Patterson looked between Miika and me and nodded.
The tunnel didn’t run straight, but rather took a long curve from the hotel to Justice. Gradually, the platform at Justice came into sight. I took the lead, and we hugged the tunnel walls to break up our outlines and hide our presence as long as possible. My vision was far better than the Humans’, and better than Miika’s.
The platform at the hotel had been flat and empty, with not even a bench for someone to sit and wait. But there appeared to be a wall along the tunnel between the Justice platform and the walkway.
“Agent Patterson,” I said, “have any of you ever been through here before?”
He motioned to someone behind him, and Agent Clark came forward.
“There’s some sort of wall across the end of this walkway where it meets the platform,” I said. “Is that how it’s always been?”
He thought a moment, then said, “No. None of the platforms have a barrier or any kind of gate. Only this railing on the side of the platform.” He reached out and touched the safety rail to our left.
“I’ll go,” Miika said. “Set a protective ward.”
He sketched a rune, another very complex one, said a Word, drew his sword, and set off down the tunnel. I set the same ward I had used under the hotel. We waited.
Miika sidled down the tunnel with his back to the wall and a glamour blurring his image. I watched as he worked his way close to the platform and reached the barrier.
A bright light flashed forth from the barrier, enveloping Miika. He responded by sketching runes in the air over his head with both hands. Bright yellow bursts of energy shot from between his hands, illuminating a ward in front of him as it absorbed and dissipated each burst. After a few minutes, the ward shimmered, faltered, and collapsed. A machinegun opened fire, but another burst of energy flashed forth from Miika’s hands, something behind the barrier exploded, and the gun fell silent.
Miika jumped over the barrier brandishing his sword. I heard faint screams, then silence. Miika stood at the barrier and signaled us forward.
We climbed over the concrete barrier and found six bodies dressed in military combat uniforms. A machinegun on a tripod lay in the middle of the platform, looking as though it had exploded.
“There was a trap spell and a ward,” he told me.
“Set by Nieminen?” Isabella asked.
He shrugged. “Him or another mage. No way of knowing.” He leaned toward me. “There is nothing to pull energy from down here except the earth itself. If there are more such obstacles, it will be difficult.”
I understood what he meant. The energy he used to break the ward came from his own life energy. Reaching in my bag, I pulled out a grapefruit and a chuck of beef jerky. He devoured them and gave me a grateful smile. It wouldn’t replace all the energy he expended, but it would help.
Patterson opened the door, and we filed inside the building. We climbed twelve flights of stairs to another door, and Patterson again opened it. The two guards on the other side were disarmed and handcuffed. I shot a paintball that put them to sleep.
Karen checked her phone. “Hey, we have a problem.” We waited while she called Torbert. After a couple of minutes, she set the phone to speaker and held it out. We all clustered around.
“The Army has jumped the gun,” Torbert said. “They’ve moved troops into the city and set up defensive perimeters around the White House, Pentagon, Capitol, and most of the main department headquarters, including Justice and the FBI. They’re blocking both entrance and exit, so we can’t get Adair into the Capitol.”
“So, even if we stop Nieminen, the President will still go ahead with his speech and the Congressional vote,” Isabella said. “We can save their fucking lives, and they’ll sign our death warrants. Why do we bother?”
None of the Humans, even Karen, would meet my eyes, or look at Isabella or Miika.
“Because it’s the right thing to do,” I said into the silence. “The same reason I agreed to help you find that damned statue.”
Isabella bit her lip, then grabbed Karen’s phone. “Saying ‘I can’t’ isn’t good enough, Torbert. People are dying already. Get your ass in gear and get it done. Cut the power or something.”
A moment of silence was followed by Torbert saying, “Yes, ma’am. I’m on it.”
“Okay,” I said, “Where do we look?” It was a big building, and time was winding down.
“Where are we?” Isabella asked.
“In the sub-basement,” Patterson said.
“Well, let’s start here.”
We set off down a long hallway with Miika in the lead. I extended my senses, trying to identify whether any life energy existed behind the doors we passed. It appeared that most of the rooms were used for storage, and I didn’t expect many people to be down there after working hours.
The scrying stone heated up the moment we emerged from the stairwell. Nieminen was somewhere close, but for all the stone could tell me he might be six floors above me.
The building was huge, and after scouting down only one hall longer than a soccer field, I knew we didn’t have a chance of searching it all in time. I called the group together.
“This is too slow. I’m sorry, but we can’t wait for you. Miika and I will go ahead.” I knew that Isabella could keep up with us in her jaguar form over a short distance, but I didn’t know about her endurance. She obviously wasn’t worried about that, as she changed and snarled at me. I turned and ran.
I soon outdistanced Miika, which I realized was due in part to his halfling heritage, but also due to the difference in how men and women were built. My legs were longer. Isabella kept up with me for a while, but gradually fell behind.
I was racing down a hallway in the middle of the building when the stench of the statue hit me like an avalanche. I stumbled and almost fell, my stomach rebelling. Skidding to a stop, I cast about me and realized the sense of the foulness came from above me. We were on the wrong level. I leaned over, my arms wrapped around me, and fought the urge to vomit. The scrying stone was almost too hot to touch.
Isabella caught up to me, rubbed against me, then changed. “What’s the matter? Are you okay?” She leaned down, trying to see my face.
I didn’t trust myself to talk, but I pointed toward the ceiling.
“We’re on the wrong level? Crap.” She straightened up and then grabbed my arm. “Come on. We passed an elevator in that last corridor.”
The farther I got from the statue, the better I felt. We were almost to the cross-corridor when we met Miika.
“We need to go up,” I said. But when we reached the elevator, we discovered it didn’t work. We went searching for another one or a stairwell.
Coming around a corner, we ran into Karen and the Secret Service agents.
“We need the next level,” I said. “I can feel it up there.”
Patterson informed us that half of the elevators were out of service due to a project to replace them all. We finally found a stairway near one corner of the building. We climbed the steps, and I stopped at the top, trying to get my bearings and identify where in the massive building I had felt the statue.
Karen consulted a map she had on her phone, and said, “This way, I think. It’s part of the library.”
It took us about ten minutes to reach the room she identified. As soon as we turned down the corridor, I had no doubt. Bracing myself and taking a deep breath, I said, “It’s here.”
Chapter 28
We approached a double metal door, and everyone spread out around it in the hallway. I reached out and tried to open the door, but it was locked. Miika sketched a rune, and when he spoke the Word, the metal of the handle crumbled into dust. I stuck my finger in the hole it left and pulled the door open.
Isabella slipped past me into the room, and Miika followed her. I drew my sword and trailed after them.
I found myself in a large room with shelves filled with paper file folders. All the lights were off, but a glow deeper in
the room provided enough light for us to see clearly.
I checked the time. The President was scheduled to speak at nine o’clock, and it was five minutes after eight. Most of the people allowed into the Capitol would be there, and the President would show up around eight forty-five.
Quietly sneaking through the room, I heard chanting in a language I didn’t recognize. I laid a hand on Isabella’s back, and we slowly crept forward.
A nude woman, who I assumed was Susan O'Shaughnessy, lay on a wooden table in an open area in the middle of the room. Silver spikes pinned her wrists to the table, and more silver spikes through the hollows of her ankles held her spread legs. Her eyes were open, and her face showed no signs that she was in any kind of discomfort.
Surrounding the table were five candle stands in the shape of a pentagram, linked by a black line. Three feet farther out were five more candles, connected by a white line that I assumed was salt. A circle, also drawn with salt, ringed everything. A naked man wearing a cloak stood chanting in the space between the two pentagrams.
Nieminen had used a mage for his spell in Arlington, and another one to summon a demon. As far as I could tell, O’Shaughnessy was still intact. There wasn’t any blood on her torso, though she was marked with symbols drawn with ashes. She was obviously either drugged or bespelled, as she gazed with adoration on the man who planned to murder her. If she was in her right mind, her crucifixion would have hurt like hell.
A golden statue of a jaguar stood gleaming in the candlelight between the woman’s thighs. Three hundred pounds of gold translated to a statue about a foot high and maybe two and a half feet long.
I took a strong hold of Isabella’s hide, but she seemed to have learned from her experience jumping into a mage’s circle.
Nieminen didn’t react to our presence, but he was busy, and I figured he hadn’t seen us yet. Miika began to draw one of his complex runes in the air, and I moved a little away and behind him. I wasn’t sure what he had in mind, but the last place I wanted to be when the magic started flying was between a battle mage and a blood mage. For the first time, it struck me that we might stop Nieminen’s plans and still die. The amount of power building in the room was immense.
Miika stopped. The rune hung in the air, complex, beautiful, and terrible, glowing with an inner fire. He took a deep breath, raised his hands into the air, and spoke the Word that activated it.
The room exploded, and as I flew through the air, I had time to think that I probably shouldn’t have been standing so close.
I hit one of the metal shelves, hard enough to drive all the air from my lungs and feel a couple of ribs crack. Luckily, the shelves weren’t bolted down, the weight of their contents holding them in place. The shelf tipped and fell, and I landed on top of it in a cloud of old paper.
Black and stars and more blackness. Through the fog of near-unconsciousness, there was a feeling of urgency, that I couldn’t just lie there and hurt. I rolled over, a motion that hurt almost as much as anything I had ever experienced. Grabbing onto the shelf, I pulled myself up enough to see. The room was dark, the only light coming from the hall behind me. Miika was slumped on the floor, while Nieminen picked himself up from the ruins of another shelf on the other side of his makeshift altar. The table lay on its side, its legs pointed toward me, and I couldn’t see Susan.
With a snarl, Isabella launched herself across the room, pages of paper floating about her. Nieminen waved his hand, and she hit an invisible wall, bouncing off and rolling across the floor. He stepped forward to face the cat’s threat.
I managed to fight my way to my knees, drew my athame from my bag, and threw it. The knife hit Nieminen in exactly the same place as when I knifed him before, and he screamed.
Isabella sprang at him and knocked him down. The table obscured my vision, but I saw Isabella roll head over heels out from behind it. Nieminen stood and raised his hand with a fireball ready to hurl at the cat.
Struggling to my feet, I waded through paper toward him, thinking, Is this guy crazy? Has he seen all the paper in this place?
I thrust my sword into Nieminen’s back all the way to the hilt. He stiffened, and the fireball in his hand sputtered, then began to shrink. It winked out, and Nieminen fell forward, sliding off my blade.
Susan O’Shaughnessy screamed. I leaned forward and looked over the table. She hung there, her limbs still pinned to the table.
A small black-haired woman dressed in red walked past me, around the table, and picked up the statue. All three hundred pounds of it. It was almost half her size.
“Thank you,” Akari Nakamura said with a smile. She made a motion with her hand, and I found myself frozen in place. “This has been quite an entertaining quest. After setting that tracking spell on your kitty, all I had to do was sit back and let you lead me to it. I had no doubt of your ability to find it. You’re so earnest and persistent.”
Her eyes turned down to Nieminen and the wailing O’Shaughnessy. “Such hubris. Hubris and stupidity.” Her eyes rose to me. “I find the two often go together, don’t you agree?”
She started to walk past me to the door. I didn’t know if she’d forgotten Isabella, or thought the jaguar was no threat, but she never even glanced in that direction. So, she didn’t see the jaguar morph, her form becoming that of a woman in a jaguar skin, her head that of a jaguar with an almost-Human face. Not Isabella’s face, but one so terribly beautiful that it almost hurt to look at her.
Ixchel reached out with a long-fingered, fur-covered hand ending in three-inch claws and grabbed Nakamura around the throat. The mage’s eyes bulged, her tongue protruded from her mouth, and then she died without a sound. It was shockingly quick. The statue fell to the floor.
The goddess leaned down and picked it up with one hand, then turned to face me. She smiled, revealing fangs that would put a vampire to shame, and dipped her head in a slight nod. With a sideways shuffle step, she parted the veil and disappeared.
I found myself able to move again. Susan O’Shaughnessy continued to whimper and sob. Looking around the room, I was astonished to see Isabella standing there in her Human form.
“You’re still here.”
“Yes. Mother has never been the maternal type.”
Out in the hall, we found Karen and the other agents. All had been frozen like I was, but none of them appeared to be injured. I went back inside and knelt down by Miika. He was barely conscious.
“Silly man. You’ve exhausted yourself,” I said.
“We won?”
“We won.”
He closed his eyes and fell asleep with a smile on his face.
Everything went black. When you’re in a basement with no light, it is very, very dark. I looked toward the doorway, and even with my Elven sight, all I saw was black.
Not wanting to lose Miika, I straightened him out, then picked him up and carried him toward the door, shuffling my feet and trying not to trip over anything. He weighed about the same as Isabella in her cat shape, but he was much longer. I thought I did well. I didn’t drop him and only bumped him into the wall once before I found the doorway.
“Isabella?” I asked as I stepped into the corridor. There was a little bit of light there. It came from the emergency exit lights set at intervals near the ceiling.
“Yeah,” she said. “We lost power.”
“Did we do that?”
I heard her chuckle. “Naw, I think Torbert did. At least, I hope he did.”
I kindled a mage light and accompanied Patterson’s men back into the room where they freed Susan O'Shaughnessy. They carried her and I carried Miika. We found stairs leading up to the first floor.
Karen managed to contact Torbert, who told her the President’s speech had been cancelled. Patterson called his superior and reported that we had neutralized the threat. For my part, I was bone tired and thirsty. All I wanted was a glass of water and a place I could lie down.
We came out on the ground floor and sought an exit. That was when we ran in
to soldiers, who pointed guns at us and ordered us to put our hands in the air. It was an effort doing that while holding Miika, but I managed.
“We got separated from our tour group when the lights went out,” Isabella said. “Can you please direct us to the nearest exit?”
The soldiers stared and Patterson laughed. He held up his identification and said, “Patterson, Secret Service.”
Karen held up her ID and said, “FBI.”
“What are you doing here?” a soldier with little gold birds on his shoulders demanded.
“We work here,” Patterson said. “I might ask what the military is doing in a civilian institution. Did you get lost?”
They wrangled back and forth for a while, then Patterson made a phone call. I sidled closer when he handed the phone to the soldier.
“Colonel, this is Attorney General Mathew Adair. Are you part of this coup d’état some of these generals are attempting? I’m telling you, those who are part of this conspiracy are going to regret today. The President plans to prosecute the traitors to the full extent.”
We were soon escorted outside and medical personnel attended to us. About an hour later, several PCU men that I recognized showed up with a couple of cars. One of them offered to take Isabella, Miika, and me home.
I gratefully accepted, but Isabella asked, “Can we stop by a take-out joint on the way? I’m starving.”
Chapter 29
A week after we saved the U.S. Government from destruction, I threw a dinner party. Torbert, Karen, Miika, and Isabella, along with Tom Edwards and Daniel Patterson, made up the guest list. Although I couldn’t get all the proper ingredients, over the years I had found passable substitutes, so I served a true Elven feast.
I hadn’t had a dinner party at my house since Carolyn got sick. She used to love to entertain, though she didn’t do it often. It was always close friends, almost all of them witches or mages. She used the occasions to show off our culinary skills, fixing fancy dishes that were a lot of time and trouble, dishes we almost never fixed for ourselves.
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