by R. L. King
Ocelot slammed him against the wall, but the man was fast, strong, and well trained. He ducked under Ocelot’s next punch and, still blinded by the smoke, wrapped his arms around his opponent’s waist and tried to bull them both forward and out of the cloud.
Toby Boyd screamed. One moment, he was standing next to the tall British mage as the two of them headed confidently out the elevator and toward freedom, and the next moment everything went dark.
He clutched wildly for the mage’s arm, but before he could grab it, something that felt like a whirling tornado snatched him up, spinning him high up into the air and then forward. He screamed again, pistoning his arms and legs in a desperate attempt to free himself from whatever had grabbed him, but its grip was both strong and impossible to get a handhold on. He felt like he was being blown upward in some kind of wind tunnel, then snatched through the air like he was flying. Under more pleasant circumstances he might even have enjoyed it, but right now it was terrifying.
It was only when he started to lose altitude and was deposited gently down next to a shadowy, dark-skinned elf woman standing near the open doorway by the drekkers that he figured it out: it was an air spirit! It had to be!
He stared in wide-eyed panic at the woman. “What the hell—?”
“Shh!” She put a finger to her lips and waved him forward. “Come on. I’m part of the team that’s extracting you. Sorry about the scare, but we needed a way to get you out fast. Car’s ready.”
Boyd panted, bent over and clutching his knees, not even aware that his illusion had dropped, his white robe had been blown away in his flight, and he was now standing in the parking lot in his underwear. Right now, that wasn’t even rating on his list of things to think about. Instead, relief washed over him. Of course! He shouldn’t have doubted that these guys knew what they were doing. “Come on!” he urged. “Let’s go before my guards catch up to us!”
The elf woman smiled. It might have registered somewhere in the back of Boyd’s mind that the smile looked odd, but a lot of things were looking pretty fragging odd right now. He followed her out to the car and scrambled into the back seat, ducking low. In a moment, it sped off into the night.
CHAPTER 14
LOS ANGELES
PANDORA CLUB
SATURDAY MORNING
The lights still weren’t back on, and the crowd at Pandora had reached a full-scale panic now. The dance floor was emptying, but since nobody had any idea where the exits were in the dark, the dancers ran in random directions, slamming into each other, trampling the fallen in their headlong rush to escape. A few of the guests kept it together enough to pull out their commlinks and use them as flashlights, but the lights did little to help them shove their way through the seething, mindless throng.
It didn’t make anything any better that Toby Boyd was not the only corporate reveler being minded by one or more heavily armed babysitters. When the lights went out, every one of those babysitters engaged whatever form of low-light vision they had, readied their weapons, and attempted to collect their charges so they could get the hell out before the drek hit the fan.
It also didn’t help that somebody got the bright idea to shoot up a flare to try to get a better look at what was going on. The bright little light flew high above the crowd and hit one of the caged dancers, igniting the feathers that comprised her costume. This had two effects: the first was that her panicked screams added to the horrific soundscape of the club, and the second was that the fire sprinkler directly above her began dousing the center of the dance floor with slippery fire-retardant chemicals over an area of two or three meters. The dancers underneath, having no idea what had just hit them, panicked even more and redoubled their efforts to get away, resulting in yet more tramplings.
All around the perimeter of the dance floor, both club security personnel and corporate bodyguards did their best to try to quell the panic, but it was a losing battle. When the crowd surged over them a couple of the bodyguards, convinced that someone was trying to make off with their charges, let loose with a barrage of gunfire into the air. The terrified crowd took them down, but not before a few rounds tore through several of the clubgoers.
Frag, she thought. <’Hawk, you guys got the dwarf back yet?>
Dreja spun. Winterhawk was never that terse. Something was up.
“Maya! Have you found Boyd yet?”
“He’s leaving,” the cat said. “Kivuli took him out the side door, over by the bathrooms on the other side.”
“What?” Winterhawk was stunned for a moment. “How’d he get over there? Can you follow them?”
“There’s a rather large air spirit in the way,” she replied dubiously.
Bugger. Winterhawk glanced around, then send off two messages. The first was to his own air spirit: “Deal with the spirit by the exit door. Maya will show you where.” The second one was to the team:
Another gunshot went off, somewhere on the other side of the room.
Winterhawk donned his low-light glasses and took a look around, pulling in mana to summon up an armor spell. Everywhere he looked there were writhing bodies, trampled bloody figures on the floor, and security guards brandishing guns and trying to restore order.
Something shimmered into being in front of him, forming from discarded beer glasses, bits of litter and napkins, twisting bar stools, and other detritus from around the club. It whirled and spun and formed itself into a humanoid form three meters tall and almost as wide, dropping down in front of Winterhawk. It roared, its voice sounding like the feedback from a whole stack of amplifiers during a trog-rock concert.
Ocelot brought his knee up between the bodyguard’s legs and felt the man’s grip on him loosen. He shoved the guard backward, slamming him into the wall. He briefly considered drawing his gun and shooting the man, but there was already enough gunfire flying around now, and he didn’t want to attract attention to what they were doing. He’d seen the message about Boyd’s abrupt departure, and the longer he stayed here tangling with the dwarf’s bodyguard, the better chance that their objective would get away from them.
Backpedaling, he let the bodyguard make the next decision: he’d either revert to training and go back to looking for Boyd, or he’d come after Ocelot. Ocelot wasn’t sure whether the bodyguard even knew where Boyd was, but the dwarf obviously wasn’t here. If the man decided to come after Ocelot instead, then he’d deal with him. But he had to lure the guard out and away so he could ditch him and get after Boyd.
He glanced over and his eye
s widened as he saw the mass of whirling detritus that occupied Winterhawk’s attention. It had just picked the mage up and tossed him several meters toward the bar. <’Hawk?>
Winterhawk, scrambling back to his feet and flinging something at the spirit that made it flare bright red, didn’t respond.
Tiny came pounding up to Winterhawk just in time to see him sail across the open space and crash into the bar. He drew his Ingram and pointed it at the trash-spirit, which was wading over toward the mage as he got back to his feet, and opened up, sending two quick bursts into its center.
He might as well have been tossing spitballs at it. It didn’t change direction or even acknowledge his presence, continuing its inexorable advance on Winterhawk.
Tiny was about to stow the gun and pop a spur from his cyberarm when he spotted something else: another shadowy figure was moving, crouched and stealthy, toward Winterhawk from behind him. The mage, still facing the spirit, obviously didn’t see him approaching, and between the screams and the gunfire and the general cacophony there was no way he could have heard it.
Tiny raised the gun again, leveling the barrel at Winterhawk. “Down!” he yelled over the link. He got a brief glimpse of the mage’s wide, shocked eyes before Winterhawk caught on and hit the floor. Tiny squeezed off another burst in a neat pattern in the center of the second bodyguard’s chest. The man staggered back, his hand going to his jacket. Tiny plugged three more rounds into his face before he could get his gun out.
Tiny hesitated for a moment, then nodded and launched himself toward the panicking crowd and the other side of the club.
Dreja jumped down off the bar. Her flashlight beam had picked out the tall form of Tiny bulling his way through the edge of the crowd in an attempt to reach the other side of the club where Boyd was last seen. She hurried to follow him, but even as she did, she knew they would never get there in time. No one in the crowd was actively trying to impede their forward progress, but panicking crowds try to head for exits, and the place where Kivuli had spirited Boyd away was one of the few available ones. That meant a good portion of the crowd was trying to get where they wanted to go, and even with Dreja’s flashlight and the smattering of other light sources—flashlights, commlinks, and the occasional flare—the combined effect of too many brains shutting down and too many bodies stampeding like mindless cattle meant the dance floor and its immediate environs were a dangerous place to be. Dreja was big, tough, and armored, but she wasn’t the only one who was.
She changed course, heading for the periphery of the crowd, where she could move faster, but there was no chance she’d get there in time. Kivuli and Boyd were probably already gone by now. It would be up to either Winterhawk and his spirits, or Scuzzy and his deck. And both of them were currently otherwise occupied.
Drek! This whole job was going to hell right in front of her eyes, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
The emergency lights kicked in as Ocelot buried his fist in the human bodyguard’s gut, knocking the wind out of him and, from the feel of it, cracking several ribs. The man crumpled into a heap on the floor as suddenly everything was bathed in a reddish glow, making the place look even more hellish than the fight did.
Scuzzy sent.
More crashes. The whirling spirit had stopped moving—it remained rooted in place, its nimbus of detritus spinning around it, focused on Winterhawk. The mage too stood motionless, his gaze locked on it. Ocelot had seen this before: he was trying to banish it. He popped his cyberspur and launched himself toward the spirit. Maybe if he could get its attention, ’Hawk would have an easier time dealing with it. They had to get out of here.
Dreja had almost reached the other side of the club when a mob of screaming clubgoers came pounding back the other way. She barely dived out of their path before they would have trampled her. Tiny, a little ahead, didn’t even bother: he just put out his massive arms and diverted them to either side, clearly not caring if he knocked any down into the others’ paths.
With the emergency lights on, it only took Dreja a second to figure out what had spooked them: the two air spirits, Winterhawk’s and the one that had borne Toby Boyd away, filled the hallway leading to the exit and were currently engaged in battle. Anything from the immediate vicinity that wasn’t attached to the floor—tables, chairs, trash, plates, cutlery, purses, and even a few small clubgoers—was currently whipping around as potentially deadly projectiles as the two spirits went at each other with increasing fervor.
The mage didn’t answer.
Dreja was about to do that when she spotted something: it was hard to see, because the spirits were nearly transparent except for their whirling clouds of trash, but it looked like one of them was shoving the other one into the club, leaving a potential opening in the hallway leading toward the exit.
Waving at Tiny to follow, she leaped for it before it closed.
Tiny hurried behind her.
“Go!” Winterhawk yelled, pointing his hands at the trash spirit and focusing all his will into his banishment spell.
Banishments took a lot of work: spirits didn’t generally want to come to the material plane, but once they were summoned they were dogged about following their orders. Trying to send them back if you didn’t control them tended to make them grumpy, and right now a grumpy spirit was just one more in a series of things Winterhawk and his team were going to have to deal with if they were going to find Toby.
The spirit’s aura flared red and angry as the spell hit it, its energy diminishing.
He spared a thought to his ally as he gathered his own energy: “Maya, did you find them?”
“I’m following them,” she replied. “They’re heading away in a small car. Not fast, but they’re already not close to you.”
“Stay with them,” he told her, and then had to break off the conversation as the trash spirit made a renewed attempt to gain the upper hand. He was going to have to do something definitive soon, before his strength gave out. He felt the spirit flare again, but this time it wasn’t his doing.
Then he saw him: Ocelot! Spirits weren’t easy to affect with mundane weaponry, but apparently nobody had told Ocelot that: his cyberspur flashed in the reddish light as he slashed it through the spirit’s form, dissipating it still more. It roared its amplifier-feedback roar and spun on him, raising arms made of two hovering bar stools.
Winterhawk grinned. Bad idea to turn your back on a mage, even if you were a spirit. He pointed his hands again and barked out a series of arcane syllables. The spirit flared brighter red than the emergency lights and its feedback-screech rose to a howl—
—and it was gone, leaving the various bits of bar debris that had made up its form to crash to the floor.
Ocelot recovered fast, hurrying to where the mage stood, a little bent over and panting. “We gotta find Boyd!” he yelled in his ear.
“Maya’s tracking him,” he yelled back. Then over the link:
CHAPTER 15
LOS ANGELES
SATURDAY MORNING
They all made it to the van, using whatever they needed to get through the crowd and shove their way out the front door. Outside, they could hear sirens screaming in the distance, and the clubgoers who’d managed to escape stood in shaking knots in the parking lot. Some of them were snapping holopics or vids of the scene.
The team pil
ed inside with Dreja nearly tossing Scuzzy bodily into a seat, as he was still focused fully on his deck. Cosworth hit the gas and tore out of the lot, barely avoiding running over oblivious bystanders.
“I got ’em!” Scuzzy said. “I hacked the cameras out back and saw them go—they’re in an old Americar.”
“Can you do anything about it?” Dreja asked.
“Trying.” He sounded distracted. “I’m gonna see if I can divert them away from their route by hacking the traffic signals.”
“Do it,” Winterhawk said from the shotgun seat. “Maya, remain on standby—keep them in sight, but if that air spirit shows up, get out of there.”
Kivuli stomped on the pedal, slewing the little Americar around a corner onto a smaller street. She had no idea if anyone was watching or following her, but she had to assume they were. The sooner she got Boyd out of sight and got the information from him, the better she’d feel. She only wished she’d been able to steal a car with an engine instead of a couple underfed hamsters under the hood, but it was too late to deal with that now. She had a good head start, and with luck, that would be enough.
“Where we going?” Toby asked, fumbling with the seatbelts in the back as another sharp turn slung him sideways and nearly knocked him over. “Are we meeting up with the others?”
“Yeah,” she said, distracted. “There’s a rendezvous point we’re all supposed to meet at.” She spared a quick glance back at him. “You’ve got the info we’re here for, right?”
Toby tapped his head. “Yep. All in the headware. You get me safe and it’s all yours.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, ducking her head so he couldn’t see her sly smile. Headware! This was even better than she’d hoped—she could just hook up a cable to him and pull it down, without having to convince him to give it up without the others present. “You’ll be safe as a baby in no time. Just hold on tight and stay low.”