Blood Relation (Arcane Casebook Book 6)

by Dan Willis

  “What happens then?” he voiced his thoughts.

  Diego gave him an intense look, not one of anger or intimidation, but the kind of look an earnest friend might give when delivering a dire warning.

  “Let me show you,” he said.

  Using his left hand, Diego unbuttoned his smoking jacket, revealing a blue silk shirt. Without stopping, he unbuttoned the shirt and pulled it open. Across the left side of his chest, radiating out from a spot over his heart, was the most complex rune Alex had ever seen. The escape rune he’d finished a few days ago was nothing compared to this. It was etched into the skin of Diego’s chest, but Alex could tell it was no tattoo. The lines were too perfect, the colors too bright. Whoever had done this has used some kind of magic to bind the construct into the man’s flesh.

  Alex’s eyes tried to trace the interlocking symbols but every time he thought he’d followed one to its end, it doubled back into another shape.

  “Mesmerizing,” Diego said. “Isn’t it?”

  Alex could only nod his agreement.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” he admitted. “What is it?”

  Diego chuckled.

  “This is the Immortal’s punishment for failure,” he said. “Or in my case, for success. It’s called the rune of damnation and it forever shuts me out from rune magic.”

  That couldn’t possibly be true, and Alex knew it. Whatever rune he’d used to stop time was incredibly powerful, something Alex had believed only a sorcerer could do.

  “Your magic seems to be working now,” Alex said.

  Diego smirked and closed his shirt.

  “I’m sure that you are aware that runes aren’t the only kind of magic,” he said. “Let’s just say that I’ve found that drawing magic from the universe isn’t the only way to power a construct.”

  Alex was about to ask him to explain that, but he felt a sudden pulse of magic that pushed against him like a wind. He turned toward the place the power had come from and found a shattered glass globe about the size of a baseball on the hardwood floor.

  “Alas,” Diego said in a voice that sounded genuinely disappointed. “Our time grows short. What you need to know, Alex, is that sooner or later the Immortals will come for you. First they’ll tell you how important you are. How there is great evil in the world, and they need you to be their agent.”

  That bit sounded very familiar.

  “Alex,” Diego continued, then he paused. “Brother, hear me. No matter what they promise, they will turn on you. As soon as you are no longer useful to them, this is what awaits you.” He pulled on his shirt again, revealing the damnation rune.

  Alex felt another pulse from the broken globe.

  “In addition to being unpleasant,” Diego said, “the methods I’ve had to use to stay alive are quite dangerous.” He stood and moved to the other side of the room, grabbing a few things out of a portmanteau trunk and stuffing them into a leather valise. “When the time suspension rune fails, the backlash will be quite severe,” he continued. “I enhanced this construct with that little trick you did at dear Linsey’s apartment. I really must thank you for showing me that; the backlash now will be several times more destructive. I’d suggest you start running immediately.” He dropped the pistol into the pocket of his smoking jacket and moved around to the room’s large window. “And don’t forget what I told you, Brother. The Immortals will turn on you, sooner or later. When they do, you’re welcome to come find me.”

  Another wave of the decaying spell hit Alex and he noticed the fragments of the glass globe, that had been suspended in the air by the rune, were beginning to move.

  “Good luck,” Diego said, then he threw open the window and leapt out into the night.

  Alex was torn between the desire to run to the window and the desire to just run. He quickly mastered himself. As soon as Diego’s construct failed, this room and maybe more were going to dissolve into nothing from the backlash. Diego told him to run, so it was quite possible that backlash would be much larger than Alex originally thought. With Danny and the policemen still frozen in the hall, there was nothing Alex could do to keep them from being consumed.

  “You’re supposed to be smart,” he growled out loud. “Iggy thinks so, Moriarty thinks so, even that psychopath Diego thinks so, so think! How do you stop an explosion of backlash? What can you do that will stand against…”

  He tore at his suit coat, ripping out his rune book and paging frantically through it. There was a chance, but it wasn’t good. If he was wrong, it might destroy the entire hotel and him along with it. Still, he had to try.

  “This is so stupid,” he said as he tore out a temporal restoration rune. Not bothering to fold it, he dropped it on the slowly expanding pile of shattered glass from the globe and flicked his lighter to life.

  Praying that he wasn’t about to kill himself and everyone else in the building, Alex touched the flame to the flash paper. It caught, burning in slow motion as Diego’s construct failed. The shattered glass began to expand quickly as time returned to normal. Alex began to hear sounds out in the hall, but before anyone could move freely enough to enter the room, the shards of the glass globe slowed and stopped. It hovered in place for a moment, then moved backward, collapsing in on itself until it solidified into a glass ball sitting on top of a round metal base. Inside was a model of the cathedral at Notre Dame, and white paper shapes swirled around it like birds.

  Alex picked up the water-filled orb with a trembling hand. As he touched it, he could feel the magic inside, straining to burst forth but held in place by his own rune.

  The door behind him burst open and Danny and the policemen rushed in.

  “Alex,” Danny said, taking in the room. “How did you get in here?”

  “Never mind,” Alex said, standing up and holding the glass ball at arm’s length. “In ten minutes this thing is going to explode and destroy the hotel.”

  Danny opened his mouth in confusion and then shut it again.

  “Trust me,” Alex said. “You’ve got to get everyone out.”

  Alex needed to figure out how to get the ball out of the hotel, but the only thing he could think of was his vault, and that might expose his office or the brownstone to the backlash. Neither of those would be a better place for the ball to explode. He could shut it in his vault and just leave it there, but he had no idea what that kind of backlash would do in the extra-dimensional space the vault occupied. It could become even more dangerous for all he knew.

  “You,” Danny said, pointing at one of the officers. “Go activate the fire bell. The rest of you take a floor and get everyone out of the hotel. Now! Move!”

  The officers scrambled to obey, and Danny joined Alex.

  “Can you use your escape rune?” he asked. “Dump it in the north Atlantic like you did with Sorsha’s castle?”

  It was a good idea, but his latest escape rune was currently hanging on his vault wall where it wouldn’t do him any good. He opened his mouth to explain that when he realized what Danny had said.

  “You’re a genius,” he said, running to the writing desk in the room and scooping up the gilded telephone. “I need to talk to Sorsha,” he said when the line connected.

  “I’m sorry,” the voice of her secretary said on the other end. “She’s not available right now. Can I take a message?”

  “This is Alex Lockerby. Tell Sorsha that if she doesn’t get to room eight-seventeen of the Hotel Astor in less than ten minutes a lot of people are going to die.”

  21

  The Golden Arrow

  “What’s the plan?” Danny asked, striding back into the room as the fire bell began to ring.

  Alex put down the telephone, still holding the glass ball out at arm’s length. He knew that if his rune were to fail in that moment, the reaction of the double backlash would completely destroy him, but holding it away from his body just felt like the sensible thing to do.

  “I called Sorsha,” he said. “Her secretary took a message.”


  “What about Barton?” Danny asked.

  Alex shook his head.

  “He’s out at the Brooklyn relay tower overseeing repairs. By the time anyone got him a message, it would be too late.”

  Danny gave him an encouraging look.

  “But you have a plan, right?”

  Alex tried to think of something. His vault was still an option, but he had to save that as a last resort. Vaults existed in an entirely different dimension and there was no telling what the backlash would do in there. The magic could fizzle without its connection to the real world, or it might destroy Alex’s entire vault. For all he knew it could destroy the entire dimension where vaults existed. He didn’t think that was likely, but he didn’t really know, and he didn’t want to find out.

  “You’d better get out of here,” Alex said, not taking his eyes off the little representation of Notre Dame inside the glass.

  “Like hell,” Danny said. “You don’t have a plan and two heads are better than one.”

  Alex opened his mouth to argue but the feel of the magic in the glass ball changed.

  He was running out of time.

  “What about the roof?” Danny said. “Hold on to that thing until right before it cuts loose, then throw it. That should keep it away from any people, right?”

  “Unless it falls all the way to the ground before anything happens,” Alex said. “We’re running out of time, but I don’t know exactly how much is left.”

  “That’s not true,” Danny said. “I remember Jerry Pemberton. You knew when the rune was down to about a minute left.”

  “Yes, but this thing could fall to the street in a minute.”

  “Can you make it fly?”

  Alex shook his head. As far as he knew there wasn’t an anti-gravity rune.

  “I still think the roof is our best option,” Danny said. “If that thing does dissolve a chunk of the building there’s nothing above it to fall down.”

  “Right,” Alex said with a nod. It wasn’t a great plan, but it was better than anything he’d come up with.

  Danny headed out into the hall and turned right toward the stairwell.

  “Elevator,” Alex called, turning the other way. “There’s at least ten floors above this one, that’ll take too long.”

  As Alex moved carefully down the hall, Danny pushed past him and ran to hit the elevator button. Before he reached it, however, the floor bell chimed and the door opened.

  “Sorsha!” Alex gasped as the sorceress emerged into the hall.

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded. “Is there a fire?”

  “This thing,” Alex said, raising the glass ball to her eye level. “In a couple of minutes it might explode.”

  “A snow globe?” she said, unimpressed.

  Alex had never heard of snow globes, but now wasn’t the time to wonder why anyone would make such a thing.

  “Who cares what it is,” Alex said. “You’ve got to get it out of here.”

  Sorsha looked genuinely confused.

  “Why? Is it filled with nitroglycerine?”

  “An evil runewright used it to stop time and the backlash could blow up half this hotel,” Alex explained.

  “Or more,” Danny added.

  Sorsha’s eyebrows furrowed and she stuck out a finger toward the snow globe. When she was still several inches away, there was a crack like thunder and she pulled her hand back like it had been burned.

  “What did you do?” she gasped, looking at Alex with wide eyes.

  “I stopped it from killing me, Danny, a dozen policemen, and most of the guests on this side of the hotel,” Alex said. “Now I need you to teleport this somewhere it won’t kill anyone when the rune I used to contain it fails.”

  Sorsha’s face slackened and her mouth opened in an expression of helplessness.

  “Alex,” she stammered. “I can only teleport to places I’ve been, you know that.”

  “Did you ever visit Antarctica?” Danny asked.

  “No,” she said, “and before you ask, I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon or the Bermuda Triangle either.”

  Alex felt the temporal restoration rune begin to unravel, pulsing like an accelerating heartbeat. He had less than a minute. No time to reach the roof and even if Sorsha could make the snow globe float it might not clear the building in time. The only option was to teleport it somewhere.

  Somewhere Sorsha had been that was far away from any people.

  “Your castle,” he said in a moment of pure clarity.

  Sorsha gave him a hard look.

  “I fail to see how blowing up my home and raining debris all over the city is better than just losing this hotel.”

  “Not your new castle,” Alex said. “The original.”

  Sorsha held his eyes for a moment as she processed the information, then she nodded grimly.

  “Give me a moment to find it,” she said, closing her eyes and taking in a deep breath. “When I tell you, throw the snow globe straight up in the air.”

  “But don’t hit the ceiling,” Danny added.

  Alex forced himself to relax his grip on the glass ball and took a breath himself. The thumping heartbeat that heralded the end of his rune was racing now, faster and faster.

  “Almost got it,” Sorsha said. She was sweating now, and her breathing was fast and shallow. Alex thought she’d be able to find her castle easily; after all, she’d teleported to it many times before. Of course, it was now under a mile or two of the North Atlantic, so that might complicate things.

  The pulsing energy of the dying rune thumped one last time and Alex heard a tone like the ringing of a bell. As he watched, the glass ball cracks spread across its surface and it began to break for a second time. He felt the greasy air of corruption erupt from the ball and it stung his fingers where he held it.

  “Sorsha!” he yelled, tossing the globe in the air. Foul magic burst from it as it flew and Alex grabbed Danny, dragging him along as he threw himself to the carpeted floor of the hallway.

  As he fell, Alex could feel the pressure of the expanding wave of corruption behind him. When it reached him it would vaporize him, going right on through to get Danny, the floor, and whatever else stood in its way.

  He hit the floor hard, rolling onto his back. Above him the glass globe was already in pieces, expanding outward just as they did when Diego shattered it to activate his time-stop rune. A ball of roiling black energy formed in the center where the glass used to be and suddenly burst forth.

  Alex threw up his hands, more out of instinct than any belief that they would stop the inky wave of death, but after a few seconds, he was still there. Daring to peek around his arms, he saw the churning energy contained inside an invisible sphere. It flowed and moved like a living thing, seeking a way out. The suspended shards of glass stopped expanding and were slowly moving back, flowing into the shape of the snow globe again.

  Standing on the opposite side of the retracing globe, Sorsha stood rigid with her hand extended and her splayed fingers bent. She was chanting in the guttural voice Alex always associated with sorcery and her eyes glowed as if lit from inside. Sweat was rolling off her face and her hair moved like she stood in a strong wind. Her outstretched hand looked as if she was trying to grip a baseball and, as her fingers slowly closed, the snow globe came back together.

  Trembling, Sorsha raised her closed hand and suddenly brought it together with her other hand in a clapping gesture. When her hand opened, the ball tried to expand, but before it could do any more than quiver, a silver light enveloped it and it vanished.

  Alex just lay on the floor, staring open mouthed at the spot where the snow globe of death had been a moment earlier. He’d felt the power coming off it like waves of heat from a furnace. It was more than enough power to level the Hotel Astor and maybe some of the surrounding buildings as well.

  And Sorsha had stopped it with one hand.

  “Sorsha,” he gasped, turning to her. “That was incredi—”


  As he looked, her eyes rolled back in her head and she collapsed, falling forward. Alex lunged and managed to catch her against his chest before she slammed into the floor.

  “Sure,” Danny said in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “sacrifice your body to keep her from hitting the floor.” He pushed himself up to his knees and Alex could see a knot already forming on his forehead. Danny must have felt it because he reached up and touched the spot, then winced.

  “Sorry,” Alex said, trying to shift Sorsha enough to sit up. “That thing was about to eat both of us.”

  Danny got his feet under himself and stood.

  “Is she going to be all right?” he asked, grabbing Sorsha under her arms and pulling her off Alex. “Where did she send that thing?”

  “If we’re lucky, the North Atlantic,” Alex said, standing and looping one of Sorsha’s arms around his neck. “Let’s put her on the bed in Diego’s room.”

  “Diego?”

  “Evil runewright,” Alex supplied.

  They carried the unconscious sorceress back to the open door, then laid her gently on the made bed.

  “What now?” Danny asked, looking around at the room and the open portmanteau trunk. “There must be plenty of things in here that you can use on another finding rune.”

  Alex thought about that, but Diego had known when the finding rune connected to him. He’d allowed it so that he and Alex could talk. He’d take steps to prevent that, going forward.

  “I don’t think that’s going to work again,” he said, explaining what had happened. “We should look around though. Maybe we can figure out his next move the old fashioned way.”

  “Alex,” Danny said, putting a restraining hand on his friend’s shoulder. He nodded in the direction of the bed.

  Sorsha seemed to be breathing normally but there was a drop of blood oozing from the corner of her left eye making its way slowly down her cheek. Alex didn’t know much about first aid, but he knew bleeding from the eyes was a bad thing.

  “You call down to the desk and tell everyone it’s okay to come back, while I go get Iggy,” he said, pulling his chalk from his pocket. “Then call Captain Callahan and get him over here.”