The Lost Prince

by Edward Lazellari

  “Don’t get it in your mouth or eyes,” the preacher yelled. Everyone covered their heads with their jackets and shirts.

  Cal jabbed it with his sword. The beast grabbed him and pulled Cal toward its maw, but lost strength as the magic drained out of it.

  “How many of these freaking things are there?” Daniel cried out. Bree and the kid were shaking. Cal knew he was going to have to pay a fortune in therapy for the girl.

  The doors opened on the ground floor. The way was clear. Mal, Lelani, and Cal led the way down the service corridor, tense and paranoid, and moved toward the loading bay. Cal went through the double swinging doors first. A catering truck filled with food and a large wedding cake was backed into the elevated dock. The bay was relatively empty otherwise.

  He motioned for the others to join him. He was halfway down the stairs when a golem dropped down onto the sidewalk just outside the truck port. Cal stopped, and the group slammed into him from behind.

  The beast was hunched, its massive forearms before it, knuckles braced on the ground like silverback gorilla. Saliva slobbered from its snarling mouth. Three more dropped next to it, adopting the same posture and blocking their escape. Cal was about to order retreat when two golems crept up the service corridor behind them. Lelani cast a spell that shut and bound the steel doors to the hotel. It would only hold the ones in the corridor for a minute.

  The beasts closed in slowly, talking to each other in whatever passed for a language, careful not to leave any gaps. Their gaze returned often to Daniel, their programmed target, as though in anticipation of a reward, like the culmination of a sexual act.

  Cal wished he’d taken Bree from the boy’s arms. It was the first time he believed he’d lose the prince.

  “Prelate?” Cal asked.

  “I cannot bind them all,” Allyn whispered back, a desperate strain nestled in his voice.

  Cal prepared to attack—Malcolm and Lelani read his body language and made ready to follow.

  Three black Cadillac Escalades screeched to a halt behind the creatures. Five middle-aged Mediterranean types—in retro casual bowling shirts, leather jackets, silk slacks, loafers, and pinkie rings—spilled out of the vehicles. In addition to the gold jewelry dangling from their wrists and necks, all held assault rifles. Three men armed with flamethrowers poked up through the moon roofs on the tops of each Escalade. They collectively let loose a tsunami of fire, cutting down the golems. The creatures screamed as the hail of bullets and flame liquefied them where they stood.

  The golems still in the hotel finally broke through the steel door. Allyn bound them with his iron rod, and Mal, Colby, and Lelani made short work of the beasts. When all the beasts were dead, a very large man stepped out of one of the Escalades. He was six feet at least and pushing three hundred pounds, impeccably dressed in a cream-colored sharkskin suit with carnation in the lapel, had tightly wound salt-and-pepper hair that looked like the early stages of growth on a Chia Pet, and yellowed gnarled teeth when he smiled. He was smoking a thick cigar.

  “Holy shit!” Colby said. “Dominic Tagliatore?”

  “The mobster?” Allyn said.

  “Son of a bitch!” Mal quipped.

  The man approached the group, stopping before Callum, puffing on a thick Cohiba.

  “You know those are illegal,” Cal said.

  Tagliatore shrugged in that way that said Forgetaboutit.

  “You’ve changed,” Cal added.

  “Own a lot of restaurants,” the fat man said, patting his ample belly.

  “I’m confused,” said Lelani. “There was no Dominic Tagliatore in the original rescue party.”

  “Sweetie…,” the fat man said, pointing his cigar at her and with a flirtatious wink, “… you can call me Tilcook.”

  CHAPTER 42

  BRINGING UP BABY

  Gone.

  Lord Dorn could not sense the golems anymore. The last of them had been defeated. He thought for certain with the wards down, his creations would make short work of the guardians. He had underestimated his opponents. His earlier elation waned, and the pressure of the headaches returned. A dark cloud covered his thoughts. He blew apart a window, reentered the building through an empty office, and climbed the stairs slowly back to the observatory. Hesz, Kraten, Lhars, Tom, and Catherine MacDonnell watched silently as he entered, measuring his mood, which was clearly not victorious.

  “How’d we do?” asked Tom.

  We? thought Dorn. How fared we? The plan was Dorn’s, its execution as well—yet Tom took it upon himself to share some of his master’s failure. Since Dorn could not very well punish himself, he was grateful for a volunteer. The power of the lay line swelled within him. He said the words and made the hand gestures and shot Tom out of an east-facing triangular window. The man arched over the city before he lost momentum and plunged seventy stories into the icy waters of the East River. Everyone in the room remained quiet. And tense.

  It occurred to Dorn that the problem with the attack was perhaps not the plan itself, but its scale. Symian trudged up a stairwell carrying a bag full of sandwiches, bottles of water, and soda. He stopped when he saw all their expressions.

  “Did I miss something? Where’s zombie Tom?”

  Hesz shook his head ever so slightly and swiftly—almost a twitch. The gesture actually gladdened Dorn. His men were looking out for each other. They would need to. The pressure in his head grew—his reason slipping. It stirred in him a panic that one of these times when he descended into these episodes he would not emerge whole again. He would be lost to madness, deserving of only a dungeon cell in some wretched asylum without even a pot to piss in.

  Scale.

  He pulled out the flask with the golem elixir. In there were hundreds of Catherine MacDonnell’s viable ova, all waiting to be born by his hand. With the power surging through this building, he could bring them all forth. But the elixir was capable of so much more—it was forbidden magic—exponential. The radiation made it hyperpotent, boundless—limited only by how much stock he could provide it. Catherine had another ovary. He leered at her. She sat bound and unresponsive against a wall on the floor staring off into another universe, lamenting the loss of her family. She noticed him observing; her back stiffened, her expression changed, and she pressed herself more tightly against the wall.

  “My lord,” said Symian delicately. “We may need her for an exchange. Less damaged than more. This building—this city—is overflowing with females. Let me bring you some.”

  Hesz and Kraten backed away from the half-troll. So much for solidarity.

  In genius lies madness, and it was at this moment at the precipice of another dark episode that Dorn came up with a truly wicked thought. He struggled to retain reason and then stopped, realizing reason would only talk him out of a necessary action.

  “How many females?” he asked in a rough gravely voice. His hands pressed into his temples as though the switch to turn off the pain lay beneath the bone.

  “My lord?”

  “In this city … how many?”

  “The population swells to fifteen million during the day, my lord,” said well-read Hesz, sticking his own neck onto the stump. “Half are female.”

  A smile that he knew would frighten the devil himself squirmed its way onto Dorn’s lips—teeth gritted and cheeks stretched wide with dementia, he thought his face would rend itself apart. His reflection in the marble looked half mad, the veins in his forehead distinct and pulsing.

  “Subtract those who are older than young and younger than old,” Dorn said. It was becoming harder to speak.

  “Millions,” said Symian. “My lord, I don’t…”

  He turned to Catherine MacDonnell with the most devilish look and asked, “Their monthly blood … where does it go?”

  “I don’t understa—”

  “The shedding of your moon blood … your unseeded spawn?”

  “No,” Catherine whispered. “Women don’t flush … we throw it away … in the tr—” />
  “Every one of you?” Dorn said mockingly. “Every last woman in New York? Every discard, inventoried and logged!” he spat at her. The pain had become unbearable.

  Dorn found the water closet. Symian held the scrolls open before his master. Dorn poured the remains of the elixir into the toilet and flushed it. As the water swirled he chanted again in that dark language that sucked the soul from the world. Only this time, it fed like a vampire on a cornucopia of limitless energy coming from the lay line. Dorn continued to chant, channeling more and more of the magic down the building and through the pipes that brought the enchanted elixir to the sewers of New York. The spell would spread through the miles and miles of mazelike tunnels, the repository of all discarded things.

  CHAPTER 43

  AN OFFER HE CAN’T REFUSE

  Underneath the Waldorf Astoria hotel, the guardians and their new saviors caught their respective breaths under the cover of an old abandoned railway platform, away from golems or the attention of the local authorities. The station was left over from a bygone era when the Central Railroad owned most of the land that covered Park Avenue north of Grand Central Station. The remnants of track stretched east and west into blackness, beyond the meager uses of the Metro North commuter rail and Amtrak. One such spur of track stopped under the Waldorf, used by presidents and dignitaries of past eras to move about veiled from prying eyes.

  “I think that was the last of them,” said Callum. He looked over the group to make sure everyone was all right.

  Clarisse was still in shock over Tim’s demise, but physically unharmed. Daniel, Scott, and Allyn looked shaken in that way civilians do when they’d just escaped imminent death. Colby and Lelani were cool and collected as always—centaurs were a tough breed, and ex-NYPD were hard to rattle, whether dead or alive. Bree was at Callum’s side, leaning against him, arms wrapped around his leg, head resting on his thigh. He stroked her hair gently, thinking of all the television he and Catherine had never let her watch to shelter her from violent programming.

  Tilcook had always been a big man, even among the palace kitchen staff. In his youth, he could carry a side of beef alone to the carving table and carve it into its respective cuts expertly in under thirty minutes. No one handled a cleaver better than Tilcook. Cal wondered about the life of excess and debauchery that added the extra hundred pounds these past years.

  “I got my memory back same as everyone else,” Tilcook said. “I was on my way to the hotel to parley with Mal, you know, catch up on what’s doing, when this thing went down and the cops cordoned off everything. Only way we could reach you was through these tunnels under Park Avenue. It’s all hush-hush. Roosevelt used to use these tracks so no one knew he was in a wheelchair. Drove the car right off the train with him in it into the freight elevator and onto Forty-ninth Street. That’s how we brought the cars in.”

  “How do you know about it?” Malcolm asked.

  “Sometimes I need to move merchandise from here to there … on the down low. Ya know?”

  “So you went from kitchen help to crime lord?” Daniel asked. The boy was a little too much in awe of Tilcook for Cal’s taste. To the world at large he was known as the Debonair Don. The man flaunted the law for years, killed hundreds, if not more, in mob hits and territory battles, and was not a worthy role model for a prince of Aandor.

  “Crime? What crime?” Tilcook said, gesticulating his wrist back and forth while holding his thumb against his fore- and middle fingers. “I’m a businessman. I look out for my interests. It’s all perspective.”

  “Boss, the police are moving into the hotel now,” a thin, older fellow said. He wore a royal-blue Adidas track jacket over his black retro bowling shirt and had brown eyes and slick black hair that was too uniformly dark to be natural at his age. A weak chin hovered over the cords of his neck that drooped against his tanned, leathery skin, the kind that betrayed one’s love of too much sun. The toothpick in his mouth shifted back and forth when he spoke. He wore only one pinkie ring compared with some of the others and his bracelet and chain count was also tasteful by comparison.

  “This is my—ah—business associate, Tony Two Scoops.”

  “Yeah, definitely not a crime lord,” Daniel said to the group.

  “So what do we do about this oobatz magician on the Chrysler Building?” Tilcook asked. “He’s bad for business. I got boys working in this hotel.”

  “Uh, boss…,” said Tony Two Scoops, nodding toward Daniel.

  “Later,” said Tilcook, waving his lieutenant away.

  “The boys … we gotta know our stake.”

  “What stake?” said Cal.

  Tilcook ignored the cop and turned to Daniel. “Your Highness … me and the boys, we’re in a little trouble. Kind of wore out our welcome around here.”

  “We’re looking at twenty to life for some of our—uh—business methods,” said Two Scoops, pronouncing it mehtuds.

  “Nowhere we can go no one’s gonna recognize us, see?” Tilcook continued. “So we was talkin’ these past few days since I got my marbles back … there might be other worlds to explore, where a man can settle down and enjoy his old…”

  “Where a man might enjoy his ill-gotten gains and escape justice,” Cal interrupted. “Things are too hot here and you want to tuck tail and run back to Aandor and bring your toadies along.”

  “He may not have put it quite that eloquently,” Mal said. The dwarv was irritated. “Jesus H. Christ, Cal—the man just saved our lives.”

  “Please!” cried Reverend Grey. “Do not take His name in vain.”

  “He robbed and murdered his way up the food chain,” Cal said to his sergeant at arms. “And just when, after years of effort and millions of dollars, the law catches up with him, he wants to disappear into another universe like a Criss Angel act.”

  “That’s about right,” Tilcook said. He puffed on his cigar.

  “How many people have you murdered?” Cal asked Tilcook sharply.

  “Probably less than you back home,” Tilcook said. “Funny thing about murder … it’s okay to kill your stepfather with a table leg and walk away from the consequences, but if you’re protecting your livelihood…?”

  “Self-defense is an appropriate use of deadly force,” Cal said angrily. “Daniel was only in that situation because the idiot screwed up the identity spell.”

  “Agreed,” said Tilcook, with a Cheshire cat–size grin. “I’m only in my situation because of screwed up magic, too—and I been defending myself for thirteen years. So whaddaya say? You can do worse than havin’ La Cosa Nostra watchin’ your back when there’s some whackadoo magician gunning for ya.”

  A tremor shook the platform, triggering a cascade of worried glances around the group.

  “My lord, Dorn resumes his attacks,” Lelani said, a bit uncertainly.

  “Wait a minute,” said Allyn. “Everyone felt that tremor; am I wrong?”

  “But with the shields gone, aren’t we dog meat?” Daniel asked.

  “There’s so much iron and concrete insulating us down here, there’s actually some measure of protection,” Allyn said.

  A second vibration shook the platform.

  Daniel turned to Tilcook. “Yes,” he said. “You have a deal.”

  “Now wait a minute!” Cal said. Not this again. It would have been much easier if the boy were still an infant.

  “You wait a minute,” Daniel told his captain. “I never met any of you people before last night. You’re telling me some pretty tall tales, falling over yourselves to want to help me. And all these people are asking for is favors from, or a trip to, a kingdom I’ve never seen or even believe exists, all for some promises you all admit I have the ability to deliver, and you expect me to employ some kind of impartial judgment on what favors I accept and don’t when my life is in danger?” Daniel said in one adamant, exhausted breath.

  “This Dorn is never going to stop coming after me. The goombah squad usually asks for money for protection, of which, I am comple
tely tapped out of at the moment. Do you know how lucky I am that Dominic Tagliatore and Tony Two Scoops just want a ride out of town for the privilege of saving me from an—what was that word…?”

  “Oobatz,” said Tony. “Mean’s crazy.”

  “From an oobatz wizard perched on the Chrysler Building, that—in your words—is ‘never going to stop coming after me.’”

  Cal had a head full of responses to Daniel’s rebellion, but the volume of his arguments defied orderly reason and power of conviction. The kid was a survivor, and where as Callum saw Daniel’s successful reclamation as the conclusion of his current mission, Daniel looked to his continued survival as an open-ended escapade. Cal couldn’t make the prince accept his authority as the captain of his personal guard. And who was Cal to lecture … by rights, Daniel could promote Malcolm or Tilcook to general on the spot and put them in charge of his protection.

  The third tremor felt like a minor earthquake. Dust and rubble dropped from the ceiling and clanked on the roofs of the cars they’d brought back down.

  “The prince has spoken,” said Malcolm.

  “What about Dorn?” asked Allyn. “We can’t leave him be anymore, Cal. He’s getting more desperate and willing to hurt many people to get what he wants.”

  “How long can Catherine remain safely in his custody?” added Scott.

  Cal grimaced. Stubbornness was his family trait as well. He hated to admit Malcolm was right. “Dorn has to die,” Cal said.

  They all looked at Cal in silence—the guardians fully understanding what it meant for the captain, both personally and morally, to advocate this course of action. Cal had never been one to seek violence. He was simply the best there was at responding to it.

  “He can’t be left alone to rain this kind of terror on people,” Cal continued. “Prince or no prince, this earth must be rid of Dorn of Farrenheil.”

  Malcolm and Tilcook nodded in accord.