She winks. ‘Let me come with you to see if there’s anything I can help you with.’
‘No. It’s OK,’ I say, breaking into a run for the exit.
I push open the doors and look directly into the face of a goblin before he hits me in the solar plexus and drags a bag over my head.
12
TRUE WILL HUNTING
I’M HANGING FROM chains that have been attached to ceiling bars in an upmarket private gym. Through the windows I can see the convention centre, leading me to believe that I’m being held in the centre’s hotel complex. My headpiece, microphone and weapons are hanging from a bicep curl machine in the corner.
I am suddenly filled with the most terrible feeling of anxiety, and oddly enough it’s not because I’ve been captured by goblins. I’m thinking about Kyle and Esmé.
‘What’s up, boy wonder? Why the long face?’
I look up to see that Mermi has been chained to a shoulder press machine. The look on her face seems to say that she meant to be kidnapped and beaten by goblins but will only tolerate it as long as she finds it amusing.
‘I’m chained and bloody,’ I blurt out.
‘Darling, it’s not a party until SOMEONE is chained and bloody,’ she says. ‘But that sadness is not just about getting beaten up, am I right?’
So I tell her about it. I tell her about Kyle and Esmé and how I can’t hang on to my friends or my girlfriend. ‘I’m trying to be a better person,’ I say.
‘Oh darling. Vanity is my favourite of all the vices. You’re trying to be good, which is admirable, but you’re become so invested in this image of yourself as a good person that you’re ignoring common sense. That’s just vain. Fashion is about liberation. Fashion is not about trying to be who you are, darling; it’s about trying to be who you’re not. Is there anything more liberating than that?’
‘I’ve really fucked this all up, haven’t I?’
‘Quite, darling, quite. But how about we get out of this little predicament and then we can have our nails done and chat about it?’
She gives me a sly look, then vaults up on to her chains like a gymnast and uses her feet to manipulate the manacles until they pop free of her hands. She drops lithely down on to the ground and raises her arms like she’s waiting for her final scores.
‘Bravo,’ I croak, and she gives a smile.
‘You’re not a fashion designer are you?’ I say as she helps me out of my chains.
‘Of course I am.’ She pats my cheek. ‘I just happen to have another job as well.’
I grab my earpiece and mike and call Ronin.
‘Bloody hell, sparky,’ he says. ‘Where are you? Shit has kicked off here.’ I can hear gunfire in the background.
‘I’m OK. We’re somewhere in the hotel, not sure where.’
‘Goblins,’ Ronin says. ‘The whole upstairs is swarming with them. Something big is going down here, Bax. The Witch got back the lab report on that pill I took from the Obayifo.’
‘Ecstasy?’ I ask.
‘About as far from it as is possible.’
I hear the popping of more gunfire in the background and Ronin breathing hard as he runs.
‘Turns out it’s an alchemical substance that makes you more susceptible to the egregore. I think he’s been dosing people here with it. Are you feeling OK? Anything weird happening in your brain?’
‘No more than usual,’ I say. I can feel the egregore thudding against my head. ‘You?’
‘Yeah, I’m OK. Think I ate too much at the buffet, though.’
‘Tell him to meet us at Room 454 in the hotel,’ Mermi whispers into my ear. ‘That’s my suite.’
I relay the message.
‘Perfect,’ Ronin says. ‘I can get there in about ten minutes. Be careful, sparky.’
Mermi puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You mind if I borrow one of your weapons, boy wonder?’
‘Uh, OK,’ I say.
Mermi grabs the short sword from its sheath and slashes the air with it. ‘Interesting blade,’ she says. She nods to Legba. ‘How are your combat skills?’
I drag the gun from its holster. ‘Just shoot something until it stops moving, right?’
‘Quite, darling, I’m glad they’re teaching you something at Hexpoort.’
‘How’d you …’
‘Wait until we get to my room. I’ll tell you everything I know, I promise.’
We make our way to the foyer of the hotel, where all semblance of order and respectability has been abandoned. Fashion Week has been unexpectedly cancelled in favour of a vicious bout of supernatural terrorism. Heavily armed goblins in balaclavas stalk the hotel. Terrified people huddle together in groups, some of them nursing bloody wounds, and try to figure out exactly how their glamorous night of high fashion turned into this. A thick sense of rage and terror hangs over the area like a giant swirling storm cloud.
‘It’s growing,’ Mermi says with a grim look.
‘You can feel it?’
‘Of course. THAT is what this whole thing is about.’
We huddle against a wall and Mermi puts an arm around me as if she’s comforting me.
‘Shit,’ I whisper. ‘How are we going to get to your room?’
‘Subterfuge and then a little stabbing,’ Mermi says. ‘Hold still.’ She wraps her arm around my neck and puts the sword against my throat.
‘Whoa,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure if this is the best …’
She pulls me to my feet, the blade very close to the important veins in my neck, and marches me across to a goblin at the end of the corridor.
‘I’ve got one of them,’ she says. ‘The boss is going to want to see him.’
The goblin looks confused, which is a particularly ugly expression for a goblin. ‘One of …?’ he grunts.
‘One of them.’ Mermi gives an exasperated sigh. ‘THEM.’
The goblin understands that he’s supposed to know who THEM refers to. But although he’s racking his brain, he clearly can’t quite get to a suitable answer. He reaches for a two-way radio at his belt. ‘Let me call the boss.’
Mermi throws up her hands. ‘Give it to me. I’ll speak to the boss.’
The goblin passes her the radio and Mermi flashes him a winning smile. And then jabs the short sword through his eye. He drops to his knees with a stunned gurgle and looks up at her, suddenly understanding what this was all about. Mermi nods and drives the sword further into his head with the palm of her hand. As the goblin slumps, she grabs his assault rifle, slings it over her shoulder and then retrieves the sword from the goblin’s skull, kicks open the door, and drags me through it.
Glass explodes around us. The other goblins clearly didn’t miss the whole stabbing-in-the-face of one of their comrades. Mermi turns as she runs and strafes the auditorium with a line of automatic gunfire. I cover my head with my hands as we hurtle towards the elevators. A goblin up ahead brings his gun to bear on me and Legba jolts in my hands as I put a bullet through his shoulder.
The goblin roars, crosses the distance between us in one giant leap, grabs me around the waist and slams me into the hotel’s soft carpet. The impact knocks the wind from me and Legba skitters out of my hand.
The Boer’s training kicks in like a generator sputtering to life in a blackout. I wrap my legs around the goblin’s waist to stop him from getting up, and jam my fingers into his eyes. His eyeballs are all gooey, like putty, and I have to force myself not to recoil from the sheer ewww factor. I drive my thumbs in deep and dig around as if I’m searching for lint in a navel. Fuck, this is disgusting.
Unfortunately, even blinded the motherfucker doesn’t know when to quit. I’m right underneath him so he doesn’t need to see much in order to pound the living snot out of me, which he proceeds to do.
I cover up with my elbows and weather the barrage of goblin fists as best I can before twisting him around so that we’re both on our sides. I scramble away from him and stand up, which kinda foils his whole killing-me schtick, because now he has abso
lutely no idea where I am. I snap the baton out of the harness around my chest, flick it open with a click and sweep the legs out from under him. He lands on his knees. I spin the baton around in my hands and take a running baseball swing at his head. That does the job.
Mermi is busy firing up at goblins on the first floor of the conference centre. Bullets whine around us and she jerks her head to the elevator. ‘Let’s get inside.’
She lays down a line of cover fire and we scuttle backwards through the foyer. The concierge has been decapitated and is lying in a pool of blood on the marble floor. The foyer has more chandeliers than is practical, and I can’t tell if several of the paintings have been splattered with blood or whether they’re just that ugly.
Mermi hands me a gun she stripped from the corpse of a goblin and we wait for the elevator. It pings and we step inside. One. Two. It stops at three, the doors open, and we empty our clips into a couple of goblins, who look surprised as they are aerated by bullets.
We reload. Four. Mermi pokes her head around the corner and gestures for me to follow her. We lope down the hallway and reach Room 454. She slides her card through the lock and barrels inside, slamming the door shut behind us.
The hotel room is chic – lots of glass and steel. The bed is all taut white linen and there are enough paintings of abstract shapes on the walls to teach a primary school geometry class. I slump down on the bed and Mermi throws me a water from the minibar.
‘So what the hell is going on?’ I say, lying back and prodding at my body to see if anything is broken. ‘Who are you?’
She turns to me. ‘Agent Mermi of the Bone Kraal. Pleasure to meet you, Apprentice Zevcenko.’
‘You’re part of the Bone Kraal?’ I say, sitting up.
She smiles and holds up a hand. ‘Guilty.’
My hand is on the handle of my gun. Mermi looks at me and gives me an angelic smile, the assault rifle hanging in her hand. ‘You think you could draw before I could, apprentice?’
I lick my lips. ‘I don’t know.’
She lifts her hand off her gun. ‘How about we don’t find out? I believe my partner, Radnick – he’s the assistant you saw downstairs – is dead. You’re in no better position than I am, so how about we don’t shoot each other?’
I take my hand off Legba. ‘OK. But you really need to explain what’s going on.’
She sits down next to me. ‘I’m from the Bone Kraal. The real Bone Kraal, Baxter, not the idea of the Bone Kraal that Lefkin has been using to bend the Hidden to his will.’
‘So the Bone Kraal really exists?’ I say.
‘We always have.’ She reaches up and pulls away part of her left ear, and then does the same for her right. She holds the prosthetic plastic in her hands. Her real ears jut from her head, proud and pointed.
‘You’re Azikem?’ I say.
‘Indeed.’
She stands up and retrieves a dossier from a briefcase under the bed. ‘Lefkin Demishka. The Muti Man,’ she says, handing me photos of a young Crow. ‘The youngest Tengu ever to have risen in the Crow hierarchy. In 1987 he was captured by dwarven black ops and subjected to experiments.’ She hands me another set of photos. It shows the thing I saw at Hexpoort, half human, half Crow, all twisted and deformed.
‘They should have killed him. He was released as part of a deal between MK6 and the Crows that culminated in their misadventures with Basson. The failure of their operation, thanks to you, left a power void that Lefkin stepped into. His methods have gradually become more and more extreme, and he’s used the name of the Bone Kraal as a way of securing support among the Hidden.’
‘Why?’ I say. ‘To what end?’
‘Revenge. He intends to punish dwarves and humans for what they did to him.’
‘So why aren’t you helping him?’ I ask. ‘Doesn’t the Bone Kraal want the same thing?’
‘The Bone Kraal, the real Bone Kraal, wants the power imbalance to be redressed. But the wanton bloodshed that Lefkin is aiming for won’t do that. It’ll tip everything into chaos.’
‘So we stop him.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
She cleans the blood off my short sword on the white duvet and hands it back to me. ‘A nicely balanced weapon,’ she says.
I hold it in my hands. ‘You killed a goblin with it. First kill. That means you get to name it.’
She looks at the blade. ‘Anatole. It’s the name of someone who was special to me.’
‘Anatole it is.’ I slide the sword back into its scabbard.
An explosion rocks the hotel and the windows in the room rattle. ‘Ronin,’ I say into my mike. ‘You OK?’
‘The Flock,’ he says, breathing heavily. ‘They’re heading to your location. Get away from the win—’
There’s an explosion of glass as several winged Amazons smash through the window of the room. Their faceplates are down and they have swords and handguns held in front of them.
‘Get out of here, Baxter.’ Mermi swings her assault rifle up. ‘You have to find Lefkin and destroy the egregore.’
‘You’ll be OK?’ I say.
She plants a kiss on my cheek and opens fire, punching one of the Flock across the room with a barrage of bullets, and sending the others scattering.
‘Darling, I’m always OK.’ She pushes me to the door and ducks behind the bed as return fire rips into the modern art on the wall.
I slam open the door and run into Ronin. Five goblins are coming down the corridor towards us. He grabs my arm and pulls me towards the stairs. We duck around the corner and I fire into the rapidly approaching grey shapes. One of them tumbles and the others return fire.
‘You feeling all right?’ I say, searching Ronin’s eyes for any inclement psychological weather. No reply. ‘Ronin! You OK?’
‘OH GOD.’ He has his back up against the wall, and rivulets of sweat are streaming down his face. ‘It’s here.’
‘What?’ I say, looking down the flight of stairs.
‘The wolf.’
‘There’s nothing there,’ I say. ‘Seriously. You said that Lefkin was dosing people with that drug. You ate from the buffet. What if he poisoned that?’
‘I knew it would come to get me.’ He flattens himself against the wall. ‘Eventually.’ He draws the Blackfish and fires down into the empty stairwell.
‘Ronin?’
‘GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!’ he screams, and is up and running down the stairwell before I can stop him.
‘RONIN!’ I shout. ‘Jesus, you insane motherfucker. Stop for a second. There’s nothing there.’
He stops abruptly, turns and pins me to the wall. The knife is out of his boot and against my cheek before I can react. His eyes are no longer their usual calm, everyday insane. The pupils are huge and his left eye is twitching uncontrollably.
‘You’re working with it, aren’t you? You and the wolf are partners.’
‘Ronin,’ I say softly, painfully aware of the knife that is poised below my eye. ‘Ronin, it’s me. You ate poisoned food. It’s made you crazy. Well, more crazy.’
He looks up as if he’s heard something. ‘The howling. Why won’t the howling stop?’ Then he vaults up and sprints down the stairwell.
I take a deep breath and get up to follow him, but goblins appear above us in the stairwell and open fire. I press myself against the wall and empty Legba’s clip upwards. There’s silence as I reload, and I make a break for it. Gunfire follows me as I leap down the stairs, but I reach the ground floor alive. I sprint through the foyer and skid to a halt in front of the familiar figure I see hiding underneath an antique chaise longue.
‘Kyle!’ I say. ‘Jesus, I’m so glad to see you.’
He crawls out from his hiding place and we hug for a length of time that would be completely awkward under any other circumstances.
‘What. The. Fuck?’ Kyle’s hands are shaking with adrenalin and his eyes are wide.
‘What happened to your date?’ I say. ‘Is she OK?’
‘Er,’ he say
s. ‘OK, fine, I didn’t have a date. But that’s why I was here, I was working on it, OK?’
‘Your NLP speed-seduction shit is never going to work,’ I say with a grin.
‘IT IS! I’ve almost isolated the formula. Any time now.’ He gives me a rueful look and then breaks into a grin. ‘So what do we do now?’
‘We steal a car and get the hell out of here,’ I say.
We steal a yellow Ferrari. Kyle is so excited that his extensive online car-stealing research has finally paid off that he can barely contain himself. He struggles with the door for a few minutes before popping it open, then gives a triumphant fist pump and gets into the driver’s seat. He fiddles for another few moments before the car starts up with a throaty roar. The wheels squeal as we lurch off towards the entrance. The goblins in balaclavas manage to squeeze off a couple of rounds before Kyle ploughs through, and a bullet punches the windscreen between us. Kyle does a handbrake turn out into the road and pounds on the steering wheel with glee.
‘Witch,’ I say into my mike. ‘Ronin has gone AWOL. Do you copy? Katinka, Nom. Anybody. Do you copy?’
Nothing but static.
Kyle’s phone buzzes and he steers with one hand and holds it with the other.
‘Oh shit,’ he says, spinning the car around a corner. ‘Look at this.’
‘Oh shit,’ I say. The hashtag for Fashion Week has changed thanks to a Vintage Mindy blog post. #KILL is lame, it states under a picture of me taken from Facebook. The new hashtag is #KILLBAXTER. Put it on your blogs, your Twitterz, your Books of Face. If you see Baxter Zevcenko … well … give him a special Vintage Mindy high-five. To the face. With a chainsaw. LOL! Just kidding. No I’m not. Srsly. Kill Baxter Zevcenko.
‘Bloggers want to kill you?’ Kyle says. ‘That seems a little harsh, even for the Internet.’
I explain the situation to him.
‘Damn,’ he says. ‘How many other people has this psycho dosed with the drug?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t even know how we’ll be able to tell who has been dosed and who hasn’t.’
Kyle slams on the brakes. A group of kids – tweens and early teens – have blocked the road up ahead.
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