“Let’s go,” Zeke said.
We hurried down a steep path to the park below, tree branches and berry vines snagging at us as we propelled ourselves down the slope. Pete bumped into me as everyone stopped and gathered at the bottom of the trail, then we sprinted across the open area to the dock. The concrete planks and soft lapping of water beneath us absorbed the sound of our footfalls, and we reached the building without incident. The door stood wide open.
“Wait here,” Zeke whispered. He and the other enforcers slipped inside. After a few seconds, Zeke reappeared. “All clear.”
We entered the main room of the Marine Science Center. Glass aquariums and imitation tide pools made of concrete and fake rock held starfish, octopuses, and other colorful sea creatures.
Zeke pulled back his sleeve and began tapping on his calculator watch. Jo put a hand on Zeke’s wrist. “It’s okay, old timer. There’s an app for that.”
She pulled out a mobile phone, plugged a tiny crystal into the end of it, tapped on the screen, and held it up. I could see that it showed the room on its tiny screen as if on a video monitor, but overlaid on the image were a series of colored lines and text.
“Looks like there’s alarms and wards all over the place, but they’ve all been tripped already. And there’s a door hidden … there.” She pointed to a nearby tide pool.
She crossed to the tide pool, and tapped on the phone some more, then swiped her finger across it.
The tide pool wavered like a heat mirage. A glamour. The water and sea life inside it disappeared, replaced by a narrow stairwell leading down into darkness.
A roar of pain sounded from the darkness below.
Jo put away her phone. Reggie moved beside her. “Sounds like we’d better hurry or the Króls’ distraction will be over.” He leaped over the small wall and descended the stairs, drawing his two batons and snapping them out to full extension. Zeke hopped the wall and followed after, with Jo close behind.
A wolf howl echoed up from below. Pete growled.
“You okay?” I asked him, drawing the pistol from my jacket pocket.
In response he leaped after the enforcers.
“Okay, then,” I muttered. “Ready or not, here we come.” I moved to the wall and heard a scratch behind me. I spun around and raised the revolver, waited a minute in frozen silence, but saw nothing. Probably a seagull outside. I hopped over the low wall and descended the narrow stairs, the cold of the ocean seeping through the concrete walls that pressed in on either side.
The stairs dumped out into a featureless gray room, unremarkable except for a pair of ancient diving suits, the kind with the big round metal helmets. These particular suits, however, had metal claws extending from the gloved hands like talons, and lay on the floor, stabbing at their own bodies and twitching as if in pain.
The dark writhing shapes of rats pressed against the inside of the helmets’ windows.
Moving on.
I hurried through the single door and emerged into a long hallway just in time to see Pete sprint through a door at the far end. Two more doors stood opposite each other at the center of the hall. The entire length of the hallway was littered with rat bodies, and bits of rat bodies, and lots of rat blood, interspersed with scorch marks and chunks of blasted wall.
I half-ran half-slid my way to the middle doorways. I spun in a full circle as I slid to a halt, and the Ratt song “Round and Round” began playing in my head.
Both doors were open and dented. I held the pistol in a tight grip and quickly bobbed my head around the edge of each doorway, checking the rooms. The room to the left looked like an office with officey furniture and officey lighting. The room to the right was a storage room with diving gear, a radio, office supplies, and a fine variety of rubber ducks. Both rooms were empty of people or feybloods, far as I could tell. The sound of clashing metal and angry shouts, growls, and grunts came from the doorway at the end of the hall.
I propelled myself through the slick carpet of rat remains for the far door.
“Finn?”
I spun around, almost losing my footing.
Heather stood behind me, holding herself as if cold, a frightened expression on her face.
“Heather! Where did you come from?”
“I … I was hiding. They were asking me questions, threatening me, and then … there were shouts from the hallway, and they left me locked in the room, but someone smashed open the door, and—it was terrible.” She ran to me, grabbing me. “Please,” she said into my chest. “Get me out of here.”
“What about the others? Sammy and Mattie, and Vee? Where are they?”
“I don’t know. They kept us separated. Please, Finn, take me out of here. I can’t be here another second!”
“I—” There was a howl of pain that sounded like Pete. I grabbed Heather’s shoulders, held her away so that I could look into her eyes. “Listen. The way is clear to the outside. Just climb the stairs back there and you’ll be free. I need to help the others.”
“No!” Heather grabbed me. “Don’t leave me alone. Please, just take me out, and then you can come back.”
I felt torn between the need to help Heather and the sound of battle coming from the doorway. Heather looked so fragile, I felt myself instinctively wanting to carry her away to someplace safe, to soothe her fear and tell her everything would be okay. To be her hero.
“I can’t,” I said to myself and to her, forcing her away from me. I guided her back to the door of the supply room. “I have to go. Stay here if you need to, and I’ll come back for you, I promise.”
I ran-slid to the doorway at the end of the hall and leaned against the wall, took a deep breath, and spun through the doorway with the gun held ready.
The door opened onto a catwalk above a chamber the size of a high school gym. There were no nerdy kids being pummeled mercilessly with rubber balls, but a battle every bit as brutal raged below.
To the left, Reggie and Jo were engaged in a Jedi battle with three enemy enforcers—two young men and a woman. The battle was hard to follow, they all moved so fast. Their glowing batons and suits threw off blinding flashes of blue and yellow sparks as blows landed and strikes were deflected. But I could tell our side was losing that battle—Jo held one arm to her side, and Reggie moved far too slow compared to the others. One of the enemy enforcers shouted, a tattoo flashing across his throat, and the force of his shout blasted Reggie back several feet, lacerating the top of his bald head as he ducked and covered with one arm.
To the right, Petey wielded his sword against three waerwolves. The beasts were fully transformed, each a wolf as large as a Saint Bernard, their brown and gray hackles up, their lips pulled back from vicious fangs. Pete whirled the blade side to side, Beastmaster style, so that it was a barely visible gleam, and fresh slashes oozed blood on his back, arms, and legs. The wolves moved around him, trying to flank him, but weren’t leaping. The reason for their caution was evident in a fourth wolf who twitched on the ground, its back bent at a sharp and unnatural angle. Petey might not actually know how to use a sword, but he wasn’t dueling swordsmen, he was chopping at wolves, and he possessed enough strength and speed to chop them in half.
Zeke had reached the far side of the room and attempted to climb the stairs to the catwalk opposite my own. The only exit I could see from the room led from that catwalk. But Zeke faced an enforcer who looked like he could bench press the Hulk, and the brute had the high ground, better equipment, better magic, and most importantly wasn’t running on little more than caffeine and determination.
And between me and Zeke, in the center of the room, the Króls battled the two sasquatch mercenaries. Or rather, the two sasquatches clumsily battled each other, their claws ripping through each other’s fur while the Króls each moved a doll covered in sasquatch hair. What remained of the rats swarmed around the Króls in a protective circle.
Grayson and the hostages were nowhere in sight.
I took all of this in during the few second
s my eyes needed to sweep across the chaotic battle of claws and fur, fiery batons and wizardry.
“Finn!” Heather shouted behind me, her voice panicked.
I spun around.
Heather held a wand pointed at me, and a burst of light like a photon torpedo fired from the wand right at my chest.
“I’m sorry,” Heather said.
29
Take On Me
I’d like to say that the pain of betrayal was far worse than the pain of the wand blast, but they were pretty damn close.
One time, I licked a spoon that had been used to scoop ice cream until it was covered in a pale white frost, and my tongue stuck to the frozen metal. The icy feeling of the blast striking my chest felt exactly like pulling that spoon free, times a hundred and ten.
I screamed.
My butt cheeks twitched.
The spell from the wand crackled into the Pac-Man of energy that appeared out of my chest, then flowed out along my right arm, causing my arm to spasm. Frigid energy flew from my hand back at Heather a split second before the spasm jerked my finger on the trigger, and the ear-ringing blast of a gunshot echoed through the hallway.
Heather’s eyes widened in shock as the wand blast hit her stomach. They narrowed in pain as the bullet followed close behind. She remained standing, the wand extended, her eyes clenched shut.
“Heather!” I stumbled toward her, shaking off the tingling edges of pain.
“I’m sorry, Finn,” she said again, and opened eyes now brimming with tears. There was something odd about the way she spoke, as though she were a bad ventriloquist.
I tried to take the wand from her still outstretched arm, but it wouldn’t budge. Not the wand, not her hand, not her arm. She stood frozen solid as a statue. She breathed in short pants, though, and her eyes worked frantically to look down, so at least her insides hadn’t locked up. Contrary to popular myth, it is rather hard to survive being completely frozen, what with your heart and lungs stopping and all.
The bullet hung frozen as well, half buried into the flesh of her stomach. I lifted her shirt. The ripple from the bullet’s impact was visible, as if molded into her skin.
That had to hurt.
“Why the hell did you try to freeze me?” I asked.
Tears ran down her stiff cheeks. “I did it for Orion.”
“Orion? Does Grayson have him too? Where are the girls?”
“You don’t understand. It’s not just Grayson,” she said. So Grayson really was behind this. “There are others, powerful arcana. And Grayson is— I can’t betray him. Orion would hate me, I would lose him completely.”
“Wait, you’re saying Orion is in Grayson’s little Arcanite cult? I hate to question your parenting choices here, but maybe you need to set a good example for your kid. Like no killing old friends or their family?”
Her eyes looked past me, to the doorway. “Grayson promised you wouldn’t be hurt. Or Mattie. In fact, he ordered me to keep you out of the fight.”
The fight. Shit.
“Don’t die, I’ll be back.”
I rushed back to the catwalk and took in the status of the battle as I sped down the stairs to the main floor.
The Króls seemed to be doing well, with the sasquatch siblings now bloodied and swaying unsteadily. Unfortunately, the Króls were the only ones on Team Finn that I didn’t give a crap about.
Reggie was on one knee, and Jo fought desperately to keep the other enforcers off him. She disarmed one of the enemy enforcers, but he shouted something even as the baton spun from his hand. A tattoo no larger than a fist flashed briefly across his throat, and his entire body became wreathed in blue-white fire like the batons. He threw a flying spin kick at Jo, and Jo was knocked back, smoke rising from the burned side of her head.
Zeke had been driven back down to the bottom of the stairs and was completely on the defense now, protecting his head with his baton and his arms as the brute enforcer rained a vicious stream of blows down on him.
The wolves surrounded Pete, and one leaped from the side, its teeth clamping onto Pete’s sword arm. Pete howled in pain, grabbed the wolf by the scruff of the neck with his free hand, and swung it in a vicious overhead arc down into the wolf who leapt from the other side, driving them both into the floor. The top one yelped in pain; the bottom one’s cry was choked off by the blood bursting from its jaws.
The third wolf tackled Pete from the front, its teeth snapping for his neck.
The choice was easy. I knelt in the shadow of the stairs and took aim at the wolf on top of Pete. Praying they didn’t swap places, I fired twice.
The wolf jerked and cried as a dark burst of red blossomed on its shoulder. Pete threw the beast off him. I tried to get another clear shot as Pete regained his feet, but the two surviving waerwolves limped to the far side of him. It would be too risky to shoot from this angle, especially with my lousy aim.
I turned to the enforcers. Reggie had regained his feet, but Jo knelt on her hands and knees, and the flaming enforcer kicked her in the gut, lifting her off the floor in a burst of blue-white fire. Jo hit the floor hard and shouted something, her hands pressed to the floor. The concrete flowed up over her, covering her. The fiery enforcer’s next kick to Jo’s side sent up a cloud of concrete dust.
Zeke tripped on the bottom step, and fell back. The brute enforcer raised his baton.
Shit! I fired at the brute enforcer’s head. The bullet ricocheted off the metal stairway a foot to his right, but it distracted him long enough for Zeke to recover and swing at the brute’s kneecap. The blow bounced off in a flash of light but forced the man to retreat a step. A half step. And then he resumed his assault on Zeke.
The gun was not cutting it. Or rather my aim was not. And I would have to get close to the brute to summon his spirit. First things first. I dug the Króls gnome statue out of my satchel and stuck it on the floor.
The statue tipped over, revealing a hole beneath it. Priapus’s head poked out just far enough for him to survey the scene. Then he leaped out, twin sickles ready.
“So you wasn’t lyin’,” he said, eyes fixed on the Króls and the sasquatches. He whistled. More gnomes began jumping out of the hole, fanning out behind Priapus. “Tonight, we collect wergild, boys!” he said as they gathered.
I fired at one of the waerwolves as it stalked out to the side of Pete, but I missed. Damn it!
“Priapus, I need your help with these other enemies.”
“Do we look like friggin’ heroes to ya?” the gnome asked.
“You can keep the enemy’s equipment. And you can take the waerwolf carcasses—fur, teeth, musk glands, the works, without ARC penalty. That alone should bring you a small fortune. Deal?”
Priapus licked his lips and glanced between his dozen gnomes and the enforcers. “We don’t get involved in the affairs of wizards,” he said. “I’m sure you can figure why.” He looked at the waerwolves. “The fur folk, however, them we can fight. But if things go badly, we vamoose, no breach of contract, got it?”
“Fine. Agreed.”
“And witnessed,” the other gnomes chorused.
I pointed out friend from foe to the gnomes just to be safe, and then ran around the edge of the room, circling behind the enforcer battle to approach the stairs on the far side.
Surprised and angry cries from the waerwolves drew my attention. Seaweed entangled the beasts, springing up from the concrete floor in a thickening mass. Pete lunged in with his sword, stabbing at them.
Seaweed sprang up around the sasquatches and the Króls as well, and the rat swarm rushed at the gnomes, who formed a wedge with Priapus in the front, sickles held at the ready.
I reached the stairs and snuck beneath them as best as I could, keeping my eyes on the brutal enforcer’s legs as he descended the last few steps. With luck, he wouldn’t know what hit—
“Gus, behind you!” one of the other enforcers shouted.
Damn spoilsport!
Gus the brute shouted and charged Zeke, push
ing him back from the stairs. So much for the old ankle grab. I left the shelter of the stairs and snuck up best as I could behind Gus. I couldn’t sense his spirit with all the chaos and magic around us, but if I could just touch his head, I could summon—
Gus heel-kicked my stomach back through my spine. At least, that’s how it felt as I lifted off the floor on a rocket of pain, and then fell flat onto the cold concrete. I moaned, and somewhere the thought that I should move before I got my skull stomped on wrestled with the voice going “Ow! Ow! OW!” in my head.
I grabbed the gun from the floor and inched my way backward, seeking the shelter of the stairwell, knowing I would be too slow.
And then Pete stood above me, swinging his sword at Gus.
I managed to sit up and survey the scene.
Pete and Zeke had Gus on the defensive now, attacking him from both sides.
The flaming enforcer lay sprawled on the floor dead or unconscious, and Reggie and Jo pressed the remaining two enforcers back into a corner.
Harry had torn free of the seaweed and knelt beside the limp body of his sister, his head bowed. As I watched, he stood and ran in a loping gait for the stairs leading up to the exit, his mouth open wide, a low keening noise trailing from him.
The gnomes sliced and diced the rats and advanced now on the Króls. As the sasquatch fled, the gnomes began to turn in pursuit, but Giselle shouted a string of words that sounded like Klingon with a German accent. Red-black lines pulsed along her throat and arms, and darkness rippled through the air before her like mud stirred up in a fast-moving stream. Priapus shouted a command and the other gnomes knelt and overlapped sickles. The wave struck the point of their wedge and split along it. As the split curse hit the edges of the rat pile, the rats melted away and their bones collapsed to sludge in seconds, like the bad guys at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
The gnomes advanced on the Króls again.
Finn Fancy Necromancy Page 33