Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3)

by Schwartz, Jenny

  The entrance of four terrified children, turned into living bombs, into living death for other children, was a foul assault on that energy.

  Lewis didn’t have the magic to use a search spell to find the people responsible, but the mother of pearl energy did that for him as it pulled away from four men. Four putrid green blots on the shimmering landscape.

  Lewis moved.

  Gina grabbed the door handle and held on as the car hurtled around a corner. A spell had been used to clear a lane of traffic to ensure the swiftest journey to the New York portal. She could see the golden glow of it at the edge of the street if she slipped into mage sight. And mage sight was easy to slip into since she was so stressed, on the edge of desperation.

  No matter what they did, they wouldn’t be in time. The demon had been diabolically clever, and Lewis was alone. A solitary man against a demon’s long-term plan.

  “Jim.” A bubble of silence abruptly enclosed Fay. Whoever Jim was, she wanted privacy to speak with him on her phone. Two minutes later, as the cars stopped outside Paul O’Halloran’s apartment building and portal, Fay released the bubble of silence. She spoke as she got out of the car. “There’s a portal in Mérida. The town is a center of Maya culture, and civilizations often coalesced around portals, whether they were consciously aware of them or not. The porter of the Mérida portal is reclusive, but my stepfather, Jim, is a friend and a porter from Australia. He’ll meet us at Paul’s portal and take us through. In this emergency, Luis won’t protest the use of his portal or its revelation.”

  Kora obviously had questions, but she bit them back.

  They ran down the steps to the New York portal.

  A late middle-aged, stocky and resolute man stood to the side of the portal talking with Paul. He gave Fay a quick hug and Steve as well. “Hold hands, people, and I’ll lead you through the in-between to Luis’s portal. I can’t contact him, but he’s probably out caving. I have his permission to enter the Mérida portal and I’ll bring you with me. If you release each other’s hands in-between, you’ll stay lost there. No time for baby-sitting, today.” The laconic Australian accent emphasized Jim’s urgency.

  Gina gripped Shawn’s hand and Steve’s. Steve held Fay’s hand, who held Jim’s.

  The in-between swirled and tip-tilted them, disturbing and unsettling their senses. They walked quickly through a space where gravity clutched, released and attacked from all directions. A green light shone in the distance, darted to their right, then steadied and opened into a portal. Jim led them through.

  They emerged into a cool, dim space lit by the shimmering green of the portal. Tiny stone carvings ringed the portal, repeating figures painted on the walls of the space. Ancient, yet still vibrant, the paintings were Mayan.

  “A temple.” Gilda, the chief demonologist, gazed around, enthralled.

  “A cellar,” Jim corrected. “A bunch of colonizing Spanish monks, I can’t remember the order, built their monastery over the portal, claiming it. Upstairs. It’s a house, now. The main plaza is only one street away. If you run…”

  Steve was already at the top of the stairs. Fay and Chad were at his heels. Shawn stayed beside Gina, matching pace.

  “I don’t need a baby-sitter,” she said, borrowing Jim’s scathing phrase. She could look after herself.

  “I’m sticking by you because you know more than anyone,” he said.

  She stumbled on a step.

  He caught her arm, lifting her up and on without pause. “You know more about what Lewis can do with his new power. And maybe, you’ll be the one he contacts.”

  “I don’t think so.” They ran along the shadowy hallway of a private house and out the front door as a single stream of fast-moving humanity. There they hit a milling crowd of panicking civilians and two policeman shouting in a doomed attempt to instill some sanity in the mob.

  Mob or not, people hurried aside for the group of mages and Steve.

  Gunfire cut the air.

  Lewis was grateful for Sven. Not that the older guardian was present, but that he’d insisted all guardians study mundane weaponry. As a result, Lewis could defuse a simple bomb, and the explosives strapped to the children were simple.

  A touch of his translocating power, flicking it out in a needle-like action, detached the detonators on all four children. The children and everyone around them wouldn’t know, but death was no longer imminent.

  In that breathing space, Lewis translocated to behind the first of the four men watching from hiding. The man hadn’t even registered Lewis’s presence when Lewis jabbed under his jaw. Five quick, ruthless jabs to certain pressure points and the man collapsed unconscious. He’d wake to a world of pain, his limbs unable to obey him for hours.

  Two minutes later and the men were all crumpled, their guns and other technology useless to them. Let the Mexican police find them. The assumption would be that foreign secret service operatives had acted to disable the terrorists. The assumption wouldn’t be far wrong.

  The immediate danger had eased, but there was still the threat of injuries as people stampeded out of the square. However, inhabitants of the buildings framing the square seemed to be dealing with that. Doors opened everywhere, ushering children and their accompanying adults to safety. Others ran down narrow streets. Only up one street, the traffic was coming the other way.

  Fay and Steve—and Gina’s red hair glowing like a beacon. Other mages surrounded them.

  A sense of hope, of having allies, lifted Lewis’s mood.

  He translocated into the shadows of the street through which the group had entered. “I’ve disabled the detonators on the bombs strapped to the children. The terrorists behind this are unconscious.”

  Gina spun around and hugged him. Everyone else was more disciplined. Lewis ignored discipline and returned Gina’s embrace, but he remained watchful.

  Steve spoke to someone on his phone. “Ric. A jaguar-were in the local SWAT team,” he said in explanation when he’d passed on Lewis’s message. “It doesn’t look like you need us.”

  Three men ran down the street, past them, but only the one in the lead seemed to see them.

  “That’s Ric,” Steve said. Which explained things. One of the mages had had the sense to cast a look-away spell to hide the group’s presence. Since magic didn’t work on weres, the jaguar-were had seen them, anyway.

  “I appreciate your support,” Lewis said. “But explanations of how you came to be here have to wait.” He was curious, but the clock was ticking. As bad as this situation was, likely it was a distraction or the spark for something worse. He had to go. This had to end, now. “I know who, or what, the fifth member of the Group of 5 is. It’s a demon.”

  Gina looked up at him with wide eyes. “You know?”

  “Where is it?” Fay demanded.

  Lewis looked across the main square of Mérida where the four children were in floods of relieved tears as the SWAT team divested them of the bombs and paramedics stood by to assist them. The paper flowers had been scattered and trampled into a jumble. But the flowers were only a symbol of how much worse things could be.

  “The demon is here,” Lewis said. “It never left Mérida.”

  Chapter 13

  Gina marveled that Lewis could be cool and calm and completely the disciplined guardian while she was attached to him like a limpet, but she couldn’t bring herself to let him go. He looked so good. Tough, in control, steely with determination. Safe, whole, hers.

  “Where in Mérida is the demon?” Steve asked.

  Fay and Gilda were simply heads down, gazes preoccupied, concentrating on discovering the answer to that. Both were skilled demonologists.

  “I don’t know the precise address,” Lewis said. “But the Mexican drug lord who was originally targeted by the Group of 5 had a compound just outside of town, towards the coast.”

  “A compound doesn’t sound good,” Shawn muttered. “On the other hand, I feel like a bit of violence.”

  Gina glanced at him, st
artled.

  “Being a PA is stressful,” he added.

  Lewis grinned briefly.

  “Got it,” Fay said. “It’s a few miles. We’ll need vehicles.”

  Gina would never have thought of it, but Shawn and Steve acted as if it was standard practice. As the group cleared the congested, panic-stricken center of town, the two men peeled off to negotiate the purchase of battered vehicles from their owners. While the previous owners stared in bemusement at solid wads of cash in their hands, Shawn and Steve drove their cars out of sight around a corner and everyone piled in. Gina found herself sitting on Lewis’s lap in the backseat of a hot, old car that lacked air-conditioning.

  “I don’t think you should run away without telling anyone where you’re going in future,” she said.

  Shawn was driving, but Gina caught a flash of amusement in his reflection as he watched them via the rear vision mirror.

  “I’ll remember that,” Lewis said.

  “We have time for explanations, now,” Kora said from the far side of the backseat, two guardians whose names Gina hadn’t caught were stuffed in between. It was more than a tight fit. Only Gilda rode in solitary splendor in the front passenger seat. She was navigating, able—like Fay in the car in front of them—to lock onto the demon’s location.

  “Go ahead, then,” Lewis said.

  Gina bit her lip to control a giggle of relief and tension. Kora had evidently meant Lewis should explain himself. Instead, the commander of the guardians found herself reporting to him. She was brief and accurate, though, as she covered events at the Collegium headquarters.

  “Right,” Lewis said when she’d finished. He readjusted his hold on Gina, his forearm pushing up under her breasts. “When we reach the drug lord’s former home we need to remember that this demon has shown a willingness to use both mundane and magical means. So we’ll have to disable both to gain entrance. Our role here is to support Fay and Gilda to banish the demon.”

  Gina kept silent. If she said anything, he’d leave her in the car—with a guard—and she wanted to be at the confrontation. If she did nothing else, in an emergency, she could try beating the demon with her house witchery in the same way it whisked an egg. Demon soufflé. She giggled, and everyone stared at her.

  “Sorry. Funny thought. Not worth sharing.”

  Fortunately, Gilda took the attention off her by proclaiming the demon’s presence beyond the high walls of a compound just visible down a long driveway. The walls were an egg-yolk yellow stucco and topped with the glint of metal. Razor-wire, probably.

  Shawn stopped the car alongside Steve’s in the shelter of a stand of jacaranda trees, and everyone got out.

  Without a word, the guardians, including Kora, faded towards the compound.

  Gina guessed it was what they’d trained for, storming magical and mundane defenses.

  Lewis stayed with her. He stared towards the compound.

  “The demon’s aware of us,” Gilda said.

  No one responded.

  The gates of the compound swung open. Shawn strode out, gesturing them in.

  “Six minutes to disable technological defenses and guards, not to mention any wards.” Steve frowned at Fay. “Suspicious?”

  She grimaced at him. “I’d say the demon wants to party.”

  A shiver ran down Gina’s spine.

  “Then we won’t keep it waiting.” Gilda stomped forward, very much the chief demonologist.

  Lewis, though, looked to Fay.

  She shrugged. “Without the demon’s true name, we need to see it to banish it. We have to know it in some way.”

  The four of them caught up with Gilda and joined Shawn at the entrance.

  “Only two guards,” he said.

  “Good help is hard to find.” A stunning woman in a miniscule red bikini strode out of the modernist white house that sprawled within the stucco walls. She was model-beautiful, all boobs and flat stomach, her long black hair magazine-perfect in its disarray.

  “Demon, I banish you by the words of the—” Gilda began.

  “That’s the demon?” Gina whispered to Lewis. She’d never seen one before.

  She was overheard. “In the form of my summoner’s choosing.” The woman posed in the middle of the courtyard, hand on hip. If the demon was concerned at being the focus of a circle of Collegium mages, it didn’t show. “He was rather juvenile in his tastes. Insecure, possibly, about his sexuality.”

  “Was?” Lewis asked while Gilda continued her banishment spell and Fay edged sideways with Steve.

  The frown between Fay’s eyebrows was not reassuring. She seemed puzzled.

  “The woefully undereducated idiot who summoned me did so because he feared a rival drug lord. Before I could eat his heart, his enemy shot him.” The demon squeezed its left fist closed.

  Gilda’s spell faltered. Her eyes rolled back in her head. She rocked and fell backwards.

  The guardians surged forward. All of one foot.

  The demon held them.

  Except Fay. Fay kept moving and Steve, a were and immune to magic, shadowed her. Fay spoke as she circled the demon. “A drug lord who summoned a demon lord. He had ambitions.”

  “Evil but smart. I could have done a lot with him.” The demon turned its head to track Fay’s progress.

  Gina’s body was heavy, as if turned to lead. Her bones ached, too. Possibly that was the fury of her magic clashing with the demon’s. No wonder the demon was confident. It had inhabited this place for over a year. Its power was grounded in it, and its power was significant.

  “You’re strong.” The demon stared at Fay. “I’ll have to kill him.” Abruptly, the demon dropped its human form and lashed out at Steve in its incorporeal body.

  The incandescent flames that were the demon’s true form roared at Steve.

  But he wasn’t there.

  He leapt aside, and in that instant’s movement, he shifted into his leopard form.

  He was three times or more the size of a real leopard, beautiful and predatory. He snarled and swiped at the air in front of the demon.

  In mage sight, Gina saw his claws rend the demon’s warding.

  Fay danced past him, a knife in her hand, tearing further at the warding, her expression intent. They moved together in a swift, practiced fighter’s dance. This, obviously, wasn’t the first time they’d fought a demon. Blood appeared on Steve’s right shoulder, then on Fay’s face.

  “Enough,” Lewis whispered.

  “Not nearly.” The demon’s voice was a roar of flame. “But at least let me end this for you.” The demon evaded Steve, slashed at Fay, and its whole fiery, powerful form lunged at Lewis.

  Without magic, without any protection at all, Lewis would die.

  Gina flung a fire-dousing spell at the demon, intensifying it with all she had.

  The demon laughed and, undeflected, completed its lunge at Lewis.

  Lewis saw the demon fling itself at him. It wasn’t that time slowed. The Deeper Path couldn’t alter time. Morag had said as much. But his guardian training had always brought him into the moment. During a fight, he was at his most Zen.

  What clarity of sight did give him was an appreciation of the demon’s true form. Not flame. Not even magic. The demon was something completely other-worldly, and he saw how the human mage’s summoning of it remained. Fetters cut into the demon’s incorporeal form and festered, bubbling blisters of noxious purple. Agony that the demon ignored.

  As the demon launched itself at him, Lewis pushed Gina behind him. Untrained in demon combat, she’d die. His own wards, placed by others after his magic burned out, would barely resist the demon’s touch. But with clarity of sight, balanced not quite in the silver world Morag inhabited, nor in the golden threads of magic, but in his own mother of pearl moment, he gathered that aurora pearl light and threw it as a net around the demon.

  The demon paused. It flicked back into its human form, a naked gorgeous woman. “What is this?”

  But Lewis had al
ready seen the truth. “You’re in agony. I’ve seen the wounds of the summoning. Why do you stay? Why not return to your realm?”

  “Because here there is a feast of despair, of violence and hate, of fear. Such delicious fear. It is worth the agony.”

  And in that moment of gloating, gluttonous enjoyment, Fay struck.

  The blade she’d used on so many demon banishment’s tore into the demon’s human form, released its true form, and tore it, too. In fact, Fay tore open an entrance to hell.

  Lewis stared at the copper blaze that opened between the realms of Earth and the demon’s true home. Then the rip sealed. The copper light vanished. Lewis released his clarity of sight, sinking gratefully into the real and familiar three dimensional world.

  In this world, Gina was warm, solid and clutching at the back of his shirt. “Is it gone?”

  The other mages were moving again, no longer caught in the power of the demon lord.

  “Yes.” Fay returned her knife to its wrist sheathe, the blade disappearing swiftly as a result of years of practice. She approached Steve in his massive leopard form.

  The demon had torn his shoulder open, exposing the muscle. Fay tickled Steve’s whiskers. It seemed an idiotic thing to do, but even as the couple stared at one another, the wound to his shoulder began to knit together.

  “Wow,” Gina murmured. She stood beside Lewis, leaning into him, their arms around each other. That felt healing in a different way.

  “How?” Kora exclaimed. Magic oughtn’t to be able to heal weres.

  Fay didn’t answer.

  Steve rumbled a growl that sounded amused. Leopard laughter?

  “None of our business,” Lewis said. He had his own secrets to keep. “Wait! This isn’t over.”

  Guardians who were already on the move to give the villa a more thorough investigation, as per standard procedure, halted.

  “The demon is gone.” The chief demonologist was conscious, but remained seated on the ground.

  “We have to clean up,” Kora added. “We don’t know what it left behind. We can’t let mundanes just wander in. The two guards, when they wake up…” Her restatement of the obvious petered out as no one paid her any attention.