by R. L. King
She did as she was told. He felt her hand squeeze his good shoulder, and then she was off. A ganger poked his head around the corner; Jason fired another shot and he ducked back. Jason began backpedaling toward Verity, keeping the gun trained on the space around the far corner. At least this one seemed to be working, but he only had a couple rounds left and no extra magazines. “Anything?” he called softly back to Verity.
“Clear,” she called back.
“Okay, go around. I’m coming now.” He sensed that he was only about ten feet from the corner, and took the chance that if they’d had guns, they would have used them by now. He turned and sprinted the rest of the way, executing a quick turn around the corner. The stairway, empty now, lay ahead of them. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go while it’s clear.”
She started up the staircase, but almost immediately stopped short, causing Jason nearly to run into her. “Keep going!” he snapped, still afraid that the two gangers would make their appearance—possibly with reinforcements by now—any second.
“Wait!” she called. She ducked down, scrabbling at something on the floor. “Be careful. Don’t move! You’ll step on it!”
Jason froze, wondering what she’d found. Another gun? A dead body, or part of one? One of those incendiary grenades the DMW seemed so fond of? (He was grateful they didn’t seem to be using them in here, given the fact that the whole building was made of old, dry wood.) “What is it?” he demanded in a harsh whisper.
She scooped something up and held it so he could see it. It was the small crystal-and-wireframe cube Stone had been carrying. “The cage?” he whispered.
“It must have fallen out of his pocket when they were carrying him,” she said.
“Or he dropped it on purpose,” Jason said eagerly, heartened by the thought. If he had dropped it on purpose, it meant two things—he didn’t want Lucas and his cronies finding it on him…and he was still alive.
“Jason!” Verity yelled, pointing over his shoulder.
He spun. In his surprise at finding the cage he had momentarily forgotten about the gangers, and they had taken that opportunity to make up lost ground. The two of them came pounding up the stairs, screaming and waving knives. Verity evicted one of them just as he reached her, shoving his unconscious body back where it smashed into his friend and took him tumbling down. Jason plugged him without a second thought. He was beyond caring about who he hurt at this point—his only objective now was to get to the office, rescue Stone, and deal with Lucas. Oh, and get the hell out of here and as far away as possible. That, too.
“Go, go, go!” Verity urged, already pounding the rest of the way up the stairs.
“Wait!” Jason yelled. “What if there’s—”
“It’s clear!” She was already at the top. “Come on. We have to hurry. They won’t be expecting us this soon!”
The tech booth was clear except for a pile of ashes and clothing that used to be a ganger—one that hadn’t been there last time they were there—on the ruined board. The door halfway down the back wall was closed. Verity grabbed the knob. “Shit, it’s locked!”
“Back up,” Jason ordered. It didn’t look like a metal door—just a standard interior model. Verity stepped back and he wound up and kicked, just like they’d taught him. The door splintered away from the frame and flew open. Both he and Verity ducked off to the side in case anybody was waiting for them.
Nobody was. The hallway beyond was deserted. There were two more doors, one on either side. “Which one?” Verity whispered.
Jason was about to say he didn’t know when he spotted something—a faint flickering glow coming from beneath the one on the left. He pointed silently toward it, and she nodded.
“Do we just break in?” she whispered. “Can we even do that?”
Jason looked down at the gun in his hand. He double-checked it—still only one more round. “Whatever we do, we gotta do it fast.” No sound came from the other side of the door—either it was soundproofed, or they just couldn’t hear. Oddly, they couldn’t hear any gangers coming up the stairs either. Had they given up? That hardly seemed likely. He didn’t have time to think about it now, though—Lucas and his people could be killing Stone as the two of them dithered over what to do. “Get ready,” he told her.
He rushed forward and kicked the office door open.
It’s amazing the amount of detail you can process in the space of two seconds. That was about the amount of time Jason had to notice the detail in the office: Stone bound and unconscious on the floor, his overcoat with his magical items tossed in a far corner; a large desk, behind which stood a tanned, gray-haired man with movie-star features twisted into a rictus of hatred; another man, unassuming and mousy-looking, standing over Stone; the slumped dead form of another DMW ganger, his eyes fixed open in surprise nearby; a shimmering, glowing thing on the far side of the room, surrounded by flickering candles.
A shimmering—
Oh, fuck—
“Holy shit, it’s a portal!” Jason yelled.
Verity pushed in past him. “What? What are you—” Her eyes fell on the mousy-looking man and widened in shock. “Oh, my God, Jason! That’s the guy from the basement! At the halfway house!”
“Kill her!” screamed the man with the movie-star looks—the man that Jason and almost every other person in America had seen for years smiling out at them from TV talk shows, telethons, magazines, and billboards. “Kill the girl!” he yelled in tones completely alien to the soothing, pleasant baritone with which he had interviewed entertainment royalty and addressed the country’s social problems.
“Verity! Go!” Jason yelled. He was already swinging the gun around to cover the mousy man, who had to be the mage and was thus the stronger threat at the moment. “You try it, asshole, and I’ll plug you before you can get the spell off!”
“Wait!” A weak voice called from the floor off to Jason’s left.
Jason didn’t take his eyes off the Evil mage. “Al?”
“Can’t—kill him,” Stone got out with difficulty.
“What the hell? Why not?” The Evil mage was hovering there, obviously reluctant to make a move with Jason’s gun trained on him.
“Can’t—Cage—”
“I have it!” Verity yelled from the other side of the door. “I picked it up!”
“See?” Jason said, still without turning. “We can—”
“No…we can’t,” Jason could hear Stone shifting in his bonds, and the mage’s voice took on a strained urgency. “Only—one. Must—save—”
“Only one? What the hell are you—” And then he realized what Stone meant. The cage was only built to hold one Evil. If they killed the mage and evicted the Evil from him, they’d either have to let it go free to take up residence elsewhere, or capture it and have nothing in which to capture the Evil possessing Lucas. “Shit!” he yelled. “Al, what—”
And that was when he made his mistake. The shock of what Stone had said caused Jason to turn toward him as he spoke. It was only for a split second, but that was all it took for the man driven by a panicked and alien force to take his chance.
The Evil-possessed mage leaped forward, faster than one would have thought it possible for such a small and unassuming man to do, and clamped his hands on Jason’s shoulders. “Now, you die!” he whispered. His burning gaze locked on Jason’s, he leaned forward as if in expectation—
—and nothing happened.
Jason had no idea what the man had been trying to do, but he didn’t let him get another chance. The man was off balance, obviously shocked that whatever he’d been attempting hadn’t worked as planned. All at once Jason had a crazy idea. An insane idea. An idea that couldn’t possibly work. And yet—
Roaring with rage, ignoring the throbbing pain in his arm and the fact that it was bleeding again, Jason flung his arms around the man and bull-rushed him forward—straight toward the portal.
At the last moment, the Evil mage realized what Jason was doing. He screamed, strugg
ling madly in his captor’s grip, but Jason was stronger. “No, you fool!” he yelled. “You don’t know what you’re—”
Jason let go, shoving him forward. For a moment he teetered, arms flailing almost comically as he made a desperate attempt to regain his balance. His thin hand locked around Jason’s wrist as he went over backwards. Jason planted his feet, suddenly fearful. If he went over too, if he touched that thing—
—And then Verity was there behind him, grabbing him around the middle. The Evil mage overbalanced, and his tenuous grip loosened. His screams echoed around the room, and then his head broke the shimmering surface of the portal and the screams silenced as if someone had hit a switch. The rest of him followed. The portal flickered crazily like a TV set that couldn’t tune in a station. It crackled, and the swirling surface roiled and surged. Verity staggered back, shaking, trying to get as far away from the portal as she could.
“You—fool,” Stone said faintly from the floor. He was trying to struggle up, but his bonds were preventing him from doing so.
“What the hell is going on?” Jason demanded, his gaze darting back and forth between Stone and Gordon Lucas.
“They’ve—tried to construct a temporary portal,” Stone said. He looked pale and he was bleeding from a cut on his head, but he appeared to be gaining strength. “It’s—failing.”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Oh, fuck,” Jason breathed. “What happens if it fails?”
He didn’t get a chance to answer before Gordon Lucas spoke. “You won’t leave here alive,” he said. His voice sounded calmer now, and Jason could definitely hear the beloved talk-show host and philanthropist behind the mad words the thing inside him was saying. “The others will be here soon. Even if you kill me, you know I won’t be truly dead. It will be unfortunate to lose this vessel—it’s served me well, and it will be difficult to find another that will be as suitable. But no matter. A temporary setback at best. And now I’ve got all three of you here.”
“Al?” Jason sounded urgent. “The portal?”
“If it goes, it’ll take out most of this building,” Stone said. He glared at Lucas. “Including you. Not just the vessel. All of you.”
Lucas grinned, showing large, white, capped teeth and somehow making the handsome face look macabre. “How little you know, mage. Just keep talking. They’ll be here soon.”
Jason glanced toward the door. Where were the DMW? Why hadn’t they come? Why couldn’t he hear anything outside?
“You might as well put that gun down, boy. You aren’t going to use it on me, and we both know it.”
“Like hell,” Jason snapped, not lowering the pistol from where he had it aimed at Lucas’s heart. “You make a move, I’ll blow you away.”
“No you won’t, or you’d already have done it,” Lucas said. “A failing of your kind—you always want to preserve the vessel. Don’t you see that this is all you’re good for—to be vessels?”
“Yeah, talk it up, scumbag,” Jason said. He’d noticed that even Lucas now seemed to be casting furtive glances toward the door, as if he too were wondering where his backup was. “We got time.” Without turning, he said to Verity, “V, can’t you—?”
“Trying,” she muttered, her voice thick with frustration. Stone was silent; Jason could see him past Lucas, and he looked like he’d passed out again. That wasn’t good.
“Ah, yes,” Lucas said. “I should deal with you. I don’t know where you got that annoying power of yours, but I really can’t allow you to keep it. You’ve caused me and the others far too much inconvenience.” He rose from behind the desk and smiled at Jason. “Go ahead and shoot me if you want to. Even if you wound me and I don’t die right away, your mage friend is right—that portal is going to lose its structural integrity soon, now that you’ve killed the only one who can control it. Do you want to take the chance that I’ll survive it, even if this vessel doesn’t?” He moved around the desk and looked at Verity. “You, however, are different. I need to ensure that you don’t get out of here alive. No more inconvenient escapes for you.” He stood over her and smiled. “And your fear as you die will make me stronger. That’s the best part.” He stepped forward—
Stone, directly behind him and far from unconscious, lashed out with his bound feet, catching Lucas hard in the backs of his knees. The Evil roared something in a language that none of them understood, pitching forward toward Verity, reaching out with his arms toward her—
“NO!” Verity yelled. She closed her eyes and pushed with everything she had. Her effort was clear—this was no simple ganger.
Lucas’s handsome face contorted into ugliness, something inside him struggling against her. Jason watched in horror as his features twisted and became inhuman. He heard something crack; when blood appeared at the man’s mouth, he realized that Lucas must have been clenching his teeth so hard that he’d broken them—or maybe his jaw.
Verity’s face was screwed up in concentration, sweat beads bursting out on her forehead. “You—get—the fuck—OUT!” she screamed, emphasizing her words by pushing out physically with her hands on his chest.
Lucas screamed, too—it was a sound unlike any of the three of them had ever heard. An inhuman, alien sound of rage and agony and shock. His hands flew up and clutched at his head, his nails ripping the tanned skin, which sprouted blooming, bloody wounds in their wake. He looked like he was trying to pull off his own face. Then his whole body went rigid and he fell backward, crashing into the desk. The old wood broke and splintered into a heap of cracked debris, Lucas’s twitching body in the midst of it.
And something broke free of it and flew upward.
It wasn’t an indistinct ball of white mist like the evicted gangers had ejected. This one glowed a sickening, reddish-purple hue, bright as a light bulb, but somehow not illuminating the rest of the room. It looked like a small, unhealthy sun hovering there in the air, appearing for the moment to be disoriented.
Jason was not idle. He leaped across the room, pulling out his knife and getting behind Stone. The mage had been bound with plastic zip-ties; Jason sliced through the one holding Stone’s hands behind his back, and he pushed himself up to a sitting position while Jason worked on his feet. “Quickly!” Stone yelled to Verity. “Before it escapes! Cage!”
Verity, momentarily shocked by what she’d seen, recovered her senses. Fumbling inside her jacket, she pulled the little apparatus out and tossed it to Stone, who deftly caught it. Shaking free of the bonds Jason had cut from his feet, he struggled up and held the cage aloft near the hovering form. Breathing hard, he began reciting an incantation in the same odd language Jason had heard him use before. His eyes were fixed on the Evil, unblinking and intense.
The glowing ball obviously had some knowledge of what was in store for it; it tried to make a break for it, first heading toward the door and then changing direction abruptly and darting toward the portal, which was now rolling and surging with alarming frequency. It moved toward Jason, then toward Verity, who glared at it and waved it away. Then, finally, it began to move, slowly and with great protest, toward Stone and the cage he held.
It looked like the world’s strangest tug-of-war match, or like an odd fisherman trying to land an even odder fish. The glowing ball would draw closer, then move away a bit. Each time, though, the distance it pulled away was a little smaller than the distance it was pulled toward Stone. Closer and closer it got to the cage, its light flaring first purple, then red, then a clashing mix of the two. If it were possible for a glowing ball of energy to panic, then it was quite clear that was what this one was doing. Stone’s arms shook with the strain of focusing his will on the ball. He was fixed on it and nothing else.
So was Jason—until he smelled something burning. He allowed himself a quick second to glance to the side, and what he saw made his blood freeze. The force of Lucas’s body crashing into the desk and destroying it had sent chunks of dry, rotting wood off to the side, knocking over two of the candles near the portal. A small bla
ze was forming, fueled by the dry wood of the floor and the desk.
“Al!” he yelled. “Hurry it up!” He snatched up the first thing he could get his hands on—Stone’s coat—and threw it over the flames, trying to smother them. It was too late for that, though: the coat caught fire and the flames began to spread.
“No, Jason!” Verity wailed. “The crystals—”
Too late, Jason realized that all of the crystals and other objects Stone had created to help him channel magic had been in his coat. He tried to grab it back, but the fire was already flaring up around it. “Al!” he yelled again.
It wasn’t clear whether Stone had heard his words or noticed the loss of his items, but something in Jason’s urgency must have gotten through. He tightened his grip on the cage, gritted his teeth, and leaned forward, passing the little construct through the seething mass of purple and red. Something screamed—more in their minds than an actual physical sound—and then the glowing ball blinked out of existence, reappearing in miniature form inside the cage. Stone dropped to his knees, puffing and pale, his head bowed. He stuffed the cage into his pocket.
Verity grabbed his arm and tugged. “Come on,” she urged. “We gotta go. I don’t know what that thing in the corner is, but it doesn’t look healthy. And the place is on fire!”
Those last words finally seemed to reach him. With effort, he dragged himself to his feet. “Let’s go,” he agreed. “Where’s my—” His gaze fell on his jacket, which was blazing merrily now. His expression hardened, but there was nothing to be done about it now. “No matter. We have to get out of here before that portal blows.”
“Or we burn to death,” Jason muttered. “Let me take point, in case there are any more gangers out there. With any luck it’ll take a while for the fire to spread, and we can find another way out. How long before the portal goes, Al? Do you have any idea?”