by Steve Vera
“Like what?”
Gavin shook his head impatiently. “That is an entirely different conversation for another time. All you need to know is that Asmodeous the Pale is free and is on his way here to kill us all.”
“And you, too, if you’re still around,” Cirena added.
He studied the five of them a good six seconds before speaking, “How am I supposed to believe all this? Drynn? Other worlds? Underworlds?” He gave his head a shake. “Magic.”
Noah jabbed him firmly in the ribs by way of answer.
Good point. Still…
Somebody’s phone rang. Gavin looked down. Crinkling his eyebrows, he leaned back from the conversation to answer his phone. “What’s up?” he asked in a low, hushed voice.
The conversation around the table paused.
“What?” Gavin demanded. “Who? Is she all right?” He spoke loud enough to attract the curiosity of three businessmen and a woman at another booth, folders and attachés beside chop shrimp salads and fried calamari.
“What did he look like?” The distant, tinny voice was indiscernible, absorbed by the sounds of the restaurant. “Give me that photograph,” Gavin said to Skip, pointing to the Padfolio beneath his arm. It was not a request.
Skip sniffed, unzipped the Padfolio, took out the envelope and handed it to Gavin. He did not release it when Gavin grasped it.
“I’m in. Whatever is happening, wherever you go, I go.” He waited for Gavin’s response.
The muscles bunched at Gavin’s jaw but he nodded.
Eyebrows shot up in unison around the table.
Skip released the envelope.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I don’t much feel like talking,” Gavin said dismissively as Skip followed him to his car.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. Think of it as therapy.”
Gavin shot him a look but unlocked the door just the same and slipped into the driver’s seat of his Audi A6. Skip followed without the smallest inkling of pain. Hot damn, I love magic. The moment his seatbelt clicked shut, the car roared to life and out of the parking lot. Jack followed on a sleek, black motorcycle that looked as if it could break the sound barrier, and behind that, Tarsidion’s Suburban—Cirena riding shotgun, Noah in the back.
Gavin put the car through its gears seamlessly, revving to 4500 rpms before upshifting. “I have a question for you,” he said, his eyes never leaving the cinematic windshield.
“Shoot.”
“Why do you want to get mixed up in all this?” he asked in a low voice.
For the first time it sounded like incomprehension rather than condescension. “Happened under my watch,” Skip replied simply.
“For honor then?” Gavin asked.
“Call it whatever you want.”
The Audi pitched sharply to the left as Gavin navigated through a cluster of slow-moving cars, eliciting several angry honks. His brow creased in concentration, or it could’ve been the sun. Handsome as he was, the kid was going to have an accordion on his forehead if he didn’t lighten up.
“You seem surprised.”
Gavin shrugged, as if being asked what he wanted for dinner. “I’ve found that people in this world are…more self-serving than I am accustomed. Honor is a foreign concept.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t judge so broadly.”
Another shrug. “Perhaps I shouldn’t.”
Either he was really lucky or a really good driver because he weaved through traffic like a Formula I racecar driver; he always found a hole.
“Noah said you were different,” Gavin observed, zipping through a yellow light.
Jack and the GMC zoomed right behind.
“Well, Noah is a smart girl. What’s her deal, anyway?”
Just before Skip thought he wouldn’t answer, Gavin surprised him. “She’s homesick, I guess. When it became clear we weren’t going back, she changed.” Something dark fluttered across his face. “It’s easier for her to hide in the mountains and watch that damn tomb than to live. She hates this place.”
Assimilate.
“Why?” Skip felt oddly defensive about his home world.
“Besides the obvious of being away from everything she’s ever known? Imagine no longer being able to taste. Imagine an artist suddenly going blind or a musician suddenly going deaf. You can exist, certainly, but your life is forever different, forever lacking.”
“I don’t think I follow you.”
Gavin pulled up to a red light, looked at Skip. “We are Magi, Skip. Magic is everything to us, like paint to Picasso or the guitar was to Jimi Hendrix or, in darker cases, what cocaine is to an addict.”
Skip gave him a sideward glance.
“Different genesis, similar dangers,” Gavin explained.
It made a kind of sense. People could get addicted to anything; why not magic?
“So if magic doesn’t exist on this world, what was that I saw in the restaurant back there?” Skip patted his chest.
“That was an aberration. She used something she’s been saving for ten years on you. I hope you appreciate it. The magic that exists here is a distant, warped echo of what it is on Theia, frustratingly diluted and unpredictable. That parlor trick you saw back at the restaurant? That’s the extent of our power here.”
“It impressed me.”
Gavin gave a cryptic shake to his head and drove on.
Four minutes later they pulled into the parking lot of a preppy-looking apartment complex. Before the car had even stopped, Gavin threw up the emergency break, and the car lurched forward. He jumped out and was jogging toward the entrance of a nondescript brick building with an impressive number of windows, right past an idling black stretch limousine.
Skip followed. The door banged shut as he made the entrance. He tracked the sounds of Gavin’s footsteps thundering upstairs. On the third floor he came upon a slowly closing door. He pushed through it, jogged twenty feet down the hall and found the front door to apartment 3C open. Skip tapped his badge and entered.
Gavin stood in the middle of a ransacked living room, heel planted firmly on the cracked cover of a DVD. CDs, Blu-ray discs, books and everyday life were strewn across the floor. A pink MacBook lay snapped in half by the coffee table.
Gavin was staring at a spot over a misaligned couch. Like a bloody fan, the wall was smeared with the palm and fingertips of a…woman’s hand.
The latch of a door down the hallway clicked open. Gavin stirred. Skip motioned vigorously to the wall on the left side of the hallway entrance while flattening himself against the right. He pulled out his Python.
“Gavin?” came a female’s voice. Bad girl—always say, “Who’s there?” It was much harder to fake a name than to grunt an affirmative.
The face that emerged from the bedroom door would have been pretty had the right side of it not been mottled, swollen and caked with blood. Dead, listless eyes burst to life when they connected with Gavin’s.
“Gavin!” she screamed and launched herself toward him, flinging her body through the hallway into his arms, burying her face in his shoulder, a torrent of sobs racking her body. “You left me, you bastard, you fucking left me,” she chanted over and over again.
“Ho-lee shit,” Jack said, pushing into the living room. Tarsidion and Cirena entered behind him.
Midhug, Gavin pointed with his head at the room she’d just emerged from. Skip nodded and squeezed past them. One of the two men inside was holding a bloodstained wet rag over a bowl of steamy water, big guy, while a much-smaller man helped him clean his hand. There were two fingernails on the dresser.
Skip’s lobster risotto came a-knocking. Jac
k was right behind him.
“Was it this guy?” he asked Mr. Nail-less, holding the picture Skip had printed of Donovan in his bedroom.
Nail-less nodded.
“His ass is mine,” Jack said and then disappeared out of the room.
*
It took a little while to calm things down. Raymond’s nails would grow back, Max’s nose could be reset and Amanda’s face would heal. As to their emotional trauma, Gavin could only guess.
If time hadn’t been an issue, Gavin would have immediately gone to the hospital, but it was an issue. The sun would be setting in a couple of hours.
“Anything else?” he asked gently. The nine of them were crammed into Amanda’s living room, recuperating around her broken coffee table.
“You mean, besides the fact that we had our asses handed to us on a platter?” Max asked in a nasally voice, holding a wad of toilet paper to his bloody nose. “No.”
Gavin was torn between fury, bafflement and impending dread; this had not been on his list of things to do today. Not that any of it was. Whoever had laid a hand on his Amanda was losing a kidney.
“He did say one thing,” Raymond mumbled. His eyes were glazed in pain, his hand encased in gauze. “Right before he left.”
“And what was that?” Noah asked. A long pause.
“That it was coming.” Amanda. Numb voice.
His four brethren exchanged a quick glance with him.
Gavin stood. “All right. The plan remains the same. We get you to the airport and then to the other side of the world. Everybody up.”
“What are you talking about?” Raymond asked. “We need to go to the hospital. My nails were torn out of my fucking fingers.”
“You can go in Paris,” Gavin said. “C’mon, we’re leaving. Now.”
Tarsidion, Noah, Cirena, Jack and Skip stood with him. The three victims hesitated. If he let himself, Gavin could cry at the expression on Amanda’s face—blotted with a nasty starfish bruise that was turning blacker by the minute. Her lips were split in two places and her left eye was nearly swollen shut. And Gavin couldn’t do a thing about it.
Asmodeous was coming.
The nine of them filed out of Amanda’s apartment without saying a word. They passed a couple of college kids wearing workout tank tops who gave them wide berth as they tromped wordlessly down the hallway. Once outside, the tang of autumn filled Gavin’s nostrils, relieving him of his claustrophobia.
Before they reached their vehicles, a flock of birds erupted from a tree across the street. All heads swiveled. Gavin’s heart was a jackhammer.
“What’s coming, Gavin?” Amanda asked quietly. Everybody looked.
“Something worse than you’ve just seen,” he said, forcing himself to meet her broken stare. “Jack, you take point. You,” he said, looking at Tarsidion, “are rear guard. Cirena,” he said and tossed her the keys to his Audi, “ride behind us. And you,” Gavin said, pointing at Skip’s chest, “will ride with me.”
“Isniak noluve’e achrono, Stavengre.” This time it was Cirena who spoke.
“We have no choice,” Gavin replied evenly to her.
They locked stares, but it was Cirena who looked away first.
“What language is that?” Max asked.
Gavin didn’t answer, simply held the door of the limousine open, motioning for them to enter. Amanda went in first, keeping eye contact with him until she stepped inside. Max followed and then a sheepish, wounded Raymond, still cradling his hand. Jack’s motorcycle revved to life.
“Are you coming?” Gavin asked Skip.
Noah waited calmly beside Gavin. They no longer tried to dissuade him. Skip sniffed.
“I told you I was in,” he said and then ducked inside.
Gavin shut the door behind him and took a long, controlled breath. He looked at Noah. “We’re in it now,” he muttered.
“That we are,” she agreed.
Gavin scanned the tops of the buildings and any trees around them. “Think he could have gotten here by now?”
“He would have had to cover over twenty-four hundred miles in three days and eleven hours. Without magic…how?”
“Mmmm.” It was sound logic. Gavin stared at the giant sugar maple across the street where all the birds had erupted earlier. Without his gifts he could no more penetrate the Overlord’s camouflage than any other mortal.
He kept his gaze locked on the tree. A thought, swimming in the currents of his brainwaves, rose to the top of his mind.
“Think he could have hitched a ride on a plane?” He kept his voice light. Conversational. What I want you to do right now, Noah, is tell me that I’m nuts for even bringing it up.
She didn’t. Instead, her eyes widened. “Surely not,” she said without conviction. “He couldn’t possibly, not without magic. He’d be too high…there wouldn’t be enough air. How high do planes fly?”
“Between ten and forty-five thousand feet, depending on the aircraft.”
“Ten-thousand feet?” she asked, eyes going wide. It was like realizing she’d left the kids in Amsterdam after reaching Australia.
“Yeah, but like a Cessna, there’s no way it would be able to hold his weight. A jetliner, on the other hand…” He let his sentence trail off.
“Surely someone would notice the Lord of the Underworld stowing away on an airplane, right? He’s heavy, and even on Theia he was incapable of holding spirit form for much more than an hour. And here? On Earth without magic? He probably doesn’t even know what an airplane is. Impossible. “
Gavin looked down at his feet. “Impossible, like escaping his prison?”
He looked up. They locked stares. Even her legendary serenity couldn’t keep the gloss of dread from out of her eyes. Gavin sighed and shook his head. “It can’t be ruled out. C’mon, change of plans.”
The two walked over to the trunk of the GMC, where Cirena and Tarsidion were waiting. Jack edged his motorcycle to the rest of them.
Inside the trunk was an arsenal. None of them had the slightest clue as to how firearms were going to affect the Overlord, and Gavin would prefer they find out that little answer at the Bastion, where they’d have the advantage of magic and the best that science had to offer.
All they had to do was get there.
Gavin reached in to the trunk to grab his trusted Mark 23 but noticed a couple of hipster kids prowling the parking lot. One of them had a telephone out and looked as if he was contemplating taking some pictures. Tarsidion had a way of attracting attention.
One hard look from the five of them, however, was enough to dissuade them. They pulled an about-face, got back on their skateboards and peddled away, laughing in the way friends say, “Did you see that?”
After a subtle but thorough scanning of the lot, the five of them armed themselves quickly. As originally intended, Gavin grabbed the Mark 23, holstered it to his hip and then took out a Japanese national treasure. It was his Osafune Mitsutada tanto, a priceless gift he’d been given by Max Sullivan Senior for saving his son’s life in a rather spectacular fashion. Wonder what he’d say today.
Cirena’s disdain for firearms of any type caused her to simply not use them. Instead she pulled out a wicked-looking crossbow with a laser sight, all modern composite materials and graphite bolts.
“Perhaps you should make an exception this time,” Gavin said, holding out his pistol to her. “At least have one as a last resort.”
“I will not,” Cirena replied, holding one of the quarrels out to him. It was a black, long shaft with a silver-gray tip. “Do you know what that i
s?”
“A quarrel head?” Gavin said after a quick examination.
“It’s phosphorous. This bolt could burn straight through a tank. If it penetrates his body, Deos will burn from the inside out.”
“You’ll only get one shot.”
“I still have this,” she said, opening her thigh-length jacket. Cleverly tucked against her torso was a slender, elegant ax hanging upside down in a sheath from a leather strap tied around her shoulder. Gavin, of course, recognized it immediately. It was a gift bequeathed to Cirena from another world and time, from another race of people, even. He didn’t need her to pull it out to remember the silver-red runes inlaid in the dark polished metal, or the perfect balance of its head to shaft that could turn any warrior into a master.
“You still have her?” Gavin asked allowing a smile of recognition.
“Of course I do,” she answered. “Though I admit her services are not often necessary here, and I would not debase her by simply chopping wood.”
The ax even had a name, K’lesha, and it was older than all of them put together. A king had given it to her during the war—a gift for saving his life also, also in a spectacular fashion.
“Well, that makes me feel a little better.”
“The quicker we get this over with will make me feel better,” Tarsidion commented drily, ratcheting back the action of the converted AK-47 he took out of the trunk. Tarsidion had no such aversion. “Let’s see how Deos handles a full magazine in the ass.”
“Something tells me we’re going to find out,” Gavin said, staring at his companions. “And if I didn’t tell you before, thank you for not killing me.”
“What is this?” Noah asked.
“They performed a Ritual of Accounting,” Gavin said as casually as if he’d just told them what movie he’d just seen.
“What?”
“Only need three. We would have included you but you were entertaining our new charming friend half across the country.”
Noah looked at the three others. “How could you?”
“It was his stupid idea,” Jack said, flicking his thumb toward Gavin from his motorcycle.