by R. L. King
Stone sighed. “No way to know. From the look of it, maybe fifteen minutes. If we’re lucky.” He hurried out behind Jason.
“Wait!” Verity said suddenly when they were out in the hall and about to shut the door.
“What?” Jason was trying not to panic, but it was getting harder.
“What about Lucas? He’s still in there! And he’s not Evil anymore!”
“Oh, crap!” This was one of those times when Jason really hated having an overdeveloped conscience. “Crap. We can’t just leave him.” He was already spinning around to head back in. Stone followed, with Verity bringing up the rear.
Lucas was conscious again, and standing near the fallen DMW ganger. He was unsteady on his feet, his face was bleeding from where the Evil had torn at it, and his expression was one of abject horror. He held a gun loosely in one hand.
“Don’t shoot!” Jason yelled. “We gotta get you out of here.”
“Out?” Lucas seemed to be barely aware that he was talking to anyone. Tears ran down his face, joining with the blood and staining his expensive suit. His gaze traveled around the room, taking in the portal, the dead ganger, the growing fire. “My dear God. What—what have I done?” His voice was a dead monotone, his eyes haunted.
“Mr. Lucas—” Jason took a step forward, not taking his eyes off the gun in the man’s hand. “Just—”
Stone came up alongside him. “He’s not coming, Jason,” he said gently. He looked at Lucas, and some understanding seemed to pass between the two of them. He touched Jason’s arm. “Come on—let’s go.”
“But—”
Lucas raised the gun—but not to point it at Jason or Stone. Instead, he raised it to his own head. “I’m so sorry…” he said softly.
“No!” yelled Jason, diving forward, but it was too late.
The gun went off, taking the side of Lucas’s head with it. Blood and brains and perfectly coiffed silver hair flew out, staining the walls and, even more sickeningly, speckling the miasmic surface of the failing portal and slowly absorbing through and disappearing. Jason stared in shock, moving closer to Stone in an effort to shield Verity from the sight. For once, she didn’t protest. Lucas’s body crashed twitching to the floor for the last time, the flames licking at his legs and igniting his suit.
“Guys—come on!” Verity urged, near hysteria, grabbing each of them by an arm and tugging. “We have to go!”
As one, the two men turned and hurried after her. “How are we gonna get out?” Jason said, scanning the area ahead of them for gangers. “We can’t go through the club. And we still gotta go back for the prisoners.”
“If they’re still alive,” Stone said. He was staggering a bit, as was Jason, but they both moved as fast as they could down the stairs. Jason half-expected to see gangers any second, but so far all they encountered were the bodies—unconscious or dead—of those they’d already dispatched. Jason and his overactive conscience felt a twinge of regret that there was no way they’d be able to get them out—after all, it hadn’t exactly been their fault that they’d been possessed by extradimensional horrors—but there was no helping it. If they found a way out and the place hadn’t gone up yet by the time he got Verity out safely, he’d consider coming back in for them. Otherwise, all bets were off.
By the time they reached the ground floor and hurried down the hallway toward the shop and where they’d left the former captives, they could already smell smoke. “I don’t think we have too long,” Jason said. “I know smoke rises, but this place is in bad shape. That whole second floor section—the whole fucking roof—could come down once that fire takes hold.” He raised his voice as they reached the under-stage area. “Come on out, you guys!” he yelled. “We gotta get out of here fast!”
A few seconds passed, and then the bedraggled group of former captives came out, picking their way out through the debris, led by the Forgotten man. All of them looked considerably less shell-shocked and terrified than they had when Jason, Stone, and Verity had left them there.
“What happened?” the bearded man asked. “Can we go now? Is it safe? I smell something.”
“The place’s on fire,” Jason said. “We have to get out fast. Did you see any gangers?”
“We took out a couple of them,” the bearded man said, looking proud. “They didn’t see us, and we took a chance.”
“How are we getting out?” asked one of the women, frightened. “Did you say the place was on fire?”
“I can smell the smoke too,” said the boy.
“Al,” Jason spoke up. “The crystal you gave him—can you—?”
Stone shook his head. “It’s tuned for concealment, not combat. It won’t—”
He didn’t get to finish as the air was filled with yelling voices and pounding footsteps. “There they are!” one voice cried. “Get ‘em!”
Everyone spun in toward the voices in time to see three gangers skid to a stop at the top of the metal staircase above them. Two reached in their jackets. “Die, fuckers!” yelled one.
Jason reacted instinctively, firing at the one who’d yelled with his last round while shoving Verity to the side behind a large broken light fixture and diving on top of her. “Down!” he screamed, unable to stop the second ganger before he flung something into the midst of the group.
Stone reacted fast, grabbing the arm of the nearest prisoner—the Forgotten man—and launching the two of them forward to roll under one of the wooden workbenches. The rest of the homeless group wasn’t so lucky. The incendiary grenade hit the ground between them and exploded, and suddenly the air was full of agonized shrieks and the smell of burning flesh and hair as the remaining former captives caught the brunt of the grenade’s effect. The hallway lit up with flames, fanned further as the terrified, dying people ran around in a desperate and futile attempt to outrun the inferno.
Verity screamed, shoving her way out from under Jason, to get to them, to do something—anything—to help. She glared at one of the gangers and evicted his Evil with barely a thought.
The remaining ganger, seeing now that by tossing the grenade where he did, he’d cut off his only escape route, stood for a moment in indecision at the top of the stairs. Stone rolled out from under the workbench and plugged him with a spell, staggering back into the wall and sagging against it. The ganger dropped off the edge and crashed to the ground, his clothes catching fire too.
“Al!” Jason screamed, scrambling back to his feet and yanking Verity up with him. “What do we do?” His head jerked madly around, looking for an escape route, wanting to help the dying people, but knowing he couldn’t. He had never felt so impotent—and now their one last desperate escape route, the tunnel back to the club, was engulfed in flames. Above them, they heard faint popping sounds, followed by a muffled crash. The smoke and the stench of burning bodies filled the area. “What do we do?”
Stone was breathing hard, coughing, obviously trying to keep it together despite the fact that he was almost as panicked as Jason was. “The doors!” he said, pointing at the firmly chained metal double doors.
“They’re locked, Al! No way I can break that down!”
“Can you break it?” Verity demanded to Stone. She too was coughing from the smoke, her eyes streaming. “With magic?”
“I—” Stone started to say something, then obviously realized he had no other choice but to try. He took a few steps in the direction of the doors, braced himself against the back wall, and focused his gaze on the door. His eyes were streaming too, and his head wound was bleeding down his face—angrily he brought his arm up and swiped the smoke-induced tears away, then put both hands together and pointed them at the door.
The lock rattled, then fell back with a thud. The doors didn’t move. Stone slumped back against the wall, white and shaking. “I can’t do it—” he breathed, coughing. “Not without some sort of focus—”
“They’re all gone, Al! You have to—” Jason stopped. “Wait! Al! You said you can use people, right? To power spells?”<
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Stone stared at him. “What?” Then he shook his head. “No! I won’t—I won’t do it. I don’t have the control—”
“You have to do it!” Jason yelled. “You don’t have any other choice! If you don’t do it, we’re all dead!” He leaped across the hall and grabbed Stone’s shoulders, getting right up in his face and shaking him. The flames were getting closer, the smoke thicker. Around them, the wooden building cracked and popped. Jason thought he heard another explosion upstairs. “Damn it, Al, do it! Use me as a power source, and get that door open!”
Stone glared at him for another couple of seconds, and then something hardened in his eyes. “God damn you, Jason!” he snarled, half-sobbing. His hands came up and with surprising strength he spun Jason around, gripping his shoulder in a viselike grasp with one hand while focusing both his gaze and his other hand on the door. Verity and the Forgotten man watched, horrified, nearly heedless of the fire now. They obviously knew that this was their last chance and, one way or another, it would all be over soon.
For a moment nothing happened. Jason felt Stone’s hand shaking as it grasped his shoulder. He forced his eyes shut and concentrated as hard as he could on giving whatever power he had to Stone to use. He didn’t care if he died now, drained of all his vitality, if it meant getting that door open and getting his sister and the others out safely. The sacrifice would be worthwhile. An absurd thought flitted through his mind: You can’t say I never gave you anything now, V.
Stone barked out a command, thundering it at the top of his lungs and nearly deafening Jason. Instantly a loud BOOM split the air, drowning out the sounds of the fire, the moans of the dying, the muffled explosions. Jason’s eyes flew open in time to see a massive bolt of glowing, magical energy arc out from Stone’s hand and hit the door. The lock hissed and deformed and cracked open like it wasn’t even there, the heavy chains dropping away like two dead snakes.
“Go! Go! Go!” Verity cried in near panic, throwing herself against the right-side door’s exit bar. It flew open, and she nearly fell over in her rush to get outside.
The fire flared brighter with the new influx of oxygen from outside, licking at their clothes and singeing their skin. Stone’s hand dropped from Jason’s shoulder. Stunned, Jason looked down at himself in amazement. He wasn’t hurt—not aside from his bleeding arm and all the other bumps and cuts and bruises he’d taken inside the building. Whatever Stone had done to him—the thing that under the best of circumstances was supposed to drain him of his vitality to the point where he’d take days to recover—hadn’t even made him dizzy. What the hell—?
Stone had recovered his senses sufficiently to shove him hard in the back. “Outside!” he ordered. The Forgotten man was already in motion too, casting a quick, regretful glance back toward the burning forms of his former companions before ducking outside the door. Jason allowed himself to be shoved, and in a moment the four of them stood, pale and shocked, in the cold night air. Far away, they could hear the sounds of sirens. Someone must have seen the fire and reported it.
Jason was breathing hard, coughing, bent over with his hands on his knees. “Holy crap, that was close,” he got out between breaths. “We—”
Stone ignored him. “You,” he snapped at the Forgotten man. He was white as death, barely able to get words out. “Focus. Concealment.” He thrust out an impatient hand.
Fortunately the man seemed to make sense of his ravings. Reaching in the pocket of his ragged jacket, he pulled out the crystal Stone had given him before and dropped it into the mage’s hand. Stone muttered something over it and then started moving. “Come on,” he said, without waiting to see if they followed. “We don’t want to be nearby when that place blows.”
The four of them made it halfway down the block on the other side of the building away from the club when the top front part of the theater building imploded with a crash that shook the area like a minor earthquake. The entire front end of the building collapsed into itself, sending up choking plumes of thick dust and smoke into the night sky. Flames shot up from the front end to mingle with those that were steadily consuming the back part of the building, joined briefly by shafts of weird, flickering, multicolored light that winked out in mere seconds. The sirens were getting closer.
Jason sagged back against the side of a building and just watched the theater burn. He kept shaking his head, unable to form a coherent thought. Verity watched the building too, tears streaming down her cheeks for which the smoke and fire couldn’t take full credit. The Forgotten man, shaking and confused, merely stood there and stared at nothing in a state of near catatonia. And Stone, staggered from exhaustion, watched Jason, an odd expression in his eyes that nobody else noticed.
They all stayed that way for a long time, hiding in plain sight as the fire trucks and police cars and the media vans and gawkers moved into what had been nearly deserted streets.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
If the proprietors of the upscale steakhouse in Palo Alto had any issues with the strange collection of individuals who trooped up into their private second-floor meeting room the following night, they didn’t mention them. Given the large sum of money the organizer of the event had paid them to provide a lavish dinner and otherwise stay out of the way as much as possible, they contented themselves with hoping that the group would at least remain back there and stay away from the rest of the clientele.
Stone had been unusually quiet for the remainder of the previous night as they’d managed, eventually, to hail a taxi and ridden back to their hotel suite in San Francisco, and equally quiet on the drive back to the house in Mountain View. They’d given the Forgotten man a ride to the area where he last remembered seeing his friends—they were able to follow the chalked signs and reunite him with a small group of ragged men and women who were shocked and surprised to see him. Stone, Jason, and Verity didn’t remain to swap stories; Stone just gave him a little cash with a nod of thanks, then just as silently went back to the car and waited for Jason and Verity to join him.
Jason and Verity didn’t bother him. They too weren’t feeling much like talking; reeling from all the shocks of the evening, they simply sat and stared out the window as the lights of the freeway flashed past. Jason was astonished that anything as normal as traffic could be happening around them after what they’d been through. He wondered if anything would ever be normal again. He knew the screams of the dying, burning people in the building would haunt him for years to come, and his mind wouldn’t stop going over ways in which he could possibly have saved them. Saved the boy, at least. Verity seemed to know what was on his mind, for at one point during the drive her hand had crept across the seat and settled on his. He’d smiled faintly at her, but said nothing.
The next day passed in a blur. They tended their wounds, slept a lot—though fitfully—and waited with trepidation for the phone call that would indicate that someone had seen them near the theater building, that the police wanted to talk to them, that somebody had spotted Stone doing magic. But the call didn’t come, and as the day went on they began to relax, just a bit.
Stone had disappeared for an hour at midday; Jason didn’t ask him where he went, but when he returned he announced that they had a dinner engagement that evening. Jason suspected he knew what it was about, but again didn’t ask. It was a strange feeling, and he thought both Stone and Verity shared it—that it wasn’t time to talk about it yet. He wasn’t sure what they were waiting for, but perhaps this evening would reveal it. When they arrived at the steakhouse and spotted Lamar, Marilee, and the rest of the Forgotten group huddling outside near the back of the parking lot dressed in shabby but clean clothes, he knew he was right.
Now, they all sat in the wood-paneled room, the kind of room where business deals and decisions affecting thousands of people were made over cocktails, staring down at the plates of appetizers the tuxedo-clad waiters were placing in the middle of the long table, and they waited. Of Lamar’s group, only Lamar himself looked like he’d ever been
inside a place like this; the others shifted in their seats and clearly felt out of their element. Jason, nursing a beer and feeling out of place himself, wanted to force Stone to speak—but he knew the mage would do it in his own time.
Stone didn’t say anything until the waiters had finished bringing the appetizers and drinks. When the door closed behind them, he looked around the table. “Please,” he said, his voice oddly soft. “Eat. Enjoy.”
Tentatively, the others began passing around the dishes. “Dr. Stone,” Lamar said at last. “Is it over? Is that why you’ve asked us here?”
Stone stared down at his plate. He hadn’t joined in partaking of the food yet, though he had already polished off half a large drink. He sighed. “No. It’s not over. Not completely. But it’s a good start, at least for a while.” He looked over across the table. “Jason, if you would be so kind…”
Jason wasn’t quite sure what he meant for a moment, but the Forgotten were all starting to ask questions now, and he realized what Stone wanted. The mage still didn’t want to talk, to explain, to answer questions yet. He nodded. “Yeah.”
With Verity’s help, he explained to the Forgotten what had happened. Their voices shook as they got to the part about the fire—by mutual agreement following a quick glance at Stone, they didn’t mention anything about the failed portal. All around the table, tears sprang to the Forgotten group’s eyes as Jason told them about the ones who didn’t make it out. “How horrible, how horrible…” Marilee sobbed, fumbling in her single tote bag for a tissue.
“I can’t believe it…” Lamar said softly, shaking his head. “Gordon Lucas…I don’t think any of us ever suspected—He must have used non-Evil to run his events, or someone would have noticed…”
“No doubt,” Stone said, speaking for the first time. “I doubt they’ll be able to identify his body in that wreckage, but I suspect the Evil involvement in that organization confined itself to the upper echelons. It was brilliant, really—giving them access to the very people they wanted to destroy without causing any suspicion. I’m quite surprised he didn’t get hold of more of your people.”