by Scott Duff
“Yeah, Peter was doing that. It’s a conscious act, not something that just happens. I don’t know how to do it yet. Hell, I don’t know how to do much of anything yet, but fight.”
“Okay, well, the plan really hasn’t changed that much, has it?” Dillon asked. “We’re just a man down. I go down and find out if he knows he’s being followed. You watch. If it looks like he’s in on it, you rescue me. You think you can do that? Rescue me from him if he’s a bad apple?”
“I’ll do better than that,” I said with a smile. Touching his chest with my fingertips, I coated him with a thin shield then isolated the power feed in my mind and sent it out to be continuously fed from a battery, like I’d done with Ethan. “That should keep you safe until I can get to you.” The Stone hummed in agreement.
“What is it? It feels like there’s something crawling all over me suddenly,” he said, shifting nervously in place.
“An energy shield,” I said. “It’ll help stop most things. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t duck and run, though.” I glanced back at the monitors. “Damn, he’s moved again.” Dillon took the remote out of my hand and started scanning quickly with the cameras. He was faster with it than I was.
“There he is,” he said. “We gotta do this now before we lose the chance. I’m going down now. You run into my closet and grab a cap and jacket like I’m wearing and come back here. If he sees them and they’re magical, I’ll head for the back rooms. If they’re not magical, I’ll head across the dance floor. Sound good?”
“Sounds risky, but I don’t have a better idea,” I said.
“I can’t have Peter saying I didn’t take care of you, now can I,” he said then turned out the door and down the hall purposefully. I crossed the hall just as he stepped into the elevator. He was scared, that was easy to see, but determined. Crossing his bedroom, I entered the… well, the clothing store he called a closet. It was at least half the size of his bedroom and had two full-length mirrors on either end. The most recently rummaged area had a label on the shelf above it that actually read “Grunge Sports.” This whole section was Grunge something. I grabbed the same team Dillon wore and headed back. Didn’t want to create some sort of issue with bystanders by supporting the wrong team in the wrong city by accident. Sports fans can be rabid.
I got a good sense of where Dillon was in the building with the shield I held around him. He had just stepped out of the elevator into the hallway downstairs. I tapped at the remote trying to get a shot of the double doors that he would come out of. Ferrin had moved again while I was getting the jacket and it took a few minutes to find him. He stood beside the dance floor again, scanning the people. One of his tails had gotten closer. The two at the table had kept their vantage point and were directly across from him now. The fourth guy was moseying around the far side toward the third, in no hurry. I still didn’t have faces on any of the four and Ferrin’s was never again clear past that brief glimpse.
Dillon slipped out the “No” door and moved quickly to the end of the bar, pausing to get his bearings. I could feel the vibrations of the music through the shield as I stood watching him. One of the bartenders stepped up quickly and put a glass of dark liquid in front of his tapping hand resting on the bar. I wished for one of the earpiece and mic combos we had back at Dunstan’s. That would have made this easier. Or if I could just whisper in his ear from here. Hmm. That was an interesting idea.
Dillon picked up the drink he was given and shot the contents back quickly, without even acknowledging it was there, but the bartender watched him curiously. I watched the bartender as he did. He stopped one of the barbacks, and pointed Dillon out to him. Then they both watched Dillon for a moment. They exchanged glances then the barback went to the other bartenders and said something to them. I couldn’t tell what was happening there so I ignored the small inactivity and went back to my idea.
I pushed the shield up Dillon’s neck and head to encompass his ears but left openings at the canals. Then I opened a very small portal, anchoring one end of it onto the shield wall and the other end about eight inches in front of me. Then I tried them out.
“Dillon, can you hear me?” I said in a normal voice. He jumped and looked behind him. Okay, good start. “Dillon, this is Seth. If you can hear me, nod your head once, please.” He nodded but very slowly. “Does that mean you can barely hear me?” He nodded once again slowly. I started repeating the word “Testing” while moving my end of the portals slowly until his head jerked. “Better then?” He nodded once. “Good. I’ll try to figure out a way for you to talk to me while you find Ferrin. He’s near the dance floor watching. One of the tails is sitting two tables back. Be careful. Please.”
There was an odd flow of people from one of the cameras that caught my attention briefly. A number of people exited the back room for some reason, lining up along the walls of the rear of the bar. From what I could tell, they were all normal bar patrons and were apparently having a good time. None had the telltale fuzzy faces of hiding mages. Damn it, why did Peter have to act the fool? He would have a better idea of what was going on here.
Dillon was approaching Ferrin and had to have my attention. He was dancing off-tempo in what seemed a very un-Dillon way to me—clunky and drunken. He glanced up and acted like he’d just seen Ferrin for the first time, calling out his name. Ferrin had to be confused by Dillon, but I just didn’t see through the fuzz. By his hand motions, Ferrin was brushing him off, rather brusquely, but Dillon persisted, grabbing Ferrin’s hand and shaking it rapidly up and down and moving closer. Close enough to be fuzzy himself for a moment. He leaned in and said something that cause Ferrin to still completely then laughed loudly and leaned in again. After that, I could see Ferrin’s face clearly, shaking his head no.
Score one for us—our plan worked—but against us. He hadn’t known about his tails, very bad. “Next question, are they magical?” I asked. Ferrin smirked at Dillon and hunkered down closer to the table. The resolution on the picture wasn’t good enough to tell where he was looking, but at least I could tell it was him. Ferrin shrugged. Crap, I didn’t know what that meant.
“Is that the answer, Dillon? Is the shrug mean he can’t tell?” I asked. Dillon nodded once. “Damn. Okay, I’m gonna risk coming down, then. Stay with him.”
As I turned to leave the office, I felt a slight tickle at the edges of my perception. Just the ghost of an image nearby. The Stone snapped to attention and the Day sword fell into my hand instantly. I pushed my senses out into the apartment, feeling for anything that wasn’t there before, any dents in the energy field. I found two. One was climbing slowly in a cut section of the window in the bathroom. The other was on the far side of the elevator and heading this way. I couldn’t tell how that one got in. Decisions, decisions. To kill or not to kill, that is the question.
Deciding I really didn’t have the time to deal with these two, I sent the Day sword into hiding and walked calmly into the hallway. Hitting the elevator call button, I waited for the first man to attack. His choice of weapons was shuriken throwing stars coated in something presumably poisonous. They didn’t hit. They joined him at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. I did give him the opportunity of seeing daylight for the last time. From several thousand feet up. It was roughly midway along our flight plan between New York and Dublin, to the best of my memory, anyway.
I stepped into the elevator and pressed down. Relief that I was going to miss the second man fled as he slipped in quickly between the closing doors and took his first swipe at me. He wore gloves that had razor-sharp knives sewn into them and wore a small charm around his neck that glowed an ominous and eerie green. I didn’t have a name for his gloves but if I hadn’t been shielded my face would have been a bloody mess. He lurched forward for another strike but I sent him after his friend in the Atlantic before he had time to make it. I was pretty sure they weren’t close enough to talk but I didn’t feel bad.
“Dillon, things just got a lot more complicated,” I said into my portal
s as I adjusted my cap and jacket in the mirror finish of the elevator. The razor-handed guy had nicked the cap. “I’m about to come out of the elevator now. You might need to come with us, at least for a day or two. I don’t know yet.”
The elevator doors opened to a tall man in a black suit with a large handgun and silencer. He shot me three times in the head and twice in the chest. And, hell yeah I flinched! It didn’t hurt but I still flinched with each rapid phft sound. He was somewhere over the Atlantic before the slugs hit the ground. I searched through the halls before I got out of the elevator, just in case.
I was gonna have to send Harris a box of candy.
Now I understood what Dillon was doing at the end of the bar, getting ready, steeling his nerves. I did not want to be doing this alone and here I was, facing a huge room of people that had a very small number that wanted to kill me and I didn’t know why. Frankly, I was starting to feel a bit territorial, too. Maybe that was part of that excess odor I’ve smelled all night. Tons of excess testosterone. This was my gay bar, damn it, and they were trying to take it away from me.
I stepped out of the elevator and felt the thrum of all the weapons in my head. The weight of both swords shifted down to just below my elbows. The Quiver and the Crossbow moved between my shoulder blades. They helped build my confidence, but I had to figure another way out of this. There were too many innocent people in the way. Then I felt the string of the Crossbow hum against the Quiver, setting the Bolts to vibrating and I was suddenly and strikingly aware of each and every one of them. And each and every man in the room, as if they were a target. It was like being under the wards at Dunstan’s or the one at home after Kieran got there. I was hyperaware. Awesome.
There were two new dynamics in the room we hadn’t known about before I came onto the floor. The first I had expected. That there were more than four problems to take care of out there, I had not seen. The four men we noticed were indeed magically active, fairly powerful actually, by the looks of them, but they were veiled much like Ferrin had Marty and Ian covered. Not particularly skillfully veiled since they almost looked like quadruplets, but they hid their power well enough. But they had cover in the crowd, eight pairs of them spread out over the bar and armed.
The second dynamic was that Dillon had coverage and I wasn’t sure that he was aware of it. And it was a very good coverage. I guess the bartender found his behavior erratic enough to put a couple of very well built tails on him. They were intent on Ferrin’s every move and I had no doubt that if it devolved into physical violence that they could hold their own against Ferrin in a fair fight. It wouldn’t be a fair fight, though, not against Ferrin. But far more interesting than these two were the other ten. These ten were paired off and set like chess pieces around the bar near each pair of backup men. Someone else had pegged them before I had.
That had to be the man in the back of the bar, the one wearing the biker’s leather pants and jacket with no shirt. His muscular chest showed signs of tattoos at the edges of where the jacket opened and ink showed along the left side of his neck. He wasn’t exactly a big man but he had presence. His dark eyes pierced through me, trying to take my measure, and I met his gaze without flinching. I don’t know how he knew something was up—he wasn’t magically active—but he did and he was protective of his territory. I rather liked him. He acknowledged me with a nod and went back to scanning his playground.
Time to get this party started.
Chapter 51
I stalked through the bar with a purpose, elbows out and arms wide. I felt like I should have my own personal Hugo Montenegro soundtrack playing. It was pretty much a letdown that I wasn’t noticed until I was five feet away from Dillon. The mages I could understand not seeing me, but the military guys? They were almost startled when I sat down beside Dillon.
“Hi, Mike! Fancy meeting you here,” I shouted over the music. I set a buffer around us in the air so I could hear. This close to the dance floor, the volume was near deafening.
“Seth, good to see you, too,” he said, not shouting as the noise had quieted to a far more manageable level. “Where’s Peter? I was supposed to be meeting him here. I’d like to thank him for not telling me he was sending me to a…” He glanced over at Dillon quickly and changed his choice of words. “Cruise bar.” He nodded politely to Dillon, who smiled and returned the nod.
I grinned at him. “He needed to return home suddenly. Something he ate, I think, but don’t worry, I’ll see you get home safely.”
I glanced over Ferrin’s shoulder at the mage behind him talking in a huddle with his two military backups. The three mages behind me were in a similar huddle with two of their backups, but the other two pair of backups were still in “hiding.”
“It’s not the first time that Peter’s eaten his left foot up to his kneecap,” Dillon said with a smirk.
“It’s nice to know someone else can make mistakes,” Ferrin muttered, not unkindly.
“Are they here for you?” I asked, turning in my chair to stare at the group of five. It took them a moment to notice but then they were definitely unsettled by my attention on them. I turned back when Ferrin answered.
“I can’t imagine why,” he said in his low and airy voice. “Except that these are exactly the type of people I avoid. The kind of people you asked me to inquire after. I would love to know how they found me, though.”
“There’s a mark on the bottom of your shoe,” I said. “It was very faint now, but still there. Even at its strongest, I doubt it showed much. They’re getting antsy. Shall we get this started?”
“I don’t understand,” Dillon said, grabbing my forearm and stopping me from getting up. “Why don’t the two of you just disappear, go home or wherever. Leave. It’s got to be safer than dealing with whoever these nut jobs are.”
“Safer?” I asked. I was pretty sure I was doing my dog impersonation there, turning my head to one side in confusion. “For whom? Us? Probably, but what about tomorrow? Why should we let these jerks define where we can and can’t go? And what about you? You were seen talking to us both. What are they going to do to you after we leave? They broke into your apartment and tried to kill me. Are you so sure that they won’t do that to you? Or even that they weren’t after you in the first place? Do you want to risk that? Because I don’t.”
I felt the minor pulse of mage fire from Ferrin as he blasted the mark off his shoe. He was up and stamping his foot on the floor, aggravated both at himself and at wherever he’d picked it up. From the epithets he was muttering, he’d figured out where it happened.
“You ready to dance?” I asked him, grinning at his theatrics.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he muttered. “Where ya wanna do this? Not here, obviously.”
“Let’s head for the roof,” I said. “I know where it is and there’s probably already some of them up there.” The silent communication going on here was so cool. I was just looking at people and I knew they were going to do what I wanted. This wasn’t an invasion. This was my fight.
First thing was to get Dillon taken care of. I caught the attention of the closest barback security guy combo with a waving hand gesture and pointed to Dillon. Then moved on to find Mr. Leather in the back and pointed straight up. He nodded affirmatively, which I took to mean he and his people were willing to go, so I latched on to everybody all at once and shifted them all up to the roof. Then I located the ones we hadn’t seen yet and sent them to the roof, four of them, and moved them over with the others.
I needed a minute after all that, slumping over against an HVAC unit. Moving that many people around is tiring. I can see why people didn’t do it and I was glad I didn’t have to go far.
There were numerous shouts of surprise and alarm, mostly from the other guys. Leatherman’s men seemed to roll with the change in scenery quite easily and were cordoning off the sides of the roof nicely with threatening postures. The mages were still very disoriented and the constant shouts from the others to “Do something!” weren’t h
elping.
One of them finally managed enough concentration to tap a line and shout a word. A spout of green flames shot from his outstretched hands toward Ferrin, I suspect because they felt he was the bigger threat. Ferrin was already twisting out of the way when I caught the fire a yard out and sent it curling, first skyward then back on its sender. I had to angle mine, though, to throw him off the roof instead of incinerating him on the roof, risking whatever lay beneath. He died a split second after his fire hit him, before he left the roof. I didn’t feel the slightest touch of guilt.
However, I did feel the teeniest bit guilty when Ferrin’s spell flew past me and hit the man to the right of the first. Only the teeniest since he was in the middle of a casting himself. I wasn’t used to seeing Ferrin actually tossing that kind of power around and this was a majorly twisted reality he’d created. One of them had started to form a shield but it wasn’t nearly strong enough or fast enough. Ferrin’s chaotic red and gold twist flared as it punched through then ruptured as it hit the man. The cascading flares of energy in sheets of gold and red ripped him to shreds by slicing through him at oblique angles. White-hot lightning fired at the planar joins, stabbing fiercely through what little we could see of the man. The power the man held fed Ferrin’s spell again as the energy wave released into it and the spell doubled in size, seizing one more mage fully in its power and grazed the last mage, removing his arm just above the elbow. He didn’t start screaming until the light show ended. Then the blood pulsed out of the arteries in his arm with the beat of his heart. His scream lasted until he passed out, which only took a few seconds.
Ferrin didn’t stop there, though. He did lessen the severity of his attacks, though I doubt his victims would agree. Another few words spoken in a harsh and gutteral language and he turned into a living Van de Graaff generator. At least that’s what it looked like to me in the bright violet light he cast off. Maybe living lightning would be a better description. He struck each man with a weapon through the metal of the weapon, excising each with surgical precision. They fell, smoking and singed, and I couldn’t tell if they were going to get back up again. Definitely not anytime soon. He turned back to the remaining men, snarling. They jumped but more or less stayed where they were, hands out, heads ducked. Leatherman and his men seemed more threatening now that their side just bashed the competition, more puffed up, pumped.