They ordered drinks and some munchies. Sure enough, the tables I had identified continued to take an extraordinary interest in our sisters.
A tall man at one of the tables I identified stood and went to the washroom. One of the glamoured elves followed him. The elf came back a few minutes later, but the tall man did not.
Carmelita jumped up and came over to the sisters’ booth. “Beatrice! Long time no see,” she said and sat down. “How’s it going? What are you up to?”
It turned out that Carmelita and Beatrice went to high school together, unsurprising as the children of the Hundred tended all to go to one of three or four schools.
All sound from their booth suddenly ceased, and I knew Carmelita had cast a sound shield over them. She stayed there for about five minutes, then went back to her table with Luanne. Next, one of the glamoured elves came over to the sisters’ booth and asked Beatrice to dance. After he returned her to their table, the other two elves came and asked both women to dance.
I kept my eyes on the watchers. Some of them were starting to get bored. All of them were watching other women, at least a little bit. I sent a signal out for my main distraction.
Loud, boisterous, and flaunting it—obviously half drunk—Kirsten and Mary Sue blew into the place like a hurricane, drawing every eye in the place.
I sent a signal to the elves dancing with the two sisters. They immediately changed their own glamours and cast glamours on the sisters. The elf with Beatrice led her back to the washrooms, then out the back door. The elf with Karolyn took a roundabout route toward the front door on the side of the room away from my blonde friends.
I followed Beatrice, and Mychal, Carmelita, and Luanne followed Karolyn. The women cops paused in the doorway to discuss which bar they should hit next. The remaining elves followed me, stopping in the hallway and blocking the exit.
Mary Sue and Kirsten made their way to my booth and took our seats. With any luck, Courtney’s men had lost us in the confusion.
Outside the club, each of the women was immediately surrounded by a phalanx of glamoured elves and ushered into a waiting armored limo. I crawled in beside Beatrice, and the driver took off for the loop around the harbor to the freeway.
“Did Karolyn get away?” Beatrice asked. I held up my hand as I accessed my implant, then smiled.
“Yes. They’re taking the eastern route to the airport and we’ll meet them there.” I pulled a recorder out of my pocket. “Now, I need a statement from you—an official statement—of what you saw at your house the night your father died.”
Chapter 37
We fell in behind an armored personnel carrier with Whittaker markings, and another one fell in behind us. I knew the vehicles were mage shielded, as was the limo we rode in. Our driver was a human mage, but the other three people in the car with us were elves. It would be the same in the car that carried Karolyn and Novak.
Everything went smoothly until we slowed down on the exit ramp to the airport. That’s when a volley of fireballs splashed down on the road ahead of us and on our vehicles.
“Well, that settles the question of whether your mother wants you back, or whether she wants you dead,” I said. Beatrice’s eyes were large in her face, her shock evident.
Lightning lashed out toward the cars, and more fire rained down on the road. The cars slowed. We might have been shielded, but the road was melting in front of us. With a loud crack, the road buckled, and the ground shook with a mini-earthquake. The car we were riding in lurched as the ground heaved beneath us, and then we were rolling over into the ditch. Luckily, by that time, we had slowed quite a bit, and we were all wearing seat belts.
The car came to a stop on its side. The door next to me was up, so I reached for the handle.
“Everyone stay in the car!” one of the elves said. “We have to maintain the shield.”
The ground continued to move under us, bouncing the car around. Lightning and fire fell on us, the thunder rattling my nerves. I wondered what our attackers would try next.
Whittaker and his commanders had spent a considerable amount of time identifying the best spots for an ambush. Their prime candidate was that exit ramp. So, although the pounding we were taking seemed to go on forever, it actually lasted about ninety seconds. That’s when Whittaker’s troops and ten of Joren’s elves cut loose on our attackers.
Just as a couple of demons bounced off the elves’ shield around our car, the night lit up like a fireworks display. Balls of energy hit the two demons, and they vanished. The mages attacking us turned their attention to the mages who were attacking them. Things got a lot more chaotic, but after a couple of minutes, the ground stopped moving, and we stopped being bounced around.
I looked out the windows and saw shadowy figures moving around, but the trees hid most of them, and it was impossible to tell which side anyone was on. I pulled my magikally enhanced night goggles from my bag and put them on. The scene gained clarity.
It appeared that human mages were primarily engaged with other human mages, while the elves were hunting demons, and the demons were hunting us. Very convenient when the demons funnel into an area the elves could easily defend with their swords. I saw a lot of headless demon bodies lying around.
The demons broke first. Being essentially selfish beings, and with the promise of a human meal growing less likely by the second, the ones remaining decided to go elsewhere for dinner. The elves let them go, turning their attention to the mages attacking us.
Humans and elves had basically left each other alone during the Rift War while both fought the demons. I quickly understood why. Humans greatly outnumbered the elves in our world, while the average elf wielded magik as strong as the second tier of human mages. Their strongest mages, such as my grandfather, Joren, were in a league all their own. Lightning bolts that put Olivia’s best efforts to shame pounded down on Courtney’s mages. Blasts of wind blew them off their feet and hurled them into the trees. The trees themselves attacked them. And when the combatants came within physical proximity, the elves’ spelled swords often beat down the human mages’ shields.
I felt for my phone and called Mychal.
“Novak,” he answered.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Where are you?”
“Yeah. At the airport. I’m watching one hell of a lightshow west of here. Is that you?”
“We were ambushed.”
“I had a feeling. I changed our route, and we came through Glen Burnie. Wow. That lightning is spectacular.”
“Are you outside? Get the hell into the hanger! Get her on that plane!”
“I was waiting for Whittaker’s boys to get here. We’re still in the—” The call abruptly ceased. I tried to call him back, but no answer. I called Whittaker.
“Mychal is at the airport, but I’m not sure where. His phone went dead.”
“I have people there and more on the way,” he said.
I hung up, and said, “Let me out. I need to see what’s going on.”
One of the elves pushed open the front door of the car and crawled out. Once he was on solid ground, he opened my door. I scrambled out and looked down into the car at Beatrice trying to follow me.
“Stay in there,” I said. “The elves will keep you safe.”
I turned and looked in the direction of the airport and saw flashes of light.
“That’s Karolyn,” Beatrice’s voice said beside me.
“How can you tell?”
“Her lightning always has a weird tinge of green. Dunno why.”
Crap. I turned to the elves who were all out of the vehicles and had formed a protective ring around Beatrice and me.
“We still need to get this young lady to her plane, and we also need to help the other young lady at the airport. Got anything quicker than walking to get us there?”
We were still at least a mile from the cargo hangers where the plane waited to take the sisters to Ireland.
“We can have cars here in five minutes,” one of them
said.
I pointed to the lightning at the airport. “As soon as possible.”
He barked out orders in Elvish, and the elves split into two different groups—one running toward the airport, the other into the woods to our east.
“It will take our warriors only a couple of minutes to reach the airport,” he told me. “The others went to get the vehicles Joren and his warriors came in.”
I knew there was no way I could keep up with the elves going to the airport, so I stood around and fidgeted while I waited. Most of the fighting around us was winding down. Two helicopters with Whittaker markings passed low overhead on their way toward the airport.
Four minutes and thirty seconds after the elves departed, the first truck showed up, with three more following it. The flashes of green lightning in the direction of the airport had ceased, replaced by flashes of red and white. I grabbed Beatrice and jumped into the lead truck along with four elves, and the driver took off.
We bypassed the passenger terminal and sped toward the cargo warehouses. When we reached the area, we almost drove into the middle of a mage battle. Whittaker had stationed a group of mages and a company of human soldiers to guard the plane, and if Novak had just taken Karolyn inside, they would have been all right.
The armored limo they came in lay on its side next to a large hole in the tarmac. The undercarriage of the limo was warped and twisted, and it was pretty obvious that a bomb of some type had gone off under the car. Magikal shields weren’t perfect, and they couldn’t protect against everything. The concussive force of a bomb going off under a shielded limo had to go someplace. Magik bent the laws of physics, but it was still subject to them.
Three other vehicles in the area were damaged, two of them on fire. The Whittaker men were fighting from inside the hanger, and when the elves showed up, they attacked the assaulting force from the rear.
We hustled Beatrice out of the car and into the hanger. A large cargo jet sat there, its engines idling. I turned the girl over to three women in Whittaker uniforms that I recognized as former Findlay guardians—people who had served under Osiris. They urged her up the steps and into the plane.
Looking around, I saw Mychal sitting on the floor with his back against a stack of boxes. His head was bandaged, and one of his arms was wrapped tightly to his torso. I walked over and squatted down in front of him.
“You don’t look so good,” I said.
He lifted his head and opened his eyes. “I screwed up.”
“Where’s Karolyn?”
“I don’t know. When I woke up, I was here with a medic working on me.”
I sprang up and whirled around. Locating a Whittaker man with officer’s insignia on his shoulders and a mage patch on his sleeve, I strode over to him.
“Where’s the woman who was in the limo?”
He shook his head. “They captured her. She put up a helluva fight, but we couldn’t get to her. I lost three men trying.” He pointed in the direction away from where I’d come. “Drove off that way.”
I made a command decision. “Tell the pilot to take off. Getting one of them out of here is better than worrying about both of them.”
He nodded and pulled out a radio. A minute or so later, the jet revved up its engines, and Whittaker’s troops lay down a barrage of fire, clearing the area outside the hanger. The jet started moving, and I felt its magitek shields engage. It carefully steered around the crippled limousine, then turned and headed along the taxiway toward the runway. A fireball splashed harmlessly against its shield.
When it reached the runway, it didn’t slow down, but gained speed and was soon airborne. I figured Whittaker had pre-cleared it for takeoff.
I turned back to the officer. “Do we have any tracking on the vehicle that took her?”
“Yes. It’s on the freeway headed north. We’re tracking it with drones, helicopters, and we have vehicles following it. Commissioner Whittaker wants you to call him.”
I did so.
“Dani, we can stop that car,” Whittaker said, “but I have no idea what will happen. They haven’t acted like they care if she dies.”
“They’re probably taking her up to either Findlay House or Elk Neck,” I said.
“Elk Neck,” he replied. “They don’t use the road from Findlay to the freeway. They would have to drive past the Novak and Domingo estates, and that hasn’t worked very well recently.”
“So, we can either risk her life by stopping the car, or hope that they don’t kill her once they take her out of the car.”
“They had a chance to kill her when they captured her. She was unconscious.”
I ground my teeth together so hard my jaw ached. “Yeah, let them go. We’ll see if we can figure another way to get her away from her family.”
Chapter 38
We took Mychal to the hospital where he was treated for a three-inch cut on his head, a concussion, and a broken arm. His father sent guardians, and they took Mychal to the Novak estate. He hadn’t had his seat belt on when the bomb went off and got tossed around the inside of the limo. An elf who was standing outside the limo was killed.
From what I could gather, Karolyn fought like a mama bear, and tried to make it to the hanger, but was overwhelmed by the sheer number of attackers. When all the smoke and lightning cleared, we counted twenty-four human and elven corpses, along with a dozen demons. The two trauma hospitals where we sent the wounded had a busy night.
“Tell me some good news,” I told Whittaker when he called me after midnight.
“Susan Reed escaped from Gettysburg.”
No one ever escaped from the prison in Gettysburg.
“I said good news. How in the hell did she do that?”
“Want to hear the bad news?”
I took a deep breath. “You really are a sadist, you know?”
“Brian Crozier escaped with her.”
Crozier was the pre-eminent non-demon crime boss on the east coast until I put him behind bars six years before. That had earned me a promotion to sergeant.
“She’s been there a couple of weeks, and she managed to escape? No one escapes from Gettysburg,” I said.
“We had an escape thirty or thirty-five years ago,” Whittaker said. “We’re investigating, but it had to be an inside job. I’m sending a couple of truthsayers up there first thing in the morning.”
I thought that Susan teaming up with Farringdon was bad, but Farringdon was simply a psychopath. Crozier was a criminal genius in addition to being a psychopath.
“Any other kernels of joy you’d like to drop on me before I go home and go to bed?”
“Helen Dressler-Findlay formally endorsed Courtney’s claim to Findlay this evening.”
Helen was my Granduncle Richard’s widow. Her three daughters had a potential claim to Findlay after Courtney, her sister, Karen, and a few others, including me, if you went down that rat hole far enough.
“Goodbye,” I said, and hung up.
When I straggled into the office mid-morning the following day, I told Carmelita about Susan.
“Watch your back,” I said. “I doubt that woman has a forgiving heart.”
She laughed. “The problem is, all of the information we have on her is useless now. She can’t go back to her home, or access her bank accounts, and she’s not going near her HLA contacts.”
I nodded. “She’s starting a new life. Crozier has been out of commission for the past six years and totally cut off from communicating with his old organization. It splintered after his arrest, and after a short internal war, three different gangs formed with three of his old lieutenants in charge. I don’t think any of them will be glad to see him.”
“Is he a mage, a witch, or what?” Carmelita asked.
“A mage, and a fairly strong one. He has both aeromancy and hydromancy. One of his favorite ways of killing people who displeased him was to draw all the water out of their bodies. I understand that it’s fairly painful.”
She shuddered. “So, if he can’
t count on his old followers, what will he do?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that. I don’t think any of the current top crooks want to step aside for him, but a lot of those underneath them will take their chance.”
“Where do we start?” she asked.
“With Miss Tina Stewart, Crozier’s old flame. He’s going to want to screw her or kill her. Maybe both.”
When I arrested Brian Crozier, and he realized he was going in front of a Magi tribunal instead of a regular court of law, he ordered his mistress to sell his mansion and certain other assets to raise money for bribes. To do that, he gave her a power of attorney. Tina double-crossed him. She sold the mansion to herself for a pittance, appropriated the rest of his assets, took his right-hand man into her bed, and set herself up over the Crozier organization.
That sparked a war with several of the other criminals in the organization, not because of loyalty to Crozier, but because they didn’t like taking orders from a woman. Tina was a powerful witch, with a talent for blood magik and an affinity for controlling demons. The war didn’t work out well for her rivals, but she did lose control of Crozier’s drug markets to Ashvial, and some of her human trafficking, firearms trafficking, and extortion businesses to other of Crozier’s minions.
She maintained her hold on illegal gambling, money laundering, and counterfeit goods, as well as the prostitution and human trafficking that she had personally run for Crozier. One of her specialties was supplying vampires and sex demons—succubae, incubi, and liliths—to upscale human and vampire customers. It wasn’t strictly illegal, as long as the minor demons were willing. Drugging or spelling or coercing them was frowned upon, however. Supplying humans to demons was definitely illegal.
We drove out to Tina’s place north of Columbia. Crozier’s family had been a successful third-tier Magi family after the Rift War, but after Brian’s parents died in suspicious circumstances, he was the only heir. His record showed run-ins with the cops starting in high school. By the time he reached university and started pimping out his fellow students, loan-sharking, and dealing drugs, he was well on his way to a successful career. His mistake was trafficking underage humans and drugs that came across the Rift.
War Song (The Rift Chronicles Book 2) Page 22