The dog at her heels had stopped, teeth bared and whip tail held nearly parallel to the floor. A low tone thrummed through the concrete, the vibrations making Ramona’s vision blur. Her stomach clenched as the hum grew louder.
“Overwatch, we have incoming Kriegers and Spheres descending north of Vine City Station. Advise evacuations to the northeast stadium exits.”
Mercurye raced back to them, the rest of the pack following close behind him. “There’s nothing down there. Offices are empty. We could send the dogs back later, but for now…” Another rumble made his words unnecessary. He nodded to Ramona and took off for the main level. Leader’s dogs followed in a furry blur, the little beagle finally abandoning her charge for more pressing matters.
Ramona made her way up the tunnel, struggling to keep her footing as the thumps and thrums resonated through her skeleton. She neared the tunnel opening to the field, able to hear the high-pitched whine that signaled the arrival of the Spheres. Through the open dome, the multiarmed monstrosities loomed on the horizon. “Pride? Bella? What’s the plan?”
“Escort Sovie and Gilead with their teams to the Congress Center, or what’s accessible during the rebuild. Set up a triage area and prepare for casualties.” Bella’s voice was grim. “This wasn’t an accident. He knew they were coming.”
* * *
The last of the Kriegers collapsed in a burning mass of metal against the western goalpost. Outside the dome, a Sphere had sunk into the ground less than fifty meters from the MARTA stop at Vine City. Red and white lights flashed with each ambulance that arrived for more casualties. Ramona kept count through her HUD, directing traffic and coordinating supplies that arrived from ECHO. Overwatch fed her information from the center of the battle while the CCCP channels gave her a steady stream of challenges and cursing, mostly from the Commissar.
A blur of black landed next to her. Corbie tucked back his wings and worked his jaw with his hand. “Bloody Kriegers. You’d think they’d give up, knowing what we can do to ’em out here.”
“They know, and so did Verdigris. I guess they decided to team up.” Ramona wrinkled her nose. “Or they’re holding him hostage. He can’t have that much that they want.”
“Dunno.” He inclined his head toward Chug, who toted a pallet of medical supplies like a child pulling an empty wagon. “He say anything else? Back on the pitch, what he managed…gods, that was brilliant.”
“Nothing. Like it never happened.” She watched Soviette move through the line of injured and dazed civilians. The doctor maintained an aura of calm concern and empathy with her charges, yet she seemed to avoid looking in Chug’s direction.
Corbie shrugged. “Eh. Pity. Seemed like the sort to chatter with over a pint. Anyhow, Gillie’s got nearly two dozen we’re going to have to process when this is all said and done. Terrible way to get into the meta business, but…”
Ramona coughed. “Yeah. Terrible thing, trauma.”
He cringed. “Sorry, love. I’ll circle back and check status, make sure we aren’t missing anything.” He took to the sky, banking to the left to begin his survey. Smoke filled the sky to the south and the west, but Ramona couldn’t make out any other threats on the horizon. For the time being, it seemed like the day was out of surprises.
* * *
Bella crouched in the shadow of a downed Death Sphere and reactivated her private comm to Bulwark. Shortly after the first wave, she had pinged him to check the status of the campus. She had yet to receive a reply, even though the other folks housed at ECHO hadn’t reported any attacks or catastrophic failures. Rather than obsess over it, she had focused her attention on the battle at hand and left the signal to ping Bull at regular intervals. With the Colt Brothers maintaining their links and coordinating the battle resources through Overwatch, Bella had had little else to do but fight alongside ECHO and CCCP.
She assumed Vickie’d been juggling chainsaws, and had basically left anyone who knew what they were doing alone. But now…the silence on Overwatch Two was beginning to bother her.
“Bull!” she said urgently, for the third time. “Look, whatever’s between us can—”
“Bella, we need to talk. Off comms.”
Finally a response. “I’m kind of up to my ass in alie—” An “urgent” light from Overwatch One blinked in her HUD. The Colts. She switched freqs. “Guys, whatever it is it—”
“Commander, we’ve lost ping on Victrix.” Sam Colt never called her “Commander,” and never interrupted her and he had just done both.
“Whaddya mean?” she replied, comprehension eluding her. “What ping? Life signs? Location?”
“All signs, Commander, about the time this donnybrook started. She’s just…gone. We’ve informed Commander Bulwark, but no one else.”
And now, Bull’s feed was flashing “urgent.” And now she knew why.
“Bella—”
“I know, we need to talk. Now. Off comms.” She checked her HUD. He was at HQ, in the secure lockdown area. “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
…to be isolated from everything, to watch it unfold before you, and be able to do absolutely nothing. And to know you could help, if only, if only…I told John and the Seraphym I wanted to be a big damn hero. And all I could do was claw at the wall between me and your world.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
Nightmare
Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee
Vickie came awake all at once. She always came awake all at once. The last time she’d had a gentle, sleepy awakening had been…well, she couldn’t remember it.
She woke with the words of her father ringing through her brain.
“Hostage 101. If you’ve been knocked unconscious and taken, don’t let your captors know you’re conscious until you’ve explored where you are, without moving, with every sense but your eyes.”
Okay, Dad.
First thing, all her Overwatch Two implants were deader than last year’s leaves. She’d been dumped in a curled position against a wall. She wasn’t handcuffed or hobbled, and there wasn’t anything over her head. So whoever took her must have control over her in some other way, and must be pretty damn sure of that control. Both the wall and the floor were cold. The wall had caught bits of her hair; it was rough and felt like concrete, at least on the back of her head, while the floor was smooth and felt like linoleum, at least through her gloves. Wait. Two sets of gloves: hers—ones she could feel earth magic through—and a different set. That wasn’t good.
It smelled of mildew and cleaning chemicals. The air wasn’t moving. But it was cool in here and the floor and wall were cold, so there must be some air conditioning.
She’d been there long enough for the cold to seep into her. So, at least an hour.
The floor wasn’t vibrating, so there was no heavy machinery or traffic anywhere around. So this building was probably some distance from a road. Maybe even outside Atlanta altogether. There were no people sounds, like conversation in the distance, or footfalls…
So wherever I am, if there’s a lot of guards or something, they’re not making any sound I can hear.
It was cave-quiet, in fact. But there was someone in the room with her. She heard breathing. The kind of raspy breathing an old person who smokes a lot makes.
Taking a slightly deeper breath of her own, and concentrating, she smelled stale tobacco smoke under the cleaning chemicals. Now, whoever was here could be a guard who smoked, but a guard would presumably be young, not old and wheezing slightly. So chances were, this was her captor. She had suspicions, but those could wait.
Jesus Cluny Frog, my head hurts. She suspected a concussion. It felt like a concussion.
So much for normal senses. Now to look with the magical, inner eye…
And her environment lit up like a Christmas tree.
Layered spells under her, behind her, above her, and on three sides, clearly forming a cube of spells ten feet on a side, probably cast on top of something physical, like a cage. There was
a second spell-cube on top of that, farther away, probably cast on the room itself. Antimagic spells of course. Spells that would keep her from using her magic against anything outside the cage she was in. Spells on the room that would cut off her Overwatch Two implants from everyone else. And spells on the cage as good as any science fiction force field, that would keep her inside as effectively as titanium bars. No wonder her captor was confident he could control her.
Combine that with the smell of stale tobacco smoke and the wheeze of an old man, and there was only one answer.
“To what do I owe your repugnant presence, Bela Nagy?” she asked, sitting up carefully, and just as carefully opening her eyes.
Concrete walls, check. Floor linoleum, probably over concrete; really good insulator against magic is linoleum. To spellcast the floor took a lot of brute strength, or he painted physical glyphs all over it with something I can’t see. Floor wax, maybe. No windows; correction, windows have been bricked up. Skylight. One metal door in the left-hand wall. And him.
Sure enough, there was her great-uncle on her father’s side, Bela Adjoran Nagy, standing, facing her prison, with his arms crossed over his chest. He didn’t look nearly as seedy as she had hoped. More like one of those whipcord-tough, old, white-haired Russian Cossacks from the Georgian Mountains who lived to be a hundred and fifty and walked twenty miles before a breakfast of yogurt and horseshoe nails washed down with homemade koumiss. He was wearing long, black, hooded robes, because of course he is, which made him look more like Gargamel from the Smurfs than a fierce, evil wizard.
Which he was, actually. An evil, fierce wizard. One who had already tried to murder her once, because she had destroyed something terrible that belonged to him. He might well be the most formidable solo wizard she knew. He’d certainly waxed her young ass once already.
But—here was her ace in the hole—he knew nothing about her anymore. She had been under the radar for so long, and so very far away from all the traditional sources of magical education, he had no idea what she’d been turning into.
Not that he had ever understood mathemagic anyway. He was a rote learner, like most magicians. He had no idea that when you saw magic as math, you could take spells apart and put them together in new ways on the fly, if need be—or that you could invent new spells altogether. As for her techno-shamanism…well, for one thing, he was like most mages and fried anything electronic he touched, and for another, trying to explain that to him would be like trying to explain quantum physics to a toddler.
That didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. He was. Incredibly dangerous and extremely powerful.
But he was, without a doubt, underestimating her. If he hadn’t been, she’d have been pumped full of tranqs, shackled hand and foot, and had a hood over her head.
He frowned, clearly not liking her attitude. And let’s piss him off some more. Time to channel the Djinni. “Nice dress,” she continued. “Could use something to pick it up a bit though. Maybe a snappy purple scarf, or a cute little chain belt. Planning on trying out for RuPaul’s Drag Race?”
“You should hold your tongue, girl!” he snarled. “And show your uncle proper respect!”
“I don’t see any uncles,” she responded calmly. “I see a disgusting, perverted old man the Nagys disowned years ago.”
This was not bravado or false calm. Other than her pounding head, she had descended into a positively serene state of mind. I guess if you contemplate dying often enough, when the moment comes, you’ve already accepted it. The moment might just have come, for the current situation was very binary.
She would definitely escape this magic cage. The “bars” were wooden slats she could kick or jump or roll through with no effort once the spells on them were gone, and under the cover of taunting Bela, she’d already set in motion the magic it would take to obliterate them. With a little time she would be able to unweave the spells that had turned a big wooden crate into a powerful, inescapable prison. The prison kept magic from affecting anything outside its barrier. It didn’t do squat about stuff that was working inside.
So once the magic came down, there were only two ways this would end. Either she would beat Bela Nagy once and for all, call her friends in ECHO to come get her, and walk out of here after gathering as much intel as she could—
Or Bela would kill her. Because her friends didn’t know where she was, and she had no expectation they would discover what had happened to her. Bela could have used a portal, like the one at St. Rhia’s, and apported her anywhere in the world. It could be minutes, but more likely would be weeks or months before they managed to find her. She knew plenty of secrets, and even if he couldn’t get any magical ones out of her that he’d understand, there was a lot more that she knew that he could sell. Verd would pay almost anything for her computer passwords, for instance.
So she was not going to give him any choice about what was going to happen. If she couldn’t escape, she would make sure he didn’t profit by kidnapping her. There were too many ways he could use her, and although she could hold out against him for a while, in the end, anyone can be broken.
And…she was all right with that. Death was something she had thought about so often that she’d come to terms with it quite some time ago. She would satisfy that vow she’d made to Red to the letter. The Colts could pick up the reins. JM and Sera…were off the charts. The Eggheads were nicely ensconced in their new home, which had been delinked from her magic. Everything would go on just fine without her. In fact, if someone hooked up Eight, it would almost be as if she had never left.
Meanwhile, until that spell finished its work, she’d make him angry. The angrier he was, the less he would be able to think clearly, and the more he would concentrate on her and not what she was doing. Of course, anger would make him stronger, but that was a risk she had to take. She didn’t want him noticing she was destroying her cage, and to do that, she had to keep him distracted.
“Watch your mouth, girl,” he growled. “I have powerful friends, with armies and weapons you can’t even dream of. They tell me you’ve been making all manner of clever toys for this ECHO you’ve fallen in with, and I intend to learn how you did it.”
Wait, what? She stared at him for a moment. And then she began to laugh.
“What is so amusing?” If looks could kill, she’d have been paste.
“Are you actually saying what I think you’re saying?” she gasped, around gales of laughter that were more than a little bit hysterical. “Did you actually throw in with the Kriegers? The Thulians?”
He pulled himself up proudly. “Ours is a partnership that began before you were even born, child. I have already reaped many rewards from it, and there will be more to come. Doppelgaenger has seen to every…”
She fell over on her side, she was laughing so hard. Because this was the height of absurdity. Even if he broke her, he could never do what she had done. She could show him, over and over, and he would never ever master even the simplest of hacks, much less the masterworks that Overwatch Two and the memory matrices were. It would be like trying to show a blind man how to paint portraits. And he had no idea that he was demanding something he simply could not have, due to his own limitations.
But the real joke was that he’d been suckered by the Nazis.
“Doppelgaenger! He stroked your ego, and you were idiot enough to believe him! Oh my god!” Tears stung her eyes, she was laughing so hard. “You idióta! You hülye! Are you senile? Has Alzheimer’s turned your brain to mush?”
Then something occurred to her. Because it was pretty obvious at this point that Doppelgaenger was…call it “allowed to pursue a private agenda.” Doppelgaenger was probably the only Thulian that knew about Bela Nagy. Which meant Bela Nagy was a sucker twice over. He’d been flimflammed by the shapeshifter.
“Have you even met a Thulian besides Doppelgaenger?” she asked, still laughing, getting the words out in gasps. “Of course you haven’t! They don’t give a shit about you, not the important ones like Val
kyria and Ubermensch. You’re just Doppelgaenger’s little rent boy. You’re the hot chick on stage, the magician’s assistant. Is that why you’re in that dress? If you want to keep your job you need to show more leg and cleavage, Bela Nagy.”
He was slowly turning interesting shades of red and purple.
She kept the jabs up, still laughing as if she couldn’t stop. She was already in control of herself, but he didn’t know that. “You’re an untermensch, you bolond vénember, you’re a Hungarian mongrel. There’s no need to keep their word with someone like you, it’s like lying to a dog, and they’ll allow Doppelgaenger to promise you anything he thinks you want. And as soon as he gets what he wants out of you, it’ll be pfft! the gas chamber—or maybe, since they’re modern space Nazis, they’ll just stand you up against a wall and disintegrate you. I’d like to see you pit your magic against a Death Sphere!”
She got back up, slowly, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, still chuckling…and gathering her feet under her. Because her spell had done its work, and the entire network of all those carefully layered enchantments on her cage was about to fall apart like panes of glass hit with exactly the right resonating frequency.
And that was when a child screamed, somewhere outside the door to this barren, concrete room. And again. Then came the wailing cries of more.
She felt her eyes widen as realization hit her. “You’re going to do it. You’re going to make the amulet again!”
“Of course I am, you ridiculous child.” Now he was laughing. “My ally needs these children for a little while longer, then, they’ll be mine. One among them seems particularly…susceptible to my needs. And I will be—”
“Te kibaszott szörnyeteg! Meg foglak ölni!” she screamed, and flung her arms out wide.
And her prison shattered.
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 35