The Myth Manifestation

by Lisa Shearin

  We weren’t merely locked in. We were waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  Or the next buka.

  Ms. Sagadraco looked to Rake. “Lord Danescu, have you heard from your portal mage?”

  I sidled up to Rake when we were out of earshot. “You didn’t tell her.”

  “This is more important.”

  Important, yes. Though in my opinion, not as important as Rake’s magic not working. But with Ms. Sagadraco hosting her own little corner tea party, I could see where Rake wouldn’t want to blurt out his temporary shortcomings. He was right. His magical mojo interruptus could wait. Finding a way to get out of here couldn’t.

  The hotel was cut off from the physical world, but portals weren’t part of the physical world. Our captor might have thought of that and blocked that way out as well; or we could get lucky and that detail might have slipped their megalomaniacal mind.

  Rake had sent his portal mage down here to see if the portal still worked.

  Though if Rake’s magic was acting funky, it stood to reason that the portal mage would have been likewise afflicted, perhaps even the portal itself.

  I hadn’t been into the hotel’s basement. The renovation hadn’t made it down this far. Repaired light fixtures and a fresh coat of paint had been the extent of it. It smelled like the inside of an antique store. You could smell the old, as if the air down here was the same air from a hundred years ago.

  “Guests don’t see this part,” Rake said. He must have heard me sniff. “I changed only what was necessary.”

  “No complaints from me. I like it.”

  Rake opened the next door into a wide and pristine corridor. It was art nouveau with an emphasis on the new. It was well lit and even had art on the walls. I could see where he wouldn’t want guests who arrived via the hotel portal to get a dose of antique shabby chic.

  The six doors down the hall’s length were all equipped with wall-mounted security key pads.

  Rake went to the door at the end of the hall and knocked.

  No response.

  He knocked again. “Kenan?”

  Nothing.

  “Stand to the side,” he told me. Rake quickly keyed in a long series of numbers on the pad, followed by a retina scan. There was a click as the door unlocked.

  Rake stood to the side of the door, against the wall, and pushed the door open.

  The room’s motion-sensor lights came on in response.

  Kenan Chaitan, the portal mage, was inside, but he wasn’t moving, nor would he ever move again.

  He was dead.

  And the Regor Regency’s portal had been destroyed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I froze, not from fear, but knowing that touching anything could destroy evidence. There was nothing left in the room to be afraid of. It had come, killed, and gone.

  Rake knelt to examine the body of his portal mage. Kenan Chaitan was an older goblin. I had seen him only in passing, and we had never spoken. Rake’s touch was gentle, not from any desire to preserve evidence, but something more. This man had been more to Rake than just an employee. He had been a friend. A friend who had been brutally murdered.

  To the untrained eye, the hotel’s portal would look like a doorframe standing in the middle of the room. The frame itself was silver. The exterior was covered in runes, the interior in pale blue crystals—the crystals for power, the runes for stabilization.

  It had all been melted down to slag.

  I carefully crossed to where the body lay. “How?” I asked softly.

  “Strangulation.” Rake’s voice sounded husky. “And electrocution.”

  I blinked. “Electrocution?”

  Rake’s jaw hardened. “A mage did this. Strangling Kenan wasn’t enough. He wanted to make him suffer.”

  The word “overkill” popped unbidden into my head, but I wasn’t about to say it out loud.

  “You said ‘he.’ The killer was a man?”

  Rake nodded distractedly, his fingers straying over Kenan’s ruined throat. It looked as if he’d been burned. “The windpipe was completely crushed. A woman could have done it, but the size of the bruising and burn marks around the neck indicate a man’s hands. He was overpowered quickly. The killer began strangling him, crushed his windpipe, and while Kenan struggled to breathe, electrocuted him. That accounts for the burns.”

  I drew breath to ask how Rake knew that, but stopped myself. I knew Rake was no saint. His business dealings were merely a front for espionage. I considered bringing up the goblin governor and Dagara Jakome, but doing that would be as good as admitting that I’d been listening in. I knew Dagara was a mage; I hadn’t gotten the same vibe from the governor. If Rake thought either one could be the killer, he’d already added them to his list of possible suspects. I didn’t need to mention it. Yet.

  “What kind of mage could do that?” I asked.

  “A sick bastard.”

  “I meant, was he human? An elf or goblin? Or other?”

  “Being able to channel electricity through your body isn’t a rare skill for an advanced-level mage of any race or species,” Rake said. “They generate the charge internally. It’s similar to lightning, but not as strong. They then send the charge into their victim through touch. It doesn’t have to be lethal. A mage can function much like a living defibrillator, saving lives.” He forced his eyes away from Kenan’s throat. “Others use it to take lives.”

  I indicated the ruins of the portal frame. “Would they have had enough juice for that?”

  “That’s different.”

  “How so?”

  “More power, for one. And what was done to Kenan was electrical. Destroying the portal took heat; a lot.”

  “Can anyone on your staff do that?”

  “My battle mages.”

  “You trust all of them?”

  “Makenna, if I didn’t trust them with my life, they wouldn’t be working for me. I haven’t survived as long as I have, doing what I do, without paranoia being my best friend.”

  How had the killer gotten in here? Could he have already been inside and Kenan walked in on him? I remembered the retina scanner, and had an unwanted flashback to that scene in The Avengers where Loki needed that German scientist’s eyeball to open the safe to steal the Tesseract. Thankfully, Kenan’s eyes were intact.

  “Other than you and Kenan, how many people is the scanner authorized to let in?” I asked.

  “No one else. Kenan was attacked from the front, and there are no defensive wounds on his hands.”

  I knew what that implied.

  Rake sat back on his heels. “Kenan knew his killer, and trusted him well enough to bring him into this room.”

  “Could the killer have come through the portal and been waiting for him?” I asked.

  Rake shook his head. “Kenan never left the portal activated, and only he knew the activation codes.”

  “Could he have turned it on and brought him through?”

  “Possible, but unlikely. I’ve known Kenan for years. He came down here only to check the portal. If for some reason he needed to bring someone through, he would have cleared it with me first.”

  And if he didn’t? I thought it, but didn’t say it. The question had to have crossed Rake’s mind, as well. But if Kenan had brought his killer through the portal or into the room with him, that meant he knew him well enough to trust him; and if he trusted him, so did Rake.

  We didn’t just have a murderer in the hotel with us. We had a traitor. A traitor who didn’t want any of us to escape.

  “Could someone have overpowered Kenan psychically right after he’d unlocked the door?”

  “No. My staff mages are well trained against attacks of any kind. While it’d be impractical to have battlemages in every position, as the hotel portal mage, Kenan was more than capable of defending himself. I saw to it personally.”

  I thought of something. “Damn,” I muttered.

  “What is it?”

  “Bert.”

  Rake
now looked confused in addition to guilt-ridden.

  “Bertram Ferguson,” I clarified. “Our staff necromancer.”

  “Damn,” Rake said in realization. He’d seen Bert in action.

  “Yeah.” We couldn’t get out—and Bert couldn’t get in.

  Bert could have simply asked Kenan who had killed him. And if Kenan’s soul had already left his body, Bert had another way of getting the information. He could detect what a victim had seen in his or her final seconds of life, that is if they had seen their killer. According to Rake, the burn and strangulation marks on Kenan’s neck meant he died looking right at his murderer.

  I froze. Unless the killer had been cloaked—and invisible to anyone except a seer.

  “Rake, if the murderer was cloaked, Kenan wouldn’t have seen him. You can’t fight what you can’t see. But if there’s surveillance video, I can pick up at least a vague outline of someone using a cloak.” I stood. “I take it you have security cameras on this door?”

  Rake followed suit, smiling grimly. “You know I do.” He jerked his head toward an area over the door. “And in here.”

  Another camera.

  “Are they monitored?”

  Rake frowned. “They are. Constantly.”

  “Maybe the killer did something similar to the camera that he did to the portal.”

  “And made it look like a malfunction.”

  “I hope the camera wasn’t fried, so we can get that footage to Kenji,” I said. “If there’s anything there, Kenji can enhance it, and I should at least be able to determine height, and whether the killer was humanoid or not.”

  “That would eliminate only half of the delegates.”

  “Every little bit helps. Though we wouldn’t need any of that if Kenji’s delegate tracking program was working.”

  I pulled out my phone to notify Ian, then remembered it didn’t work, either. Nothing worked. “Son of a biscuit. I keep forgetting. Okay, stay here with Kenan. I’ll go get Ian and be right back.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Somebody’s gotta go, and you’re more qualified to stay here and guard the crime scene.”

  “There’s a cloaked murderer out there.”

  “I’m a seer. Even if it’s a good cloak, I’ll be able to see a body-shaped mass that blends with the background.”

  Rake jerked his thumb at the pile o’ melted portal. “He did that without touching it.”

  That slowed me down. “Oh.”

  He almost smiled. “May I suggest I lock the door and we both go?”

  “Or we could do that.”

  We heard the screeching and shouts before we got back upstairs to the lobby.

  Our fast walk turned into running.

  When we got there, Rake and I just stopped and stared.

  My mouth fell open, and I didn’t even bother to close it. “What fresh hell?”

  Swooping in and around the atrium and flying through the lobby were what looked like those flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz.

  Except without the cute little bellhop outfits.

  They were buck naked, and I really wished they weren’t. Some things you just didn’t want flying over your head without pants.

  They seemed to be having a good time swooping down through thirteen stories of atrium and buzzing the lobby. At least I assumed all that screeching meant they were having fun. The bukas and grimtog had been angry. Fun would be a welcome change, but it’d be even more welcome if they could have fun quietly. I was on my last couple of Advil, and since we couldn’t get out of the hotel, there was no way to get more.

  The delegates had been herded back into the ballroom, which I assumed wasn’t included in the monkeys’ flightpath. Some of our commandos were armed with the tranquilizer dart guns they’d tried unsuccessfully on the bukas. Their luck didn’t seem to have improved. Their aim was great; the darts simply weren’t working. Fortunately, the monkeys hadn’t started firing anything back. I’d once been at a zoo when a kid had pissed off a chimp. The chimp did what angry chimps do when tormented by a brat.

  There hadn’t been enough wet wipes in the world to clean that kid up.

  Yasha ambled over, seemingly unconcerned with all the ruckus.

  “They came from somewhere on the seventh floor,” he told us without waiting for us to ask. “Was weird.”

  That assessment coming from a nearly hundred-year-old werewolf said a lot.

  “Where’s Ian?” I asked.

  “On seventh floor.”

  “Gethen?” Rake asked.

  Yasha pointed straight up. “Also seventh floor.”

  I spotted Kitty over with Ms. Sagadraco. Vlad Cervenka and the goblin and elf ambassadors were no longer with her, but the boss hadn’t moved. Her only concession to dive-bombing monkeys was that she was now standing in the corner, teacup in one hand, saucer in the other. Like I said, the boss had been in London during the blitz. This was nothing.

  I darted over to Ms. Sagadraco, staying as close to the walls as I could. Rake and Yasha followed.

  We told her about Kenan Chaitan’s murder and the destruction of the hotel portal.

  As Rake related how the hotel portal mage had been killed, Yasha moved to stand protectively next to Kitty.

  When he finished, Ms. Sagadraco took a sip of tea and glanced up into the atrium. “Since these creatures appeared after we were locked in, we must consider the possibility that these acts are being orchestrated from inside the hotel. I am not implying that any of your people were responsible, Rake. Though that is something we must consider as well. More than a dozen delegates had already checked into the hotel when the bukas appeared. Some were on tours in the city, others remained here. We need to know who was in the hotel when the infiltration took place, their skill levels, and whether they bore animosity toward goblins in general and you in particular. If you wish to place the blame on me for your questioning, please feel free to do so. Could anyone have overheard you telling Kenan to check the portal?”

  “We were at the front desk,” Rake said. “There was no one in the immediate vicinity, and we kept our voices down. However,” he paused, the smooth muscles working in his jaw, “Kenan could have been followed.”

  And Rake was beating himself up over not sending one of his security team with him.

  In his mind, Kenan’s death was his fault.

  Rake’s guilt trip had stops at more than one destination. If Kenan had known his killer, it stood to reason it would have been someone he worked with. Here, in this hotel. That meant Rake had hired the killer, and that someone in all likelihood was in league with whoever had sealed us inside. As to who that individual was, we had a whole hotel full of high-ranking supernatural beings, their support staffs and security people to choose from, half of whom hated the other half. It was a just a hop, skip, and a jump from wanting to kill a few enemies while they had them all in one place, to not caring if the rest of us were collateral damage.

  The delegates did not need to find out about any of this.

  For many, the hotel portal had been their only way home. Yes, there was a portal at SPI that could be programmed to the needed coordinates, but even if we found a way out within the hour, it would take days to get them all back to their home worlds and dimensions.

  However, we still had a portal mage. One of the most powerful in the world.

  “Kitty, how many people here would know you’re a portal mage?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone I know.”

  “Good. Though we still might not want to tempt fate. Do you think you could open a portal from here to SPI HQ?”

  Kitty jerked her head toward the great murky outdoors. “Through that? Probably not, but I won’t know until I try.”

  I turned to Rake. “Do you have a safe—”

  “The penthouse. After what happened this morning, I’ve activated my full wards. And yes, at least those are still working. Plus, the penthouse is already set up for magic work. Miss Poertner will be as safe there as gold in Fo
rt Knox.”

  If Kitty could get us out of here, she was worth more than her weight in gold.

  “Yasha,” I said. “You’re officially Kitty’s bodyguard.” I gave my friend a quick smile. “Kitty, I hope you like having a werewolf for a shadow.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  We paid Kenji Hayashi a visit in his borrowed office.

  Our Chief Technology Officer was half elf, half human, and all proud geek.

  Gethen Nazar was all goblin, but he and Kenji had achieved a working relationship of mutual respect during the past week that they’d been next-door neighbors. Kenji wasn’t a mage, but what he could do with computers and all things tech approached the closest to magic a mortal could achieve.

  Kenji had brought in what he called his “portable surveillance” equipment, meaning it only took up half a room rather than the whole thing. He’d left his second-in-command in charge of SPI’s computer networks, and by extension SPI’s worldwide network, to be here.

  Kenji’s delegate identification and glamour detection program was his newest baby, and he wasn’t about to let anyone else oversee its rollout. He also served as the communications hub for both of our commando teams. In addition to comms, every commando was equipped with a body camera that let Kenji see what they saw. More than once he’d saved our people’s lives, getting help to individual commandos quickly when they’d been attacked, ambushed, or overrun.

  They considered Kenji their guardian angel.

  Those comms and body cameras weren’t working now.

  “Any luck?” Ian asked the instant he walked into the room.

  “Do I look lucky?” Kenji snapped.

  Whoa.

  Kenji was the cool and calm Zen center of SPI’s world. I’d never seen him angry, regardless of how sideways a mission went. Now he wasn’t just angry, he was pissed. His eyes were locked on his main computer display as his fingers flew across the keyboard. The wall of monitors in front of him was dark. Monitors that should have been watching over each and every one of our commandos.

  Kenji’s fingers stopped flying, and our elf tech stopped, closed his eyes, and deeply inhaled through his nose. He held his breath for a moment, then slowly exhaled.