by Bill Fawcett
The emergency lights cast a grim yellow glow over the carpeted expanse. Luckily, the hundreds of chairs stored in there were piled up in stacks of ten and twelve near the back wall. Plenty of room, Regina thought, just as the door slammed open again. Regina turned and ran toward the intruder, changing in mid-stride from human to dragon.
She cursed at the sound of her favorite blouse tearing up the back as the scales of her spine thrust through the cloth. The fire ant reacted with typical insect swiftness. He dropped his own disguise and stood up on his hind legs, all four fore-limbs preparing to take on the enemy. Its eyes took up almost half of his head, and the mandibles took up almost all the rest. Impossibly narrow neck and waist joined the three segments of its body together.
Regina would have loved to crisp the creature into a slagged heap with a burst of flame, but she was afraid of setting off the smoke detectors. One of the biggest problems they had was playful fans setting off alarm after alarm that caused the big buildings to be evacuated and the fire trucks summoned, incurring increasingly large fees from an increasingly irritated fire marshall. DragonCon had fewer of them than most large conventions, partly due to the wizards’ cooperation spells, but mostly to fandom in general being self-policing. If she started the weekend off with a false alarm, she’d never hear the end of it from the rest of the concom. Instead, she landed on the soldier’s back and planted her rear claws solidly in the thick chitin.
It swiveled its upper portion around and bit her on the forearm.
“Ow! Dammit!” Regina let out a howl of pain that echoed off the ballroom’s high ceiling. She swiped at the ant with bared claws.
It ducked, bent its knees and rolled over, dumping her onto the carpeted floor. Regina opened her wings and flapped up out of reach. Her foreleg throbbed like a hangover. She was dying to give the miserable monster a blast of fire just for spite, but she could not risk it. Instead, she flitted halfway around it and went for its narrow throat. It raised an armored leg into her neck, snapping her jaws shut. She jerked her head further up and knocked its jaw upward. The mandibles clacked.
Regina landed on all fours and lunged for the creature’s left hind leg. She twisted her neck and threw the ant on its side. It curled around her head, tearing at her spine and ears. Every bite sent white-hot pain lancing through her nerves. She chomped deeply into its thorax. Ugh! Ants tasted terrible, like pancakes fried in axle grease. She spat out the first mouthful and went for a second.
The ant squealed, a shrill noise that caused the chandeliers overhead to dance in protest. It battered at her, snipping at her spines with its jaws. Regina tried to push the creature’s jaws away from her. She decided to use its own ruse. She launched herself up, and came down on top of it with all her weight. She heard a snap! The ant let out one more squeal and lay still.
Moving tenderly to coddle the parts of her that ached, Regina levered herself up and sat on her haunches.
The ant’s spindly limbs continued to twitch. The bronze sheen of the multifaceted dark eyes started to dull. She leaned close to see if it was really dying.
The ant’s upper body jerked upward, its mandibles snapping. Regina moved her snout just in time.
“Damn you, die, already!” She swiped at it with a claw. The head flew off its skinny neck and bounded across the room. “Ugh.”
Regina felt the bites on her head, neck and forearm. Someone was going to have to take a look at those. She refused to think of having them hurt for days the way an ordinary fire ant bite did. But what to do with the body? The engineer was going to turn up any moment. She was lucky he hadn’t come already. She might have to eat the corpse to conceal it. The prospect made her feel sick. She’d already had a bite of it. Her wounds were making her feel woozy. Better to call for backup.
She touched the radio in her ear with the tip of a claw.
“Everette, I’m in the Regency Ballroom, and I need some help getting rid ...”
The sound of voices reached her sensitive ears. People were coming toward the ballroom. Quickly, she kicked the remains of the ant corpse underneath the skirt of the table that held the lighting and sound boards at the rear of the ballroom, then struck a pose with one arm up and her wings spread.
“Hello?” Everette’s voice echoed tinnily in her ear. “Regina? What’s wrong?”
A half-dozen heftily-built fans in graphic T-shirts and jeans wandered in. Regina stood absolutely still.
“Nobody here yet,” the first one said. He was a big boy with a scanty beard and wavy dark hair. “We can get the best seats for the show.”
“Ah, cool,” the second fan exclaimed, running over to look at Regina. The African-American teenager walked around and around her. “Look at the great dragon sculpture here!”
“What show is it from?” the first teen asked. “I never heard of a blue-green dragon. It’s not even in D&D!”
“I don’t know,” the second said. “Maybe it’s a movie prop. Look how real the eyes are. They seem to follow you!”
“Hey, you guys shouldn’t be in here yet,” a mellow baritone voice said from the doorway. Bill Mann, a stocky man of middle height whose small features left plenty of room for a high, creased forehead under his curly, dark hair. His radio cable was clipped to the neck of his ‘WWGD?’ T-shirt with the outline of a standing lizard breathing lightning superimposed around the letters. No doubt had often found himself asking in unusual cases the very question the initials stood for, which was a restatement of his own philosophy: What would Godzilla do? Since he never had much of a chance to trash Tokyo, Bill settled for putting his best efforts toward his assignments. DragonCon ops counted on his reliable nature and even temperament. “Show’s not on until three. We haven’t got it set up yet. You’re going to have to leave right now.”
Regina could have kissed him.
“If we help set up, can we stay?” the second teen asked, hopefully.
“Nope. Sorry. Hotel regulations. It’s for your own safety.” Bill stayed by the door until the cluster of teens retreated. He glanced over his shoulder, then addressed the statue. “All clear.”
Regina waited a moment before hastily re-transforming. Without the wings for balance, she staggered. In human form the bites hurt a little less than they did on sensitive dragon tissue, but they looked pretty bad.
“Oh, my,” Bill Mann said. “That really is a mess. Let’s get you to a medic. I’ll have someone come and take care of that soldier ant ASAP.”
He put his shoulder under her arm and started to help her out of the room.
“We have a bigger problem,” Regina said. “The concealment spells are all breaking down. That ant got in, and none of the alarms went off.”
“Everette,” Bill said, touching his radio control, “someone needs to go and find the ... operators. We’ve got containment breach.”
* * *
Complaints were coming in from all over the convention venue. Pat Henry frowned over yet another report that spells had broken down in several places, and conclave business was overlapping into the convention. Fans were excited about having seen a two-legged red-scaled wyvern flying into the Marriott through a skylight in the atrium. Pat had started a whispered rumor campaign with the recipients ‘sworn to secrecy’ to counter the sighting with news that it was a special effect, part of a preview of an upcoming Lucasfilm fantasy movie. The wyvern himself, mundanely known as Stanley, was embarrassed to have been spotted and given a dressing down by the senior draconians present.
“We’ve got to find those wizards,” Pat said. He got on his radio to the rest of his staff. “Find the ... operators. Check anyplace that any of them have been seen. This is a top priority. And you’d better go loaded for bear. We’ve had some sightings and at least one encounter.”
Subtly, among the growing crowds across four hotels, radio-bearing personnel started making inquiries, and the news that they were sending back were
n’t good. Janice left the autograph area and set out in search of Penelope Winton, a magician who was a major British media fan. She was almost always in the room set aside for that program track, sharing episodes with fellow enthusiasts. No one had reported seeing her. Janice checked at the Hilton and found that Penelope had actually been in town since the night before. It took some persuading, but she managed to convince the hotel security chief, Bob Askill, that it was important to look in Penelope’s hotel room to make sure nothing had happened to her. Her luggage was unpacked, but her purse was missing. Janice hoped Penelope was with it.
For the fourth time in fifteen minutes, Everette Beach tried the cell phone number for the Fulbrights. James and Tera weren’t on staff that year, though they had been in the past, but James had been good enough to use his talents to seal the multiple entrances to the Marriott. Those spells had shown fewer holes than others cast by less experienced magicians, but security personnel were starting to see wear and tear, especially where the weave intersected the tunnels that joined the hotels to the skywalk. James would never let anything get that ragged on purpose.
The phone rang four times, then a perky female voice came on the line.
“Please leave us a message at the tone!”
Everette hung up without adding another query to the ones he had already recorded. It might be that the Fulbrights had turned off their cell phone to avoid waking up their baby daughter. They could also be meeting with their fellow pirate recreationists, many of whom were in attendance. Or they were just out of cell phone range. He just had a bad feeling that none of these might be so.
“Can you take over for a little while?” he asked Sharon Tiedeman. Sharon wasn’t in the confidence of the top levels of staff yet, but her silent assent as she sat down at the main console told Everette that she might indeed be worth trusting, and soon.
“Reports, everybody?” Pat’s voice crackled through the earpieces.
“I’ve got nothing,” Everette said. “James and Tera are nowhere. Their little girl’s okay in the children’s room. I’ll ask my wife to pick her up if they don’t come back before it closes.”
“Susan Charnoff didn’t make her three o’clock or five o’clock panels,” Bill Mann reported. “She hasn’t been in her hotel room since morning, either, according to the access records.”
Other personnel reported the same thing: usually reliable wizards and magicians, program participant, fan or staff, had failed to show up at panels or other events. They had all gone missing, often just after checking in at the hotel. Calls to cell phones yielded nothing. John and Brenda Tackett started making cautious calls to the guests’ home phones in case they had returned, or not even left yet.
“She should be there,” Rajiv Bhatan said of his artist wife Ansri. “Her phone is very good. Do you want me to come down there?”
“I’m sure it’s just a missed connection,” John said, forcing a pleasant tone into his voice. “Perhaps she went out to dinner with some friends and forgot about her panel.”
“Perhaps that is it. We are in a different time zone. Maybe she did not reset her watch when she arrived. Please ask her to call me when you speak to her.”
“I will. Thank you, Mr. Bhatan.”
“My pleasure.”
John hung up, gnashing his teeth.
The dragons in the conclave were starting to get worried. A fierce Andean dragon who had only been persuaded to come this year after a decade of pleading by all the draconians in the American southeast was starting to make sharp comments about the poor organization. Pat refused to doubt the commitment of his staff even in the face of evidence. Why would all the magicians walk off the job at once? And where were they?
“Is there anyone left who can refresh the spells?” he asked John. “Anyone we know is still safe?”
“Well, there’s Ms. McCaffrey, but we don’t want to stress her out. Her bursitis, you know.”
“If she’ll put a glamour on the door to the conclave, that should be enough for ground zero,” Pat said. “Anyone else?”
“Well, we’re still waiting for a few to arrive. Their planes haven’t landed yet.”
Pat eyed him. “Are you sure they’re on board?”
“No reason not to. I’ll have a couple of dragons meet them at the airport and escort them straight to you.”
“Don’t let them out of your sight for a moment.”
But that proved to be more difficult than it seemed. Three fans from the west coast whose powers only worked in combination, not unlike the witches in their favorite TV show, “Charmed,” arrived and were whisked to the communications office by tenacious and nervous security people in a huddle of secrecy that intrigued and confused them. Pat gave them a quick briefing and sent them out, again under heavy guard, to shore up the defenses around the Hyatt.
Unfortunately, a horror writer coming in from New Jersey was not so lucky. She made it all the way by van to the turnaround in front of the Marriott. When her driver got out of the car to take her luggage out of the back, he stepped out of eyeshot for one moment. When he came back, she was gone. Searching the hotel and the surrounding area proved fruitless.
* * *
“Well, now, that is most peculiar,” Anne said, as a cluster of her fans looked puzzled at the blank wall at the end of the corridor. She reached out and rapped it with her knuckles. “Now, I was positive I could get through here to the other side. I was sure there was a door.”
“Everyone makes that mistake,” one of the Pern fans, Steven, said politely. “We’d have to go down one level to get across. Or up two.”
“Maybe we just took a wrong turn,” Anne said, hopefully. “There’s a shortcut here somewhere. If you just wouldn’t mind taking a look—it’s for motor-chairs and carts only, not a regular footpath. It’s a door, just the same color as this wall. I used it last year.” She gave them a winning smile. “I don’t want to be late for my autograph session.” Willingly, the group of fans spread out to look, leaving only Koolness, Aranel, Hisham and Angel around her.
Koolness waited until the footsteps were far enough away.
“All clear,” he said. He and the others formed a screen so that casual passersby, of whom there were many, couldn’t see what she was doing.
“Fine,” Anne said, rummaging in her bag. “My heaven, if I’d known I was going to have to be casting spells I would have brought along a cat or two. Cats are very good for witchcraft, you know. Mine in particular.” She brought out a handsome, purple-enameled fountain pen and unscrewed it. “They tried to take this away from me at the airport, but I told them that an author has to have a pen! Now, let me think ...”
She leveled the pen at the wall and began to draw upon the air. With her eyes closed, she began to sing softly to herself. Anne had a sweet, strong voice, trained for theater. The rich tones seemed to flow into the pen. From the point issued iridescent golden lines, like oil spreading out upon the surface of a pond. Koolness tilted his head, thinking that if he caught the pattern just right he might be able to read the words in it.
Before he could even absorb the shape of it, the pattern sank into the wall. For a moment the dull-colored paint seemed brighter and slightly shiny, like metal. He touched it. It felt like painted drywall.
“That ought to take care of it,” Anne said. “Let Pat know when you speak to him.”
“I will, my lady,” Koolness said.
The rest of the fans returned, trying not to look as if they were thinking ‘I told you so.’
“Sorry,” Steven said. “None of the doors go through on this level.”
“Well, my mistake, then,” Anne said. “This hotel is a regular rabbit-warren. We’d better go the other way. There’s little time left. It would be so much more convenient if I could just go between on dragonback.”
“Don’t we all wish,” Angel said, with a grin.
As t
hey followed Anne in her rolling chair, only Koolness could hear the sibilant voice behind them.
“Thank you, friends ...”
Anne outdistanced her escort easily in her motorized transport, leaving the others to jog behind her to catch up. Koolness came around the corner just in time to see an elevator open. A couple of large men in black T-shirts came out of it. He could scent the powerful tang of ant on them from across the room. Most humans would put it down to ordinary body odor, but it made his eyes water.
“Can we help you in, Ms. McCaffrey?” one of them asked. He leaned over to take hold of the handle at the top of her backrest.
“Why, that would be very kind,” Anne said, but with a backwards glance filled with meaning. Koolness and Hisham put on a burst of speed.
“We’ll take that,” Koolness said, smoothly, moving into place at Anne’s shoulder. “It’s our honor. But you can hold the door.”
The two men exchanged peeved glances.
“Okay,” one of them said. “Nice to see you here, ma’am.”
“Thank you!” Anne said. Fans piled in to take up the available space, since elevators ran slowly if at all during the long weekend, leaving no room for the two large men to board behind them. Anne sighed as the doors closed. “Did I ever mention that I do find safety to be in numbers?”
Koolness had to agree.
“Ah, well,” Anne said, as if to herself. “It would just be nice to get to go through that door once.”
* * *
The gopher, a brand of staff volunteer so named because they ‘go fer’ whatever was needed by senior staff members, rapped tentatively on the door of the mini-suite in the corner of the twenty-second floor of the Hyatt. Dale was in his middle twenties, but had gained a reputation for tact under Brenda Tackett’s firm tutelage. Such care was required when dealing with the media guests, many of whom could be difficult in the extreme, such as this one. He’d never met Shawna Lacey before, but he’d seen all her movies. She starred in a series as a hell-witch who battled demons who escaped to earth from the pit.