The Phoenix Illusion

by Lisa Shearin

  That brought up a thought.

  “Uh, guys? Rake thinks the Khrynsani did what they did pretty much to be a pain in the ass. If the cabal is using these abandoned buildings as tests, they would have to have sent them somewhere. The Southwest has a lot of empty spaces. Do you think a tiny piece of that might have twenty-one new buildings?”

  “Do we have photos of them?” Ian asked.

  “Some.” Kenji was nodding and clicking. “As to any new towns springing up with mismatched buildings, let me borrow a couple of satellites and see what I can find.”

  My partner frowned. “Military satellites?”

  “They’ve got the best ones.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “No, it’s not. Their own people will be making the path changes. Of course, they won’t know about it.” Kenji waggled his eyebrows. “Just call me The Glitch.”

  “I didn’t hear this.”

  The elf flashed a grin. “You couldn’t have. I never said it.”

  “Do any ley lines correlate to the building sites?” Ian asked, taking a sharp right from a former US Special Forces officer witnessing the piracy of US military satellites.

  I’d forgotten about that. “That’s right. Phaeon’s magetech generator needed ley lines to work.”

  “It’s the first thing I checked,” Kenji replied. He hit one key and leaned back. “Look at that.”

  I whistled. “Yowza. It looks like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lights all wadded up into a ball.”

  “Ley lines, energy vortexes, spirit portals, you name it, they’re out there. The building sites are divided among them. Since most of the events happened too long ago to have any magic residue left, I’m checking on power outages in the nearest town to determine the likely dates when the buildings vanished.”

  “Good idea,” I told him. “Where do you stand on that?”

  “Info is still coming in. Like you said, there’s a lot of empty out there. Some of the closest towns have populations of less than fifty. But even in the smallest places, outages get reported, either to the local police or electric cooperative. Don’t worry, we’ll get what we need.”

  Kenji’s desk phone rang. He glanced at the readout to decide whether to let it roll over to voice mail. Kenji was notorious for not answering his phone unless it was the boss, Mr. Moreau, or worth his time.

  He snatched up the receiver. “Hey, Claire.” He glanced over at us with a wink. “Yeah, they’re right here.” He listened for a few moments. “Uh-huh. Well, that makes things interesting. I’ll tell them.”

  “Tell us what?” Ian asked before Kenji had hung up.

  “The metallurgy analysis came back. The slag from Rake’s house is a ninety-five percent match for the magetech generator’s case. Sounds like Phaeon did a fancy upgrade for your goblin Nazis.”

  14

  Two hours later, we got our first big break.

  An agent in our Los Angeles office reported a building disappearance that had happened last night. A friend of hers was a location scout for a small film company. She and one of her staff had visited Shiloh City, Nevada, yesterday and had liked what they’d seen. Shiloh City was different than most of the mining boomtowns that’d sprung up throughout the Southwest in the mid- to late 1800s. Its buildings hadn’t just been slapped together overnight; as a result, they were substantial enough to withstand a film shoot. At least the exteriors were. They wouldn’t be using the interiors; those would be shot on a studio soundstage. But the exteriors were more than stable enough not to fall on cast or crew during shooting.

  They’d rented an RV and had camped nearby. Last night, all of their electronic devices had lost power for over an hour, and they’d been treated to a light show in the sky. They’d chalked it up to some kind of solar flare thing. Once the glow in the sky faded, their power came back on, and they went back to sleep. When they’d woken up this morning, the hotel that’d been there yesterday was gone. Not gone as in collapsed into a pile of rubble. Gone as in it had never existed.

  The location scout immediately took pictures of the now-vacant lot and called her SPI agent buddy.

  Within twenty-four hours was the ideal timeframe to find strong remnants of whatever mutant lovechild of magic and technology had been used there.

  Our LA agent forwarded the photos her friend had taken of the hotel and surrounding town. I didn’t know what kind of movie they’d planned to shoot there, and for our purposes, it really didn’t matter.

  Gone was gone.

  Kenji had forwarded the photos to me and Ian. As I flipped through them on my phone, there wasn’t a brick or board left to say the town’s hotel had ever been there.

  Normal folks would probably say “spooky,” but when you work for an organization like SPI, “spooky” takes on a whole new meaning. Things would have to get a lot weirder to qualify.

  Whoever had built the Shiloh City Hotel had put a lot of work into it. It was a two-story, red brick Victorian. Amazingly, the hotel’s tall windows had been intact, with no glass missing that I could see. Through the ornate double doors had been a lobby with a curved staircase against one wall that presumably led up to the guest rooms on the second floor.

  On either side of it had been a saloon and restaurant. The three buildings had been constructed separately, but according to the location scout, a Boston entrepreneur had bought all three in 1888 and had connected them by knocking out the walls in between. By converting the holes in the walls into arched doorways, he’d made the Shiloh City Hotel a Wild West precursor to Las Vegas, a couple hundred miles to the south. Eat, drink, sleep, and gamble all in one place.

  Only now it was a place that didn’t exist anymore—at least not in Shiloh City.

  Ian frowned as he scrolled through the photos Kenji had sent us of the other buildings that had disappeared. He had gotten word back about power outages close to six of the disappearances. The Shiloh City Hotel made seven. Information on seven out of twenty-one wasn’t great, but it at least gave us something to work with.

  The hotel was the largest building so far. The sawmill taken in Colorado had been smaller, but not by much.

  It had been gone for five days.

  The next building had been taken twelve days ago. It had been marginally smaller than the sawmill.

  Ian’s eyes scrolled down the list of probable dates and building sizes. “Phaeon’s escalating. Each time a larger building.”

  “But still with no one inside.”

  “That we know of.”

  *

  Tam hadn’t been able to reach Agata Azul. Since we now had a trail that might actually be followable, we needed to track it while the scent was fresh.

  With Ben Sadler.

  Tam was confident that our consulting gem mage would be able to help.

  Ben was confident that he was having an anxiety attack.

  I really couldn’t say that I blamed him. If I were in his shoes, I’d probably be hyperventilating, too.

  “Honey, you’re not gonna be taking on Phaeon, Isidor, a megamage, or a goblin Nazi,” I assured him. “You’re merely going to use one rock to find another rock. We have people to do all that other stuff.” I waved the hand and arm that wasn’t presently around his shoulder. “It’s what they train for, and quite frankly, they live for it. They’re crazy like that.”

  Tam was tugging his crystal ring off his finger, and I resisted the urge to clamp down on Ben’s shoulder to keep him from running away. He wasn’t really going to run (at least I didn’t think so), and he needed to know that we had the confidence in him that he didn’t.

  Tam held the ring out to Ben. “Just try it. If it doesn’t work, you’re off the hook, I believe the phrase goes.”

  “Okaaay.” Ben took the ring and slid it on his finger. As soon as it touched his skin, the flames inside began flickering in what I could only describe as extreme enthusiasm.

  “It’s a little large,” Tam noted, “but we
can fix that.”

  Ben froze and emitted a squeak. “That won’t be necessary,” he barely whispered, staring down at the entirely too happy rock. “It…constricted.”

  Yikes.

  Tam was calm, at least outwardly. “I should have expected this.”

  Ben’s voice was strangled. “Yes, you should have.”

  “Can you take it off?”

  Ben tried, and to his relief and ours, the ring easily slid off his finger. The crystal’s glow dimmed.

  “I think you hurt its feelings,” I told him.

  “That’s odd,” Tam said.

  Ben swallowed with an audible gulp. “I was going to go with ‘terrifying,’ but that’ll work, too.”

  “It could be an acknowledgment of your gift,” Rake ventured.

  “Did it do this with Agata?” Ben asked.

  “Agata has a pendant; she never tried on the ring.”

  “Maybe you should consider it a hug,” I suggested. I left “from a finger-sized python” unsaid.

  Ben wasn’t convinced, but he did slide the ring back on his finger. As he took one breath after another, forcing himself to relax, the flames inside the crystal again flickered happily.

  “Come to think of it, I have heard of rings of power sizing themselves to those they have accepted,” Tam noted.

  Ben tried to smile, but it looked more like a grimace. “Just call me Frodo.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Tam asked.

  “Earth literature reference,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “Things didn’t go so great for Frodo, but I’m sure this situation will be entirely different.”

  “Agata didn’t experience any adverse reaction to prolonged contact with her pendant,” Tam said. “If it weren’t for that bond giving her direct contact with the Heart of Nidaar, hundreds of people, myself included, wouldn’t be alive right now. We owe that bond our lives.”

  Ben began to look less unsure of his role in all this. “If you think it will help.”

  “It may be the only chance we have to find those crystals.”

  “How close will he have to be for the ring to work?” I asked.

  “Agata’s pendant began detecting the Heart of Nidaar…” Tam turned to Rake. “How many of your miles are the Laskani Islands from the north coast of Aquas?”

  Rake thought for a few moments. “About twelve hundred.”

  Tam did some mental math of his own. “Then add another two hundred from the coast to the mountain containing the Heart. However, the Heart of Nidaar is enormous.”

  “So size matters,” I said with a straight face.

  Rake didn’t take the bait. “The area where the events have occurred covers approximately a thousand miles. It can be done. And if we can get even a decent residual from the Shiloh City site, we can start zeroing in on the cabal’s home base before they decide they’ve done enough tests and move on to their real objective.”

  Alain Moreau had been running a think tank with SPI’s brainiacs to try to determine what the cabal could be after. Working from the hypothesis that their home base was somewhere in the five states where the disappearances had taken place, they had determined strategic locations that could be the mages’ potential target.

  Entirely too many of those possible targets were military.

  Cheyenne Mountain, Los Alamos, White Sands, Dugway, Nellis, and who could forget Area 51. Those were just the bigger names. There were dozens of bases, chemical depots, and weapon test sites. Plus, there were the top-secret locations that only select people in the government knew about.

  It was a terrorist smorgasbord. And those terrorists were at the top of the evil mage food chain and had allied themselves with beings who were essentially aliens possessing an indestructible and limitless power source.

  Yeah, we had to take any clues we had and run with them. Fast.

  The size of their target was increasing, and the time between the taking of those targets was decreasing—and so was the time we had left to find their ultimate target and stop them.

  “I want you to try something,” Tam was saying to Ben. “Using the crystal in the ring, try to sense the two crystals down in the lab.”

  Ben closed his eyes and took a deep breath. After a few seconds, the flicker of the crystal in the ring slowed in time to a heartbeat, presumably Ben’s.

  The rest of us were trying not to breathe, at least I was.

  Less than a minute later, a slow smile crept over Ben’s lips as he opened his eyes. “Oh yeah.”

  “You got it? Them?” I tried not to sound surprised.

  “Loud and really clear.” He looked at Tam, and his smile widened into a boyish grin. “I can do this.”

  Tam clapped our gem mage on the shoulder. “I never doubted it.”

  15

  Instead of an SPI jet, we’d take Rake’s jet to Nevada. In the human world, one of SPI’s jets would be just another corporate plane. In the supernatural world, it would attract attention we didn’t want. For that matter, so would Rake’s. This particular jet wasn’t registered to Rake, at least not directly. Its ownership was buried under half a dozen holding companies. In addition, it was plain as far as corporate jets went, really plain. It all too obviously wasn’t the latest and greatest in aviation technology. But there had to be more to it than met the eye. I couldn’t imagine Rake owning an avionic piece of crap.

  Ben shared my opinion, but took it one step further. He looked downright concerned at our impending mode of transportation. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell he doubted the thing was even airworthy.

  Rake noticed. “She’s got it where it counts, kid.”

  I snorted a laugh. Hot as hell with geek bona fides. I mean, really, how much more could a girl ask for? “I love you.”

  Rake’s eyes gleamed. “I know.”

  We were at SPI’s airfield in Westchester County, north of Manhattan. Now that he was in Vivienne Sagadraco’s good graces, she’d allowed Rake to use it as well.

  “When I travel,” Rake continued, “there are times I don’t want to attract attention.”

  “Mission accomplished,” Ian drawled.

  We soon discovered the outside of the jet was a disguise for what was inside—in the cabin and under the hood, or whatever it was called on a plane. We not only flew to Nevada in style, we got there fast.

  We landed out in the middle of the Nevada desert. At least that’s what it looked like. However, once we were on the ground, I saw that the tarmac had been artfully dusted with desert sand. The airstrip had been recently paved, which was at odds with the rusted-out domed building that passed for a hangar.

  I glanced from the rusted building to the fresh tarmac beneath my feet and back again. I didn’t say a word. I merely gave Rake a sideways glance and raised an eyebrow.

  “I am not the only one to appreciate discretion while traveling,” he said mysteriously.

  “So it only looks like we’re out in the middle of nowhere. We’re obviously close to somewhere…interesting.”

  It was Ian who answered. “That would depend on who you ask.”

  Rake and Ian traded a meaningful look, leaving yours truly clueless. It wouldn’t be the first time they had information that I didn’t. Rake was a goblin spymaster. Ian was former Special Forces. Since our landing site wouldn’t be the oddest thing we’d encountered today, I kept my curiosity to myself. This was probably one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” places.

  The mystery continued as Rake gave me a sly grin and, taking my hand, led me to the hangar. “I’ve arranged a surprise for you.”

  Next to the side door, Rake pushed back a flap of tin concealing a keypad that wouldn’t have looked out of place at SPI. He keyed in a series of numbers, and a much-heavier-than-it-looked door clicked open.

  The lights came on automatically, revealing a hangar so shiny and new you could’ve eaten off the floor. It was empty except f
or an old military Hummer and a two-door, soft-top Jeep Wrangler.

  I squealed. I couldn’t help myself.

  When I’d moved to New York, I’d had to leave my Jeep back home in the North Carolina mountains.

  God, I missed that Jeep.

  Rake swept me a little bow. “Your noble steed awaits, my lady.”

  It took everything I had not to run over and throw myself across the hood in a full-chassis hug. “This is even the model year I have back home.”

  Rake grinned. “I know.”

  “I want you now.” And I didn’t care who heard.

  “I know that, too. Hold that thought, we’ve got work to do first.”

  *

  The Jeep left a rooster tail of dust as we sped across the late afternoon Nevada desert.

  This wasn’t exactly what Rake and I had had in mind for our first trip away together, but that didn’t stop it from being freakin’ awesome.

  I was driving, Rake was riding literal shotgun, and Gethen was in what passed for a backseat holding on to the roll bar. He’d said he wasn’t letting Rake out of his sight, and to do that he’d insisted on being in the Jeep with us. I was the smallest and would’ve been a better fit for the backseat, but there was no way in hell I wasn’t driving.

  Ian, Tam, and Ben were in the Hummer behind us. At least they had been behind us. It hadn’t taken long for Ian to get tired of eating our dust. Now he was more or less beside us.

  Dr. Cheban had sent a device with Ben that was like a souped-up metal detector. She’d programmed it to home in on even the smallest concentrations of metals found in the magetech generator. Between it and Ben’s gem skills, we were hoping to strike it rich in our abandoned mining town.

  I felt Rake’s eyes on me and risked a quick glance as the Jeep bounced its way over another dip in what passed for a road out here.

  “What?” I yelled over to him.

  He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. Just that you haven’t stopped grinning since you got behind the wheel.”