by Tim Marquitz
I glanced at the sky as I walked, trying to clear the memory of Veronica’s interrogation from my mind when another thought intruded, for which I was very grateful. The power out, the stars had appeared in its absence. They sparkled above, littering the sky with winking eyes. It was a beautiful night for a puzzle.
Sixteen
It was a foregone conclusion that Hobbs had blown the power plant, not that it’d ever been a question of who so much as why. What purpose did it serve cutting off all the electricity to a portion of the city you wanted to conquer? You’d just have to go back and fix it all if you planned on keeping the place. Weres and vampires could see in the dark, so that might have something to do with it, but they had to know demons could too. They weren’t exactly gaining any sort of tactical advantage by blacking out the area so it had to be something other than that. But what?
I knew Veronica would have pulled the information from Hobbs, but the thought of having to rely on her stuck in my craw. I didn’t need her to figure this out. Hobbs wouldn’t have blown the plant without a reason. He either needed Old Town dark, which didn’t make much sense, or he needed to deprive someone of power, which also didn’t make much sense. It wasn’t like he was fighting the electric company. None of Baalth’s defenses relied on electricity so that wasn’t it either.
Unless…
The duke’s warning came back to me then, bringing a smile to my lips. ‘Uriel has a fantastic view from up there,’ he’d said, and he was right. There was a third option I hadn’t thought of until right then. Wasn’t sure it made any more sense than the first two, but there was only one way to find out.
I glanced back at the sky and put some energy into my thoughts. It was easier than I expected. Just like when Rahim was in my face—however unconscious that had been—I drifted upward, my feet leaving the ground. My smile grew, stretching my cheeks as I defied gravity and floated toward the twinkling stars.
At first it was like riding a tramway, the street pulling away turtle slow. The view expanded around me in an almost leisurely manner, a hot air balloon on a still day. It was more inches a minute than miles per hour. I put a little more oomph into it and increased the speed without scaring myself. It amazed me how refined my control was despite having never levitated before. It had to have been some instinctual thing left over from Longinus that I didn’t understand, but I certainly wasn’t gonna complain about it. I wasn’t a pro with my magic yet, but I was light years ahead of where I’d been a few months earlier.
The magic was well and truly mine now. That was a satisfying feeling.
I’d avoided real power my entire life, fearful of what it might do to me, fearful of what might change because of it but none of that mattered anymore. Shit was falling apart before I was powerful. It was a trend that had yet to stop. The only thing I’d lost by claiming Longinus’ power was Karra and our baby.
A lightning bolt of agony speared my head right then, and I suddenly felt heavy, the earth reclaiming its hold on me. I started to fall. In a panic, I pushed everything out of my head except for what I needed to remain afloat. It worked, a magical hand seeming to catch me after I’d only fallen a couple of feet.
“That’s what I get for thinking,” I muttered, wiping the sweat from my brow. It’d been close.
A quick glance down made it clear how uncomfortable a landing from this height would have been, and I really wasn’t up for testing my physical resistance. The new me was pretty sturdy, but a two hundred foot drop might test that in ways I didn’t want to experience. I sucked in a deep breath and willed myself higher, focusing solely on keeping myself airborne. Concentration was key, as it had been during the firefight. I needed to stop worrying about all the other shit and get my head in the game. Find out what Hobbs was doing, deal with it, and then worry about all the other drama rearing up after I was done.
The night was quiet as I drifted into it, Old Town buried in a shroud of pre-dawn gloom. The horizon had brightened in the time it had taken me to rise above the city but the world loomed before me in inky blackness. Well above the tallest of Old Town’s buildings, the view was breathtaking.
El Paseo shimmered a short distance away, people’s electric bills shining in the darkness as the city stretched out for what seemed an unimaginable distance. The city had always been large, but to see it from this angle was to be amazed by its serpentine crawl across the desert. It wouldn’t be but another generation before there was no space left between El Paseo and its neighbors. Only the occasional patch of emptiness dotted the network of lights, some small, undeveloped area having yet escaped the machine of society.
I willed myself to spin slowly around, so I could take in each part of the city as it filled my vision. Downtown was a mix of lights and darkness as the electrical lines were drawn in the sand. Much of the business district still shone with power, but the tail end, the area that bled into Old Town, had gone black. It was an odd diorama from where I hovered, brilliance cut short by a wall of ebony. The morning commute in those areas would be hell.
My gaze drifted across the swath of nothing, scanning for any hint of the third option I’d thought up. I knew there was more to Old Town than what I could see because I was hovering above it, but damned if I could see any. The emptiness went on and on, merging into the distance where I knew the desert butted up against the city. There was nothing, shooting my theory in its ass.
I sighed, surveying the area one last time before I gave up, willing myself a little higher to make sure I saw all I could. Ten, twenty feet higher I went, but there was nothing. Out of frustration, I pushed further and further. Fifty, one hundred feet, my body spun slowly, methodically as I floated upward, my eyes on a swivel.
That was when I noticed a glimmer I hadn’t spotted before. It was as if a streetlamp had suddenly been turned on, a flashing brightness that cleaved through the dark at the edge of Old Town. Right where it shouldn’t be. Unconsciously, I floated that direction, trying to imagine the layout of the city as I did, overlaying my location with that of the strange light in the overwhelming ocean of black. It might well be a residence or business, which just happened to have a generator on hand for situations such as this, but there was no reconciling its out of the way placement. As far as I remembered, there wasn’t anything out that way except…
I exhaled hard as I realized what the place was, my excitement dwindling.
The light was coming from the reserve power plant set on the outskirts of the city. It hadn’t been operational for over ten years, but this was the kind of situation it had been maintained for. The repair crews were probably there to bring it online to augment the other plant and bring power back to downtown and Old Town. Seeing how the other plant had been blasted to bits, it made sense they’d need to resurrect the dinosaur get the city back to operational.
I continued moving that direction for a lack of options, peering through the darkness as I angled lower and lower to the ground for a better view. Only the singular light remained lit as I drew closer. There wasn’t any hint of vehicle or work lights illuminating the area, which struck me as odd. There might not be much in the way of utility lights to brighten up the plant, but anyone working there would need a hell of a lot more than one to do their job.
As I drifted nearer, I noticed the outer gate was still closed, a massive wad of chain still wrapped about its poles, a thick padlock in place. My eyes scanned the road up to where the light shone, but there was no one there: no vehicles, no workers, nothing. I followed the line of the road back toward the city and didn’t see any vehicle headlights anywhere along the way, my gaze circling back to the single lamp post that flickered near the center of the plant. There was no way it could be a coincidence.
More comfortable on my feet, I dropped inside the fence and landed, doing my best to be quiet. I managed it pretty well, but decided not to risk patting myself on the back to avoid injuring my arm. It might not have been a Wright Brother’s moment for anyone else, but I was pretty damn proud of mys
elf.
I tucked that feeling away for later and let my senses loose. Nothing rang against them, which made me kind of nervous. The plant was the perfect place for an ambush or trap, but I wasn’t sure it was either. Why the hell would Hobbs leave a light on for me? It wasn’t like he worked for Motel 6, far as I knew. I couldn’t scent any were-critters or vamps hanging about, and while humans didn’t give off much of a ping, there didn’t seem to be any of those around, either. The place was deserted.
Then who turned the light on? That was gonna bug the fuck out of me.
I started off toward the light post with constant pulses of my senses ranging out and my ears and eyes on full alert. There wasn’t anything to find, though. Crickets chirped in the background and the occasional bird cried out, but as far as I could tell, the place was desolate. I crept through the quiet plant, slipping under a wall of old transformers secured on poles. A quiet hum ran through them, the faint echoes of energy setting the hair on my arms to standing. I ran my hand across the casings as I walked past and could feel the current they were carrying.
It was pretty suspicious that there was power flooding through the plant seeing how it was only intended for backup during emergencies. As far as I knew, the plant was only run in order to maintain its functional integrity. This clearly wasn’t about that since someone would have to be there to make sure the system operated properly. Leaving it to run on its own was counterproductive to that goal.
What did Hobbs have up his sleeve?
I circled under the humming electronics, on my way toward the lone lamp post, when I saw a mass of cabling running down from the clustered transformers. Half a dozen cables wormed together into a single rubberized sheath, which was easily the size of a horror movie anaconda. The gathered lines were as thick as my chest and ran from beneath the electrical hardware, trailing out in the direction of the lamp post. My eyes followed its course and saw the light shined right over top of the cabling as it sprawled further through the plant and out of sight behind a mass of small buildings.
Hobbs had left a path for me to follow whether he’d meant to or not. He might as well have painted a big arrow on the concrete that said: “This Way to the Insidious Plot.” Though, I had to give him credit. If I hadn’t thought to get a bird’s eye view of Old Town, I would never have seen the light that lured me there. He couldn’t possibly have planned for that, which meant the cable and the running power might not have anything at all to do with him or his plan. Shit, for all I knew, this could have been one of Baalth’s schemes that’d been running before Mihheer helped him get extra crispy.
Either way, I wasn’t gonna learn what it was by standing around presuming. I left my senses running and chased after the power cable, which turned out to be pretty easy. No one had bothered to hide the thing or put any effort into disguising it. The cable ran across the ground in plain sight, circling through maze of utility buildings until it ran up a ramp and went inside the largest of the buildings, which looked more like a warehouse. The aluminum door was rolled up about halfway, nothing but darkness visible beyond its maw. It didn’t inspire confidence. But if anything, I’m braver than I am smart.
I went inside.
Five feet…ten feet…fifteen…and still nothing jumped me. It must have been a record, or something.
The warehouse was filled to the rafters with spools of wire and cabling and packaged transformers and all sorts of wilted cardboard boxes that showed faded logos and equipment names I had no clue about; electric gizmowhatsistats or some shit. It was all French to me with a hint of duh. The layers of dust on it all assured me no one had been in there for a while except that there was a path of stirred up gray that ran alongside the big cable I was following. The dust had been wiped away sufficiently to keep me from recognizing footprints, but there was no mistaking someone, or several someones, had laid the cable recently, sticking close to its length as they had. That shot my idea that Baalth might have been involved somehow. No dust had settled back yet. Baalth was cold and stiff long before any of this had been done.
I followed the cable through the warehouse, surprised that my senses remained silent. Nothing lurked in the big empty space, only the sound of my impatient steps and the tiniest of hums from the current running through the cable made any noise. It was disquieting, and it seemed as if the cable would run on forever. Just when I’d about given up on finding the end, the smell hit me.
It was like a Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber song, wrapped up in a Milli Vanilli backbeat with lots and lots of poo extract. Or a sewer. Pretty much the same thing. Both left me a little nauseated.
The cable turned a corner around a wall of wood pallets and aluminum crating, where it dropped through a massive hole that had been dug through the concrete floor. It snaked between two sheared off pieces of rebar and dropped into darkness. The stench of Teen Spirit wafted thickly out of the hole, and I heard the quiet trickle of running water below. A quick glance over the edge confirmed my worst fear—well, it wasn’t Snooki lying in there naked, so maybe it wasn’t my worst fear. It was, however, a gooey and wet sewer tunnel.
I sighed, not sure if I was up for a Shawshank Redemption moment. How many miles of shit would you crawl through for a Klondike bar?
Fortunately, I had magic at my disposal. No sense that anything was lurking below—outside of resurrected corn kernels and billions of sperm who’d lost the lottery of life—I willed my power to flow up over me like a pair of hip waders and jumped down. A wet and disturbingly slushy splash greeted me. The water came up to my knees, but the cabling had been pulled so tight that several inches of it hung above the surface, making it easy to follow, if not pleasant. The smell was much worse down there than it had been above.
Wanting to get out of the muck, but cognizant of errant splashes, I sloshed through the steel tunnel as quickly as I could. There were no lights on in it, not that I’d expected any, but I could see well enough. The water was a dark black, but the surface had a silvery sheen that looked like the reflection of the moon as I stirred it up. It was beautiful in a crappy kind of way.
The sewer tunnel went on and on. Fortunately, somewhere along the way, my nose burned out and the stink became almost bearable. It was a small mercy considering my magical waders were collecting all sorts of fragrant hitchhikers, which reminded me of a South Park episode.
Finally, a short set of steps appeared, the cable running up them, over a short—and mercifully dry—platform before leading upward alongside a rusted metal ladder set into the wall. I inched over and peered upward, but as had been a trend, the new tunnel was dark but I could have sworn I saw the dull flicker of a light near its end. Once more I amped up my senses, only the vague sense of magical energy ringing back against them. It was so dim, so cold, I was certain it wasn’t a person. There’s an obvious difference between living energy and non-sentient. It was also so low wattage as to possibly be an afterimage, of sorts, magical energy having been used nearby recently enough to have left a trace sense behind.
Whatever it was, there was no sense of threat to it, which kind of left me deflated. I’d wandered through miles of murky shit-water in the hopes of finding something—anything—and all I was picking up was trace magic. It was rather disappointing.
I tested the ladder to make sure it’d hold me, and climbed up it, readying my power just in case. A steel door, kind of like those on a submarine met me at the top, the cabling running through a hole carved in the cement to the side of it. My senses told me nothing lurked on the other side, so I spun the wheel and pushed. Brightness poured out.
In the dark for so long, it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust, but even after they had, there was no decrease in brilliance. I climbed into the room to find it was made out of silver. Small, mystical lamps were embedded at the ceiling, the walls reflecting the hell out of them until every surface glowed with illumination. That had been the energy I’d sensed, but it still didn’t explain the room.
Almost circular in design, the wall
s sloped around, curving upward toward the ceiling where the lamps were, a five foot wide flat surface defining the roof. The floor was larger than that by a good twenty feet, but even it was made out of silver, or something that looked damn close to it. The door at my feet had been coated on the top, as had the door at the far end of the room, which was pretty much the same submarine-type portal as the first. The hum of the cable echoed through the room, and I could feel its energies running beneath my feet as I went over to the other door, my hair standing on end. My brain spun in my skull. Why the hell would anyone make a room out of silver? Right above a sewer even. The shit didn’t make any sense.
As I went to let myself out, the door at my back slammed shut. I spun, ready to let loose a magical blast and saw the wheel spin tight. I was alone in the room. The echo of the door reverberated through the place, the dull hum growing rapidly in the background. My brain gears slammed into drive. I’d walked right into a trap. Even though I’d expected it the entire time, the lack of magical threat lulled me into stupidity.
The thought of teleporting popped into my brain, but I still wasn’t confident in activating the power so I chose to do it my way. Energy welled up at my hands, and I aimed them at the portal, the buzz of bees growing as though I’d stuck my head in the hive. The noise must have shaken some sense loose because just as I released my energy, I recognized what the sound was: electricity.
Right then I realized the power hadn’t been cut, only redirected.
That was my last thought as hundreds of thousands of volts ripped through my body.
Seventeen
I awoke with a start, my face slamming into something I couldn’t see above me. Stars danced in my eyes, my brain, and pretty much everywhere else. I drowned in them, brilliant dots of light whirling around me.
Then came the pain.