“Why will Helena need help?”
I tried to think of a way to explain it that would make sense. “The bigger the magic is, the harder it is to do. Think of it like lifting something. You can probably pick up a pencil hundreds of times without getting too tired. Make it a jug of milk, you’ll get tired a lot faster. It costs you more.”
“So, the thing you did with the water,” she shivered a little, “that was like—?”
“For me, that was like bench-pressing two-hundred pounds. I couldn’t keep it up for very long.”
Patty nodded. “And this thing with the graveyard?”
I rubbed my cheek as I thought about it. “I’ve never done anything remotely that big. My best guess, it’d be like dead lifting a train car and holding it over your head.”
Patty’s eyes went very wide. “She can do that?”
“She thinks she can.”
“That’s not an answer, Hartworth.”
“I honestly don’t know. She’s a lot stronger than I am, but this isn’t just a question of raw power. Some kinds of magic require a—” I cast around for the right descriptive. “I guess you’d call it spiritual purity. I don’t play with those things because, well, obviously. I can set someone on fire or knock down a building because I know how to manipulate the right forces, but it’s just brute force and applied knowledge.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, though it takes me forever. Case in point,” I said, waving at the paper in her hand.
“I see,” she said. “You need a lot of prep time to do these kinds of things. But the water?”
“It really is a cheap trick, and I’ve had years of practice. Anyway, what Helena is going to be doing is next-level stuff. I can’t explain it because I just don’t comprehend it. If she can do it at all, and if it doesn’t kill her outright,” I said through clenched teeth, “it’ll take a hellish toll on her. She might not be in any condition to move under her own power when it’s done.”
“But why is that an issue, if all the bad guys are at the school?”
“Backlash,” said Helena, joining the conversation. “In all likelihood, it won’t touch you at all, but for Adrian or me, it’s bad. When you rupture a magical construct you release its power into the world. Larger and more complex constructs release larger backlashes. If you’re conscious and ready for it, you can protect yourself. If you’re not conscious or aren’t ready for it, it can burn out your mind. Burst blood vessels in your brain. If it’s sufficiently large, it can kill you.”
I added, “Cavanaugh’s tomb is built to withstand exactly those kinds of forces. Get her inside, conscious or not, and she’s got a fighting chance. So, someone needs to be on hand to help her.”
Patty wasn’t happy with it, but she nodded. She was starting to understand how insanely dangerous a game I was playing. I only hoped that I understood it. I glanced at the sky. I was cutting it way too close for comfort.
“Time to go,” I said. “Remember, stick to the plan.”
I turned to walk to my car. Helena caught my arm and I looked back at her. Her eyes were focused on something in deep space, but I saw raw fear swimming in their depths.
“In case I don’t see you again.”
She hugged me with fear-strength and it hurt. I hugged her back.
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“Jesus, you’re an awful liar. Try not to die.”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
I kept my brave face on while I got into the car. I kept it on while I drove. I kept it on right up until the moment I pulled up in front of that church turned high school. Then it slipped and I was just afraid. No, not afraid. People were afraid of spiders and heights and walking under ladders. That kind of fear was manageable. I experienced a blind, irrational, phobic response. My heart pounded. My hands shook. My legs trembled. I flashed back to my dream of staring up at the school’s open doors and seeing the interior engulfed in flames like Satan’s own hearth. I ducked my head to cut the line of sight. If I’d been coming at the building cold, that fear might have paralyzed me. I’d been in there before. I knew what to expect.
I started to build walls in my mind, probably very much like the ones Abby had needed to build in her mind. I laid them down, mental brick-by-brick, until they formed a protective shield around my consciousness. Then I built another layer, right behind it, and then another right behind it. By the time I was done, it was a multilayered sphere of will and idea and imagination. The shield wasn’t perfect and never could be perfect. Things would bleed through. The walls could be breached, but it would be enough to see me through for a little while. That’s all I needed, a little while. After a little while, it’d all be over for better or worse. On the upside, if things went to hell, I’d be dead. So there was always that to look forward to.
I went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. The hard case sat there looking plastic and benign. I opened it and stared down at its contents, which were anything but benign. The hard case served a two-fold purpose. It was a measure of last resort and a kind of pre-emptive protection for the world at large. Most magic needed a person, or at least a mind, with innate magical talent to direct and control the forces. I used runes to accomplish that, while Helena had transcended such limitations. Some magic, however, didn’t require someone with any active magical talent. It just needed a body.
The things in the hard case were of the latter type. Any fool with enough of a mind to pick them up could use them. That is to say, if they were deeply stupid. Only a few things in the case were even nominally safe. The Eye of Horus was innocuous enough, assuming you didn’t point it at the wrong thing. The chalk was actually benign. The mirror pendant I’d given Abby was safe, although I’d made that one myself. There was an old skeleton key that I was pretty sure was safe, though I’d never quite worked up the nerve to test it myself.
The key didn’t fit any mortal lock. If you took it to certain places of power, though, it would open a door to one specific destination. My understanding was that it was a pocket dimension inhabited by beings that were not remotely human, but were not predisposed to automatically kill anyone who stumbled into their domain. Play your cards right and they would teach you things, provide you with secret knowledge, and help you to unfold any native power inside you. I didn’t know what happened if you played your cards wrong, which was why I’d never tried it. I’d offered it to a few people that I trusted. Every single one had asked me the same question.
“Have you tried it?”
When I said I hadn’t, they all turned me down. I guess I was some kind of litmus test. Anything I wasn’t willing to try was perceived as suicidal. In retrospect, there might be some wisdom in that. My reputation, as I understood it, was that of someone willing to take calculated risks, and even dangerous ones, for the right payoff. I suppose my unwillingness to try the key, based largely on my own uncertainties about my character and politicking skills, gave other people the wrong idea that the key was fundamentally dangerous.
Then there were the things I wasn’t sure were dangerous, but had been taken from people and things that were dangerous. They were probably just tools, but every tool functioned as a double-edged sword. After all, a hammer was fabulous for driving nails, but it was also fabulous for caving in someone’s skull. It’s all about how you use it. There was a small crystal ball that I’d lifted off the catatonic body of Tony Damelus. I leaned toward the opinion that it was dangerous. I’d gotten a nasty vibe from it when I plucked it from his hand. Sanity overruled curiosity and I didn’t try to use it.
There was an ivory carving of a something that looked like a mix between a hedgehog and a lion. It hurt my eyes just to look at the stupid thing. I thought I knew what it did, but wasn’t sure I could control it. As with the crystal ball, I chose to exercise restraint. There were a handful of other items in the case that fell into the same category. I’d used a few of them, experimentally, and concluded that I didn’t understand them well enough to e
mploy them in anything like a danger situation. Magic you did understand could still prove lethal to you if you used it the wrong way. Magic you didn’t understand was like a lobbing a live grenade into the situation when your life was on the line.
The rest of the items, the majority of them, in fact, were things I knew were dangerous. I’d either seen them in action, found people who knew, or used them myself, generally in a state of abject desperation. There was a ring inset with a shard of obsidian from an Aztec sacrificial knife. Pierce someone’s skin with it and that little beauty ripped their life out of their body and fed it to you. Of course, do it once and you had to keep doing it to stay alive. It could make you immortal, if you had enough victims lined up, but stop feeding it for long enough and it ate your life.
There was a silver pendant crafted to look like a series of concentric circles that would bind someone to your will forever. Pitfall, you had to exert your will over them constantly or they became the equivalent of bloodthirsty zombies, minus the craving for brains. I figured that out the hard way when I distracted the last owner. There were at least a dozen such objects, all horrible in use and consequence. I considered and rejected almost all of them. Granted, I probably wasn’t going to survive to see those consequences, but if I did survive, I had no interest in becoming a serial killer or zombie master or any of the other truly miserable fates those objects heralded.
There was one thing in there I could use, if I dared. I stared down at it, nestled in the foam, and I wavered. It was a small kris knife, though probably not made in the usual way or for the usual reasons. Kris knives of legend were reputed to possess extraordinary magical powers, and I knew why. This particular blade was a cage for some kind of malevolent spirit. I didn’t know exactly what kind. The demon I took it off wasn’t feeling talkative, what with not having a head anymore. The knife was probably strong enough to at least hurt what was inside the school, but I hated to even pick it up. There was no obvious pitfall to using it, which made me quite certain the price was both heavy and spiritual. My theory was that it stained the soul and added tons of karmic debt that I’d have to pay off in another life.
In truth, given the option, I’d have destroyed everything in the hard case. Unfortunately, it’s always easier to make a magical object than it is to destroy a magical object. In the case of the knife, it might have even been the wrong choice. It’s no small chore to bind a spirit into an object and I’d never known it to happen without compelling reasons. I glanced up at the school, felt the fear it generated skitter along the surface of my mental shield, and picked up the knife. I slid it into my back pocket, where it would be a little less obvious. I closed and locked the hard case. I shut the trunk. Then I walked up the steps, opened the door to the school, and stepped inside.
Chapter 46
I experienced another one of the disjointed spaces in my memory right after I stepped through the door. The first thing I do remember with any semblance of clarity was being on the floor with my hands over my ears. There was noise of such volume that I thought it was going to rip my head apart. Covering my ears did nothing to cut the volume. The noise was inside my head, transported from some netherspace occupied by things that had no business on the material plane. Once I managed to piece together that thought, I was able to adjust my mental shields enough to mute that horrific, all-consuming noise well enough to let me do little things, like breathe, stand, and walk. Despite damping down the volume, I was certain that every second of exposure to that noise did psychic damage that would take years to heal, if ever.
“Doesn’t matter,” I told myself.
I lurched a few steps. Where would Abby be? Down, I thought. They’d take her as far down as they could go. I stumbled through the halls, my head pounding in time with the psychic noise, and looked for a stairwell. It took longer than I liked to find the stairwell. Every door looked the same, probably because of some bureaucratic ordinance. I stopped on the top landing and leaned against the wall. The noise battered my mind as effectively as a baseball bat to the skull. I felt disoriented and nauseated. The burn on my back started to throb and sent increasingly urgent, painful messages up my spine. I hardened the shell around my consciousness as well as I could, but I was fighting a Niagara Falls-sized torrent of discordant, psychic interference.
I made my legs start taking me down, one lurching step at a time. I stopped at the next landing, more disoriented and feeling even sicker. I let myself vomit all over the floor. To my surprise, it helped a little. The next set of steps left me on the basement level. There was a sensation of spinning that almost toppled me over. I leaned against the wall. My whole body shook and muscles started to spasm at random. Every instinct told me to run away. Whatever was going on down there wasn’t meant for human beings. My body started to turn back towards the stairs with no input from me, self-perseveration instincts overtaking my conscious intentions.
It was touch-and-go for a second, with my body trying to leave and my mind determined to move forward. My will won out, by the barest conceivable margin, and I turned back. I stared hard at the door, trying to force the spinning sensation to stop. It didn’t stop, but I managed to push it back enough that everything just wobbled along the edges. I banged the door open with my hip and dove through. Flopped through and fell to the floor like a dead fish might be more accurate, but dove through suggests that I intuited the attack and cleverly avoided having my throat slit by Tucker Smith.
The hunting knife swept through the air so fast it whistled. If I’d been less disoriented and stepped through the door, the knife might have decapitated me. As it was, I heard the knife, felt the acidic anger of the demon inside of Tucker, and scrambled away. I managed to get a hand on something firm and dragged myself up to standing. I turned my wavering vision to look at Tucker. He was still dressed in the scorched and melted remnants of his clothes. Where my fire had burned his scalp was a mass of red blisters. Even with my impaired vision, I could see he looked misshapen and hunched. Lil, I thought. That was her work. She must have wrecked a fair number of bones, maybe even done some spinal damage, when she flung him against that tree.
“You!” he screamed, bloody spittle spraying from his lips.
He tried to do that same blurring thing he’d done at the cabin, but Tucker’s body was just too damaged. The move was still awful in its speed, but slow enough for me to see it coming. I lurched to one side and the knife only managed to open a line of fire on my left arm instead of impaling me. Tucker’s overtaxed body slammed into whatever I was leaning on and I heard another bone break. He howled in pain, but his arm was already in motion. I stumbled away, the disorientation too much to let me fight back. The knife ripped against the bulletproof vest and opened the layered fabric. They weren’t meant to stop knives, but it probably saved my life, sparing me the indignity of being eviscerated, and limiting the damage to another line of fire across my stomach. I took another drunken step back and the knife opened a deep cut across my thigh. I think I screamed that time, but who could tell in all that mental noise.
My back came up against a wall. Even in that state of disorientation, I knew that I couldn’t keep things up. Demon Tucker was just too fast and he wouldn’t keep missing. His last swing with the knife, the one that opened up my leg, also gave me an opportunity. The speed of it carried Tucker almost one hundred and eighty degrees. So, I did the only thing I could do. I threw myself at his exposed back. I couldn’t maintain the concentration to keep the world from spinning and fight with Demon Tucker, so I closed my eyes.
I felt the inhuman strength that fueled Demon Tucker. At that range, the acidic anger of the demon threatened to scorch the skin off my face. If I was going to do anything, I needed to do it fast. His own swing had left him off-balance and my tackle had carried him to the floor. The knife slid away with a scrape of metal on concrete. In the heat of moments like that, the mind ups its game and boosts the processor speed. Or, in my case, it hits the hamster with a cattle prod and the wheel goes into over
drive. You get the false impression that the world has slowed.
One upside was that the overdrive mode was seemingly immune to the psychic noise and I got a few precious moments to think clearly. I couldn’t take Demon Tucker in a fair fight. He was too strong and too fast. What I did have was a momentary leverage advantage. Whatever extra strength and power the demon gave Tucker, it didn’t make his body any less vulnerable to damage. I heard the bone break a moment before, which meant I just needed to do something Tucker’s body couldn’t survive. Once the host body died, the demon had to go back to wherever it came from.
I considered the knife in my back pocket and dismissed it. I didn’t dare take the time to pull the knife. In the end, there are only a few surefire ways to kill someone with your bare hands from my position. All that passed through my head in the moments between me crashing into Demon Tucker’s back, him hitting the floor, and me landing on top of him. Demon-infested or not, Tucker’s body was still human. An impact like that scrambles the nervous system for a second. If I’d left him even that second or two to recover, I would have died right there. I didn’t allow him that time.
Tucker Smith didn’t enjoy a pretty death. While his body didn’t know what the hell was going on, I planted a knee in his back. I reached under his head, seized his jaw, and I jerked his head back to an angle it was never meant to reach. Even with the leverage, it still took all of my strength to break his neck. I heard and felt the crackle and pop as the bones, tendons and ligaments gave way and severed the spinal cord. I let go and his head flopped against the floor with dull thud. I leaned forward, breathing hard. My lungs burned and it felt like I couldn’t get enough air into them. I felt a slight movement beneath me and chalked it up to stray chemical messages and misfiring neurons in Tucker’s body.
“Kill you,” wheezed a voice beneath me.
The Midnight Ground Page 30