And it was simply gone.
She watched Red dash into the apartment, leaping over the fallen door, and rush headfirst down the hall to Vickie’s control room.
“Red!” Mel hissed. “Hey! It could be a…”
Her cry died in her throat. The Djinni was being reckless, and he obviously didn’t care. He only had one thing on his mind. Victrix was in trouble, and his first priority was to get to her side.
“Well, damn, ain’t she the lucky girl,” Mel muttered as she crossed the threshold. Leave it to the Djinni to be reckless, it would be up to her to be more methodical and unearth the clues that would lead him to her. Clues like…well, the yowling, scratching and thumping coming from the closet door. She opened it, and jumped back with a start as Grey leapt out and darted past her towards the Overwatch room. She watched, bemused, as the tiny earth elemental scrambled after the cat as fast as his little legs could carry him. She followed and glanced inside, and was mildly surprised to see the Djinni holding the cat by the scruff, ignoring the wild slashes of its claws and the soft punches to his ankle by an irate stone figure.
“Calm down, Grey,” Red said quietly, while the cat continued to hiss and screech and swipe at his arm.
Red knelt down, and let the cat go. Grey leapt away and shot Red a menacing look, with a final short hiss of anger. Herb waddled away as well, placing himself between the Djinni and the cat, crossing his arms and favoring Red with a stern look of disapproval.
“Tell me what happened here,” Red said coldly. “And shut off that alarm. And be quick about both.” Before Grey could move, the alarm shut itself off.
Mel found herself struck silent at the sight of a talking cat. In all the times she’d been here, the cat had never given any demonstration that it was anything other than a huge gray cat—like a Russian Blue, but on steroids. Sure, Vix had called it her familiar, and she’d acted as if it was sentient, but…weird, lonely cat ladies did that all the time. Thinking her cat was sentient was an understandable quirk in someone as lonely and stressed as Victoria Victrix.
Except…it was sentient. And it talked.
Red cast another cursory glance over the Overwatch room. “No fight here,” he said flatly. “Not enough damage. She fell or got knocked to the floor, got her feet tangled in cables, and then was incapacitated and carried out.” He approached the entrance and ran his bare hands over the scorched doorframe.
“Explosive residue,” he muttered, and shook his head. “Someone planted explosives here. Had to be magically and technologically advanced to have gotten past whatever she was using as sensors. And I can’t feel any magical aura on the doorframe. Somebody dispelled her magic. We must have a mole. This was an inside job.”
“Someone she knew,” he mused as he stood up and scanned the rest of the apartment, gleaning what information he could from it. Mel got the distinct impression that he was talking more to himself than to her. “An experienced mage, but one with tech backing.”
“Like an evil Vix?” Mel hazarded. “She got a mirror-universe twin out there or something?”
He shook his head and darted back to the Overwatch room. “Grey!” he barked as she followed him. “What—”
Mel reached the door again, and saw that the little stone…thing…was patting the monitor emphatically. And the monitor was filled with a single sentence, repeated over and over again in all caps.
“What is that?” the Djinni asked.
There was a flash of hesitancy on Djinni’s face, then his brows furrowed. “How do I do it?”
The cat wiggled in past all the cables to a spot where there were several junction boxes.
“Uh…y’all might be like, wakin’ up Skynet, cher,” Mel said hesitantly. “Y’all wanna wake up Skynet? This’s how y’all wake up Skynet.”
Red Djinni ignored her, his hands moving deftly as he followed Grey’s instructions. As he plugged in the last cable, there was a melodious three-tone chime, and an asexual voice said, out of the speakers up in the corners. “Overwatch Two: Eight-Ball: Interface: Online. Currently searching location Victoria Victrix.”
Before Djinni could even react to that, the voice spoke up again. “Victoria Victrix offline. Engaging pre-magic-programmed object search; looking for objects associated with Victoria Victrix.”
“What…”Djinni began, and a chime sounded.
“Objects found. Two present, one remote.”
The screen lit up with a floor plan of the apartment. There were two dots on it. One was labeled “Red Djinni.” The other was in the debris field at the door and labeled “Unknown.”
Djinni stared at it, as if he recognized it, but couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. “That looks like—”
“I have found the location of the remote object, Red Djinni,” Eight-Ball said, before Djinni could say anything. “It is somewhere inside the former Central State Hospital. It was a mental asylum,” Eight-Ball added helpfully. “It has been closed for some time. The rest of your claw would be there.”
There was a pause as Djinni pieced things together in his head, eyes narrowed. “Why would my claw be there?” He looked down at Grey. “What was an old claw of mine doing here?”
The Djinni stared down at him. “Not buying it. She’s got her implants in me. She can do anything she needs to do through them.”
“She—” Djinni looked…stricken. There was no other way to describe it. Then his eyes began to glitter suspiciously, as if…
Then he hardened all over again and became, if anything, more cold than before. She could almost hear his brain ticking things over, calculating, speculating, and coming to a conclusion.
Now he looked at Mel, really looked at her. “You know this is a trap. It has to be. This is too easy. We found her too quickly.” He softened again, just a little, for just a moment. “You don’t have to come with me. You don’t owe me anything—”
“Well, cher, maybe I owe Vix, non?” She shrugged. “I’m comin’ along. I don’t see any cavalry, so it’ll have to be me.”
Djinni shook his head. “Verd’s raining hell down on the Georgia Dome. There’s just me and Mel. We’re going, and I’m not waiting. It’s gonna take us too long to get there going flat-out as it is. But you let Bulwark, the Colts and CCCP know where Vix probably is and that we’re on the way. Maybe they’ll be clear faster than I think and they can scrape something together.�
� He thought a moment. “Eight-Ball, if you’ve got a line on Khanjar, tell her too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
* * *
Till We Have Faces
Mercedes Lackey and Dennis Lee
One of Vickie’s favorite quotations is by C.S. Lewis. “How can we stand face to face till we have faces?” Maybe because she was the faceless voice of Overwatch. Maybe because Djinni wore so many faces you knew none of them was really his. Maybe both reasons, or neither.
Ten minutes later, Victoria Victrix was in trouble.
This room was somewhere high above ground, second or third story of the building, maybe. She couldn’t get to the earth to pull geomantic power out of it, and she couldn’t use the concrete as a channel unless she had bare flesh against it, and maybe not even then. Uncle had known that, of course; there was the linoleum as the first line of insulation, but he’d been extra careful. While she was out cold, he’d pulled a second set of gloves over the ones she usually wore, gloves cinched down tight at the wrists, and probably silk-lined. She couldn’t stop running and ducking long enough to get them off. The ECHO nanoweave suit she wore was too tough to tear. The boots that went with it were form-fitting and just as tough; it took her half an hour to get them off at the best of times. The only way she could touch the concrete was with her head, which was not a good idea right now.
Serves me right for changing for Dixie’s funeral. If she’d been in her usual soft cotton pants and shirt, she could have deliberately torn through the cloth and skinned her elbow or knee, dripped blood on a crack in the floor or smeared it on the wall, and had a channel for the geomantic energy.
She hadn’t worn any storage talismans either; they were all in racks around her desk, not on her. So all the energy she had for spellcasting was what she’d brought with her.
Whereas Uncle Bela had not only his pyromancy, but he was jingling with so many charms and talismans under that robe that he outblinged a Las Vegas belly dancer.
She was running out of steam, fast. He had just gotten started. She’d spent most of the last ten minutes dodging and using what little energy she had to keep shields up. He’d knocked her into the walls twice, bruising her to the bone all over; she’d managed to deflect the same attack about half a dozen times more, leaving dents in the concrete walls. It had taken him three attempts before he figured out he couldn’t incinerate her; she’d perfected that protection a long time ago, and now it was baked into every millimeter of her scarred, tortured skin.
The Lady’s Not For Burning, she thought, a little hysterically, as she deflected a triplicate of levin-bolts, pure concentrated power that could put a hole in you like a laser, and did burn holes halfway through the concrete wall. But deflecting that much power drained her; she faltered a moment, her sight grayed out a second, and—
He got her. He slammed her against the wall, levitated her halfway up it and held her there, feet dangling helplessly. It was pure brute force. It drove the wind out of her, crushed her all over, sent shards of pain lancing across her ribs as she felt something crack, and left her gasping. She was not only running out of magical energy, she was running dry of everything else. Her vision blurred. Every breath was painful. Every limb shook with pure exhaustion. She was functioning mostly on adrenaline.
He stalked to the center of the room. The fight had blown out most of the lights, and he came to rest within a shaft of daylight streaming through the skylight, his face in shadow beneath his hood.
He always did have a penchant for drama.
He was probably expecting fear out of her. He was probably expecting her to beg for mercy.
Okay, my head is against the bare concrete wall. And he had spells there blocking her from pulling up earth energy. Because of course he had. She pulled another ounce of strength out of dry reserves. “This is all you can manage?” she mocked, and again set her spells to unraveling his. It took moments this time, crude as they were; she dropped to the ground with knees flexed, absorbing the shock; then stood up. And she didn’t let him see she needed the wall behind her for support. Instead, she smiled. “Anything you can do, I can do better.”
She was ready for the “invisible hand” at her throat; she dissolved it before it even touched her. “See?”
I can counter maybe one or two more of his lesser tricks…then I’m done. I have to get this over before he realizes I don’t have anything left. I have to get him so angry he’ll go straight for the kill.
“I can’t even touch the earth, and I’m beating you, old fool,” she mocked, forcing herself to breathe steadily, even though she wanted to drop to the ground and whimper in pain. Fear, however, was far away, walled out of her mind. It scratched and gibbered at those walls, but she was not going to let it in. She narrowed her eyes, and twisted her mouth into a sneer. “Look at you! You’re decked out like a whore in talismans, and it’s just me, and I’m beating you. Aren’t you embarrassed? You should be!” She paused and shook her head. “Unalmas vagy, ici pici fasz…”
There. She saw it. The moment he snapped. Rage entered his eyes, and he lost the last vestige of his self-control. He shook with anger, and mage-sight showed her nothing more than a fiery blur as his power blazed up in him while he called on all his talismans at once. “Baszd meg a kurva anyádat!” he roared, and raised both hands. Whatever he had planned, she knew she wasn’t going to be able to deflect it or get out of the way. Still, she bared her teeth and braced herself, readying her hands, her words, her will…I am not going down without a last gesture of defiance.
Then—
In rapid-fire succession, she heard the crash of something overhead and the tinkling of shattered glass hitting the linoleum, something landing hard behind the sorcerer, and the awful sound of flesh being torn apart—
—and then, he was there, uncoiling to his full height.
It happened so fast that she had tensed up, willing another shield to flare into existence before she realized that it wasn’t really necessary. Where there had been one figure a moment before, then there were two, then another, and one of the three fell over with a meaty thud, as a head came rolling towards her.
She stared at it in stunned disbelief.
Bela’s head.
The look on Bela’s face burned itself into her memory, a harsh sneer of rage with bits of spittle spreading unevenly over his lips, but his eyes blank with surprise, as his head came to rest by her feet.
She glanced up and saw the Djinni dashing towards her with bloody claws outstretched. She pushed off the wall, staggered forward and collapsed into him. She literally could not speak; the shock of seeing him standing there, her wonderful, terrible rescuer, completely overwhelmed her, but she supposed a brief squeeze of his arm would suffice for gratitude for now. Roughly, he kicked the decapitated head away, shed his claws and held her gently in his arms while she fought to control her breathing. The explosive release from danger left her feeling dizzy, the transition from a forced pretense of invulnerability, to being able to let the façade drop and be vulnerable again, and to be in his arms…
She began to hyperventilate. Then she stopped hyperventilating because every breath hurt. It took a few minutes. He didn’t speak, only prompting her with his embrace to calm down, to gain control, to get the words out, and then…
“What is it with you and jumping through windows?” she croaked. She stared into his eyes, his rich, brown eyes, and felt a shiver as she realized she didn’t recognize them. They stared flatly, blankly back at her, like two cold pebbles. There was no sign of anything like emotion. It was him, it was obviously him, unless another shapechanger had entered the mix and was impersonating him.
Oh, holy crap, she thought. What a mess that would be.
But it was him. She could feel it, feel him. He just wasn’t right, like something vital was missing, like something inside him was turned off, or frozen rock-hard. She reached up
involuntarily and laid a hand on his face, trying to get past that blankness, wincing with pain as she did so. At her touch, Red blinked and took a breath, and finally chuckled and collapsed against her, and they both went to their knees.
“Defenestration,” he whispered. “It’s not just a word, it’s a personal motto. And for the record, that was a skylight, not a proper window.”
She managed to drag up a smile from somewhere, tried to make it as big and genuine as she could, and took in the newly rekindled warmth of his eyes again, eyes showing humor and relief and so much more. That’s better, she thought. That’s the Red I know.
“Technically, defenestration is being thrown out of windows. And, ow, I can’t hold both of us up,” she protested. Dammit, I am sure I have cracked ribs. “Everything hurts, and what doesn’t hurt doesn’t work anymore.”
Red leaned back and propped her up against his own chest, gingerly, his arms still wrapped around her.
Avalanche: Book Five in the Secret World Chronicle Page 37