“You bringing food out there or…?” Rose asked.
“Naw, I’m letting her in.”
I unlocked the vault door and pulled it open wide and then walked up to the fake front door and opened that up. Vivian had her hand up, as if to ring the intercom button. A full day had to have passed, because the sun looked like it was coming up, and today Vivian was dressed in slacks and a blouse. Somehow, she seemed more comfortable and casual, which set off silent alarm bells in my head.
“Come on in,” I told her.
“Thank you, Mr.… oh, damn,” Vivian exclaimed, seeing the open vault door behind me.
“Mister Oh Damn. She’s a smooth one,” Rose squeaked, startling Vivian. “Probably picks up all her guys like that. First it’s Mister Oh Damn, then it’s Mister Big Cheese… Ohhhhh, I know, Mister Big Pusher or…” she kept going on.
I chuckled and waited till Vivian walked in and pointed into the round opening. Once she was through I locked the front door and went inside the bunker and closed the door, activating the lock. Vivian stood stock still, mouth open, eyes wide.
“Want me to check the perimeter, boss?” Rose asked, landing on my shoulder.
“Sure,” I told her and she flew towards the computers and started using the mouse.
I knew it was for show for Vivian’s benefit, but Rose understood why I was showing Vivian so much about the inside. She knew I had other properties and probably had a way to figure out I had been using compounding interest to build some wealth. Also Vegas gambling. A vice that had landed me in this mess. Still, short stuff was grinning savagely at Vivian as she spun in a circle, seeing the house that paranoia and violence built.
“This is… you’re even more nuts than I thought,” Vivian muttered, turning a full circle again.
“I’m still hungry, you hungry? I have cereal.”
“Sure,” she said after a minute. “What kind you have?”
“Lucky charms,” I told her, and snickered when her eyes squinted at my perceived joke.
She started talking with Rose as I went to the kitchenette and got out two bowls, cereal, spoons and the milk. I set those on the table and then went back to the coffee maker and loaded it up and turned it on. It started making ominous noises so, satisfied with my preparations, I went back to the table and poured a bowl of cereal. Rose noticed me eating and shut down the monitor and started flying my way. Somewhere, she had found the time to change as well. Her dress was, again, made out of what looked like a couple of leaves woven together, but it shimmered and had a silvery hue to it.
Vivian hesitated, looking at first the back wall of weapons and then at the work bench with my tools. Her hands trailed along the desk and then she walked over to the metal lathe I used in my gunsmithing and stood in front of the shop press. Finally, she came over to the table and took a seat across from me.
“That healing charm is probably going to make you as hungry as a bear,” she said, and then rolled her eyes as she picked up the box of cereal. “Really?” she asked, holding it out in front of me.
“It’s magically delicious,” I told her and Rose busted up laughing.
I’d bought it as a gag while in Salt Lake City and now the joke was funny a second time. Sometimes, I kill even me. Vivian wasn’t amused, though she poured herself a bowl.
“This sugar is not going to do me any favors,” she said.
“You’re still young and invincible,” I told her, “your metabolism will be good till you’re in your fifties or sixties.”
She narrowed her eyes and I wondered if maybe I shouldn’t have made a joke about age.
“Vassago,” she stated as she poured milk.
“He was there. Shot at me from a motorcycle. Almost killed me. He’s a life mage, you know.”
“You crashed and fought.”
“I unloaded over two magazines into him. Tried to shoot his dick off.”
“The target was really small, but my boss is a good shot,” Rose said helpfully.
This time it was me who almost blew out a mouthful of cereal and barely swallowed it. It was a near thing, but it hit me funny. I was going for serious and her snark-o-matic was still running full steam ahead.
“Well, he did,” Rose said looking to Vivian as if girl support worked cross species.
“Ok, so beyond what I told you, you probably talked to him for a few seconds. I want to know what he said and—”
“Let me get something,” I said and went to the work bench. I opened a drawer and pulled out the knife he’d dropped, which was wrapped in a red shop rag.
I unwrapped it and put it on the table between us.
“That’s… no, that’s not the same knife. For a second there I thought you got the knife we recovered from Justin’s body.”
“No, he dropped that,” I told her and took another bite. “Rose there,” I said, hooking a thumb in her direction, “made sure to recover it for us.”
“What does it do?” she asked, holding it up.
“I don’t know if it does anything, but it looks like the blade is damascus steel… and the patterns seem to form an unknown rune. Short stuff, did you find anything in what you read last night?” I asked.
“No boss, and I went through a lot of your older books. Because the craftsmanship of that blade was old, I went through the older books first. So far I am striking out.”
“Can you test it?” Vivian asked.
“No,” I told her, “if he wanted to cut me with it…” I dropped my spoon and thought about it again.
The reason I did so well with my sight, and why I hadn’t gone insane like most other diviners and seers, was that I was very deliberate in querying my gift. Instead of knowing everything about all of it, in order to use it without going crazy, I only asked certain questions or looked for certain results. In my mental testing, I only looked at what would happen if I cut myself or stabbed myself. I was limited in timing of the results. My gift was stunted and I could only look a handful of seconds in the future. What I hadn’t done or considered, was what would happen if I did it to somebody else…
“Vivian, Rose. I need to do something, trust me ok,” I said, and then snatched the knife up.
In the future where I cut Rose, she fell in half on the table, a horrible death, over within a second. In the future where I cut or stabbed Vivian… In a flash, I felt a rush of magic as Vivian fell over, screaming as her gift left her and entered me. Then the vision was over and I looked at the blade, my hands shaking.
“Trust you? Are you ok?” Vivian asked, watching me, a spoon in her hand, pointed down at the bowl of cereal.
“I am,” I told her and then put the knife back on the rag and wrapped it back up carefully.
“What does it do?” she asked finally.
“I have a feeling it scared the crap out of him,” Rose said. “But you’re safe, he hasn’t actually crapped his pants. It’s a figure of speech.”
“I get that,” Vivian said, annoyed at the fairy. “What does it do?” she asked me again.
“It strips the magic from whomever it cuts. I don’t know if it’s a temporary or permanent effect… and it gives the gift the victim has to… the person wielding the knife.”
“That’s… I’ve never heard of anything like that. You freaked our people out with the soul tap item, but this…” she said, reaching for it.
“Oh, hell no,” I said, careful to pull it back to me by the wrapped handle.
“But you can’t keep that,” she objected.
“I can, and I have to,” I said, holding a finger up, scanning the futures. “And if your gift is as strong as I hope it is, I need your help.” I stood up suddenly, the futures changing furiously in my mind as Murphy of Murphy’s Law kicked fate in the wrong direction.
“Why?” she asked.
I went running for the back wall of the bunker. I’d been scanning the futures for danger and something had finally tripped my consciousness. I hadn’t remembered to get my gun back from Cindy. I went for the
next best thing as the air raid siren went off.
“What is going on?” Rose screamed over the noise.
“Vassago,” I said, and pulled down an H&K MP5 from the pegboard I kept the guns hanging from.
Next was a dump pouch with an attached belt. I pulled out a double handful of fully loaded magazines; each had a dot of color near the base of the magazine. I dug through my handful until I found one with a blue dot and put that in.
“JJ is at the vault door,” Rose announced from near the computers.
“Vassago is here?” Vivian asked. “What do you need my help with?”
“Healing took most of my juice. I don’t know if I can gate without another couple days of rest,” I told her, feeling the effects of having a fully depleted magical reservoir for the first time in a while.
“Boss, JJ?”
I ran for the vault door and touched my hand to the palm reader. As soon as the door clicked, signaling that it was unlocked, JJ barreled inside, halfway wolfing out in his hybrid form. He rushed past me, heading for Vivian, probably convinced she had set off the siren and was attacking me.
“Stop!” I thundered, and he faltered then tripped as he tried to look over his shoulder.
In his hybrid form, he was probably three hundred pounds or more of ugly. Turning my way, he tumbled and, as he rolled, he transformed, shifting back to human. Once again, his shorts were the only thing he was wearing. His hair was sticking up funny from sleep and he smoothed that as he regained his feet.
“Boss, is she—”
“It’s not her, she’s a good guy,” I snapped at JJ. “But the guy who tried to ice me is coming. Wake up!”
“She’s not a guy,” Rose said helpfully, “But you know what the boss means.”
“Why am I in here, when I should be out there?” JJ asked, “defending my pack?”
“I’m your Alpha, and I’m falling back here. To my stronghold.”
“Going to drop the mountain on him, or are you worried about Cindy hearing the siren and coming over?” Rose asked.
“No, the siren is buried in the rock behind the back wall with my backup power plant,” I admitted, “so the sound doesn’t travel as far as her house.”
“Wait, there’s more here than the bunker?” JJ asked, and I saw both of my friends turn and look at me awestruck.
“Well…”
“Focus,” Vivian said, snapping her fingers.
We all turned.
“How were you doing everything remote before?” she asked.
I ran to the terminal and woke everything up. I started a program I’d had custom written for me a year before and systems within the mountain woke up. We could all hear and feel when the ten-kilowatt diesel generator behind the back wall fired up automatically as the draw on the batteries became far more than the norm and my grid tied power wasn’t enough. I had hesitated to fire all of it up when I’d thought Vivian and her enforcer muscle were going to force their way in, but I hadn’t. It was always going to be a last minute thing, so I didn’t give away the surprise until the right time. Right now was definitely the right time.
“What the hell?” Rose shouted.
“I’ve activated everything. Look, there he is,” I said, pointing at my center monitor.
“I’ll stay back here,” Vivian said and, with a shock, I realized why: she’d fry my systems out.
I hadn’t thought of that. She’d could have fried out my electronic locks just by walking into my vault if she wasn’t careful. The fact she could be this close though piqued my interest; she might not be powerful by elemental mage standards, but she was skilled. She had to be dampening the effects of her magic inside the bunker here. I’d have to ask her about that.
“You’ve got a touch of Death Magic, and what else?” I asked her.
“How the hell do you know that?” she asked, shocked.
“What other kind?” I all but screamed.
“Air,” she said after a hesitation.
I thought about it and then zoomed the camera I had rigged on a pine tree. Vassago was wearing a similar outfit to the one he’d had on the other day when he messed me up. All black, though this time it didn’t appear that he’d had leather on. Instead, it was a very American looking Brooks Brother’s suit, with a dapper hat and walking stick. I zoomed in to see his blonde hair flowing out from behind his hat, falling to his black suit coat.
“He’s a life mage,” I told her, “one of the strongest I’ve ever run across. Healed himself from 13 hollow points of both lead and silver, fired from ten feet away. I had runes of unbinding and several had a constant bleeding rune carved into the metal.”
“So, he’s unkillable?” she asked me.
“You’re a death mage. Other than taking his head off or blowing his brains out… yeah… you’re our best hope.”
“I’m not a combat mage,” Vivian said softly. “I’m an investigator and a covert operative when they absolutely need me, and death magic isn’t my strongest suit.”
“Then why the anesthetic?” I asked her while changing camera angles, seeing he was getting close to one of the shaped charges that would drop part of the hillside.
I was just about to click on the program that would trigger the charge when she spoke. “Because, when I first found you in Vegas, we assumed that you were a runaway warlock who’d taken the name of somebody who was listed as dead since 1952, but little clues led us to keep looking to see if it was really you.”
“1952?” I asked her, “I didn’t die in Korea—”
“No, but you didn’t correct the records the US Government had on you when it was reported…”
She paused, as I had hit the button, and the ground vibrated as the charges went off. On the screen, Vassago looked up sharply as part of the hillside started sliding down. I’d placed the charges near an artesian well, and cracking open the aquifer there suddenly took the pressure off of all the stone that had been slowly eaten away. It was gone, because the top of it was rushing down the hill in a torrent of stone, mud and water.
My cameras were good, but they weren’t that good. I couldn’t make out Vassago’s face, but he appeared to be startled by the explosion, and had started running. I triggered another charge, this one more or less to slow him down. He didn’t make it out of the range of the rock fall though. A boulder that had broken loose during the first charge clipped him, and he went tumbling. The second charge started a similar rock fall, but I’d placed it behind several boulders. When they went off, they were launched, hitting some scrub pine, flattening everything in their path. I had hoped it would make a huge debris fall, but instead the largest boulder sped up, despite the obstacles, and kept going. I switched camera angles on a new screen and saw Vassago swept over the edge of my graded driveway and down the side of the mountain. A large boulder followed moments later.
“You were gonna do that to me, when we first showed up to talk?” Vivian asked in a shaky voice. “Drop a mountain on me?”
“That’s only two of the charges. When I thought you were coming for me, I was going to scrub everything but the charges in the bunker and then go to my next hideout. Forty seven charges and twenty five claymores.”
“You have another place like this, boss?” Rose asked, changing subjects.
“A couple,” I admitted, “though this was going to be my retirement place so it’s nicer—”
“Look,” JJ said over my shoulder and pointed.
A hand reached from over the brink and Vassago pulled himself back up the grade. He stepped into a relatively clear section of my drive, looked right at the cabin, and then brushed his suit off.
“You’re an air mage?”
“Yes,” Vivian said, “Though being dually gifted, I’m not as strong as other elemental mages in air magic.”
“Can you carry a message to him? I don’t have a PA system out that far.”
“Sure,” she said at once.
“Ok…. now,” I told her and then cleared my throat, seeing her h
ands start to glow as she closed her eyes, concentrated and started murmuring softly. “Vassago, that was only a few of the defenses I’ve set up around my stronghold. That was a polite warning. I don’t know why you’ve decided to come after me after all these years, but I want you to know there’s a council enforcer here with me, and soon a strike force of mages will be here for your capture. Give it up. Nobody else has to get hurt. Not you, me, nor anyone else.”
I looked over to Vivian who was starting to murmur a little louder.
“Mr. Wright, I’m merely here to recover my lost knife. It became known to me from my employers that you are no longer a worry. My contract has therefore been completed. Leave me the knife and I promise you, no more bloodshed will come of you or yours over this matter. I’ll give you a minute for your answer.”
Then he folded his arms and stood there in the middle of the wreckage, unfazed at the kill box he was standing in the middle of. My cell phone started ringing and I pulled it out, seeing it was Cindy.
“Hello?” I said, Vivian dropped her spell, sweat beading on her forehead.
“Hey, you ok?” she asked, her voice alarmed.
“I was blasting a stump out, used a little too much powder,” I told her as nonchalantly as I could.
“It sounds like you took down half the mountain!”
“I used a little too much,” I admitted. “Hey, can I stop out in a couple days once I’m more rested and we can continue that conversation we had on the couch?”
“That… Uh… what?”
“I got another call coming in, can I call you back in a bit?” I asked her.
“Sure?”
“Ok, bye,” I said and hung up the phone and then stalked over to the table and picked up the knife, wrapped in a rag once more.
“You can’t give that to him,” Vivian said, “That’s got to be one of the most evil—”
“No choice,” I said and ran for the door, praying I didn’t trip.
I didn’t bother checking the futures, I was too scared to do it.
First Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Page 13