by Scott Duff
“Now that’s a neat trick!” exclaimed Peter. “Excellent self-defense. Puts the onus totally on the enemy. I like it!”
“I thought it had a certain elegance to it,” I said, looking into the conference room. The outside walls of the room were thick glass on three sides, giving it a nice view of the campus on two sides and the hall on the other. In the center of the room was a large table, capable of seating sixteen to twenty people. At one end of the room stood a chalkboard with a terrain map of the area attached with masking tape. A similar map was laid out on the table with little red and blue boxes arranged on top. There were six occupants in the room, five men and an elf. The elf wore a complex glamour that I didn’t quite understand. I mean, I didn’t understand what I was supposed to see. These men were dressed differently than the others we’d encountered. They wore tan uniforms, still lacking any national affiliations, but they did have ranks: two lieutenants, two captains, a major, and a colonel. The elf was one of the captains and he was trying to be unobtrusive.
“Time to go bye-bye, guys,” I said to the three men, knowing that they had no idea what I meant by that. Then I sent them to Gordon’s new cell, leaving their rifles to fall on the floor in front of us, for safety’s sake. With Peter and Gordon’s new trick, that was possible now. Wish I’d thought of it. Gordon would take care of their other weapons. Peter led the way into the room, tossing our guide’s weapons in a nearby chair on the way in.
“Gentlemen,” he called loudly, “If you would be so kind as to cease and desist in your efforts to maim children, we will cease in our efforts in shoving your balls down your throats.”
All six of them stared hard at us for about three seconds then broke out in raucous laughter. We glanced at each other and let them have their moment of bravado. The elf captain was the first to recover, but we knew he was faking it anyway. The colonel was next. He sat on the table at the end of the room, looking at us while the rest wound down. None of them went for weapons believing they were in control of the situation still.
“Boy, you couldn’t handle your own balls much less mine,” the colonel growled at Peter.
Peter just shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. As usual, I’m the lightweight here. I’ve only killed three of your men today. Gordon’s got seventeen on his scorecard, but one of your own men helped a lot there.” He leaned on the table and looked over his shoulder to me and said, “What’s your total for the day?”
“Just here or total?” I asked as innocently as possible.
“Just here,” he said, grinning.
“Let’s see,” I said and pantomimed moving through the campus. “The one in the auditorium made twenty-three, with one maiming.”
The colonel snorted. “You expect me to believe that.”
“The captain knows I’m not joking,” I said, “And your map could use updating.”
That startled the colonel. “What does he mean?” he growled to the captain maintaining the map.
“Oh, not him,” I said. “The elf. He felt the spikes in the ward when I fried the rapists.” I leaned across the table to examine the map, then pointed out several things for the captain. “You no longer have men in those areas. Oh, I forgot about the sentries at the front gate. Make that twenty-five. Also, those are out of place and that one and that one show too many people at those locations.”
The colonel stared at me while the other officers turned to the other captain, who was backing to the glass wall, waving his hands before him frantically in denial and shaking his head. “He’s lying! You know me! You’ve known me for years!”
“You’re not leaving this room, elf, so don’t try it,” I warned him. I could feel him reaching to twist the power for a jump to Faery, bailing out of his mission here. It wouldn’t do him any good. The ward had a nice, tight Faery lock built into it. As long as he didn’t know where the holes in the ward were, he’d be stuck. He stopped against the thick glass wall, shaking. The two lieutenants had pulled their pistols and faced him there, pinning him to the wall. One of them had pulled out their handy amulets to check the elf’s aura. It came up blank. The lieutenant turned to glower back at us.
“What’s your point?” I asked. “It shows nothing on us either and that’s obviously wrong.” I proved the point by jerking the amulet out of his hand and across the room to my hand.
“Colonel, you and your group are responsible for attacks against this school that have resulted in injury and deaths. Your uniforms show no credentials whatsoever. Am I to presume you are waging war on a secondary school?” asked Peter.
“A terrorist school!” the colonel yelled.
“Says who?” asked Peter, then pointed to the elf, “Him?”
“Our client,” said the colonel, more calmly but still with plenty of anger.
“Ah,” said Peter sarcastically. “You’re mercenaries. Must’ve cost a pretty penny to get eighty to ninety of you together so fast, huh?”
“Boy, you’re not here to talk logistics,” the major interrupted, turning away from the elf. “What do you want?”
“Your surrender,” said Peter.
The elf tried to slip out of the room then. The ward caught the shifting energy in a cascade of silver and crimson around him in a jagged circle, collapsing his glamour and shooting angry rips of power from the edges directly onto his body. His high-pitched screams of pain entered ranges only dogs and I could hear as he writhed around the searing vortex. The lieutenants near him tripped over themselves in their rush to back away. One fired his pistol at the elf but hit the cascading energy, causing a mild eruption out into the room.
The body of the elf fell abruptly to the floor as the power he called was used up by the vortex. There were still several black patches still smoking on the crispy body. The corpse now looked like an elf, unbelievably thin, seven plus feet tall, long blonde hair. His clothing was the same as before the glamour but in silk, not poly-cotton blends. One of the lieutenants rolled the body over with his foot. The elf’s face was a blackened mess, unrecognizable through the scorch marks.
“Major, sound the retreat,” said the colonel, tightly, staring at the elf’s body on the floor. “We’re leaving.”
“I’m afraid that option isn’t on the table, Colonel,” said Peter.
The Colonel snapped his head around to Peter, glaring at him. “Why? You want us gone and we don’t want to be here.”
“There has to be a reckoning, Colonel,” Peter said calmly. “Your people raped and murdered. Children, Colonel.”
“You can’t hold us responsible for rape!” countered the major. “We can’t control everything.”
“Wrong answer, major,” I said, loudly. I sent a strong surge of energy through the ward to him. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but he’d sure as hell remember it. Then I sent him to Gordon’s cell. It would look to the others like I flash-fried him on the spot. That must have worked because the remaining four all pulled handguns and pointed them at us. Peter took the opportunity to try my gun-to-portal trick on them. True to form, they gasped at their unseen enemies and froze in place.
“Colonel, I need to understand why someone would send a conventional force into an unconventional area,” I said. “And I need to understand now. So, what exactly is your mission here?”
The Colonel swallowed hard, staring down the barrel of his gun. I saw the decision he was making, preparing himself for suicide. He squeezed the trigger, his whole body flinching with the roar of the gun. I was the only person in the room expecting it as everyone jerked around to look for a falling body, muzzles still in faces but forgotten for a few seconds.
The Colonel couldn’t focus completely on the frozen billow of escaped gases or on the bullet that was forced forward by the exploding cloud, but he knew what it was. I took the gun out of his hand with Peter’s trick but left the cloud and bullet in front of him, held in place with the power of the Stone’s shields.
“No, Colonel,” I said as condescendingly as possible. “You don’t get off that
easily. You have a lot to answer and I will get answers one way or another.”
“But you’re just a boy,” he said weakly.
“Yes, Colonel,” I said. “Three boys just beat the crap out of you. And before you start to believe that you can still win by suicide, let me show you a few more things.” I reached out through the ward, feeling for the tightly wrapped packages his three- and four-man teams were leaving in all the buildings around the campus and dropped them through portals that ended on the conference table in front of us. By the time I’d collected all of them, I had sixty-seven bombs piled there.
Peter raised his eyebrows in shock. “Destroying the school? Why?” he asked.
The Colonel remained silent. At this point, I was past caring for his disposition. I tapped my earpiece to switch channels.
“Billy? You still with us?”
A pause, the length of which made me nervous, before Billy answered, “Yes, Seth, I’m here.”
“Come on in, Billy,” I said confidently. “We’ve taken the campus back, but we’ve got wounded here. At least six that need immediate hospital care. I’m about to round up the rest of the strike force now. We had no choice but to take prisoners. There were just too many of them to kill outright.”
“You’ll never get all of us,” said the Colonel confidently.
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said Peter, oozing smarm and pointing out the window. I was dropping his troops from a height of thirty feet right outside the window. Peter set the cell up for me when the first man, actually a woman, had gained enough sense to start moving out of the way.
I opened the front gate long enough for Billy to drive through then shut it again. Once I was satisfied I had everyone, I sent the two lieutenants there as well, leaving the captain and the Colonel in the room with us, their hands bound behind them with zip ties. I re-wove the holes in the wards while Peter disarmed the men in his cell. Gordon had done an admirable job in his cell already.
It was time to start cleaning up the mess. We paraded the colonel and the captain past Peter’s cell and around the auditorium building. His men were in a shocked and quiet. Gordon’s cell was more rowdy as they’d had more time to adjust to their incarceration, but they too quieted at the sight of their leader being lead like a pack mule. Billy came over the top of the hill carrying two of the first aid kits and Peter’s briefcase under his arm.
It was time to call Kieran. We weren’t going to be making it back to the castle for a few hours, not without someone to take over here. Damn, this was getting complicated.
Chapter 43
Two hours later, the campus was just beginning to get active again. Gordon and Peter had worked together to gather the two cells together, marching Peter’s four ranks wide to Gordon’s while keeping the force field walls up. It was a tight move, but both Ferrin and I were watching and ready to help if anything went wrong. Peter’s group was decidedly more cantankerous prior to seeing the cell of dead bodies next to Gordon’s. They calmed considerably when Peter sidled them up close to it. Peter told them that those men hadn’t followed orders, then left the statement to hang in their imaginations to come up with the cause of death.
Gordon sent Billy back to the front gate after we contacted Kieran and Cahill. The conflict at the castle was done except for the shouting when we’d called the last time, but neither Cahill nor Kieran discussed much of it with us, delaying that until we returned. Cahill was able to get medical aid to us within a half-hour of the call. Kieran opened a portal from the castle to the front gate for them by homing on me. The wards around the school prevented a direct portal in and apparently, that kind of magic is more difficult than I knew before doing so much of it today. Admittedly, it was harder at the beginning of this, especially in the van, but I got better at it as the day progressed. Peter just smiled when I asked him about it.
While we waited for the doctors to arrive, Peter and I talked to the boys that were hurt, got their names, parents’ names, then we started making phone calls all across Europe trying to get in touch with them. Billy radioed when the medical team got there and again a few minutes later about a frantic couple screaming about a hurt child. After that, neither Peter nor I could reach him by radio; his end was fried. It had lasted longer than we figured it would. But we trusted Billy to only let in the right people and if he had a problem, I was literally a shout away.
The parents were a nightmare. Not that I blamed them for their outbursts—well, later, I didn’t—but they were aiming it at the wrong people. Gordon took the brunt of it but I lost my temper with them. I hung them both upside down over the largest cell of soldiers and told them if they yelled at us again I would drop them in. Once they’d calmed down, I apologized for losing my temper, saying that killing over thirty people for what they’d done had made me “a bit testy.” I’m pretty sure they didn’t know want to think about that, but they quit yelling.
The med techs started to move the boys out on stretchers to the gate, but they would have to go one or two at a time. Peter and I exchanged glances and decided on a better way instantly. Emotionally wrecked or not, “nobility” or not, the parents were pressed into service. Both of them levitated and carried two each to the gate. The med techs carried the fifth boy on the stretcher. Jeff was well enough to walk, but he still needed medical attention and I made sure that the med techs knew what I had done with his lungs. I wanted him thoroughly examined by someone who knew what I had done just in case. Ferrin, though, refused to go with them, wanting to find out the reason for the attack. I didn’t force the issue. He’d done enough and been through enough that I felt he had the right to know.
At two hours after our call to Cahill, a large black limousine arrived at the gate and I felt a push on the ward for the gate to open. Billy stood behind the gate in the pose I’d gotten used to seeing him in: feet shoulder-width apart, arms crossed on his chest with the quite illegal handgun nestled in his arms, and his face a stoic mask. Billy didn’t open the gate so I didn’t either. The driver got out and said something to Billy impatiently. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but I could read the emotions. Billy wasn’t going to open the gate until he knew who was in the car. Whoever was in the car obviously thought they were too good to stand and be recognized. Arrogant twit made another grab for the wards while Billy and the driver went back and forth.
“I’ll be right back,” I told Peter and drew power in, throwing it in front of the gate as lightning. Then I skipped over to the spot with the Day Sword drawn and shining bright in the afternoon sun. “Comply with the man’s wishes or I start carving your car up by centimeters,” I said. “With you in it.” I heard Billy snort and chuckle behind me.
The man in the back of the car made another grab for the wards. He was really ticking me off. I took two steps over and drove the Day sword into the hood of the car. I’m not sure of what I hit but the engine made awful noises before it stopped running and billowed gray and black smoke. Billy couldn’t hold back his laughter, the second time I’d seen him actually make an emotional reaction.
The driver was hiding behind the car door, staring at me with his mouth agape. I moved to the side of the limo and made a production of lining my next strike on the vehicle to quarter the hood, stopping only to wave the driver to the roadside. As I raised the Day Sword, both rear doors of the limo flew open and two men got out. I glided into a defensive position with the Sword in front of me and my weight lightly on my left foot, ready to move. A tall thin man in an expensive light brown suit without the jacket jumped out. Dark brown hair framed a light tan and dark eyes did little but accentuate his long face.
“What the hell are you doing, boy?” he yelled at me.
“Guarding a school that has already been brutally attacked once today,” I said calmly. “You have refused to identify yourselves and tried to take the wards no less than three times. The next time will be your last. Call me a ‘boy’ again, especially in that tone, and you’ll speak in a much higher register for the re
st of your life.”
“Do you know who I am?” he asked dramatically, his face flushing in anger at the threats.
“Billy, did I not just say he refused to identify himself?” I asked calmly.
“Yes, Mr. McClure, you did just say that,” answered Billy still on the other side of the closed gate. I really like Billy. He seemed to know just the right things to say.
“Is he an idiot?” I asked Billy, receiving the huge spike in anger and embarrassment in the man’s aura that I expected.
“Now I wouldn’t necessarily go that far, Mr. McClure,” Billy said, changing his tone slightly, to be diplomatic. I understood his position, but this man had already played three different power plays on me—true, by the dictionary, power plays. All he had to do was introduce himself and ask nice and I would have been home already.
“McClure,” the man grumbled. “Seth McClure?”
“Yes, and you?”
“Louis Marchand, president of the European Council,” he said proudly. “As such I serve on the Board of Trustees for this institution and therefore I am the rightful caretaker of the wards.”
I couldn’t help it. I swear I tried to suppress it but it just came out—a snicker at first, then it turned into a laugh, then, well somehow I ended up leaning against the gate for support I was laughing so hard. I know I was insulting the man, but I couldn’t help it. I’ve already seen so much impotent arrogance today that I was ready to start yelling “Just whip it out and we can measure ‘em.”
“And your friend?”
“Paul Murrik, an associate of the Council,” said Marchand.