“Shut up,” I said, cutting him off. “I just pulled the fire alarm here at the OME building. We might have an explosive package on our hands. Unless you want a bunch of dead firemen, you need to do two things.”
A choked protest came from the other end of the line for a second, then a pair of strangled-sounding words, said under protest.
“What. Things?”
“First, send some officers out here to evacuate and cordon off the OME area. The entire north face of the building’s made of plate glass. Second, get the bomb squad out here.”
I hung up before he could say anything else.
McClatchy might’ve hated my guts, and as far as I was concerned, he skirted the border of insanity on a daily basis. But the man had the rank to get things moving in a hurry. And Bob did have an unerring instinct for self-preservation. Dead cops or firemen were a definite one-way ticket out of the office he valued so highly.
A swarm of cruisers and vans pulled into the lot with a skirl of sirens and the stink of hot car exhaust, disgorging a swarm of uniformed policemen. The officers quickly set up checkpoints and tape barriers, steering the crowd away from the dangerous, glass-sided areas of the building. Managers were questioned as to the whereabouts of their people while stragglers leaving the building were quickly assisted into the safety zone.
The fire department showed up next in a blaze of red ladder trucks. Right on the heels of the LAFD came a dark blue vehicle pulling an oversized trailer behind it. The trailer held a passenger cab and a forklift-shaped vehicle used for remote bomb removal. Technicians piled from the cab as soon as the vehicle came to a stop.
McClatchy may have been close – or at – the bottom of my ‘favorite people’ list, but I had to hand it to him. He did know which buttons to push to get people moving in a hurry. I began to shove my way through the crowd of OME staffers to get over to them.
The officers of the LAPD were continuing to herd people away from the OME building to a safer distance, but that certainly didn’t make it any easier for me to make my way through. At one point, I ended up climbing onto the trunk of someone’s car to get around an especially tight knot of people.
Finally, I spotted a trio of bomb technicians. They were talking animatedly with a man wearing the Fire Chief’s trademark white helmet. All four were looking at a hastily rolled-out floorplan of the building. I made my way over to them, slipping under one of the tape barriers to do so.
“Whoa, hold on,” one of the techs said, intercepting me. “Please stay back.”
“I need to speak with all of you,” I persisted. “I’m the reason you’re all out here to begin with.”
The Fire Chief looked surprised at that, but waved me over. “You pull the alarm?”
“Guilty as charged. I received a suspicious package at the admin station on the second floor.”
“Suspicious? Did you smell any fumes coming off it? Oily stains, maybe?”
I shook my head. “I just heard it slosh, as if there was liquid inside.”
He grimaced. “I thought the crime lab got liquid filled packages pretty often. Figure that it would come with the job.”
“Yes,” I allowed, “but it came with a message.”
I handed him the note. He didn’t comment, but instead handed it around for the others to read. One of the bomb techs whistled in amazement.
“That’s…something else,” he said, before gesturing to the blueprint. “Can you show us where the package is?”
I leaned over the blueprint and scanned it for my section of the second floor. Once I located the break room area, I tapped it with my finger.
“We’ve been up there before on a training exercise,” said one of the other techs. “It’s a wide enough area that we can send in our hallway robot and do a scan of the package before trying to remove it.”
Two members of the bomb squad went back to the cab, suited up, returned in blast-resistant suits. Pulling a little robot-tank thing the size of a large dog from their vehicle, they sent it rolling ahead of them into the building. The remaining tech snapped his fingers as if remembering something, and then squinted at me.
“You must be Dayna Chrissie,” he said. “One of my friends in Special Ops told me about what happened to you, that you found a similar package with a note.”
I nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“He said that some psycho sent parts of a human body over to your place.” He shook his head. “Hope that package up there isn’t a repeat.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak as I watched the bomb squad approach the entrance to the building.
My mind helpfully filled in the rest.
You know, if we’re lucky, human remains will be the only thing the techs find inside that little gift box.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The package wasn’t a bomb.
It took around twenty minutes for the explosive techs to send their robotic sniffer across the length of the building from their ‘safe point’ in the second-floor stairwell. Another twenty to scan the package and determine that the most dangerous substance inside was a solution of isopropyl alcohol. Before the hour had elapsed, the squad had brought the contents of the package out and placed it in a secure holding tank.
The holding tank was clear, so it was easy to see inside. The techs had pulled out a rectangular container from inside the box’s reinforced cardboard. The container had a lime-green lid like any food storage bin, and the sides were transparent plastic.
Inside, the container had been filled to the brim with a murky-looking fluid. Floating in that fluid were six white-gray orbs, each about the size and shape of an olive. Liquid brown peered back at me from the flatter sides of the spheres.
“What the hell’s in there?” whispered one of the techs.
“The liquid’s likely the isopropyl alcohol solution your robot picked up,” I answered. “Rubbing alcohol, in other words.”
The Fire Chief stared at the bobbing spheres of tissue. “Why would…whoever…use this?”
I tapped the holding tank as I put my thoughts together. “Rubbing alcohol can be used as a preservative solution, and you can find it at any corner drugstore. But, see how cloudy it’s already gotten? That’s because it’s not particularly effective. It’s why we normally use formalin at the OME.”
“Um,” came the noncommittal reply. The man looked as if he was going to be sick.
“I need you, or whoever’s in command here, to turn these over to the OME for processing,” I said crisply. “I want our labs to get a good look at both the contents of the plastic bin as well as the cardboard box’s wrapping.”
“The box too?” This from one of the techs.
“Yes, the box too. If there’s some pollen, hair, or fiber evidence that’s been trapped inside, I want to find it.”
He nodded. I turned and walked away as fast as I could before anyone could think to ask me to hang around and answer questions. Of course, the LAPD would want to grill me over this latest event, but I had something more urgent in mind.
Luckily, the officers present were busy opening their checkpoints, allowing the crowd to slowly return to the OME building. It also helped drain the overflow of people from the parking lot. I found my car and paused by the trunk.
Part of me really wanted to pop it open and strap on my firearm. But that wasn’t a smart idea, not when a bunch of rattled cops and firemen were already swarming the area. Instead, I got in and backed out of my parking spot.
The checkpoints had already been lifted at the farther end of the lot. Pulling around to that side to exit onto a side street, I found an onramp to the southbound side of the Harbor Freeway and gunned my way into the fast-moving traffic.
All the while, my body remained on autopilot while my brain flitted back and forth with dark thoughts. Even though I’d not smelled it directly, my nose tickled with the fuzzy, antiseptic scent of rubbing alcohol. Unlike formalin, which I associated from the first with dissection, isopropyl alcohol made me thi
nk of childhood visits to the doctor. Of wiped-clean needles and flu shots.
It also made me think of the primitive forms of sterilization available in Andeluvia.
The events in that world continued to bleed over into mine, both figuratively and literally. Grayson Archer had been born there and ended up here. Was he exiled, or was it his own idea to come here? It didn’t seem likely to me that someone with magical powers would voluntarily give them up for a mundane existence in my world.
I knew even less about Damon Harrison. A tall, strong, fast man, for sure. He must have known magic, and knew it well. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken the time to disable the magic barriers surrounding the Wainwright house. He wouldn’t have known how to command – let alone speak – with the demonic Ultari.
Perhaps he had been born in Andeluvia like Archer. Maybe that was the two men’s ultimate connection, a feeling of partnership or brotherhood between fellow exiles.
I smacked the side of my car’s steering wheel in frustration. There was so much I didn’t know. All I had were pieces, things that felt connected, but I had nothing to link them all. I felt like I was groping in the dark without so much as a lit match to find the way.
Quit it! my mind thundered. Focus on what we do know. What we think we know, anyway.
All right.
I did know two things.
Number one: Damon Harrison had likely sent me this package, just as he had left me the one containing Cohen’s remains. The items delivered, as well as the included note, were too similar to be otherwise.
Number two: Those weren’t human remains. I recognized the objects in the plastic container only because I’d seen them up close many times before. They were eyeballs, but they belonged to deer. Probably from the same ones that Esteban, Vega and I had dug up yesterday morning.
That led to the obvious follow-up question. Why?
Back that up a moment. Why go to the trouble of sending me a second package? It was spelled out plain and clear in the note’s very first sentence: This is your last chance.
In other words, killing Maxwell Cohen hadn’t been enough of a warning. A warning that, if I continued to look into Harrison – or more broadly, Crossbow Consulting – then I could expect death. Death for me. Death for my friends.
The thing is, I hadn’t been looking for traces of either Harrison or Crossbow’s work. How would Harrison have even known that I was up north on an assignment? Added to that, how would he know that I’d been poking into his favorite spot for poaching? Or for disposing of bodies?
The answer came to me in one of my brain’s hard and unmistakable clicks, gripping my stomach in an icy clench even in the hot Southern California sunshine.
Harrison must have thought that I was still trying to track down his whereabouts because he’d been there. Watching. He’d been close enough to watch me rake through the ashes of his stomping grounds. So, a brand-new message.
Since the first one hadn’t worked, he’d amped up the original warning. How?
Harrison had not only spoken to the Ultari, he had given them orders. According to Galen, we’d learned that, of all the types of wizardry out there, fey magic was the most potent against demons. Which was why I’d been sent deer eyes this time.
If I kept misbehaving, kept on snooping, they might be pieces of fayleene next time.
My insides tried to crawl out of my body at the very thought. It was time to learn something, anything, more about the threat facing me. Which was why I hadn’t bothered to hang around answering questions from the fine officers of the LAPD.
I had more urgent matters to attend to. And besides, I’d been given my only remaining lead by the Chief of Police himself, Grand Inquisitor Robert McClatchy.
Really, how could I refuse to follow that up?
I smiled grimly as I headed south for San Pedro.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I caught a brief glimpse of the Pacific Ocean as I took the first freeway off-ramp into San Pedro’s residential district. Off in the distance, huge cranes worked ceaselessly to load up container ships at the port. I turned away from them and headed along a large avenue lined with brownstone and stucco duplexes.
The psychiatric hospital soon came up on my right. Parking under the shade of a barrel-trunked date palm, I forced myself to walk, not run, to the receptionist desk. A quick flash of my badge was rewarded with a call to refer me further up the chain of command. Within a few minutes, a male orderly with a gleaming bald head and a refrigerator-sized torso escorted me inside. We walked down a hallway that glittered snowy white under the flicker of fluorescent tubes.
“Mister Clarke is under what we call ‘five-point’ restraint,” he said, in a voice that was deep enough for a full-grown centaur. “That means physical restraints for each limb, plus low-level sedation if the patient gets agitated.”
“Gotcha. What does ‘agitated’ mean, exactly?”
“Any movement that could lead to difficulty in patient medication, self-harm, or harm to others.” The orderly must have seen my expression, so he quickly clarified things. “He hasn’t been violent since his initial arrival here, if that’s what you’re worried about. But the words coming out of that mouth of his are downright strange. Spooky.”
“I’ve heard cursing before.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I’ve cared for people with Tourette’s Syndrome. Some of the stuff they say can make your hair fall out.” He rubbed his shiny pate meaningfully. “No one knows what he’s saying. It just sounds…I don’t know. Bad. Filthy.”
I nodded. “I need to speak with your patient alone, please.”
The orderly’s eyebrows went up, but he didn’t object. “Okay, I’ll let you in. Just bang on the door if you need help. And…like I said, he hasn’t been violent since he got here, but we got word from the higher-ups at the LAPD that you might be here this afternoon, so he’s not sedated. Keep your fingers away from his face.”
On that happy note, the orderly stopped at a door to our right. He tapped in a six-digit code for the lock, opened it, and gestured for me to enter. I stepped through into the dimly lit space and heard the snick of well-fitted hinges close immediately behind me.
Instead of eggshell white, everything inside this room had been painted a creamy blue. It would have been soothing, except for the strong smell of industrial disinfectant and the rusty grid of steel bars outside the window.
A single bed stood against the wall, flanked by a small table on one side and an IV drip stand on the other. I took a few steps forward, my nerves jumpy in the sudden silence.
It didn’t last long.
Ronald Clarke was a weedy-looking man with the complexion of wallpaper paste. His eyes remained closed, but they roved restlessly under the lids as if in a dream. His thin lips began to move, and the words that passed through them grew in volume the closer I drew to the bed.
“Maradj vishza,” he said, as if chanting. “Jól magam! Nem érzah!”
“Officer Clarke,” I stated firmly, “if you can hear me, respond. In English.”
The chant, if that’s what you could call it, rose in intensity as I halted a few feet away from the bed. No way was he doing this of his own free will. The man I’d met in passing seemed to be a dedicated officer, and resolutely levelheaded.
Besides, if the entity inside him wanted to creep me out, it was doing a damned good job.
“Nem érzah!” it cried, again and again.
I tried to talk over the thing, and failed. My voice seemed robbed of its weight in this small room. Spittle flew from Clarke’s mouth, landing wetly upon his chest. In desperation, I reached into my pocket. For once, my hand closed around the things I needed.
“Nem érzah! Nem érzah! Nem érzah!”
I held my hand out and opened my palm.
Clarke went silent, his eyes opening. They were shiny and hard, like coins fished out of a gutter. His nose twitched, doglike, sniffing at the cat’s eye marbles I held above the bed.
�
��That’s right,” I said. “Your senses aren’t fooling you. This is a banishment spell.”
An ungodly feral hiss came from the officer’s mouth.
“Quiet,” I ordered, and the hiss faded away. So, at least I held the power of threat over the thing. I decided to press that home a bit more. “No one knows how long demons like you Ultari really live. I wonder, what must it be like? To have lived hundreds, maybe thousands of years, only to see your death arrive in someone else’s hand.”
“You no fool me,” Clarke spat, in a brittle, alien voice. “You kill I. No matter what.”
I shrugged, then decided to bluff a little longer. “I can banish you cleanly. Or, I can make it last a while. A long, painful while.”
The thing animating Clarke took a few seconds before responding. “What you want?”
“Answers. Let’s start with you. Why are you still in this body? I thought I saw you banished before, at the Wainwright house.”
A snarl, then a whimper. “I very old for Ultari. Old demons know much. How to fuse with flesh. I wake at Keshali. Brought to this world later. Now I stuck halfway in flesh-being ‘Clarke’. It burns, it burns!”
So, it looked like I was going to be doing a favor for this thing. That was fine with me. It might make my job easier.
“You woke at Keshali,” I pressed on. “Why were you there? Were you put into the stones there after the Old War?”
Clarke thrashed in his bed, his restraints rattling against the side rails. “Sealed into stone elsewhere. Brought to Keshali. Was to fuse with the sleeping ones.”
To fuse with the sleeping ones.
It hit me like load of bricks. According to the Codex of the Bellus Draconum, the victors sealed the demons inside the ‘great stones that lay in the mountains’ at the end of the Old War. Someone had brought the imprisoned demons to Keshali intentionally, to free them and unleash them on the hibernating wyverns. Then, the Ultari could ensorcel or possess them – what the Andeluvian called ‘being hosted’.
A Warrant of Wyverns Page 12