Detonation Boulevard (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 2)

by Craig Schaefer

  “The stone is impervious,” Ezra said. “There are no windows, only the sculpted impressions of arches where windows might stand in a church built by human hands. The doors are sealed by a lock with no keyhole.”

  “Someone didn’t want anybody getting in there,” Daniel said. “Or letting whatever is in there out. You know, in my experience—and I do have experience with this kind of thing—that’s a real big sign that you should leave it alone.”

  Ezra stared at the screen, lost in thought.

  “The first time I went down there, the doors…responded. They trembled before me, but would not open. I’m not so egocentric as to think the cathedral is there just for me.” He looked to Marie and Nessa. “I think it’s for us. If the doors shook in the presence of one born from the first story, what might they do if more of us stand united? And that’s the deal I want to make with you. Help me. Work with me. If we have any hope of unraveling this curse, it’s in there. I know it, in my heart.”

  “What do you think is inside?” Marie asked.

  “Look at this place. Across worlds, across centuries, we stand at the bottom of an ocean never touched by human hands—but look. The iconography, the shape, the visions of a primal faith.”

  Ezra turned, slowly, and locked eyes with her.

  “I believe that God has a secret,” he said. “And beyond those doors, that’s where we’ll find it.”

  Nessa had been silent, taciturn, but now she spoke up. “Have you heard of Wisdom’s Grave?”

  Ezra’s brow furrowed. He thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “My predecessor, the incarnation who sent us a warning, she told us it’s the wellspring of magic. The resting place of the first witch who ever lived. She said if there was any weapon capable of winning this fight, that’s where we’d find it.” Nessa’s gaze turned to the screen. “Cathedrals sometimes have catacombs, don’t they? Or tombs, for martyred saints.”

  “Anything is possible. What do you say we make this an official partnership?”

  He held out his hand, smooth and firm, a diamond Rolex on his wrist, and gave Marie a spotlight of a smile.

  “Won’t you shake my hand?”

  She reached for it. Almost.

  But her instincts had been shouting out since she walked into the galleria. Ezra painted a picture with words. Her gut offered up a counterargument. And years on the street, badge in hand, had taught her to trust her gut more than she would ever trust the word of a salesman.

  “Tell me something,” Marie said. “At dinner, you mentioned that Carolyn is working with you now.”

  “That’s right. Happy as a clam, like I said. She could only accomplish so much on her own. She’s at our Pyramid Lake facility. Let’s seal the deal, and I’ll take you there. We can fly out tonight, as a matter of fact. I understand you’re quite the fan; finally getting to meet her must be exciting. You won’t be disappointed. She’s a very impressive lady.”

  He was trying to derail her. She didn’t let him. His hand was unwavering, demanding hers.

  “If that’s the case,” Marie said, “then why did you ransack her house? Because the only reason to do that is if you wanted something from her. Something she wouldn’t willingly give you.”

  The smile stayed on his lips, but it drained from his eyes. His hand didn’t move.

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, and he was so good she almost believed him.

  On the other side of the doorway, Rosales jumped onto the circle of stone. She poked her head through the shimmering curtain. “Boss. Need you. Now.”

  Jarred, Ezra dropped his hand and turned. “What is it? Don’t tell me the generators are acting up again.”

  “We’ve got company. Security cameras showing intruders in the mall.”

  “After hours? That’s generally a self-correcting problem, but…” He shook his head, frustrated, and pointed his cane toward the archway. “All right, field trip is over. Let’s get this sorted out. Though to be honest, I expect the galleria will sort it out for us.”

  “I don’t think so,” Rosales told him. “Our cameras picked up sound, some chatter on their way in. I wouldn’t have believed it from the video, but I recognize her voice.”

  “Her?” he asked.

  “Dr. Cross. And I don’t know who the guy with her is, but he’s walking around with a fuckin’ katana like he just stepped out of a samurai movie, so I don’t think she’s here to ask for her old job back.”

  Thirty-Six

  At night, the galleria locked itself down. Shutters rolled to seal off the few stores that remained, and the overhead lights along its blighted boulevards went dark one by one. The PA system stayed on. It warbled an instrumental version of a Beatles song, and as inky shadows spread across the dead shopping mall, the tune distorted like a warped record under a slow and broken needle.

  A fist-sized chunk of concrete sailed through the main entrance. The door shattered in a cascade of jagged glass shards as the chunk skipped off the brick-pattern tile and came to rest against a planter. A burglar alarm trilled, off-key. A few seconds after it began, the alarm died, shorting out in a spritz of electronic noise. Only the music remained.

  Savannah drifted over the threshold, the ragged hem of her robes dangling half an inch above the floor. Scottie followed right behind her. Broken glass crunched under his imported Italian wingtips. His wooden fingers, sheathed under a driving glove, twitched against the hilt of his sword. They were eager things.

  “You sure they’re here?” he asked. “This place looks deserted.”

  Savannah tilted her rag-wrapped face to the skylights. Her nose twitched.

  “Oh, they’re here. I don’t need the machine this close. I can feel them. Their blood is singing. And they aren’t alone.”

  Scottie held his sword ready as he took the lead, advancing into the mall.

  “Who else?”

  “My former employer is here,” she replied.

  “Did you like him?”

  “Not enough to let him live.”

  The beam of a flashlight strobed across their faces. A figure shambled from the dark, half-carved from shadows. He was the suggestion of a man in the suggestion of a uniform, with a badge that ran like drips of mercury down his chest. His jaw opened—and then unhinged, drooping at a broken angle as his tongue lolled. His voice burbled up from a throat choked with cemetery dirt.

  “Don’t…belong here.”

  He wasn’t alone. More shapes emerged all around them, seeming to melt from the walls, some slipping through metal grates before gelling into physical form. Scottie moved back, sidestepping as he looked for a way out.

  “Uh, Dr. Cross?”

  “Little ghosts,” Savannah sighed.

  Her rags billowed behind her as she boiled through the air. Her nails raked down, claws dragging through a watchman’s skull, and he burst in a cloud of gossamer smoke. She whirled and lashed out with her other fist, punching through another apparition’s chest.

  “Foolish little ghosts.”

  * * *

  A klaxon sounded through the abandoned department store, triggered by the security alarm on the galleria doors. It cut out, and then Ezra’s voice echoed over the loudspeakers.

  “Listen up. We’ve got some unfriendlies on site, and the mall’s natural defenses aren’t slowing them down. I need everybody to the quarantine wall, pronto. Hold the line and shoot to kill.”

  Rosales herded the guests back to the women’s department on the first floor, toward the changing rooms with the flimsy reversed locks. Daniel dug his heels in.

  “I don’t think that’s going to keep us safe,” he said. “Tell you what, how about me and my friends take a hike, and we’ll catch up later? Call us, we’ll do a meeting.”

  Rosales’s hand cleared her holster in the blink of an eye. The barrel of her .45 pressed to the middle of Daniel’s forehead.

  “I don’t have the time or the inclination to pla
y games with you,” she said. “Stay put. If you’re not standing right here when I get back, I will hunt you down. And you won’t like that. Boss wants you alive. He didn’t specify how many pieces he wants you alive in.”

  Daniel backpedaled up the stubby hallway, with Nessa and Marie close behind him. Rosales didn’t waste time locking them in. She turned on her heel and charged into the fray, leaving them behind.

  “I’m calling bullshit on this entire situation,” Daniel said.

  “Seconded,” Marie replied. “Ezra is lying to us. I don’t know exactly what he’s lying about, but nothing about this is on the up-and-up. We need to get out of here. Did anyone see an emergency exit?”

  Nessa shook her head. “I was looking, believe me. All the exits are boarded over and reinforced. The only way out is through the security cordon. And even if we can get past the gunmen, and Rosales, we’re hardly home free.”

  “You know this ‘Dr. Cross’?” Daniel asked. His gaze darted between Nessa and Marie. “How much trouble is she?”

  “Last time we met,” Nessa said, “she nearly killed me. I tore her to shreds, quite literally, and evidently she’s bounced back stronger than ever. I’m not looking for a rematch until I figure out how she did it.”

  Marie held the enchanted bag tight against her side. Her fingertips traced nervous circles across the mirrors’ faces.

  “We do have one way out,” she said.

  “When the time is right,” Nessa murmured, reciting the note they found at the Bast Club, “you’ll know what to do with it.”

  Daniel looked between them, not following. Then it dawned on him.

  “Oh, no. No. Hell no. We are not plugging that card into Ezra’s machine. Even if it works, which is a long shot—”

  Marie brandished the tarot card, turning it to catch the light. The golden circuitry gleamed.

  “A long shot?” she said. “It’s the exact same size as the ‘bookmarks’ they found in Carlo’s suit. You can’t tell me that’s a coincidence.”

  “A music CD is the exact same size as a Blu-ray. Doesn’t mean you can play them in the same machine. Besides, what if it does work? Are you seriously just going to jump into an interdimensional portal, with no idea where it leads? What if it’s the same place that got Carlo killed? What if you can’t come back?”

  “If the alternative is death,” Nessa said, “any odds are good odds. Besides, someone went to an extravagant amount of trouble to get that card into our hands.”

  He threw his open hands up. “Fine. Fine. Okay, look, I’m going to hunt for a way out of here. Just…stall as long as you can, okay? If I find another exit before you get the machine working—a not-leaving-this-dimension kind of exit—promise you’ll come with me.”

  “Be quick about it,” Nessa told him.

  * * *

  A firing line stood at the quarantine wall, rifles shouldered high, sights trained on the doorway sheathed in yellow plastic.

  They waited.

  One of the soldiers spoke, his voice muffled by his gas mask: “This a drill?”

  The man beside him gave a tiny shake of his head. Behind his mask’s oval lenses, his eyes narrowed. His fingertip brushed the trigger.

  The plastic drape exploded open like the lid of a jack-in-the-box. Birds billowed through the doorway in a screeching, mad-eyed frenzy. Ravens, oily feathers, bodies forged from congealed darkness. The men opened fire, shooting fast and blind, their muzzle flash strobing hot white against the flood of shadows as the birds swooped and screamed all around them.

  The birds rippled, scattered, and vanished. One last shell casing clattered to the tile floor.

  “Mag change!” shouted one of the soldiers, popping his rifle’s empty magazine and reaching for the fresh one on his hip. He wasn’t alone. In the sudden frenzy of the moment, half of the firing line had lost their discipline and their senses. A couple were still standing there, stunned, looking for the vanished birds and trying to put together what they’d just witnessed.

  The curtain blew open again, and this time, the man blazing into the store was no illusion. He proved it with a single downward chop of his sword. A rifle tumbled to the floor. So did the arm that was cradling it.

  As a soldier fell to his knees, clutching the spurting stump of his shoulder and howling behind his mask, Scottie was already on the move. He spun, his blade trailing garnets of blood, and drove his sword through another man’s stomach. He gave the weapon a vicious twist before ripping it free. He was in the middle of the firing line, throwing the order of battle into sudden close-quarters chaos. One of the troopers on the end hip-fired a burst from his rifle. Scottie gracefully sidestepped just before he pulled the trigger. Three rounds plowed into another rifleman’s chest, sending him crashing to the floor. The shooter joined him a heartbeat later when Scottie whirled like a dervish and sliced him from his neck to his hip.

  The last of Ezra’s men fell to the floor in two ragged chunks. Scottie stood over the corpse, his face and his tailored suit drenched in the blood of the dead, a manic grin pasted to his face. Scarlet rolled down the length of his blade in long, syrupy rivulets and pattered onto his shoes. Breathing heavy, he looked up. A new challenger had arrived, standing over by the silent escalators, fifteen feet away.

  “Where’s your uniform, soldier?”

  “Me?” Daniel asked. The remnants of his deck of cards leaped from his hip pocket, riffling into his open palm. “Oh, I’m not with those guys.”

  “Just shopping?”

  “I love this place.” Daniel waved an idle hand, taking in the empty shelves and the tangles of electrical cord. “It has everything. Dust bunnies, creepy dead people, white dudes running around and carving people up with Japanese swords. Who could ask for anything more?”

  The blade turned in Scottie’s grip. He flicked his wrist. A rainstorm of blood drew a spattered line across the floor.

  “I’ll have you know,” he said, “I spent a summer in Osaka when I was studying at Cambridge.”

  “This is my not-surprised face. So, uh, out of curiosity, who exactly are you here to kill?”

  “Technically? Everybody. That said, I’m really just looking for Marie Reinhart. Seen her around?”

  “Maybe,” Daniel said. “What’s she to you?”

  “Bitch killed my best friend. And she cut my fingers off.”

  Daniel stared at Scottie’s left hand. Then his right. Their eyes met.

  “I’m better now,” Scottie said.

  “Most people don’t recover from something like that. Don’t suppose I could convince you to let bygones be bygones?”

  Scottie’s foot slid to one side, leaving a smear of blood in its wake as he squared his stance. He braced the katana in both hands.

  “Don’t think so,” he said.

  “Well, that’s going to be a problem for me. Hey, you ever see Raiders of the Lost Ark?”

  “Sure. What about it?”

  “I’m just saying,” Daniel told him, “you brought a sword to a gunfight.”

  “Try me.”

  Daniel’s fingertips slapped against his cards. The king of spades fired from the top of the deck, whining through the air in a razor-edged blur, straight for Scottie’s throat.

  Scottie barely seemed to move. Just a twist of his wrist, a calm flick of the blade, and Daniel’s card fluttered to the floor in two pieces.

  “Oh,” Daniel said.

  Scottie took one prowling step toward him.

  Daniel spread three cards between his fingertips, dropped to a crouch, and let them fly. Scottie twisted his body to one side, pivoting on the ball of his foot as he brought his sword up. One of the cards shot past him, going wide, and two more joined the decapitated king of spades on the floor at his feet.

  “I bet that usually works,” Scottie said. He took another step, slowly closing the gap between them.

  “Usually, yeah. More often than not.”

  “It’s a cool trick, I’ll give you that. Want to see mine?�
�

  Scottie’s voice dropped to a low, hard whisper, jagged consonants dripping off his tongue like chunks of rusted metal. His blade gleamed in response, rising to the demands of his incantation—then ignited. Orange flames rolled along the steel edge, casting Scottie’s blood-spattered grin in flickering jack-o’-lantern light.

  Thirty-Seven

  While gunfire and the dying screams of Ezra’s men rang out from below, Marie and Nessa bolted to the dimensional gateway. The machines were abandoned, Bran having fled his post when the invasion began, and the circle of stone stood silent. Marie hovered over the control panel. It looked like the cockpit of a jumbo jet, a cacophony of dials and gauges and switches, half of them unlabeled and the rest adorned with red strips of punch tape bearing cryptic numbers and acronyms. Amber lights along the console still shone, glowing soft and steady.

  “We might be able to get it working,” Marie said. “I mean, he didn’t have time to shut the whole system down.”

  “Here,” Nessa said. A ribbon cable tethered the main control panel to a plastic-lidded box at the far end of the table. Beneath the hinged lid, a rectangular depression lined with golden pins sat empty, waiting to be fed.

  Marie pulled the lid up and set the tarot card, circuit-side down, into the depression. It was a perfect fit. The painted card, the Empress wearing Nessa’s face, stared up at them with stern eyes. The box clicked shut. On the console, one of the amber lights began to throb in anticipation, set into the brushed steel just above a bright red button.

  Down below, the gunfire fell silent. Marie wished she could take that as a good sign, but she knew better.

  Nessa hit the button. The generators on the far side of the floor began to whine. Lights shone down from the tripods, casting the stone circle in a gathering whirlwind of color.

  Their fingers twined, hands squeezing tight, as the faintest outline of a doorway began to shimmer upon the stone.

  “What if we can’t come back?” Marie asked.

  Nessa’s glasses captured the kaleidoscope of light, a circus carousel in her eyes.