We stopped before the massive vault door, and Nicholas shone his flashlight on the plaque with Jeremy Shane’s name.
“Yes,” said Nicholas, his voice tight with satisfaction. “Yes, this is it. Operation Sky Hammer at last. Morelli, hurry.”
Morelli went to one knee before the door, dropping his backpack in front of him and rummaging through it. “I’ll need someone to hold the flashlight for me.”
“Miss Stoker,” said Nicholas.
“No, you do it,” I said, sweeping my flashlight back and forth over the corridor. Nothing moved in the gloom. “I can hit harder with my spells.”
“Very well,” said Nicholas without rancor. He stepped to Morelli’s side, holding the flashlight as the older man went to work. I took a few steps forward, watching the gloom. “Kat, try to raise Vass and the others.”
I tapped my headset but only got static. “Can’t. We’re too far underground.”
“As expected,” said Nicholas.
“Shine the light there, please,” said Morelli.
I waited, my heart racing, and watched the corridor for any signs of enemies. Nothing moved in the gloom, and I didn’t hear anything but Morelli working. I wondered how the others were faring in the helicopter. The flames, the bombs, and the machine gun could deal with the undead readily enough, but I didn’t think they would slow down the myothar. Lightning would stun it, and the incendiary bullets would annoy it, but I didn’t think we had any way of killing the creature. Our best hope was to distract it long enough to escape, but I suspected the myothar had any number of spells that could bring down a helicopter.
No, that was wrong. Our best hope was to get in and out before the myothar roused itself to action, and to do that, Morelli needed to get that damned door open. I wanted to tell him to hurry up, but shouting at a man while he’s handling explosives is a bad idea, so I kept quiet and watched for attackers.
“Almost done,” grunted Morelli.
“Kat,” said Nicholas, and he pointed at one of the niches lining the corridor wall. “We’re going to need shelter from debris. Get that door open.”
I crossed to the door. Like all the others, it was made of thick steel bars, and the niche beyond was lined with safe-deposit boxes. The door was held shut with a massive lock, and the centuries had rusted the mechanism. Fortunately, it wasn’t nearly as robust as the vault. I hit the lock with a fire spell, and then a blast of ice. I repeated that several times and then struck it with a burst of telekinetic force. The strained metal shattered with an echoing crack, and I gripped the bars and pulled the door open.
“Ready,” I said.
“Get in the niche,” said Morelli, straightening up. He had applied plastic explosive and some shaped charges in various spots around the vault’s entrance and backed away holding a roll of wire. I ducked into the niche, followed by Nicholas, and Morelli joined us a second later.
“We’re ready?” said Nicholas.
“Yes,” said Morelli. With one hand, he held the spool of wire. With the other, he shoved heavy-duty earplugs into his ears. “Cover your ears. This is going to get loud.”
Nicholas holstered his pistol and covered his ears, and I followed suit.
“Detonation in three, two, one!” said Morelli, and he pressed a button on his wire spool.
For a second, nothing happened.
There was a flash of blinding white light in the corridor.
Then there was a noise.
Morelli hadn’t been kidding. The explosion was loud, and the confined space magnified it further. If I hadn’t been covering my ears, I might have gone deaf, and even with my ears blocked, it still was loud enough to hurt. The echoes rolled on and on, and then I heard a metallic grinding noise.
The vault door was falling forward.
I pressed my hands harder against my ears.
The sound of the vault door hitting the concrete floor was colossal. The floor vibrated beneath my shoes, and for an awful instant, I was afraid the explosion would bring the entire basement crashing down in ruin. But the echoes faded away, and I lowered my hands and pulled out my flashlight again.
“Good God, man,” I said.
Morelli peered out of the niche and grinned.
“Detonation successful,” he said with no small amount of smugness.
We left the niche, and I looked at the vault door.
Morelli’s detonation had indeed worked with surgical precision. The blast had ripped the vault door free of its hinges, and it had fallen flat on the corridor, piles of concrete chips scattered around it. Beyond the door yawned a black room, and Nicholas hurried forward, sweeping his flashlight beam back and forth.
“Well done, Enzo,” said Nicholas. “Well done, indeed.”
We climbed over the vault door and into the tomb of Secretary Jeremy Shane.
The room was about the size of a grade school classroom, and it looked like a big bank vault. Likely it really was a bank vault and had been repurposed into a tomb in the final weeks before the High Queen had unleashed the Reaping on Chicago. Safe-deposit boxes of varying sizes lined the walls, and I saw that Morelli’s blast had jarred open some of the boxes.
In the center of the vault lay a single coffin.
“Yes,” said Nicholas. “Morelli, help me get this open. Kat, watch our back.”
I nodded and stepped to the side of the door as Nicholas and Morelli headed to the coffin. As I did, a glitter caught my eye, and I looked to the side. One of the safe deposit boxes had fallen open, and inside I saw…
Jewels. A lot of jewels. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, and emeralds. Some of them cut, some uncut. I glanced at the men, but they were busy prying the coffin open. In one smooth motion, I emptied the safe deposit box of its gems and pocketed them. I didn’t care what Nicholas thought of my actions, but I didn’t want to force a confrontation with him over it. For that matter, setting up in Gary had been expensive, and I was going to need some money soon.
As for the original owners and their heirs…well, I supposed their corpses were wandering around outside.
There was a shrieking noise, and the coffin wrenched open as Nicholas and Morelli forced the lid to swing back on its hinges. Curiosity overcame me, and I took several steps towards the coffin, peering inside as Nicholas rummaged through it.
The coffin looked like a normal casket – big and heavy, designed to keep the decomposing occupant from leaking into the soil. The quilted interior had crumbled into rags, and a skeleton lay in the coffin, clad in the dusty remains of an archaic business suit. I looked into the empty eye sockets of Secretary Jeremy Shane and wondered what he would have thought of the modern world under the High Queen’s rule.
Then Nicholas lifted a briefcase from the coffin, brushing the dust from it.
It looked more like a fireproof strongbox than an actual briefcase, though it did have a carrying handle, and I saw that Nicholas had to strain a little to lift it. He set it on the floor and started fiddling with the lock.
“You should check that later,” I said, “once we’re out of here.”
“The crazy wizard girl is right,” said Morelli. “We must go at once.”
“I have to see,” hissed Nicholas, his face tight with concentration. “I have to make sure…”
The lock clicked, and he opened the briefcase.
It was full of papers. The pages had been laminated, so they had survived the centuries intact. Nicholas began flipping through the documents. Some of the pages were maps, and a few of them looked like diagrams or blueprints for some kind of complicated machine. The rest were…well, they looked like gibberish. They must have been in code, but Nicholas could read the code because his eyes scanned the lines. All the documents bore the official seal of the President of the United States and what I later found out was the seal of the Department of Defense.
“Nick,” I said.
“Yes,” said Nicholas, but he wasn’t talking to me. His face had lit up with exultation. “Yes, this is it. After so long,
this is it.”
He put the papers away and slammed the briefcase shut, but before he did, I caught the heading at the top of one of the blueprints.
It read OPERATION SKY HAMMER.
“We have what we came for,” said Nicholas, standing up and hefting the briefcase. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“First sensible idea I’ve ever heard from you,” I said.
We left the vault, climbed over the door, and all three of us came to a halt in unison.
The myothar was waiting for us.
It should have been too large to fit into the corridor, but it squeezed itself forward, the tentacles of its head and hands lashing at the ceiling and walls. The smell of fish and rotting meat washed over my nostrils, so strong that I almost gagged, and both Nicholas and Morelli leveled their weapons at the creature. I got out of the way, calling my magic to me, and prepared to strike.
Right away I noticed a problem.
The myothar’s bulk filled the corridor. There was no way to get past it. I wondered how it compressed itself to fit down here, but I supposed the myothar didn’t have an actual skeleton and didn’t need to worry about things like breaking bones.
“The human wizard female returns,” hissed the myothar in its horrible gurgling voice. It was speaking English this time. “You were marked by the Dark Ones, and you are the puppet of the Dark Ones. Fool! You have brought a Dark One here.”
“You’re very perceptive,” said Nicholas. Somehow, he remained calm as the creature squelched and oozed closer.
“You are possessed by one of the Dark Ones, ape,” stated the myothar, coming to a halt about twenty yards further down the corridor.
“I prefer to think of it as a partnership to mutual advantage,” said Nicholas.
The myothar let out the horrible gurgling sound that served as its laugh. “The Dark One lets you think that, but you are its meat puppet, its flesh suit, and you know it not. Foolish ape! You meddle with powers that you do not understand. It will be a mercy for me to slay you and devour your flesh, for you shall be spared the fate that awaits you otherwise.”
“I suggest,” said Nicholas, still perfectly calm, “that you get out of our way. We have no quarrel with you, but if you try to stop us, we will fight you.”
The myothar oozed forward another few yards.
“If it attacks,” murmured Nicholas, “wait until I strike. I will dissipate its wards, and your spells will have a greater impact.”
I nodded, flexing my fingers as I gathered power to cast a spell.
“You have entered the tomb,” said the myothar, shuddering forward a little further. “You have entered the tomb and taken the documents of the human warlord.”
“I have,” said Nicholas. “They are mine by right. Secretary Jeremy Shane led humanity in its fight against the High Queen’s tyranny, and I continue his noble struggle. We needn’t fight, but if you try to stop me, then I will force you from my path.”
The myothar went motionless, though its tentacles kept groping along the walls and the ceiling.
“You have taken the documents,” said the myothar. “Then you seek the great weapon.”
“Obviously,” said Nicholas.
The myothar screamed in fury, the sound deafening in the enclosed space, its tentacles lashing with such violence that I saw the sharp beak of its mouth.
“Fool!” said the myothar. “Blind, foolish ape! Do you not see? You are a puppet of the Dark Ones! If you use the weapon, you shall overthrow the High Queen, and the Dark Ones shall devour this world…”
“The Dark Ones are a tool and nothing more,” said Nicholas, “and…”
“Brainless monkey!” said the myothar. “You do not understand. You are a child playing with flames you do not think will burn. My people would have handed me over to the Dark Ones, so I fled here instead. You will destroy my haven and surrender it to the Dark Ones. I shall not permit it! You will perish here, and the knowledge of the weapon will die with you.”
The myothar began shuddering forward again, and I didn’t want to know what it would do if it got close enough to wrap those tentacles around us. It also began casting a spell, its tentacles glowing with ghostly blue light.
“Nick!” I snapped.
“Be ready to attack!” said Nicholas, purple fire blazing around his fingers as he gestured.
I felt the surge of power from him, and it made my skin crawl. He was using dark magic, magic siphoned from the Dark Ones and the Void beyond the Shadowlands. Just feeling that dark power unsettled me. Attempting to use it…God, I didn’t want to know how that would feel.
Nicholas shouted and thrust his hand, and a torrent of shadows erupted from his fingers.
Sergei Rogomil had done something similar during our final battle in the food court of the Ducal Mall. That had been a massive explosion of shadows, sucking away the energy from anything that it touched, and it had taken the full strength of Riordan’s Shadowmorph to hold back the dark power. This was far more powerful and focused, and slashed across the myothar’s bulk like a scalpel. The myothar didn’t slow, but I felt the cold power of Nicholas’s spell draining away the power of its defensive wards.
“Kat!” Nicholas’s voice cracked like a whip. “Now!”
I threw as much power into the spell as I could manage, and I flung a volley of lightning globes at the myothar. Fear and urgency lent my spell power, and I surpassed myself. I hurled six lightning globes, the most I had ever cast at once, and they slammed into the myothar with a thunderous explosion. Blue-white fingers of lightning crawled up and down the myothar, and it screamed in fury, flames and sparks shooting from its robe.
I had hurt it, but not seriously, and now it was even more pissed off.
The myothar’s tentacles lashed the air, and it hurled a fireball at us.
I snarled a curse and cast another spell. A wall of ice shimmered into existence in front of us, sealing off the corridor, and the myothar’s fireball struck the ice. I could cast a powerful fireball, but the myothar hit much, much harder than I could, even after a century and a half of practice. The wall of ice had been a foot thick, but the myothar’s fireball shattered it like glass and turned the shards to steam in a half second. Fortunately, the ice had been thick enough to soak up the fire, so while a gust of hot air hit us, nothing else did.
Already the myothar was casting again.
“Nicholas!” I said.
He hurled another lance of draining shadow at the myothar, and the creature let out a furious screech, its tentacles lashing like whips. I followed a half-second later with another volley of lightning globes, fingers of electricity ripping across its rubbery bulk. I saw scorch marks appear on the gray hide, and Morelli raised his pistol and started shooting, aiming for its head. The bullets left trails of smoke as they passed, burning with flashes of white light as they hit the myothar. They didn’t do any damage, but the incendiary shots did leave scorch marks. We were hurting the myothar, but we weren’t hurting it very much, and it was going to tear us apart before we took it down.
“Is there another way out of here?” said Nicholas, shadows and purple fire playing around his fingers.
“No,” I said. “Stairs or nothing. It…”
The myothar cast another spell, and it flung a dozen snarling lightning globes at us.
I cast my own spell, working the spell to resist elemental forces that Jacob Temple had taught me. A dome of ghostly gray light appeared in front of us, shimmering and translucent, and the lightning globes struck it. I screamed in pain and concentration as I tried to hold my will against the volleys of electrical power. The spell wavered, but I held the defense long enough to cancel out the attack.
The myothar was only ten yards away now. Another few feet and we would be within reach of those tentacles. We would have to retreat into the tomb vault, and the myothar could bombard us with spells at will.
“All right,” said Nicholas, stepping forward and dropping the briefcase. “We’ll have to do
this the hard way, won’t we?”
The shadows burst from his fingers and his eyes, mingling with purple fire. I had seen this kind of thing before, during the first time I had encountered the Dark Ones and their cultists. Paul McCade had been possessed by a Dark One, and during his confrontation with Riordan and me, he had drawn on his Dark One, using it to twist his form into a hideous creature with inhuman speed and strength.
Nicholas was doing the same thing.
He took a step forward, and he changed, his body rippling and flowing and reshaping itself. I expected him to become an inhuman, twisted thing. McCade’s other form had been some ghastly mixture of squid and insect and armored turtle.
Instead, Nicholas became a creature that looked like a giant panther, his form covered from snout to tail in black armor that resembled a beetle’s carapace. His tail was like a scorpion’s with a barbed stinger, and his eyes burned with purple fire. His claws and fangs were like daggers, and I felt the dark magic surging through him.
Dark magic might have surged through him, but a wave of revulsion surged right through me.
I mean, I had slept with the man, and he had just turned into something out of a nightmare.
The panther-creature shot forward in a blur and slammed into the myothar. The myothar let out an infuriated screech. Nicholas’s claws and fangs raked at the myothar’s rubbery hide, and the myothar struck back with its tentacles and beak. They moved so fast that I could barely tell them apart, and I didn’t dare attack for fear of hitting Nicholas. Which, come to think of it, might not be that bad. If the myothar and Nicholas killed each other, that would release me from my obligation to steal things for him.
On the other hand, if the myothar killed Nicholas, it would then kill me.
I glanced at Morelli and saw my own shock mirrored on his usually impassive expression.
“He ever done this before?” I said.
“No,” said Morelli. “I’ve heard him talk about those Dark Ones of his, but I never thought this…”
Cloak Games: Tomb Howl Page 18