“Well, almost all.” The new gang leader laughed and then turned to Steve and Ace. “And now, mi aleros, I’d like to introduce you to...friends of yours? Well, perhaps they are not friends but they certainly are eager to see you. They paid us well to let them know if you’d arrived and more to keep you here until they could come for you.”
The inner door opened and seven men in similar black custom-fitted suits entered. Their clothes were so similar, they looked like uniforms. As soon as they cleared the entrance, they formed a wedge. The man at the point of the wedge was clearly the leader. He was older, with dramatic streaks of gray at his temples, and an air of authority. Clearly, their arrival was a surprise to many of the gang members, if not to Jairo. The gang was stepping back, giving ground to the newcomers.
Ace pulled the backup gun from her ankle, but the leader made a quick but elaborate gesture with one hand and the pistol spun off to land in a far corner of the room. Ace instantly went for her knives.
Steve tried to gather power for his rose shield and the blast that had gutted Tataka, but he could tell that–except for the leader who continued to deal with Ace–all of the other newcomers were concentrating on him. He felt as if his mind was wrapped in soft blankets. Even the image of the Fool wouldn’t come into focus. It would begin to appear and then dissolve into cloud-colored mist.
Since he wasn’t concentrating on a card, Steve could see as Ace whipped a knife at the leader’s head, but another of his swift hand movements sent it up to embed in a roof beam. Ace dropped a knife, cursed at her clumsiness, and then threw four more so quickly it almost seemed that they flew in formation. All were deflected with contemptuous ease.
The leader raised an eyebrow as if asking Ace whether she had any more things to throw, and then, apparently satisfied that they had the situation in hand; he relaxed and pulled a delicate silver box from a vest pocket. Opening it with a snap, he took a pinch of what Steve supposed was snuff, placed in his right nostril, and inhaled with evident satisfaction. When he spoke, it was with a very slight German accent. “Jairo, thank you for alerting us to your visitors. Along with my congratulations on your new status as primera palabra, I assure you that you and your men will be well rewarded.”
Jairo nodded his head and said, “Gracias, Señor Weishaupf.”
“Weishaupt,” the older gentleman corrected Jairo sharply, and then turned to Ace. “Ms. Morningstar, I think you should stand down. Even the Ace of Swords doesn’t have a chance against a full straight.” He indicated the men behind him. “Not to mention two of the Minor Arcana.”
Something was bothering Steve. Some idea was trying to break through the haze that lay over his brain.
Weishaupt waited for a second, apparently expecting Ace to accept the hopelessness of the situation, and then turned to Steve. “Well, Herr Rowan, I will admit that you’ve gotten much further than we ever expected, but I’m afraid your time playing at being the Last American Wizard is over.”
Steve wasn’t paying attention. He was furiously trying to work out a way past the magical shields on his mind. At the same time, he was digging for that elusive memory. He kept thinking of the movie Silverado. There was a line in there....
Weishaupt turned and walked to the door, telling his companions. “Secure the Fool well, and bring him along. We still have plans for him. You can dispose of her.”
“I got it!” Steve realized. “It was the scene where the kid said that Kevin Costner had died ‘when he fell off his horse’ and Scott Glenn just smiled. Smiled because he knew that his brother would never have fallen off his horse, which meant he was still alive.”
Ace Morningstar would never have dropped a knife.
Then it came to him–the image of a knife–no, a rapier, long and thin like the stick over the Fool’s shoulder.
His fingernails dug into his palm until he felt the tips slick with blood. Instantly, the blood magic cleared his mind, and the image of the Fool was clear. He Studied the thin rod over the boy’s shoulder.
He visualized the wards they had cast on him as real blankets with edges where a needle-thin shaft would slip past and weak places that a slim point could penetrate.
It worked!
He saw his power flash toward Weishaupt like a brilliant golden wire. This time, the painful reaction to a new spell felt like a giant claw ripping out his abdomen, and the overwhelming light blinded him–but not before he saw a shield of the purest black appear between the wizard’s hands and swallow the golden wire into its depths.
Behind him, he heard a deafening bellow of triumph from the cadejo and screams of terror from the gang members standing around him.
The pain from the spell drove him to the floor, and once again, everything went black.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Steve came awake with a scream. He wrenched the bulky case that held his cell phone off his belt and started to throw it across the room. At the last moment, he kept his grip firm and brought the phone up to his face.
“Listen, you little bastard!” he yelled. “Can’t you just vibrate like every other goddamn phone? You set me on fire again and I swear I’m going to take a blowtorch to your ass!”
OH I’M IS UNSATISFACTORY, PH.D.
Steve scowled at the screen. “That doesn’t even reach the level of incomprehensible, you idiot peasant.” A riot of ideograms, phrases, and cartoons flashed across the screen. It paused for a couple of seconds on
RETURNS SUDDENLY OH SO HOT AND SOUR SOUP
Which switched to:
THIS TRANSLATOR SUCKS! 二百五
After a few more screen changes, it finally settled on:
I’M SORRY, BOSS.
Steve was curious. “What was that part after ‘This translator sucks’?”
SCREW ANCESTORS TO THE 18th GENERATION
“I assume you were referring to the translator program and not me.”
CERTAINLY, MOST BOSS
“Hmm.” Steve wasn’t convinced but decided to leave it alone. “I’ll have to remember that one.”
He was still on the floor of the MS-13 headquarters. That was a bit of a disappointment, but still being alive was a plus, so he decided that overall, he was ahead of the game. There was no one else in the room. There was a large amount of thick rope just behind him. Next to the orange La-Z-Throne, he could see a body.
At least he thought it was a body. He couldn’t quite be certain, since it appeared that a large hoofed animal had jumped on it for a considerable amount of time. In the end, he stopped trying to fool himself that it was an extra-large order of cherry Jell-O and admitted that it was a severely-flattened Jairo.
Steve had been to a couple of warzones, so he knew what would happen next. He leaned over and threw up on the floor. His head swam and bile filled his mouth.
When he could think a bit more clearly, he reasoned that the...no, he wasn’t going to think about that again...but he did, of course, and threw up again.
At least, he tried to. He hadn’t eaten all day and mostly, it was just painful dry retching.
When his head stopped feeling like there was a vise clamped tightly on his temples, he sat up, carefully facing away from Jairo’s remains, and asked the cell phone, “Where’s Ace?”
An arrow appeared on the screen and swung like a compass. He held it flat and it pointed at the door where they’d originally come in. Steve shook his arms, jiggled his legs, and–when none of these motions produced enough pain to knock him out–stood up.
His head spun for a second, but he’d practiced this type of navigation near the end of many long nights. He aimed at the door and walked straight for it, ignoring any visual cues that might have indicated a general instability in the physical world.
“Just like Hangover 101,” he thought. “And my parents said I never learned anything in college.”
He managed to navigate through the short hallway with only two bounces off the plywood walls and paused for a second to examine the now-opened front door. It looked like someon
e had fired a TOW anti-tank missile through it–from the inside. There were a few splinters left in the hinges but the rest was in small pieces, spread in the street in a neat fan shape.
Ace was sitting on the top step with her back to the door and scratching behind the ears of a large...well, it was more of a dog than anything else. Steve assumed it must be Carlos the primera palabra. Steve wondered if he was now the primo perro ladrando, which, in Steve's fractured Spanish would have meant First Barker. He staggered out, sat on the other side of Ace, and congratulated himself on keeping that particular little joke to himself.
After all, Ace was sitting on the top step, Carlos was lying down, and she still had to reach up to scritch behind his ears.
Ace looked up. “Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Ugly. About time you joined the party.”
“I woke up a while ago when Send Money decided to barbecue me again.” He pulled the phone off his belt. “Next time, I’m putting him through a George Foreman Grill.”
Ace shook her head. “You can’t screw with the phone.”
“I’m just talking about giving him a taste of how it feels.” Steve glared at the screen. The image of the Rolling Stones tongue was there again. “Do not get snarky with me, you little firebug.
Figure out some other way of making your demands known or I’ll have to decide between the Fate of the Known Universe and my own comfort–”
“And there goes the universe?” Barnaby’s voice came out of the speaker.
“Precisely. In that belt clip, he sits very close to what I consider to be sacred ground.”
“Probably surrounded by skulls on stakes like all the sacred ground you see in late-night horror movies,” Ace said.
Steve just gave her his best withering glare, which had no apparent effect. With as much dignity as he could muster, he asked. “OK, what happened after I bravely took on the leader of whoever those guys with the accents were?”
“Was that before or after you passed out?” Ace asked. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response.”
“Well, I really hate to admit this, but you did sort of save the day,” Ace said dryly. “That golden rapier or whatever you produced cut Mr. Weishaupf’s–”
“Weishaupt’s,” Barnaby corrected her.
“Let’s just settle on ‘the bastard in charge,’ OK?” She continued. “At any rate, his hand flew off and that dropped his combat capability to approximately that of a combined combat team of kittens.”
Steve allowed himself a smile of triumph.
Ace snorted. “Don’t get all puffed up. You immediately did your best imitation of a piece of lumber and went flat on the floor. Well, you did scream like a girl on the way down, but other than that, knotty pine all the way.”
“They haven’t had any knotty pine since rec rooms were replaced by man caves.”
“I came from a conservative, if not actually retrograde, family.” Ace said.
“Where did Weisswurst’s hand go?”
Ace pointed down to where the cadejo was chewing on something leathery. “As soon as it was cut off, it looked like it was a million years old–”
“More like two hundred years old, actually.” Barnaby said.
“I guess that could be right. Anyway, Cujo seems to have taken a shine to it and I’m not about to deprive him of his pleasures.” She gave the big dog monster a couple of hard swats that would have felled most people. Carlos just grunted happily and continued to chew. “Then Carlos here took the initiative and used the knife I’d tossed him to cut off the ropes from around his neck.”
“How did he do that?” Steve asked.
“Really fast.” Ace said. “I tested out the mojo factor of the seven dwarves with my last throwing knife, and when it buried itself in Dwarf Number Two’s butt, I decided that their juice had departed along with the boss man’s hand.”
Barnaby interjected. “Weishaupt is the Ace of Wands, and if you look at the card, there’s not a lot of him except a hand. Well, there is a cloud but mostly it’s a hand.”
“Makes sense.” Ace said. “Anyway, Carlos here had managed to get his feet on Jairo and was teaching him a lesson in lèse- majesté which I doubt he’ll ever forget.”
“I think that’s a safe bet,” Steve said, remembering the red smear he’d seen inside.
“Yeah.” Ace nodded and moved to continue her ministrations behind the cadejo’s other ear. “I could have used a bit of help, but Carlos here–he really doesn’t like to be called cadejo, by the way.”
“Is that one of those lèse-majesté sorts of things?” Steve asked.
“Yup. One of the dwarves called him cadejo when the action moved outside, and the last I saw that particular fellow, he was about five inches above that church spire over there.” Ace pointed. “See? About two blocks away. The one with the pair of trousers hanging off the cross arm? I think Carlos could have a great future in the NFL if he didn’t face the wrong way when he kicks.”
Barnaby spoke up from the cell phone’s speaker. “I think Carlos is the red dog in the Moon card. The good news is that there is a white dog who is probably a bi...err...a female.”
Carlos’s grunt had a certain hopeful timbre to it.
“In Jungian analysis, the Hero has to not merely appease but actually befriend the two hounds if he ever expects to get to his goal.”
Steve asked, “Am I the Hero or just the Fool?”
“As hard as it may be to believe,” Barnaby said, “you are both.”
“Which part is hard to believe?”
“You being the Hero.”
“You realize that you’re capitalizing again?” Steve leaned back against what was left of the doorway. “However, I’ll let that pass. In fact, I find myself in agreement. I am no Hero and I have no idea what my Goal is. Any clues?”
Barnaby hesitated for a moment. “Sorry, I had to block some seeker-killer malware for a second. The CYBERWAR Division is getting aggressive.”
“Can’t you talk to them and tell them to lay off?” Ace asked. “You’re not the enemy here.”
“Sadly, we haven’t been able to get through to them, and they’ve decided that since I’m about the only thing they can see, I must be an enemy. It’s just a nuisance.” Barnaby’s voice sounded thoughtful. “I am a bit more concerned about the singularity that seems to be happening out in Camp Williams.”
Steve asked. “That’s the big computer in Utah?”
“‘Big’ is one way to describe it. PRISM is in the exabyte range–that’s a step up from petabytes.”
“Petabytes are the ones with dirty pictures?”
“No. You’re confusing it with pederasts–although a number of the big mainframes do seem to have issues with their motherboards now that I think about it.” Barnaby mused. “Enough. Let’s just say that PRISM is to Fort Meade as a nova is to the spark you get when you break a white Necco wafer. The magic hasn’t fully reached there yet, but when it does, you’re really going to have a problem.”
“Me? Why would I have a problem?” Steve asked. “Didn’t I just tell you that I’m not a Hero?”
“Yes, but you don’t actually get a choice in the matter.”
“It’s not like anyone would have chosen you for the job,” Ace added.
Steve nodded in agreement. “Even I’m smarter than that.”
Ace stood up and brushed off the seat of her jeans. “OK, I’m tired of talking. What’s next?”
Steve gave an extravagant shrug, which brought a glare from the blonde SEAL.
“I think we need to send Carlos off to see Coyote.” Barnaby said. “That’s what I said we’d do when we first met him. First, because Hosteen can transform him if anyone can, and second, because he can hang out for a bit, run with the pack, and generally learn to put one hoof in front of the other.”
Carlos got up, hindquarters first, then front legs, and stood. It was damn impressive, since he was well over twelve feet at the shoulder when he stood up. Ace reached up, gave him a two- handed sc
ritch on the chest, and said, “Now, you just go back the way we came in. I really don’t think anyone will bother you–or at least they won’t bother you twice. When you get to the woods. Coyote will find you.”
“Now, don’t presume on my hospitality,” The voice came from an open window in the second floor of an abandoned house across the street. Steve looked up to see the ageless figure leaning on the windowsill like one of those housewives in a New York tenement circa 1935.
Ace scowled. “How long have you been there? I could have used some help, you know.”
“Nah, once Steve here took out the Ace of Wands, you weren’t going to have any trouble with the rest of those low cards.” He shook his head. “Was fun to watch though. Almost as good as the time I had to fight my way out from inside that monster on the Columbia River.”
Steve asked, “Why were you inside the monster?”
“Because he’d eaten me, of course.”
“I suppose you’re going to claim that was your plan all along?”
“It worked.” He turned his attention to Carlos and waved him to the east. “Friend, you just head east on 198, make sure you don’t take the on-ramp to the Parkway, and then we’ll have dinner waiting for you. Kitatama’sino.” The slim figure in the plaid shirt turned and disappeared into the darkness of the house.
Carlos leaned down and rubbed his forehead against Ace’s chest, she hugged him back, and he set off. Steve asked, “Hey, the dog with four left feet gets a hug and I get hammered to the ground?”
Ace shrugged and headed over to where the Mercedes was parked. “What can I say? He’s a lot cuter.”
Steve followed. “Barnaby? Who were those guys?”
“You mean the Illuminati?”
“Oh, come on,” Steve said. “Are you going to bring in the Bilderbergs and the Trilateral Commission next?”
“No, those two are just what they appear to be. Do you really think that if the Trilateral Commission was secretly ruling the world, they would allow Jimmy Carter to join?”
“What about the Bilderbergs?”
The Last American Wizard Page 11