“I’m glad you’re here at last,” I said, finally. “We couldn’t have lasted a moment longer without you.”
“Good,” Cowboy said. He gave Aylia a wink that was probably just short of sexual harassment. “And are you going to introduce me to your friend?”
“Not here,” I said, looking up towards the speck in the distance that was the dragon. As I watched, it faded into nothingness and was gone. The radar stations near the city wouldn’t have seen it, unless some pilots saw the dragon and radioed in the contact. “I think we’d better head back to the station.”
“Get out of here while the going’s good?” Cowboy asked, with another wink. “Come on, then. I’d like your opinion on something once we’re back home.”
He turned and led the way out of the Magical Mile. I felt Aylia falling into step beside me, her eyes wide with puzzlement as she took in Guardian Cowboy. Where I preferred the low-key approach, Guardian Cowboy shouted his identity to the skies, daring anyone to step into his path and challenge him. He wore a cowboy outfit from an old Western movie – except that it was all black, including the hat – and carried a pair of six-shooters. Rumour had it that he even owned a horse called Trigger. His competence was unquestioned; the same couldn’t be said for his mental stability. I had to admire him for living the dream, even as I wondered if, one day, I would be called in to stop him when he finally went mad and decided to destroy the Magical Mile.
“You seem to have a friend in a high place,” he remarked, as we left the street behind us. The tension in the air had faded when the dragon had broken the Voodoo Cultists. By now, the tourists had probably started to upload videos of the dragon from their cell phones and cameras onto the internet, starting a whole new series of rumours about their culture, motivations and treaty obligations. It would only benefit the Guardians to have others thinking that we could call on the dragons for aid. “Why did the dragon come to assist you?”
“I have no idea,” I said, truthfully. Or maybe not; they had tried to warn me that something bad was coming, hadn’t they? Were the dragons interested in keeping us – me – alive? There was no way to know. I was certain that if I asked, I wouldn’t get a straight answer. “I wondered if you might have called in a favour…?”
“I don’t have any dragons owing me favours,” Cowboy said, as we turned the corner and started to approach the station. “I did recover a set of suits some bastard had made out of dragon skin, but I forwarded most of them on to Washington instead of giving them a decent burial. They probably want to flame me to death instead of doing anything to help me.”
I nodded absently. Dragon skin is very – very – magic resistant. A suit made out of such material would be worth millions of dollars to the Guardians, or anyone else involved with the magical world, but dead dragons were very rare. Some magic-users tried to hunt dragon hatchlings to kill and skin them, but as even a baby dragon was the size of an Abrams tank and rather less friendly, it was a very dangerous occupation. There were a handful of dragons who were smaller – we called them micro-dragons – but they were nowhere near as useful for protection.
“My father tried to make a deal with the dragons for some of their scales,” Aylia said, suddenly. “They weren't interested in making a deal.”
“Sure,” Cowboy agreed. “What’s the old line about the definition of commitment? The hen is involved in making my bacon and eggs; the pig is committed! The dragons are also committed; I’ve never heard of one surviving after being skinned. The shock alone is probably fatal.”
He was making passes in the air as we approached his house and place of business and I stood back and let him get on with it. The station had once been an NYPD station before some magic-user with more ability than common sense had unleashed a particularly unpleasant ghost and pointed it into the station, perhaps as a kind of political statement. The NYPD had finally abandoned the station and sold it to the Guardians. Cowboy had walked into the station, according to his version of the story, given the ghost a hard look and it had fled screaming into the night. I rather suspected that it had seen his movie collection – every Western movie and TV series in the known universe – and decided that the horrors of the next world were preferable. The station had become his home and the main Guardian base in New York. It was also a known target for magical troublemakers and he’d surrounded it with enough wards to make breaking in difficult.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, as we finally stepped through empty air and up the steps into the station. He'd converted the Sergeant’s desk into a small office, with a typewriter, a computer and a large case of whiskey lying open on the desk. The massive street map of New York –with all the magical trouble spots marked – and the handful of pornographic pictures caught my eye; like me, he tended to turn his office into an extension of his home. “So, who’s the young filly, eh?”
“Aylia Faye,” Aylia said, in tones of ice. Cowboy’s eyes went wide, although he veiled his expressions quickly. “Who exactly are you?”
“A rude question that,” Cowboy commented, dryly. He was right. Asking someone for their real name in the magical world is insulting, even at the best of times. Names have power. “I am called Cowboy, Guardian Cowboy. You may call me sir.”
“Drop it,” I said, tiredly. After everything else, I felt too tired to handle a shouting match. I looked over at the small cage and frowned. “What the hell is that?”
“Fucked if I know what this varmint is,” Cowboy said. He lifted the cage and passed it to me. “What do you make of it?”
I looked into the cage. At first, it appeared empty…and then I had the sense of something snapping at me, trying to grab my nose. I peered at it with my Sixth Sense and saw…a ghostly creature, rather like a nightmarish crab, lunging towards me. It was translucent, the sign of a ghost, but the spells around the cage held it firmly in place. Aylia squeaked as she saw it clearly, but I barely heard her. I wouldn’t have been a Guardian if I couldn’t handle the sight…and really, it wasn't the worst thing I’d seen.
“I don’t know what it is,” I said. It bore little resemblance to anything I’d seen before; at least, anything I’d seen outside my nightmares. “What was it doing?”
“Just after I was finished with the sniper, cars started to crash near one of the tunnels,” Cowboy said. He took the cage back and placed it carefully on the desk. “I went there at once and…there were drivers just going crazy, smashing their cars around as if they were riding the dodgems. I tried to stop it by stopping some of the crazy drivers and others just started to go crazy instead, so I searched for the cause and finally saw this bastard…thing jumping from person to person. It possessed them for a short period and made them go crazy. I managed to lure it into a trap and caught it when I heard that all hell was about to break loose in the Magical Mile.”
“A possessing ghost?” I mused. It didn’t look like a ghost, but most ghosts are really just reflections of a person, caught in an endlessly repeating loop. They’re really magical recordings of shocking and traumatic events, mainly deaths, although there are some ghosts of people who are still alive. They linger around the scene of their deaths and upset people. “Or perhaps a demon of some kind?”
“I don’t know,” Cowboy said. “The interesting part is what I found nearby.”
He opened his own magical satchel and produced a collection of loosely-bound pages. They looked as if someone had printed them out, one by one, and then stapled them together, without regard for their survival. I also recognised them at once. They were identical to the pages in the book I’d recovered at the school, before I had been summoned to face the dragons.
“Shit,” I said. I had expected that there would be hundreds of copies floating around by now, but it was still a shock to encounter a second. “Who owned that?”
“I have no idea,” Cowboy said. “I did a quick sweep with searching spells and found nothing. I’ll hand it over to New York’s Finest and see if they can make something out of it. My gu
ess is that something was trying to summon a demon to grant them eternal wealth and power or something” – he glanced at the cage with a faint expression of disgust – “and ended up with this little beauty instead.”
“They must have been very disappointed,” I said gravely, but I could see the danger. The chances were good that the users hadn’t realised that they had succeeded in summoning something and had probably let it out of the circle by accident. They were probably dead by now, or running for their lives. “Never mind that now. What the hell was going on with the Voodoo Cult?”
He took off his hat and glared down at it. “They’ve been growing in power and influence lately,” he said. “They’ve been bringing in all kinds of unpleasant artefacts from Haiti and elsewhere and trying to sell them to the tourists, while there have been persistent rumours involving human sacrifice and even zombies.”
“I can confirm that,” I said, outlining what we’d found on the street. “Why didn’t you report it?”
“I did,” he said. “I reported it to the Mayor and to Washington. The former told me to give them a wide berth and the latter did nothing. The Mayor doesn’t want anything challenging his position when the next set of elections rolls around, but I’d bet good money that the bastard loses his position. It’s all very well when the craziness stays in the Magical Mile – New York does so love a sucker – but when it starts to leak out…”
He shrugged. “I’ll scream again at Washington for a while,” he added. “The new Commissioner for the NYPD is more of a stickler than the last, so maybe we’ll get heard. I don’t know what we’re going to do about it, though; that sniper might well have been the last straw for many of the citizens.”
I winced. A magician of pretty much any kind is not the most stable of personalities. The more power a magician amasses to himself, the more his grip on reality starts to slide away, leaving him in a world where power is all and the meek will not inherit the Earth. Most magic-users who don’t manage to kill themselves succeed in keeping themselves collected, but a handful lose it completely and end up lashing out at any convenient targets. They’re incredibly dangerous because their madness gives them access to powers they would never normally have been able to use, but like the candle that burns at both ends, they die quickly. While they live, however, they can do an astonishing amount of damage.
“Who was it?” I asked, finally. “Was it someone from the Voodoo Cult?”
“Fucked if I know,” Cowboy said. His gaze seemed to slip slightly. He was just as tired as I was, maybe more so. “By the time I reached the body, it was completely unrecognisable; the magic had burned it all to a crisp.”
“I’ll let you two chat for a while,” Aylia said, suddenly. “Can you point me towards the little girls room?”
“Down there,” Cowboy said. He watched as she slipped out the door. “You do know who she is, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said, flatly. I had expected that question sooner or later. “I’m stuck with her for the moment.”
“I bet that that’s not a problem,” Cowboy said. He gave me a smile that was almost a leer. “Fond of her, are you?”
I ignored the sally. “I could use your advice,” I admitted, and outlined what we’d discovered so far. I carefully avoided mentioning either the Beauty Stone or the Faerie weapon, but I told him everything else. “I don’t know where to go now.”
“Pixie Dust,” Cowboy repeated. He made a big show of stroking his chin. I don’t know why he bothered shaving in the morning. It was probably something to do with his lunatic self-image. “I don’t know many small dealers who would have access to more than a tiny handful. The damned stuff is so illegal that most dealers would prefer not to have anything to do with the stuff. I don’t think that even Faye himself could have obtained such vast amounts.”
“Maybe not,” I said. Was Faye ruthless enough to have the dust prepared for him specially? Perhaps he was. Perhaps not. “Is there anyone who might be able to obtain it?”
“It’s not easy to go hunting Pixies here,” Cowboy said. He looked up at his map and scowled, before picking up a cigarette, lighting it with a glance and taking a long puff. “We have a dozen groups trying to prevent people from preying on the poor helpless magical creatures” – we shared a grin; the helpless magical creatures accounted for hundreds of hunters every year – “and it’s not the safest of professions. I’d say that the stuff probably came in from overseas, maybe from China or Thailand. It could have come from Latin America, but the political situation wouldn’t allow them to hunt safely.”
“The hunters could probably buy the country,” I said, sourly. It hadn’t been that long since I’d lost a known criminal to Peru after he’d bribed a few high-ranking government officers. The bastard was still living large on his takings while I’d been embarrassed publicly. “Even so, getting it into the country wouldn’t be easy…”
“Maybe,” Cowboy said. “Have you thought about the Hole in the Wall?”
I swore. The Hole in the Wall was forbidden territory to Guardians, although we had actually sent several agents in at one time or another. It was a pocket dimension that, unlike most other pocket dimensions, wasn't connected permanently to a single location on Earth. The Wizard who’d created it had promptly declared it a free and independent nation and opened up shop to anyone who wanted to buy and sell anything. No Government in the world had been able to do anything about it…and most of them were quite happy to allow them to continue trading unmolested. It was the last place in the world I would consider taking Aylia, at least until she had been properly trained.
“It’s the most likely place for the stuff,” Cowboy added. “Failing that…what about Maxwell?”
I considered it. Maxwell was a sorcerer with a heavy line in various potions. He had probable connections to the Hole in the Wall – we believed that he was the damned place’s representative in North America – but no one had been able to prove anything. He might not have been the most powerful magician in the world, but his connections ensured that very few would dare to annoy him, unless they were backed by a stronger power.
“That might be the best place to look,” I said. I frowned. There was no way that we would get a warrant to search his house. Even if we did, we would be unable to prevent him from destroying all the evidence before we managed to seize it. Any magician involved with criminal activity knows to keep the evidence in a pocket dimension and destroy it – wiping the evidence completely from existence – before allowing it to fall into our hands. A truth spell might work, but someone with the power to create a pocket dimension could shrug one off with ease. “Perhaps…”
“Perhaps you should ask yourself if you trust your girlfriend,” Cowboy added, firmly. “Do you think that she can be trusted?”
“I like her,” I admitted. It was more than that, I privately confessed to myself. “I wish I knew…”
“Put her under a hypnotic spell,” Cowboy suggested. “If she refuses to undergo the spell, she’s hiding something.”
“So is most of the population,” I replied, crossly. There were very few people who liked undergoing hypnotic spells and surrendering all control of themselves to someone else. “Why don’t you keep your advice to yourself?”
“And then who would benefit?” Cowboy asked. “Why don’t you…?”
He broke off as an alarm sounded in the room. “Shit,” he announced grimly. A red light was pulsing on the map. “We’ve got trouble.”
Chapter Twenty-One
What is the reward for doing a good job? A harder job.
-Anon
Aylia came running back into the room.
“What’s that noise?” She asked, wiping her hands on a paper towel. “What’s happening?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Cowboy said. He stepped over to the crystal ball and glared into the formless mists. “Oh, hell. There’s a freaking monster heading out of the Magical Mile into the city, smashing all in front of it.”
“Too many Go
dzilla movies for someone,” I decided. If nothing else, tackling it would be a distraction from everything else. “Can’t the police stop it?”
“They’re still arguing about what should be done about it,” Cowboy said. For a moment, his face twisted with helpless rage. “God damn the Mayor and his cronies!”
“We’ll deal with it,” I said, standing up. The Faerie weapon felt heavy in my pocket. The vast majority of supernatural creatures have some immunity to conventional weapons, but not all of them…and I would bet that the Faerie weapon could still hurt them. “Aylia, I want you to remain here.”
Aylia stared at me. “But…”
“No buts, not now,” I said. “You promised to do as I said and this is going to be dangerous enough for the two of us. I can’t deal with the creature while I’m worrying about you too.”
“I could put you in one of my cells if you want,” Cowboy added. I gave him a look that said, very clearly, shut up. He ignored it magnificently. “You may see the creature anyway. It’s coming this way.”
“Come on, then,” I said, and turned for the door. “Aylia, stay here, please.”
Guardian Glass Page 19