have to just live with it. I hadn’t had her consent for knocking her out either, but I didn’t have time to convince everyone at MOME to join the side of reason before they blew up the world. It was going to have be enough for now.

  Even wearing a MOME uniform, I had to hope that I wouldn’t run into many other guards. I didn’t think my disguise would get me very far if I ran into anyone who worked with her.

  I’d made it to the third cell down the ramp when I saw two faces I’d never really expected to see again.

  “Sylvestra?” I thought hard, but couldn’t come up with the Troll’s name, and wasn’t sure I’d ever heard it before. I decided it was safest to just skip ahead. “What are you two doing here? I thought you were free of MOME after La Paz.”

  Sylvestra flew up to the bars that enclosed the cell, and I noticed that the whole cell front had been lined with some sort of mesh, probably meant to keep the pixie contained, since she was more than small enough to fit between the bars.

  “You’re Rhelia’s friend, yes?” said the large troll who leaned against the back wall of the cell.

  “Yeah. What happened to you two?” I asked again, completely baffled as to how they’d wound up here, of all places. The last time I’d seen them they’d kindly ignored us (after a brief misunderstanding) as we rescued Rhelia from the MOME dungeons in the Andean HQ. Unless they’d stuck around for some reason, they should have been free and clear of MOME and their shenanigans. We’d certainly left the place in enough turmoil for everyone who’d been looking for an excuse to slip away.

  The troll shrugged.

  “MOME tracked us down for guard duty again. We thought maybe they didn’t know how the last one ended, so we said yes. Turns out it was just a trap.”

  He said it with the kind of tone that suggested this was just the sort of thing that happened in his life. Nothing to be worried about. Sylvestra, meanwhile, just buzzed angrily in the air in front of me. I shook my head, reminding myself that I was on a seriously tight schedule. Before I even started speaking, I began sorting through the keys on my belt.

  “Well, my friends, today is your lucky day, as long as you can restrain yourselves from wreaking havoc until you get clear of this place entirely. I’m afraid that this time through we’re shooting for stealth, and we’re on a tight schedule.”

  “Do you spend all of your time breaking in and out of MOME headquarters, then?” asked the troll.

  I couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “It kinda feels like it, to be honest. Some days, it really does.”

  It didn’t take too long for me to find the key that worked on their lock. As soon as the door popped open and I shifted it on its enormous hinges, Sylvestra drew her sword and charged me.

  “Hey, what the fuck!? I just let you go, what’s your problem?”

  She sheathed her sword, but glared at me.

  “You are my problem, human.”

  I blinked and looked between Sylvestra and the troll.

  “Don’t mind her, she’s just cranky,” he said. “She hates getting captured.”

  The troll held out a hand to me.

  “Name’s Cronk, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you, Cronk. Call me Vic.”

  His handshake was firm, but for someone whose hand covered my entire arm, it was impressive that he managed to be so gentle. Then he turned away with a nod, beckoning to his miniature friend.

  “Did they really just set you up to capture you?” I asked, somewhat befuddled as to why MOME would bother.

  “Seems that way,” Cronk said, still waiting for the pixie to fly away from me and towards the tunnel that would lead them out of here. “Guess we must have gone up the charts of ‘most wanted’ after we helped you lot escape the first time. The arse who locked us up kept muttering about us joining the right side, whether we wanted to or not.”

  He shrugged, then dropped his hand and glared at the pixie.

  “Come on, Sylvestra. Let’s get out of here before our new friend blows the whole place up.”

  Sylvestra shot me another haughty look, then turned to fly after the already departing troll.

  “That reminds me,” I called, as they hurried up the slope. “We really are blowing the place up this time. On purpose, I mean. I recommend hustling out of here and not making a fuss, if you can help it. We’ve got a lot riding on this one. Fate of the world, yada yada.”

  Cronk waved a giant hand to show that he’d heard and continued up the stone steps back towards the tunnel entrance I’d just come down. I turned and headed farther into the depths, hoping that I hadn’t just ruined our entire plan by releasing a cranky pixie and a thoughtful troll.

  IT WASN’T UNTIL I got past the tenth dungeon cell—all of which were now empty, even though three of them had been occupied before I came clanking down the tunnels with my stolen keyring of potential freedom—that I began to worry that there was never any Technetium stored in this particular dungeon after all.

  The dripping stone walls of the steeply descending hall seemed to only be getting narrower and darker, and the smell of moss and wet stone was getting more and more overwhelming. I was officially farther into the dungeons than I’d ever been, and I had a hard time imagining that there was some kind of recently used storage facility below me. If anything, it seemed more likely that any door I might find would hide a centuries old cellar filled with gunpowder and wine casks, but none of the doors I’d opened on the way down here had contained stores of anything other than people that MOME considered criminals, so I’d continued to play Robin Hood and plough onwards.

  Finally, I came across a low iron door that only came up to my chest, tucked awkwardly under what looked to be a natural arch in the rock. The hall continued on, but I could no longer see any torchlight flickering in its depths, and I wondered if anything lay in that direction. I kind of hoped not, although it would be strange for the hall to continue to nothing. Maybe it was just an emergency exit? Regardless, I really wanted this door to be the door I was looking for. I didn’t want to have to keep going, or risk getting blown up when the dragons took out the research facilities above me, because I’d taken too long freeing captives along the way or…

  I took a deep breath and decided to stop thinking about all the things I didn’t want to have happen.

  Instead, I set about finding the key that would fit the lock in front of me.

  I was still on my knees, struggling to fit various oddly shaped pieces of metal into the dangling padlock that looked at least a hundred years old, when I heard a shoe scrape the stone behind me.

  “Oh good, you’re already on your knees. That should save us some time.”

  The voice sounded vaguely familiar, and the southern accent set my teeth on edge, so I wasn’t entirely surprised by the view when I turned around and found Rebecca Dryer standing in the middle of the tunnel directly behind me.

  I was, however, a bit taken aback to find that she had a gun pointed at Albert’s head.

  SHIT, SHIT, SHIT, shit, shit.

  This was not good. This was very bad. This was on the list of worst things that could go wrong at this point in the plan. It might have even been at the top of that list.

  Because standing before me was evidence that we were completely screwed. Not only had Albert not taken out Rebecca Dryer, indeed, Albert seem
ed to have had his ass handed to him by Rebecca Dryer, Torrence was nowhere in sight, Dryer clearly knew what we were up to, and she seemed all too willing to stop it. And even if all she did was slow us down too much, we were all going to get blown up if we didn’t get out of here in about seven minutes.

  And just to top everything off, she had a gun. And I did not.

  “Well, fuck,” I said aloud, raising my hands above my head and turning my whole body to face her, while standing up slowly.

  “Indeed,” Rebecca replied. “This doesn’t seem to be going well for you. Though I must say, I’m impressed with how far you’ve come. I didn’t think our security would be that easy to bypass. I’m really going to have to have a “talk” with my people after this.”

  She was smiling as she spoke, as if we were just catching up over a cup of coffee instead of having a showdown in the middle of a centuries-old dungeon. I wasn’t sure if that was a southern thing, or a lawyer thing, but I wasn’t a fan either way. Still, it could be used to my advantage.

  “How did you find me?” I asked, hoping she came from the James Bond school of villainy. Honestly, it seemed like decent odds she would want to talk. After all, a truly efficient villain would have simply shot me in the back of the head and capped Albert the minute she’d gotten the upper hand on him, so clearly she needed one, or both, of us for something.

  “Oh, I didn’t, sweetheart. I mean, I just stumbled upon you, really. Once I caught this bitch snooping around my office, I knew something was wrong, but I really only came down here because I needed a dose of Technetium for our mutual friend here.”

  She gestured towards Albert with the gun and I winced, watching the barrel dig into the skin above his ear.

  “Gwendamnit, I hate guns,” I whispered.

  “What’s that, dear?” Dryer asked.