by Alan Baxter
A helicopter swept overhead and he frowned. A moment’s adrenaline burst at the thought of police air patrols passed, yet he still felt concerned. The chopper was plain black, too high to be paying much attention, but he was sure he had seen it before. Probably Emma Parker had got Armour onto him.
Why couldn’t they just let him go? He had enough of trying to operate within the group, follow some plan, organise some elaborate fucking strategy. Sometimes you just had to stand up and fight. He would do all he could to destroy Hood, he owed that to the world. But there were surely plenty of others within Armour with skills enough to handle the bastard. It felt nihilistic to think so, but it had to be the truth. He had spent so little time exposed to this wide and confusing arcane underworld, but one thing he had realised was there were an awful lot of powerful people out there. Organisations like Armour and Meera’s Umbra Magi group. They could manage.
He had a clarity of thought born of that simple realisation. Go to Hood, save the children, kill Hood or be killed. The best result would be dying at Hood’s hand and taking the evil fucker with him. That would end Hood’s threat to the world and remove Alex’s presence, finally ending the risk of a Fey takeover Alex had started when he went off in search of the Darak shards in the first place. A fitting closure.
He shook his head as he rode. What were the chances of that? Nothing ever seemed to finish cleanly and completely in his life any more. But he had to try. And apart from anything else, he would not let those children die. He could be heading into his final fight, a battle he could never win, but he was strangely calm about it.
The chopper passed over again, slightly lower. Fucking Armour. Or was it the police, in an unmarked aircraft?
A sign indicated the junction with the M1. Alex swept around the long right-hand bend, weaving between startled drivers. He merged onto the main road and saw a sign for services, Watford Gap, not too far away. His eyes narrowed and he wound on the speed, pushing the bike to give all it could. Wind howled past the closed visor of the helmet.
As he approached the services turnoff, the chopper swept past again. Police or Armour? Did it matter? He needed everyone to back off and leave him to it. He cut his speed and indicated for the exit, slowing enough for the chopper to notice. From the corner of his eye he saw it bank. That’s it, come on, you pricks.
He pulled into the services and rode slowly across the car park. He smiled at the sight of several other bikes parked up near a fast food joint, pulled up next to them and ran in. He didn’t dare glance back, but the noise of the helicopter was suddenly intense as it came low over the car park for a moment before lifting away again. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake.
The fast food joint was busy, queues lining up for burgers and chips. He saw a group of bikers in one corner, lounging around a table, talking and laughing. Another leather-clad rider sat alone across the room. They had all been big sports bikes outside, any one of them would do.
Alex sat at a table behind the lone biker, breathing deeply to calm his nerves. He went through the mental exercises he had learned from Silhouette, the methods of gently coercing a person’s thoughts. He sent his will into the mind of the man, who was thankfully about his size, dressed in all-in-one red racing leathers. You need to piss. Go to the toilet.
The biker sniffed and stood. He walked off, rubbing at his temple.
Alex’s skills with this stuff were heavy-handed and far from practised, but he seemed to have got away with it for now. Without waiting too long, he followed. The biker stood in the bathrooms, the zip on the front of his leathers pulled all the way down, a confused expression on his face. He turned to leave again, pulling the zip back up, and started as he saw Alex right behind him.
‘Hey.’ Alex lifted his own stolen helmet. ‘Just pulled up beside the bikes out there. Which is yours?’
‘Ducati 1098.’ The man was clearly very pleased about his ownership, smiling and lifting his chin like a proud dad.
Alex whipped out his other hand, cracked a punch across that chin with casual expertise. The man crumpled without a sound. Alex caught him and lowered him to the ground. ‘Sorry, mate.’ He quickly pulled off the man’s boots and started stripping the leathers.
The biker mumbled and began to come around, his eyelids flickering as he fought to regain consciousness. Alex, genuinely sorry for the violence, tried the mind tricks again. Stay asleep. You’re so tired, you just want to sleep. The man’s eyes settled and he slumped again.
Fighting him out of his leathers was harder than Alex had anticipated and he desperately hoped no one came into the bathroom. Eventually the poor fellow lay on the tiles in his underwear and a T-shirt and Alex stripped off his own clothes, clambered into the leathers and boots. They were slightly too large, but that was good. He’d have never got in them if they were even marginally too small. Heavy, armoured leathers were unforgiving in size.
He patted the pockets, momentarily alarmed, before finding a single key on a rubber Ducati keyring. He offered the man on the floor one more silent apology and dragged him into a stall. He sat him up on the toilet seat and pulled the door to. It was a poor job, but would do for the short term. Alex pushed his helmet back on and strode from the diner.
He slipped the key into the Ducati as he stepped over it, hit the starter button, pushed it backwards as it roared to life. He sped across the car park and away, heading for the southbound entrance to the motorway again. He looked around as much as he safely could as he shot down the on-ramp. The chopper was nowhere to be seen. Hopefully he had bought himself some respite from the chase.
Emma Parker was red-faced with rage. Silhouette had never seen her bold and brash façade quite so rattled. ‘What the sweet fuck do you mean, you’ve lost him?’
They sat in their own helicopter, a team of four Armour battlemages silent beside them, waiting for directions from the quick-response team. Emma ranted and raved over the phone a moment longer before finishing with, ‘Well, we’ll go directly to bloody London as planned. Try to find him again, you imbeciles.’
She stabbed the button to end the call, blowing air out in an overly dramatic sigh of exasperation. ‘Right. Fucking idiots.’ She leaned forward to address the pilot. ‘Docklands, site of the incident. Go.’ The man nodded and the rotors roared. As they lurched into the air, Emma sat forward to shout over the noise. ‘Clever bastard, Alex. Led the chopper following him into a service station. They had to put down somewhere else to get to him, but he’d gone. Stole someone else’s bike and clothes. Took them a while to realise because they saw his original bike still out the front and assumed he was eating. Dickheads. As if he’d stop for a fucking snack! We have no idea now where he is. The chopper may eventually spot him again. Idiots! Anyway, what’s done is done. Maybe Alex thought that chopper was going to try to intercept and that’s why he shook them off. They obviously got too close. What the fuck was he thinking, really?’
‘Who knows what he’s thinking?’ Silhouette pushed down pangs of worry. Poor Alex. ‘He’s kind of out of his mind at the moment, everything is stacking up on him. That chopper had him spooked and he did something about it.’
Parker nodded, lips pursed. ‘Oh well, on to London. Hopefully we’ll get there first and stop him going to Hood.’
25
Alex decided to stop pushing his luck and rode through London as close to the speed limit as he could. He seemed to have shaken off the black chopper and avoided the police for the rest of the journey. London streets and traffic were too dense for high speed and he was far more likely to be caught by police in the confusing tangle of narrow roads and complicated signage.
Twice he had stopped and asked for directions to Canary Wharf. He finally had a good idea of how to get to that part of town and hoped the rest would be obvious when he got there. He had also been turning over and over in his mind the magic he had learned from Halliday’s grimoire. It was incomplete, large chunks of it semi-formed and all the more dangerous for that. But he felt like he coul
d at least apply some of the principles. He hoped it would be enough to hurt Hood. Enough to kill the bastard properly at last. Well, maybe kill was the wrong word. But end him, certainly. End his influence in the world.
He pulled the bike to a halt at the sight of yellow cordons and Army personnel a block ahead. The road was closed, heavily guarded. He was obviously close. An armoured vehicle and heavy assault rifles were on clear display. He stood the bike on its stand, hung the helmet on a handlebar and looked around. No point trying to get past them, everyone so on edge. And he certainly wasn’t about to tell them he was the Alex Caine their resident lunatic was after. He would only be dragged into their plans and their strategies and fuck that. He could use his invisibility skills, but didn’t relish wandering the streets beyond the cordons looking for the site. They had probably closed a large portion of the city. He needed a high vantage point.
Massive shining tower blocks stood all around the grid of roadways, watercourses here and there between them. The buildings were pixelated in the night, random windows still lit by late workers, or left on by people unconcerned by the power they burned. One building had a kind of wirework trellis all up one corner, some architecturally pleasing modern-industrial affectation. Alex smiled slightly at a memory of Canada, when he had been on the hunt for the Darak with Silhouette. It seemed a lifetime ago. The way she taught him to harness his magic and race across rooftops, jumping street-wide gaps with ease. I feel like Batman! he had told her.
He looked up at the heavy metal trelliswork. Time to get my Batman on.
Moving around the corner, masked from the army cordon by the building, he centred himself and gathered energy. His shields of invisibility enveloped him and he disappeared from view. Once concealed, he let the magic of the Darak, the power intrinsic in his being, flood through him, empower his muscles. It felt so good to be unfettered from the Lady’s hideously restrictive harness. ‘Death or glory,’ he whispered to himself. ‘Or both.’
He leapt up, preternaturally enhanced muscles lifting him several metres in the air to catch the metalwork. Breathing deep, using a level of focus gained over years in training for the ring, he jumped and sprang, hand over hand, climbing the building like a super-powered ape. The chill air cooled further as he rose, a soft breeze became a stiffer wind. In only a minute or so he had gained the roof, the cityscape of London spread out below him like a three-dimensional model map. The twisting snake of the River Thames was a thick, dark line in the night. He jogged across the roof, scanning from each side, looked for anything like the site he had seen on the news report. The yellow cordons were everywhere, the streets inside strangely still and quiet. He used them to triangulate his position, guess the direction of the site somewhere at their centre.
Steadying his suddenly hammering nerves, he ran for the building’s edge, gathered all his strength and power into his legs, and leapt. He sailed out into thin, cold air that whistled past him as he dropped, heading for the next roof over. The dive was massive and he felt a moment’s panic at the thought he would never make it, before the next building came up to meet him with a shocking, jarring impact. He forced his magic to harden his bones like steel and tucked and rolled, skidded across the rooftop and gained his feet again running. Without pausing to think about it, he ran again, leapt across the next street and grabbed a window cleaning cradle hanging halfway down the side of the next tower block. Letting the adrenaline rush through him, empowering him along with his magic, he clambered hand over hand up the cradle’s cables to the next roof and ran across. And there it was.
A massive hole in the ground, the foundations of some enormous building project, fenced off with ten-metre-high, corrugated-steel walls. Rough roads criss-crossed the site, demountable huts and earth-moving vehicles scattered around it like toys. And in the middle, the giant crane, school bus suspended below it. From his vantage point, even the crane and bus looked like children’s playthings far below. The bus swung gently in the breeze.
In all the streets directly surrounding the site, army and police swarmed in tight gatherings, checkpoints at every junction. There was no way Alex had the skills to survive a drop into the site from the top of a tower block. He needed to get to ground level and avoid the patrols. The last time he had used his invisibility skills, the Fey had found him with other preternatural senses. But against humans in the streets of London, he had no need to fear. The roof had a stairway access marked with a large green EXIT sign. With a mighty kick, he smashed the door inwards and ran, circling down and down, flight after flight of stairs. Panting, he finally passed a door marked G. He tried it and found it unlocked, leading into the lobby. The site was opposite, the huge glass front of the building he was in facing directly into one of the barricaded site entrances. Hood’s mercenaries huddled behind it.
Alex walked across the office foyer, invisible in his shields, and tapped the large green plastic button to open the doors from the inside. They slid soundlessly apart. One of the guards opposite noticed the movement, his attention sharpening for a moment. Completely oblivious to Alex striding across the road straight for him, he settled back down again.
Alex heard a chopper coming in low and fast as he stepped around the barrier. More Armour? he wondered. Or perhaps TV crews trying to get a look again. Shots rang out and the chopper veered away, the sound of rotors becoming muffled by architecture.
Alex would not allow any more innocent deaths to be caused by his situation, but a few less than innocent deaths might be in order. One of these bastards had driven that bus in here. None of them deserved a second’s mercy. He slipped silently behind one of the two guards, used his power to harden his hand into a steel-like weapon, and slammed it down onto the man’s balaclava-covered head. As he crumpled, Alex snatched his weapon and squeezed a volley of bullets into the fellow’s startled partner, made him dance and twitch backwards to drop dead on the muddy ground.
Reaction to the gunfire was immediate. The site erupted into shouts and a flurry of movement. More shouts and the pounding of running feet outside in the streets. Mercenaries poured from one of the huts near the crane and rushed for their fallen comrades. Alex walked out into the middle of the site, stood directly beneath the bus, tiny and artificial-seeming high above him, and dropped his shields.
He raised his arms and his voice. ‘I’m here, Hood, you fucker! Come and get me!’
From the Army station where they had been waiting, watching CCTV monitors, Emma Parker cursed. ‘Fuck! He’s already in. How did we miss him? Bloody understaffed, we are!’
They scrambled out and ran towards the site. Silhouette caught Jarrod’s eye and he gave her a subtle nod. She smiled slightly. Time to be rid of Armour and work only in Alex’s interests. First opportunity, they would slip away.
‘Sit rep?’ Emma demanded.
One man stepped forward. ‘We just found the bike, but Caine slipped away again. He somehow gained entry to the site unseen and called out Hood. Looks like he killed at least two of Hood’s men getting in there and totally immolated a bunch more when they ran at him. He just literally threw a massive fireball at them from what we could see. The fight is on in there and Alex is yelling for Hood to step up.’
Parker nodded. ‘Right, this is beyond us for now. Assume Hood will kill Caine and make sure we have all surveillance in place to track Hood and Darvill when they leave.’
Silhouette couldn’t believe her ears. ‘The fuck did you just say?’
Parker ignored her completely, pointed to another operative. ‘Get on to the Snowdonia team. Tell them we probably won’t need the battleground after all. Caine dies here, the Darak dies with him and the Fey threat is averted. Saves us having to consider our own final solution, at least. Tell the team to maintain position until they hear from me, but be ready to redeploy wherever Hood goes. If Caine dies, Hood’s the only real threat left. Of course, stay prepared on the slim chance Caine prevails.’
‘You fucking bitch!’ Silhouette raised a hand to slap the smug lo
ok clean off Parker’s face and someone grabbed her arm from behind.
‘Calm down, please, Silhouette. I’m dealing with the situation presented to me.’
‘Fuck you! What was your final solution? Kill Alex yourselves and deal with Hood on your own? You think you can do that?’
Parker held up placatory palms. ‘We did all we could to give Alex a place and do this with him. But we were never going to let a situation this dangerous get out of control.’
‘You actually prefer this outcome, don’t you?’
‘Preference is irrelevant. I’m reacting to circumstances.’ Parker strode away, pulling her phone from her pocket as she went.
Silhouette shook with rage. She whipped her arm from the Armour operative’s grip.
‘Leave her,’ Jarrod said quietly. ‘Alex needs us.’
Not taking her eyes from Parker’s retreating back, wishing all kinds of agonising deaths on the heartless bitch, Silhouette nodded. ‘You keep that fucking battleground in place!’ she screamed. ‘Alex will survive this and the original plan is still gonna happen!’
Parker glanced back at her and shrugged.
Sil turned with Jarrod and strolled from the group. Several operatives tried to block their way. As one, Silhouette and Jarrod struck out left and right, knocked Armour personnel aside like bowling pins and pounded down the street. They shifted as they ran, Silhouette easing into the warm, powerful comfort of her panther form, Jarrod into his large black wolf. They hammered along the road, keeping to the shadows, and headed for the building site.
26
Alex stood under the hanging school bus, panting from exertion, his breath condensing in swirling bursts in the frosty air. But he rushed on adrenaline to a degree he had never known before. His magic coursed through him in tidal waves of exhilaration. Two clusters of burning bodies lay churning black smoke up into the night from two groups of Hood’s mercenaries who had dared to move towards him. No more innocent life at his hands, but he was sick of fucking around. These lives were far from innocent.