by Ann Macela
Jim kept a careful eye on Irenee Sabel for the remainder of the auction. At one point, the infuriating woman actually waved merrily at him, then pointed him out to Hampton.
When the bidding was completed, the buyers congratulated, and the floor being cleared for dancing, he started across the room to her. Unfortunately, the crowd was packed together, and he lost her.
He stalked out the side exit she’d used previously, and it took him into a hall, around the ballroom, down the stairs, and into the entrance hall, where she was walking out the door. He tried to reach her, but a group of people suddenly blocked his way, and by the time he came out on the steps, she was climbing into a limo, which quickly moved away from the curb. It turned the corner and was gone.
Grimly he stalked down the stairs toward his car several blocks away. He had a name. He’d find out more about the woman soon. First, he needed to deliver the information burning a hole in his pocket.
Irenee hugged her purse with glee while the limo left Alton’s house and headed for the Kennedy Express-way. She had the evil item! She’d accomplished her first solo mission. Now to get to the HeatherRidge Center in the northwest suburbs where she and the Defender team could find out exactly what it was and destroy the object.
After checking to make sure the bag and book were still there, she pulled her cell phone out of her purse and hit the speed dial. “Hi, Fergus, it’s me. I have the item, and I’m on my way home.”
“Excellent!” His voice boomed out of the phone. “Come to the large conference room in the Defenders’ building when you get here. Everything go all right?”
“Yes, well, only one small problem, and I handled it. I even spoke to Alton afterward, when I had the item with me. The shields on my purse worked fine. He didn’t bat an eye. No way will he connect me with the confiscation.”
“Good. The man has proven to be too vindictive when crossed to give him a target.”
“I’ll see you soon,” she replied and hit the disconnect button. She’d tell him about the “small problem” later. Discussing the mysterious man over a cell phone connection wasn’t a good idea.
Besides, she needed to concentrate on the object in her purse. If it was as ancient and high a level as Glynnis thought from the vibrations, it was going to be a bear to destroy. Doing so would also be the first real test of her ability. She and the team had only practiced on insignificant evil items, tiny pieces of shattered or misshapen crystals or rocks or metal the Defenders kept for training. Annihilating a major item would put her in the big leagues. She barely stopped herself from wiggling with excitement at the prospect. Never in her wildest dreams had she envisioned the kind of future opening before her.
What a roller-coaster ride she and her magical abilities had been on during the past eight years. In a family of overachieving practitioners—her mother, a level eleven, and brother, a level thirteen, both with business mega-abilities, and her father, a level fourteen, stock market genius and Defender—what was she? A lowly level five with some organizing talent. If anybody didn’t fit into her family, she was certainly the one.
Oh, she knew she was loved and supported and her level didn’t matter, but still ... So she’d worked extra hard—she was smart—and parlayed her meager talents into a career as an event planner after she graduated from Northwestern four years ago. In fact, she’d actually gotten her organizing start while an undergraduate. Somebody with attention to details and willingness to take on the job was always needed in campus activities and organizations. She’d interned with a firm for a year before going out on her own. Thanks to her family’s connections and her abilities—both magical and nonmagical—she was doing all right.
Her biggest problem after all this was combining her world of business with her world of magic.
How surprised she, her family, and the Defenders had been when she suddenly developed new talents, extra talents, wonderful talents—the kind that usually kicked in at ages eleven to thirteen, not eighteen. Not simply Defender ability to share magical energy. No, the jackpot, Sword talent, the power to destroy. Swords, the special forces of the practitioner world. Her magic potential had shot up to a level ten. Then she’d had to learn how to control her new powers.
The Defender Council had taken one look at her and immediately assigned as her teacher not merely any old Sword, and not one of the excellent teachers in the Center, but Fergus Whipple, at level twenty—the top one—the most powerful Sword alive. Between the demands of his tutoring and her college and job activities, she was surprised she had lived through the long years of study and preparation.
It hadn’t been all drudgery, of course. What fun she’d had learning to cast or “draw” her sword, to throw fireballs and lightning bolts, and most of all to focus her energy down to a laser beam of incredible power and destroy evil. What a rush!
Best of all, she could truly hold up her head as an accomplished member of the Sabel family.
She’d have to tell her Defender team about the man in Alton’s study. Uncle Dylan would work the crowd to find out who he was. She smiled at the thought of her uncle on her mother’s side. He looked so innocuous and bland that people told him more than they realized. Behind his balding facade, however, lurked the mind of an excellent psychiatrist. With any luck, Mr. Mysterious would try to pump Dylan for her name and become the pump-ee instead of the pump-er.
Perhaps the man was in law enforcement. Once the Defenders had started investigating Alton, they’d discovered the extent of the evil in his criminal activities—drug smuggling, weapons dealings, money laundering. If the authorities had discovered Alton’s crimes, they would be after him, and Mr. Mysterious was one of theirs. The Defenders had made plans to inform relevant agencies of Alton’s deeds, but only after they had the evil item—their first priority—in hand.
As for her attraction to the man in the office? She was a young, healthy woman. Who wouldn’t be attracted to a handsome man with a square jaw and broad shoulders? She found interesting a man whose nose looked like it had been broken once, just enough to make him look rugged, not male-model-pretty, and whose hair curled just enough to make her want to run her fingers through it. And she mustn’t forget his piercing gaze. Too bad she didn’t know what color his eyes were. It had been too dark to tell in the study, and she hadn’t gotten close enough in the ballroom.
She thought she’d handled him well. Thank goodness he went along with her suggestion to leave, and she didn’t have to stun him. A body lying in the study would really have alerted Alton to something amiss.
Irenee dismissed the mystery man from her mind to concentrate on reviewing the procedures for destroying an evil item. Eventually, the limo pulled up to the HeatherRidge Center and dropped her off at the building housing the Defender offices, classrooms, and training facilities.
The center, the practitioner complex of training, meetings, research, and condo/hotel, was the only site in North America for advanced Defender and Sword education. Destruction of major evil magic items took place here in an extensive underground network of rooms. Although practitioners loved the original HeatherRidge Hotel close to the edge of downtown Chicago, nobody wanted to destroy major items in the middle of a city where a mistake could cause disaster.
When she started training, she’d moved to the Center, but she didn’t drop by her own condo in another building to change out of her evening dress. First she had to report, and she hurried down to the conference room where the team was waiting.
“I have it!” she announced when she entered the room. In addition to the six members of her team, four other Defenders—including her father—were present. The only other Sword besides Fergus was John Baldwin from New York, a member of the Defender Council. The item had to really be important if a council member was here.
Everyone burst into applause.
“Excellent,” Fergus said and gave her a hug. It was like being hugged by a combination bear and Santa Claus since Fergus stood six-five and had a full beard and flowi
ng white hair.
Irenee stepped up to the table between Fergus and Glynnis Fraser, their resident expert in the power and character of magical items, and opened her purse. “I found something else and brought it along.” She held up the book. “It seemed to go with this.” She handed Fergus the book and took out the bag and laid it on the table.
Fergus opened the book and looked at a few pages. “Looks like Greek combined with another language. Here, Jacob, what do you think?” He passed the book across the table.
Ancient-language expert Jacob Mbuto leafed through it. “Yes, at least one other. I can see Cyrillic, maybe some Sanskrit, and a few letters that appear to be totally made up. I’ll consult with a few scholars tomorrow.”
“Fine. Now let’s see the real prize. Irenee, you do the honors.” Fergus waved at the bag and the crystal bowl in the middle of the table.
“Wait,” Glynnis, a tall woman with light brown skin and salt-and-pepper hair, spoke. “First, everyone put on your robes for protection. We don’t know exactly what we’re dealing with here.”
“Here, Irenee, I brought yours,” her father said, handing her the garment, after giving her a little hug.
“Thanks,” Irenee said and hugged him back.
She shrugged into the flowing, hooded, midnight black robe but didn’t bother to close it. Her fellow Swords, Fergus and John Baldwin, wore the same color, and their greater experience and power was displayed in the many glyphs appearing—to those few with the talent to see them—on the bands down the center and on the cuffs and around the bottoms and hoods of the robes. By contrast, Irenee had only a few of the symbols; she’d accumulate more with experience.
Defenders wore the colors associated with their everyday talents, and several shades of blues, greens, browns, reds, yellows, metallics, and others swirled when they donned theirs.
Telling herself to be calm even though she was about to burst with excitement, Irenee picked up the bag while Glynnis positioned the bowl and the plate under it.
“Be careful,” Glynnis warned, “not to touch the item. Evil has a way of ‘rubbing off’ on the handler of some of these stronger articles.”
“I’ll watch out,” Irenee assured her. She loosened the drawstrings, grasped the two corners at the bottom, and slid the contents into the shallow receptacle.
A couple of people gasped. Several drew their robes tight around them. Everyone stared at what had appeared.
Irenee had expected some sort of crystal or polished rock or metal brooch with a gemstone or even a small dagger, like the pictures of various ancient evil items. She’d studied misshapen objects, semi-melted jewelry, crystal clusters in grotesque shapes, and nausea-inducing carvings.
Nothing she’d seen or heard of looked like what lay in the bowl.
An obsidian crystal about three inches long, the item was shaped like one end of a large egg. The rounded portion held many facets, but they absorbed, rather than reflected, the overhead lights. The rest of the egg had been sliced off with a slanted cut or perhaps broken along an oblique fault line, leaving a smooth, sloping side. Even more than the facets, this surface sucked in light like a miniature black hole.
“This cannot be right,” Glynnis stated, bending over the bowl. “It is not whole. Where’s the rest of it?”
“Th-that’s all there was,” Irenee said as nausea roiled in her stomach. Oh, God, she’d confiscated the wrong item. Or only part of it. She had failed. She had to clear her throat before she could say, “Nothing else was in the safe except for some envelopes and a black box with flash drives in it.”
Glynnis patted her arm. “I know it’s all you found, honey. The rest was probably destroyed long ago when the break occurred.”
Although the comment helped bolster Irenee’s confidence, disappointment still ate at her insides.
“What is, or was, the whole?” Fergus asked.
Glynnis hesitated, studied the object for a few minutes with a magnifying glass as she used a pair of tongs to turn it over. She held her hands over the bowl to measure its vibrations. She stood unmoving, eyes closed, for a number of minutes. Finally she opened her eyes and said, “Assuming it did look like an egg, I’d estimate the intact item would have been about seven or eight inches on its long axis. Taking into account the slanting cut, I estimate this is about a third of the intact whole. The vibrations from this remaining piece are incredibly strong. It’s definitely what I felt when Alton Finster used it to cast. Do any of you feel anything?”
Several Defenders reported a much higher level of dizziness and queasiness than evil items usually caused.
Irenee pushed her personal feelings of possible failure aside. She wasn’t having her usual reaction to an evil item, either. “My magic center feels like something’s tugging on it—or trying to get in.”
“That’s the item looking for a victim. Fasten your robe,” Fergus said. “Everybody, even you two at the end of the table, button up.”
Irenee kicked herself mentally for not remembering to follow one of the basic rules for dealing with nasty items. The robes, with all their heavy-duty protective enchantments, were their first line of defense, able to repel harmful spells on their own. She quickly pulled the sides together, hooked the loops over the buttons, and tied the sash. “It stopped.”
“With me, too,” Annette Chang reported.
Glynnis nodded. “As for its identity, I can’t be totally certain without more research, but it’s ancient and extremely powerful, even in its fractured state. The total blackness and the absorption of light have been documented in only a few items, and all except two of them have been found and destroyed. If it’s what I think it is, we may be fortunate to have to deal solely with this portion. It’s a coup for us that we confiscated it. Since the fifteenth century, Defenders have been looking for the Cataclysm Stone.”
CHAPTER THREE
While Glynnis and Fergus moved the Cataclysm Stone to the specially spelled and protected underground chamber where they would destroy it, Irenee ran over to her condo to change into comfortable clothes. There was no telling how long demolition would take with such an ancient artifact, even a somewhat diminished one. It was midnight already. She might be standing for hours.
Fergus had taken her aside for a moment to say she had accomplished her mission exactly as required and with great success. If the piece of the Stone was all Alton had, so be it. There was nobody else they could have sent or who would have confiscated the item with so little furor.
She’d smiled and thanked him. Although one part of her knew he was right, the other part wasn’t totally convinced. Should she have looked around more? No, she couldn’t have. Not with that man in the study with her.
Oh, goodness, she hadn’t told anyone about him.
How could she have forgotten him? Even with all her attention on the Stone? She’d tell the team immediately after they took care of the item. For the moment, she’d put him out of her mind. The destruction process required that she pay close attention. One tiny mistake, one break in concentration, one weakness in her blade could bring horror to them all.
She could do this, she assured herself.
She headed for the other building’s basements, fastening her robe securely as she went.
The team had gathered in the larger of the two “D” rooms, those used only for practice with and actual destruction of items. Her Defender team members were colorful as always: Glynnis in her purple robe; Thomas Canterbury, jewelry maker with copper, gold, and silver tracings; Bill Trusdale, landscaper with green leafy designs on his; Annette Chang, a meteorologist showing off dark blue swirls reminiscent of weather patterns; Denton Jones, tall in his banker’s robes, with multicolored engravings like money. A healer in yellow, nurse Mary Ann Matlow, was on the side preparing her medical kit.
Those in the conference room had also accompanied the team, including her father Hugh in his gold economics robe, Jacob Mbuto with black and white letters from varying alphabets on a beige background, and J
ohn Baldwin in his Sword black.
As she had been trained and was her duty, Irenee surveyed the room carefully to make sure all was ready. The five stone-clad walls glowed with spells designed to restrain unleashed, undisciplined power, and those were at full strength. Stone benches were set about two feet from the walls. Candles in sconces along the walls provided more conventional light.
A large pentagon, fifteen feet from center to corner point, was engraved into the floor. When activated, it would become their fortress. In its center a five-sided stone pedestal rose to a height of two feet. On the top sat the crystal platter and bowl containing the Cataclysm Stone.
A shiver snaked through Irenee when she glanced at the evil item. If she didn’t know better, she would swear it was looking back at her.
“Don’t stand directly in front of its broken smooth face,” Fergus said. “I don’t like the feeling I get from it.”
“Neither do I.”
“We’ll attack the Stone from the sides. The key to destruction is to kill the facets, and they’re reached more easily that way. Is everything set?”
She nodded to the big mage. “All’s in order.”
“Team members, take your positions,” Fergus said. “The rest of you get comfortable. I hope we won’t need you. Thank you for being our backup in any case. Mary Ann, are you ready?” When the nurse answered yes, he and Irenee stepped into the pentagon and placed themselves on either side of the pedestal, the length of their individual swords away from it. One Defender stood inside each corner.
“Munire aegis. Castellum. Tenere,” they all said together and pointed at the pentagon in the floor. Build protection. Fortress. Hold.
Multicolored lights flared along the five-sided figure, which glowed as shimmering walls formed and climbed to the ceiling, where they met overhead to form a roof. The walls did not prevent people or objects from passing through them in either direction, but the spells as cast would contain an inside discharge of harmful magic. Without the “hold,” the fortress protected against magic from outside. Every team member fed power into the shield until it was a gleaming rainbow.