The Myth Manifestation

by Lisa Shearin

  While the maître d’ didn’t help us out of the elevator shaft/snake pit, he was only too happy to step into the next room and call his boss for me. I was sure he’d had plenty of practice finding Rake in his own hotel to deal with any unpleasantness that landed on his doorstep. And right now, Kenji and I more than qualified as unpleasant.

  While the maître d’ made his phone call, we took the opportunity to do what we’d come here to do.

  Find that glamoured goblin.

  The key to not being questioned anywhere you went was looking like to you belonged there. In our present state, it was obvious that Kenji and I did not belong in a restaurant that had been awarded three Michelin stars last year. We fell back to the second key to not being questioned—look like you had every right to be there. We were wearing SPI’s SWAT-lite uniforms, we were armed, and the hotel had been sealed in a pocket dimension. We had ourselves a bona fide emergency. Yes, two of my guns fired paint, and Kenji’s sole weapon was a badge scanner that looked like a phaser, but it was all about attitude. And after nearly being enveloped in a nest of giant snakes, we had attitude aplenty.

  So much for our plan of taking a casual stroll around the twelfth floor.

  Kenji tried to wipe his oily hands on the front of his pants. “I think he was more upset that we didn’t have a reservation.”

  By asking the maître d’ to call Rake, I’d bought us a few unchaperoned minutes to find that goblin, and I’d fulfilled my duty to call for backup. Two birds, one stone. Yes, we got some strange looks from the kitchen staff, but all that mattered to me was eliminating suspects until we found our goblin. Whatever our guy’s intentions had been here, he’d probably run for the stairs when he’d heard me and Kenji scream. Though the maître d’ hearing us and opening those elevator doors was why we were walking around a restaurant instead of being an early lunch for snakes.

  If we didn’t find him, we could have Argus pull the surveillance video for the elevator and the foyer area of The Dunmor. Hopefully, the surveillance camera had been working when he’d been in the elevator. If so, that would at least let us read his tag and see the name he was using. Then we could have Gethen pull the most recent data on where this guy had been and when.

  What it wouldn’t do was give me a look at his real face.

  All I would be able to tell from a video image was that he was glamoured. I already knew that.

  The Dunmor’s main dining room was set for lunch. The delegates were being served breakfast in a special dining room set up downstairs, but for lunch and dinner, they had their choices of the hotel restaurants. As Kenji and I walked slowly through the room—careful not to touch and get oil on anything—the elf tech got his scanner in his hand, but held it against the side of his leg and out of sight.

  I nodded toward a closed door on the other side of the room. Having been here before, I knew that behind that door were The Dunmor’s three private dining rooms. I snagged a napkin off a table to use on the doorknob. Other than the restrooms, it was the only place we hadn’t searched.

  We stopped in front of the door. I listened for only a moment. There were doors leading to the kitchen, and if our quarry was in there, I didn’t want to give him the chance to escape. I wish I would’ve thought about it sooner and had Kenji wait in the kitchen if he tried to get out the back way.

  I took a breath, met Kenji’s eyes, nodded, and slowly opened the door.

  The first room was empty.

  At first, I thought the next one was empty as well. A black-haired, black-clad goblin in the corner of a dimly lit room doesn’t exactly stand out. His back was to us, and he was intent on whatever he was doing, and we weren’t going to get a better opportunity.

  Kenji silently raised the scanner, aimed, and fired.

  BEEP!

  We both hit the floor, but the jig was up.

  The goblin’s head jerked up at the sound, and I saw his reflection in the gilt-framed mirror covering half the back wall.

  He was not a goblin.

  This was an elf.

  I got a clear look beneath his glamour for a blink of an eye, and then his face turned into a swarm of pixels. It was as if I was seeing his face on a video.

  What the hell?

  Then things got really trippy.

  The elf dived into the mirror. Like it was a swimming pool.

  The mirror rippled once with his passing, then appeared to return to normal.

  I got my real gun in one hand, and keeping it pointed at the mirror that now only showed my and Kenji’s reflections, quickly crossed the room. I reached out with my other hand, which was now shaking, and touched the mirror.

  It was solid.

  Oh boy.

  “Don’t you have a silencer on that thing?” I asked Kenji, while Rake hustled his maître d’ out of the room.

  “I will now.”

  Gethen had turned up the room’s lights to normal levels and was inspecting the mirror for the umpteenth time. “This is a dead mirror.”

  “Well, it arose from the dead long enough for that elf to dive through.”

  I’d stopped telling everyone that Kenji and I had been standing right there and had seen him do it. We knew what we saw, and we would not be changing our story. Gethen knew that. His problem was reconciling our eyewitness testimony with what was in front of his face.

  Ian was standing where the elf had been. There was nothing there except the wall, the mirror, and the floor. “Rake, we need to get this mirror off the wall. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “None. I’ll help. Let’s lay it down on the table.”

  Kenji and I started clearing the dishes. We’d cleaned up as much as we could. To save the maître d’ a panic attack, we’d done our cleaning up in the janitor’s closet. It was the only place with anything strong enough to cut through elevator-cable grease and snake spit.

  Putting the mirror on the table positioned it directly below one of the now-bright ceiling lights. We could see every nook, cranny, and carved curve of the gilt frame. The mirror itself didn’t look that old, and even had an inch-wide bevel around its edge next to the wooden frame. I didn’t know if that indicated a modern mirror, but it looked like one to me.

  I leaned in close to the corner the elf had been standing in front of, the same section he’d jumped through. The entire mirror had rippled like a pool when he’d made his exit, but this corner was where he’d gone in.

  I knelt and got eye level with the reflective surface. If I hadn’t, I never would have seen it. “What’s this?”

  Rake knelt next to me. “Where?”

  I pointed, but was careful not to touch it. “The square piece of mirror, right in the corner. It’s only like half an inch.”

  Kenji leaned in. “That’s not a mirror. That’s a microchip.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Rake and Gethen had dispatched hotel security mages to the location of every manifestation. They now knew what they were looking for. Kenji had detached the chip from the mirror and was studying it the best he could with the equipment he’d brought with him.

  There had been a mirror at the scene of nearly every manifestation, twenty-six in all. Hotel security found chips attached to seventeen. From there they’d moved on to check every mirror in the hotel.

  Vivienne Sagadraco was to have hosted a lunch in that dining room for the elf and goblin ambassadors and both colonial governors.

  That mirror had covered half of the dining room’s wall. I didn’t want to think about what could have come through. Kenji and I might have prevented a slaughter this morning.

  We were downstairs in security, looking at surveillance videos, tracking the elf’s movements from the time he’d entered that lobby elevator until he’d made his mirror-assisted exit.

  The camera in the private dining room had been mounted in the corner of the ceiling where the elf had been planting his microchip, so he’d been out of range. It did, however, capture me and Kenji in all our spazzy glory as he’d shot the
elf with his scanner gun.

  Ian and Rake had finally stopped laughing. Even Gethen Nazar had joined in.

  Kenji and I had both frozen, gone wide-eyed, and dropped to the floor after the beep that was heard round the world. Like hitting the floor had hidden us from this guy.

  I had my arms crossed. “Yes, it was very funny. Can we get back to business?”

  The elf had only glamoured from the neck up, probably to minimize the chance of detection. He’d worn gloves to conceal his non-gray hands. As we’d watched him on the surveillance cameras, he’d made his way across the lobby to the elevators, into the elevator itself, and then exited onto the twelfth floor. All the while, his gloved right hand kept going to something clipped to his belt.

  Rake leaned in closer. “Argus, zoom in on that.” He didn’t need to specify; we’d all seen the elf fidgeting.

  “It’s like he’s checking to make sure something is still there,” I said.

  “Or covering it up whenever anyone gets close.” Rake indicated the stopped video of the maître d’ confronting the elf at the elevator. “When Niall met him at the elevator, the elf moved his hand to hide it.”

  Argus’s magnification showed a device about the size of my iPhone, but three times as thick.

  “Looks like a phone,” I said.

  “But it’s not,” said Kenji from the open doorway. “At least not a normal one.” He held up a nearly identical device. “This is my phone. It’s also my direct interface with the HQ mainframe, and a transmitter and receiver for our comms, among about half a dozen other devices.” He flashed a grin. “It’s also the world’s most responsive gaming controller.” He nodded toward the image on Argus’s screen. “Though mine doesn’t let me jump through mirrors. Do we know who he is yet?”

  I indicated where Gethen was seated at a desk with a laptop. “He’s getting some mug shots ready for me to look at.”

  One of the hotel security mages appeared in the doorway and held up what looked like a discarded hotel nametag in a zippy bag. There was what looked like some wet coffee grounds in the bag with it.

  Gethen glanced up and swore.

  I was in complete agreement.

  The hotel’s employee security system had tracked the tag to the hotel’s kitchens. It was merely the busiest place in the whole hotel right now. We were smack dab between breakfast and lunch.

  “Where did you find it?” Gethen asked his mage.

  “In the kitchen trash, sir.”

  And hence the zippy bag.

  Kenji’s scan had shown that the badge belonged to the hotel’s goblin maintenance manager, a job that had given our elf unquestioned access to nearly the entire hotel. Gethen had pulled the manager’s activity logs for the past month. He’d said that everything had looked normal. There’d been no absences at all, and he’d been responding to maintenance calls as usual. Rake had searched his office, but had found nothing out of the ordinary.

  “And since we can’t get out of the hotel, there’s no way to know if the real manager is dead or missing,” Ian was saying.

  “Whoever it is doesn’t want us to leave,” I said, “and wants to keep any help from getting in. At least the critters that keep popping up are contained to the hotel. That’s bad enough, but what if they decide to open a door, so to speak, and start releasing these beasties into the city.”

  I was suddenly the target of multiple dirty looks.

  I held up my hands. “Hey, I’m not asking for even more trouble, just raising a valid concern.”

  “I’m ready, Agent Fraser,” Gethen said.

  We had a sketch artist at SPI headquarters who drew from the images she could see while linked to your mind. No need to describe the perp; Cheryl just put her hands on either side of your head while you were remembering what you saw, and voilà. Instant mug shot.

  Anything I drew would look like a stick figure.

  Rake’s security people had a database of every elf who was under surveillance by goblin intelligence. Hopefully, this guy had warranted that kind of attention in the past.

  Gethen had pulled up the photos they had for me to look at.

  I pulled up a chair next to Gethen. I had a good memory and remembered my blink-of-an-eye view of the elf’s glamoured face. Maybe the device he carried had been responsible for the pixilation that had followed. My gut told me that I’d seen this guy before, but I had no idea where. I was racking my brain, but all I’d managed to come up with was that I’d seen his face. I didn’t think I’d ever met him in person.

  He’d been tall, slender, and blond. The lighting had been too dim to give me a good look at his eyes, though they were probably blue or green. Of course, that description applied to most of Earth’s elf population; but like I’d said, I remembered that face. He’d been as surprised to see us as we’d been to see him. He hadn’t expected to be caught.

  After ten minutes of scrolling, I hit pay dirt. “That’s him.”

  Gethen stopped scrolling, his eyes darting to Rake.

  Ian leaned in and studied the photo over my shoulder. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’m also certain and positive.”

  In a creak of leather, Rake leaned back in the desk chair he’d taken for himself, his expression grim. “Phaeon Silvanus.”

  I knew I’d seen him somewhere. “Isidor’s brother.”

  “The very same.”

  I’d never seen Phaeon Silvanus in person, but I’d seen pictures of him when I’d done a search on Hart Pharmaceuticals during the Brimstone case. Phaeon was Isidor’s brother and the CEO of Hart.

  “What’s a pharmaceutical CEO doing disguised as your hotel maintenance manager?” I asked.

  “Pharmaceuticals is but one of Phaeon’s corporate interests,” Rake said. “His skills are negligible as a mage, but he is a brilliant scientist—and inventor.”

  “And now a so-so mage can jump through what you call a ‘dead mirror.’ You think he’s trying out a new toy on us?”

  “I’d call it a weapon. And yes, Phaeon is known for being hands-on with new developments.”

  “If Phaeon and his R and D people are behind this,” Kenji said, “you can bet the science is mad and the magic dark. I’ve met his senior researcher. Nothing is off the table in their lab.”

  “Can you tell us anything about that chip?” Ian asked.

  “Impressive work. I’ve never seen anything like it. Other than that, without access to my lab at HQ . . .”

  “Understood.”

  “How many other industries do the Silvanus brothers dabble in?” I asked.

  “They don’t dabble; they do,” Rake said. “Anything that a Hart company develops either pays off in terms of profits, or gives a strategic advantage over their enemies.”

  “Of which you are one.”

  Isidor Silvanus hated Rake’s guts, and as a result, so did baby brother Phaeon. Granted, Rake had given Isidor plenty of reasons to want him dead in the most painful ways possible. Most recently, Rake had foiled Isidor’s attempt to open a direct path between Hell and Earth, and in so doing, had put Isidor on Lucifer’s most-wanted list. Now the dark elf mage had taken his personal vendetta several large steps too far.

  “They consider all goblins to be their enemies, as well as most of their own people—on this world and their own.”

  “Any idea what the fine folks at Hart are working on now?” I asked.

  “The same thing they’re always working on—their holy grail. Technology-activated magic. Researchers and mages, both elven and goblin, have worked for years to successfully combine the two. The goblins have come close, and have had limited success, but nothing remotely approaching what we’re experiencing.”

  “A melding of magic and technology,” Kenji said. “It’s brilliant.”

  That earned the elf tech some nasty looks.

  He raised his hands. “Just because the bad guys came up with it doesn’t make it any less brilliant. It just sucks that it was them and not us.”


  Phaeon Silvanus had turned a mirror into a doorway from monsterland with a microchip.

  And we were the lab rats trapped in a cage.

  “Screw seven years of bad luck,” I said. “We need to break some mirrors.”

  Ian’s eyes were on Rake. “Why mirrors?”

  “I believe Phaeon’s intended use for this technology goes beyond our world. We are but a convenient testing ground.”

  My partner’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I know. But I will. The elf and goblin ambassadors need to know what Phaeon has done. Vivienne should hear this as well. Could you arrange for them to meet us within the half hour in my penthouse? We cannot be spied on there.” Rake turned to his security chief, his dark eyes glittering with barely contained rage. “Gethen, take Fyren Balmorlan and his staff into custody. Now.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  And I thought my suggestion of breaking every mirror in the hotel wasn’t going to go over well. It paled in comparison to Rake’s news—or shall I say, confession.

  Rake kept it to himself until we’d gathered in his penthouse. He told us the wards were built into the structure of the building itself. For some reason, it was working while other magic was on the fritz. We could speak freely there. Even Ian didn’t push him. We’d suspected all along that Rake knew more about what was happening than he was telling us.

  With Phaeon Silvanus identified as the mastermind behind the attacks, our suspicions that Rake hadn’t been completely honest with us had been confirmed.

  By Rake himself.

  For starters, elven colonial governor Fyren Balmorlan was Phaeon Silvanus’s father-in-law. Yes, brothers Isidor and Phaeon hated Rake, but revenge might have been a secondary benefit, not their primary motivation. According to Rake, preserving their families’ power on our world and theirs trumped getting revenge on him.

  “Am I to understand that we have not one, but two coups in progress?” Vivienne Sagadraco asked mildly. She appeared neither surprised nor even particularly concerned, and was regarding the two goblins and one elf standing before her as if they were a trio of naughty schoolboys.