by Tricia Owens
“On your knees!”
I obeyed the officer who’d shouted, but my compliance didn’t make a difference. I grunted as I was struck across the back of the head. They knew exactly who I was. As I reeled, my senses spinning, someone grabbed my hands and clumsily laced my fingers together in front of me. Instead of cuffing me with ordinary handcuffs, one officer kept my laced hands in front of me at chest height while the second one snapped a globe cuff around my wrists. The metal cage, about the circumference of a basketball, kept my fingers locked together and prevented me from touching anything, not even the sides of the cage thanks to the way the apparatus stiffened my wrists, forcing my elbows to either side. It had been designed for IMT suspects and anyone who required the use of their hands to magic, such as an Electro-Magnetist like Calia or a KE specialist like Taurus. It rendered me completely helpless.
One of the officers jerked me to my feet and dragged me toward their squad car. As my senses cleared, I resisted the urge to look back for Elliott. I listened to the second officer report in: “We’ve got her. The suspect for Morrison and Snelling, yeah.”
Wolfgang had been right. I was going to be charged for both murders and I had no idea how to get out of them. As I was shoved into the backseat of the patrol car and the door slammed in my face, I peered out the window. The majority of the race spectators and the coven had fled, but not all. I gasped when I saw Elliott, shivering where he stood, his hands on his head. When Elliott lowered his hands, his expression was blank. A cold feeling of terror swept through me.
He took off at a dead sprint. I knew exactly who he was chasing and what his mission was.
“Elliott, no!” I beat at the window with the globe cage. I continued to scream his name, hoping he might somehow break free of the leaper’s control.
He ran without a look back. I could do nothing to stop him or save him. Elliott was going to be the next killer.
Chapter 16
One of the officers banged his nightstick against the window. I ignored him as I continued to slam the globe cuff against every hard surface inside the car, trying to break it so I could meddle my way free. Allowing them to take me into custody had been a stupid thing to do. Deep down I’d known they wouldn’t treat me fairly. Why would they? I knew too much.
I was still trying to break free when the two officers climbed into the front seat and the driver started up the car. As we pulled onto the street, the officer in the passenger seat twisted around to face me.
“Better get used to that cage, little girl. You’re going to be living in one for the rest of your life.”
“Someone’s about to be killed back there. Turn around and go back.”
“Someone’s going to be killed in here if you don’t settle down,” he growled back.
“You’re supposed to be protecting people. There’s a murderer loose back there!”
“And I’m looking at one right now.”
I couldn’t believe this guy. Actually, I could. Ginger was right: conviction rates were high in Victory City because a culprit was always caught. I reconsidered how safe I believed the city to be if statistics mattered more than truth and justice.
I flung myself back against the seat in frustration. I dreaded to think of what was happening behind me. If Elliott found Rogette he would kill her. I didn’t doubt that for a second. But what happened afterwards? Elliott was the sort of sensitive soul I could see blaming himself and taking desperate measures. The best I could hope for was that he would turn himself in for a crime he hadn’t consciously committed. The worst thing he could do…I didn’t want to think about that.
And what of Calia and Taurus? If they were still on the trail of the leaper they might recognize that Elliott was possessed by it. From what I’d seen so far of the behavior of the other Specials, I couldn’t count on those two sparing Elliott’s life. To earn the bounty, they needed to kill the leaper, and killing it while it was inside someone might be seen as the only way to do it. They might be right, but Elliott was innocent.
I smashed the globe cuff against the wire divider separating me from the front seat. “You have to turn around! If you don’t you’re complicit in a woman’s murder! Her blood will be on your hands.”
“Says the murderer.” The two men laughed.
We pulled up to a light. My wrists ached as I tried to loosen them from the cage’s hold. My fingers were jammed together at the webbing, but I believed that with a bit of pain I could maneuver at least one finger loose to touch the inside of the cage. But to do that I needed some leeway.
Bang! Bang!
“Stop trying to get out,” barked the officer in the passenger seat. He struck the wire divider again with this nightstick. “You’re going to jail, so I hope you’re ready for some—”
The car rocked violently to the right, sending me sliding across the seat and slamming into the right side door. I heard the officers curse before the car rocked again, this time toward the left side, knocking me off the seat and into the footwell.
I used my elbows to push back up onto the seat and yelped as a large figure loomed in the window beside me.
“Arrow!”
It was Wolfgang, looking wild-eyed and a whole lot feral. He motioned something I didn’t understand. I looked to the front seat. The two officers were struggling to open their doors. I had to lean up against the divider to see that the two front sides of the car had collapsed in on the men, as though the vehicle had been struck by two cars.
No cars, though. Only Wolfgang.
“Get down!” he yelled from outside.
I hurriedly threw myself across the seat and winced as kinetic energy shattered the window to my left.
“I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t blow a hole through you if I tried that on the door,” Wolfgang confessed as he held out his arms. “Come on. Crawl out.”
It was tricky with the globe cuff restricting my movement but Wolfgang managed to pull me out through the window. Once outside, I held the cuff to the ground and leaned away as Wolfgang pressure-blasted the metal.
“You’re getting better,” I told him as I shook off the broken bits of cage. The cops yelled threats at me but I flipped them off. “That was some delicate work, Wolfie.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t take your hands off,” he muttered, and I flinched because I could see that he was serious. “We gotta get out of here. My car’s over here.”
“Whose car is this?” I asked as he jumped behind the wheel of a gray hatchback. I took the passenger seat and shook shattered glass out of my hair. A koala charm hung from the rearview mirror. “Did you steal this?”
“Maybe.” He gunned the small car and we shot into the street. Looking back, I gaped at the destroyed police car we left in our wake. Wolfgang had really done a number on it.
“I heard on the police scanner that they’d picked you up,” he told me. “You’re lucky I was parked two blocks away.”
“Thanks, Wolfie. You’re risking a lot to help me.”
“I know what would happen if they got you to jail.”
I didn’t argue that. “But you need to turn around and head for downtown. That shadow creature has taken over my friend. We have to get to him before something happens.”
“Oh, great,” he muttered, but he dutifully made a couple of turns.
“There’s something big going on, Wolfie.” It was feeding crack to an addict, but I felt I had to thank him somehow and sharing my suspicions would do it. “I think Dr. Febrero was taken alive at the end of the war. In secret. There’s a chance he may still be alive.”
The car drifted into the oncoming lane.
“Wolfie!” I yelled.
He jerked the steering wheel to straighten out the car.
“Alive?” he choked out. “That means they’ve picked his brains for everything. Or at least they’ve tried. I bet they’d tried to force it. They’ve developed a neural net that—”
I cut him off before he sidetracked himself. “What do you think they wanted
from him?”
“I know what they would have hoped to have learned, which is the technology for applying heat to remote locations. That’ll have military applications. They would have wanted to know where the demons really came from since that story about them being under the ice was bogus. They’d also want to know how he controlled them. Again, more military nightmare fuel. And if there are other demons around the globe that would be very valuable knowledge indeed. Worth lying to the world about.”
“Is there any chance they didn’t learn anything from him?”
He glanced at me. “You mean like would he have been able to block his knowledge from them?”
“Exactly. What kind of doctor was he, anyway? Can I hope he was an expert in something involving the mind?”
“Not quite, but listen to this: Dr. Febrero’s specialty was Earth Revitalization. Using a combination of skills like weather control, soil manipulation, and micro-bio-necromancy he could turn nutrient-dead land into fertile soil and he could seed poisoned bodies of water with chemical-eating microbes. Sounds pretty tame and boring, right?” He grinned with pure glee. “Well, in my digging I learned that the mad doctor wasn’t as tame as he appeared. In fact, he was devious: he had a secret son whom no one ever saw, who knew everything that the good doctor knew.”
“Impossible,” I breathed.
Wolfgang cackled. “It probably feels that way to the government since they haven’t found him yet.”
I gripped the edges of my seat. “Why can’t they find him?”
“Because Dr. Febrero was a genius and more importantly, he was awake. He knew something would happen to him and so he kept his son hidden as an ace up his sleeve. His son was insurance that the things Febrero knew would never be forgotten or erased. The son was insurance against defeat. Febrero lives on through him. Or, I guess, Febrero himself might still live on. But either way, I’d bet money that Febrero protected himself so his knowledge wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a mental fail-safe or even something as mundane as a cyanide capsule in a molar to ensure no one tapped into his brain.”
“That’s crazy,” I mumbled, but my mind was on fire with possibilities. The coincidences were too neat to not be true. The Architect was Dr. Febrero’s secret son, hidden within the Sinistera Hotel for all these years. The Sinistera belonged to Dr. Febrero.
Who among the staff was aware of this? Did they fear that one day the government would come for The Architect or did they look forward to that confrontation? I began to wonder if the Specials were in fact Febrero’s private army for a war that was soon about to explode into life. And I would be dragged into it if I stuck around.
“Where are we going?” Wolfgang asked.
I hated to say it. “Look for electricity or massive damage.”
The corner of a building a block ahead exploded as if on cue. Concrete rained down on the street, causing cars to swerve.
“You mean like that?” Wolfgang hunkered over the steering wheel. “Something tells me this is going to get messy. That’s KE work right there.”
“Yeah, I don’t want you getting involved. These guys are really good and unfortunately, they don’t play nice with others. At the next light, I’m jumping out. I want you to take off, Wolfie. More police are probably going to show up and they’ll have your description.”
“I’m not afraid of the police.”
“I know you’re not. But you’re my ace in the hole. I need you free to keep digging into this story about Dr. Febrero and find out if he’s still alive.”
Wolfgang grumbled, but he didn’t argue. At the light, he pulled over to the curb. “Be careful, Arrow. That spybug cloud knew exactly how to kill Snelling. Whoever’s running it knows what they’re doing.”
I just nodded, not ready to explain to him why spybugs had nothing to do with the leaper. I jumped out of the car and ran in the direction of the damaged building. I didn’t see any electricity yet, so maybe I would be dealing solely with Taurus.
When I rounded the corner, I saw him. Or rather, I saw the trail of destruction that eventually led to him. Taurus had smashed up the buildings on this block pretty badly and I could see why. What looked like hundreds of bats were dive bombing the bearded Special.
They attacked him in two waves, so that a dark cloud seemed to continually swarm him. The bats were utterly silent, only the flapping of their wings guiding them. Taurus had smashed a car partly in half, and had taken shelter behind the front half of the vehicle while he aimed kinetic blasts at the bats. While he managed to hit a few dozen of them, most of the damage he inflicted was to the buildings around us.
The bats then did something that drew me to a skidding halt in the middle of the street.
After their latest dive bombing session, the bats regrouped and took on a new form: a giant, forty-foot tall man. The bats were packed densely enough to make the humanoid figure appear black, almost like a shadow. The form reached down and, using the combined mass of the bats’ bodies, flipped over the car that Taurus had been hiding behind, sending the KE specialist scrambling for cover.
I was in awe. This was behavior wholly foreign to the bats, which meant Elliott had commanded them, or at least the leaper within Elliott had.
Sudden pressure staggered me back as Taurus blasted the bat-man with kinetic energy. Unlike his attempts against the leaper in its shadow form, this time he found success. A hole appeared in the bat-man’s abdomen and dozens of bats tumbled out of the sky to the ground, either dead or stunned. The attack broke up the rest of the bats, and as they flew apart they gave the impression that the giant bat-man was dissolving. Resuming their multiple wave attack, the first bunch rushed at Taurus again, who found concealment behind the recently flipped car.
He would be okay, I thought, although the bats would keep him occupied for a while to come. Keeping low so I would avoid any fallout from his kinetic blasting, I ran past him and the bats and continued down the street.
I reached a tree-lined pathway that led to an outdoor shopping mall. Most of the trees were on fire. Their flaming leaves dripped onto the walkway below, forcing me to dodge them as I ran. Up ahead, electricity spidered through the air and danced across the ground. I’d never seen so much, not even in a lightning storm. The bolts tangled and jerked like spastic worms. I slowed, wary of drawing too near and being struck by a wild bolt.
Calia stood with her back to a snack kiosk that was closed for the night. Both hands were up, fingers snapping constantly, her face a rictus of anger and concentration. She was being attacked by hundreds of rats.
They were less mobile than the bats attacking Taurus, but arguably more cunning. If Calia focused too long on one wave of the rodents, others would attempt to sneak up on her from her blind spot. Rats covered the ground like ants and even more climbed up the sides of the kiosk and up the sides of the nearest shop. Those that jumped were shot out of the sky by electricity. Dead, smoking bodies littered the area and the stench of burnt hair and flesh was nauseating.
But no Rogette.
“Where are they?” I yelled at Calia.
Her violent eyes jumped to me only briefly.
“Tell me where they are before these rats wear you down,” I told her. “They’ll last longer than you will.”
“And let you claim the bounty? Fat chance.”
“At this point, no one’s getting the bounty.”
She laughed and then cursed as a rat got through her defenses and raced up her foot. She hastily flung it away.
“You know what?” she said. “Go for it. It’ll kill you off so I won’t have to.” She jerked her head to the left.
Choosing to trust her, I skirted the sea of rats and ran to the left. Listening to electricity crack, I couldn’t help slowing down, though. If Calia let down her guard even for a minute she’d be swamped and eaten alive.
“Do you want my help?” I called back to her.
“Bite me!” she yelled.
I couldn’t say I wa
s disappointed or offended. She’d tried to kill me in the hotel, after all. Maybe one day I’d feel differently about her. I kept running.
A whistle drew me around a corner. Another few stores later and I heard worse: vicious snarling and growling. I slowed up and used a children’s play area in the middle of the pathway to sneak up on the noise.
From behind a slide I peered out at Rogette, who had climbed up onto the shoulders of a bronze statue of a generic woman who was smiling while swinging a pair of shopping bags. Around the larger-than-life statue seethed a ring of agitated dogs.
The dogs lacked collars and the condition of their coats and their bony bodies told me they were feral. I hadn’t been aware of packs of wild dogs in the city, but Elliott had managed to find them and bring them here. They jumped at the statue and snapped at Rogette’s feet, trying to drag her down so they could tear her apart.
Elliott stood apart from them, his unnatural stillness telling me he was still possessed by the leaper. Since his magic was connected to animals, the beasts were the only weapons at the leaper’s disposal. Elliott whistled again, driving the dogs into a frenzy. White-faced, Rogette curled around the head of the statue. A Rottweiler leaped, jaws snapping at the witch’s nearest foot. Rogette cried out frantically, waving one of her hands over her head.
At first, I thought she was signaling for help. Then I saw the apparitions rise up from the concrete, the gray figures swarming over the dogs like spawning salmon. The ghosts were an awe-inspiring sight, and would have terrified any human who was caught in the middle of them, and yet the dogs didn’t react at all. Animals had a sense for things that humans were unaware of, and were especially sensitive to the dead. But these dogs were fully under Elliott’s control and feared nothing.
So Rogette banished the ghosts and instead did something I didn’t know witches could do.
She became invisible.
Her form blurred before my eyes and parts of her became nearly translucent. But even when I thought I could see through her to the other side of the mall in some places, there remained the heat mirage-like shimmer of her overall form that betrayed her presence. Indistinct was not the same as invisible. Not even close. But the fact that she could turn her body into this shimmery, patchy form was a revelation. It suggested to me that Rogette was not an ordinary witch and might be one of the enhanced ones that Elliott had told me about in the elevator.