Power Game

by Brad Magnarella

  Blam! Blam! Blam!

  Fluid and gobs of foulness pelted my face. Arnaud’s hands fell from my neck, and he staggered backwards in a drunken dance. Where his head had been was a pulpy stump. He dropped to the ground in a heap.

  “You all right?” Vega asked, lowering her weapon.

  “Yeah,” I replied hoarsely, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Thanks.”

  As I invoked to get the creature’s filth off me, Vega peered past me to where Arnaud’s body lay. “So, is he finished?”

  “I’m going to incinerate him to be sure.”

  I had already thumbed the cap off the dragon sand, but I paused before covering his body in the ultra-combustible granules. My magic was talking to me again, and I didn’t like what it was suggesting. I summoned shields around Vega and me and swung toward the shipping container.

  “Is he still inside?” I shouted at the host of scared and grimy faces peering out.

  Heads shook and a few fingers pointed toward the water. I sprinted to where the East River lapped the concrete wall below and cast out a ball of light. The invocation blazed brilliantly, but I couldn’t see anything across the span of choppy waters.

  I spat out a curse.

  Vega arrived beside me. “What’s going on?”

  “Arnaud outsmarted me,” I muttered.

  Vega looked from the headless body behind us to the vast expanse of water. The ball of light I’d cast moments before faded, returning the river to inky darkness. “Then who did I just take down?” she asked nervously.

  I sighed. “A zombie.”

  “A zombie?”

  In my mind, I cycled through the chase, the pulse-pounding sequence that had begun with the prickling sense someone was watching us and ended with Vega blowing the head from my attacker.

  Only the watcher and the attacker had been two different creatures.

  “When Arnaud climbed into the container, he found a body,” I explained. “Dead a week or so from the smell of him. In fact, his fellow container people had probably already stripped him of his clothes. Arnaud animated the body and sent it out the door. While the zombie and I were dancing a tango, he slipped away.”

  I watched the muscles around Vega’s jaw harden.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  She pulled out her phone and called NYPD dispatch. Peppering her rapid speech with codes, she gave a description of Arnaud and ordered a perimeter as well as an aerial search of the East River and both shores. I made my own call to the Order, filling Claudius in and asking that he have Arianna contact me immediately.

  I hung up before the old man could start babbling.

  Back at the containers, an interview with the more coherent of the container inhabitants confirmed what I’d guessed about Arnaud’s actions. He’d come in, grabbed a dead body—“Franklin” was the man’s name—sent him out, and then slipped away himself. Fortunately, he hadn’t claimed any living victims while inside. That was small consolation, though.

  As the first NYPD choppers arrived over the East River, their spotlights sweeping the waters, Vega put away her phone.

  “They’ll let me know if they spot anyone,” she said.

  I nodded vaguely, knowing in my gut that Arnaud had gotten away.

  “Hey.” Vega’s hand slipped into mine and gave a firm squeeze. “We’ll find him.”

  I nodded. He was faster than I thought he would be, more resourceful. More powerful too. I mean, hell, he’d channeled enough demonic magic to animate a corpse. He shouldn’t have been that far along, dammit.

  “Why don’t you go stay with Tony tonight?” I said. “I’ll hang out here.”

  I expected another argument, but Vega was thinking along the same lines, apparently. My grandfather’s coin pendant, which currently hung from Vega’s neck, would shield anyone inside its aura from Arnaud’s aggression. And right now, she and I both wanted Tony inside that aura.

  I escorted Vega back over the pedestrian bridge.

  “I’ll have them contact you if they spot anything,” she said, climbing into her car.

  “And I’ll be searching Arnaud’s path of flight, see if I can find anything to cast from.”

  “Keep me updated. And call if you need anything,” she stressed. “I’ll have a car give you a ride home.” I caught the door before she could close it.

  “Hey, ah, would you mind not telling your brother what happened tonight?”

  Vega smirked at my joke that wasn’t entirely a joke. “We’ll keep it between us.”

  “Miss Bossy Pants, huh?”

  “Don’t you dare start.”

  As our smiles straightened, I stooped down and kissed her. “I love you,” I whispered, which was me saying I wouldn’t let anything happen to her or her son. But in place of whatever Vega said back, her brother’s critical voice echoed in my head.

  Can you promise that?

  Or was the voice my own?

  As I’d predicted, the police search didn’t turn up Arnaud. Farther north, they found a floating body. A jugular bite coupled with the recentness of the woman’s death suggested Arnaud had found his meal after all.

  I fared no better back at Container City. I searched exhaustively around the container where the pulse from Grandpa’s ring had lit up Arnaud’s right leg, but if the demon had dropped any matter, it had already sublimated. Neither could I locate any kind of trail on the astral or ethereal planes.

  At midnight, I checked my phone. No return calls from the Order. I dialed the officers Vega had placed on standby and had them drop me off at Gretchen’s place.

  The large, handsome townhouse just south of Midtown had belonged to Pierce Dalton, the magic-user I’d worked with briefly before his demise. Through some arrangement with the Order, Gretchen had taken it over, and that’s where we had been holding our irregular training sessions. Though Gretchen still acted as though she barely tolerated me, I knew better. She had helped me foil Arnaud’s attack on Yankee Stadium by ensuring I had everything I needed. I was betting she would help me now.

  I climbed the stone steps and banged the heavy brass knocker against the door. As I waited for her to answer, I shifted to my wizard’s senses. Multidimensional bands of magic hummed around the house like a giant magnetic field. For someone who looked so disorganized on the surface, Gretchen had her defensive shit together. She’d been teaching me to improve my own wards, lessons I’d put to use on Vega’s apartment as well as my own. So far nothing had breached them.

  Yet, the Carlos voice inside me added.

  I was about to knock again when a grumbling sounded on the door’s other side.

  Bolts popped and the door yawned open. But instead of a large woman with a savage case of bedhead, I was looking down at a creature in a bathrobe with squash-colored eyes and a menacing exhibit of sharp teeth.

  “Whad’ya want?” the goblin barked.

  I jerked my sword from my cane. “Who the hell are you?”

  His eyes crossed toward the point of my blade, which now hovered inches from his face. Goblins were nasty little creatures. Vega and I had encountered an army of them in Central Park during Mayor Lowder’s eradication campaign and barely escaped with our lives. A few dozen police officers hadn’t been so lucky.

  The goblin’s eyes returned to mine, entirely unconcerned. “Make your move, tough guy.”

  When lines of energy wavered between us, I realized Gretchen’s defenses were protecting him. There was no way a lowly goblin had gotten inside unless Gretchen had intended it, meaning he was a guest of some kind. What kind, I couldn’t begin to guess … and wasn’t sure I wanted to. Eyeing the creature’s cotton bathrobe, I lowered my sword slowly.

  “Where’s Gretchen?” I demanded.

  “Not here.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  He crossed a pair of tattooed forearms and leaned against the doorframe. “I could.”

  I wanted to reach through the ward and shake the four-foot creature by the lapels of his robe. But
knowing I wouldn’t get that far before Gretchen’s wards put me in a world of hurt, I took a calming breath.

  “I’m Everson Croft, her student. I need to talk to her about something important.”

  The goblin pulled a pack of cigarettes from a breast pocket, shook one out, and took his time lighting it with a match. Goblins were notoriously bad tempered, prone to violence at the drop of a hat. But this one’s aggression seemed more passive. He blew a contrail of smoke from the side of his scarred mouth and studied a talon.

  “Look, I’m sorry for pulling my sword on you,” I said. “I’ve just never seen you here before, and—”

  “I’m a goblin?”

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “It was just a shock, that’s all.”

  “Oh, look, a goblin,” he deadpanned. “Must be up to no good.”

  In fact, goblins rarely were, but I kept the thought to myself. “More like, oh, look, a stranger in my teacher’s house.”

  He flicked the butt with a thumb to drop the ash. “Gretchen’s never mentioned me?”

  Though his deep, barking voice didn’t lend itself to nuance, I thought I sensed a hint of disappointment. “Well, like I said, she’s my teacher. We don’t really get into each other’s personal stuff.”

  The goblin gave a vague nod as if that explained something. He dropped the barely-smoked cigarette to the floor and crushed it out with a bare heel. “She’s in Faerie,” he said. “I’m looking after the place.”

  So that explained it, though I was having trouble picturing a creature built for war collecting her mail and watering the geraniums.

  “Do you have a way of getting in touch with her?” I asked.

  “Gretchen?” He gave a snort. “Said she’d be back in a few days, which could mean anything.”

  True enough. “Well, if you hear from her before then, could you ask her to call me?”

  “I can ask.” His tired look suggested he and Gretchen had history.

  “Hey, I didn’t catch your name,” I said.

  “That’s ’cause I didn’t toss it.”

  Thinking the goblin was going to leave it there, I turned to go.

  “It’s Bree-Yark,” he said.

  “Thanks, Bree-Yark. Sorry for getting you out of bed.”

  “I was already up. Don’t sleep so well in your world.”

  Not knowing how to respond, and with too much already on my mind, I bid him goodnight. When I was halfway down the sidewalk, he called after me.

  “Hey, you wanna come inside? Watch a movie or something?”

  I looked back. The creature cut a lonely silhouette in the doorway of the huge house.

  “I would, but I’m in the middle of something important.”

  “You and everyone else,” he muttered, and slammed the door.

  I shook my head. Talk about moody.

  When I reached the sidewalk, I paused to organize my thoughts. With the Gretchen option out—for now, anyway—I decided to head down to Blade’s place in the East Village to debrief her and the other hunters on my encounter with Arnaud. I was also going to tell them I was good with the thirty-thousand-dollar bounty. I’d underestimated Arnaud’s strength and savvy. His animation of the dead man had probably taken every last reserve of power he’d amassed, but given time, those kinds of demonic feats were going to cost him little to nothing.

  The more scopes we could put on him, the better.

  Because Blade’s place wasn’t far, I flipped my coat collar up against the cold wind and set out on foot. If I saw a cab en route, I would flag it down. I’d only gone a few blocks when a warm prickling passed through me.

  My magic was talking again, telling me I was being watched.

  Heart thumping, I hardened the protective field around me and unlocked my sword from my staff.

  Please, let this be another crack at Arnaud.

  The watcher was to my left and behind me, just out of sight. I could feel him tailing me now, following soundlessly. He was accompanied by a shadowy whisper of magic. Demonic? Hard to tell.

  I took two more steps and spun.

  “Entrapolarle!” I bellowed.

  With a flash, a spherical shield crackled into being around my pursuer. When the light dimmed, something was batting up and down the shield’s inside in a mad flurry of dark feathers. I shrank its confinement until the creature was pinned. It blinked out at me from an obsidian black eye and released a ragged caw.

  A raven?

  A bolt slammed into my back and threw me to the ground.

  Christ, what now?

  6

  The demonic creature that had once been the vampire Arnaud slipped from the East River, dragging his right leg behind him. Wincing, he craned his neck around. Off to the south, helicopters circled. He had passed beneath them, keeping to the river’s garbage-strewn bottom, where their searchlights were reduced to murky specters.

  With a sneer, he pulled himself to a large tree above the island’s shore and disappeared among its roots. He had burrowed the tunnel when he was newly returned to the world—and smaller. Now the rocky earth squeezed and gouged his sides. He cursed as he arrived in the lair he’d clawed out.

  “Wasn’t supposed to return here,” he hissed.

  After two months of feeding on the island’s pathetic creatures, he had grown. His senses had sharpened. Just a week before, the first gaslight of promised demon magic flickered inside him. That’s what he’d been waiting for—a sign he was ready to move onto humans, to assimilate their potent life forces.

  His plan had been to infiltrate the human dregs around the city’s periphery where he could move unnoticed, even as the dead grew in number. He knew the city’s politics too well, for they were the politics of all great cities. Broken and penniless earned you no true sympathy, much less an autopsy. The bodies would disappear into the city morgue along with the others. Their blood and souls would grow and transmutate inside him, increasing his power five, tenfold!

  He slumped against the damp wall of his cramped, bone-littered lair and peered down at his mangled leg.

  That had been the plan before the bastard wizard showed up—just as he had two months before—but wielding more power. And that cursed ring. The demon slammed a fist into the wall, creating a small earth slide.

  “But how did he find us, Zarko?” he asked. “How?”

  Arnaud’s head servant had perished along with his blood slaves when he himself was cast into the Below. But Arnaud had spent so many centuries talking to him, he found he couldn’t quell the habit. If anything, he found it comforting.

  But Zarko’s memory did little for him now.

  “We’ve been nothing but prudent,” Arnaud continued as he seized his right leg in his taloned hands. “Nothing but … careful!”

  As he said the last word, he gave a violent wrench. The leg came away with a wet crunch and rip. Biting back a scream, Arnaud shoved the useless appendage aside. Black vapor rose as it began to sublimate. He composed himself and wiped away the messy strings of matter from around his hip socket until he could see the new limb—a scrawny salamander-like leg that would grow and morph into shape.

  But it would take blasted time.

  “How?” he demanded of Zarko again.

  Had Everson Croft tracked him somehow? Impossible. His agonizing passage through the Harkless Rift had changed him, cloaking his nature from all but fellow demons. But what good was the cloaking if Everson showed up every time he ventured out? Was the ring homing in on the pact that connected them? Arnaud shook his head. The agreement at Brasov had explicitly forbade any tracking features in the binding enchantment. The enchantment was to be used for enforcement only.

  And that enchantment had hurt him tonight. Indeed, it had very nearly destroyed him a second time.

  Arnaud cradled his new leg as though it were an infant. He had been spent and wounded, barely able to pull himself through the water. Were it not for the crazy wo
man tottering along the shore, he might not have made it back here. Now angry tears stung his eyes at the thought of having to spend more months in this foul hole.

  “Why didn’t you sever my bond to the cursed pact?” he demanded of Malphas now.

  Malphas couldn’t hear him, of course. Not without a Dread Council, but Arnaud had no plans to invoke one, or him, ever again. Just as you didn’t plan to come back to this hole, he reminded himself. But you do what you must to survive.

  He gnashed his sharp teeth. It would mean humiliation, groveling prostrations, but if Malphas could restore him and sever his bond to the Brasov Pact…

  Swearing, Arnaud swept the debris from the ground in front of him. Using the talon of an index finger, he etched Malphas’s symbol into the earth, then slashed the same talon across his right wrist. The blood from the crazy woman spilled into the grooves, steam rising as the blood oozed around the symbol and joined up.

  Arnaud struggled onto his good knee and forearms until he was bowing before the liquid symbol. The act filled him with bitter hatred. He was the one who should be bowed to, not doing the bowing. He swallowed his resentment and from his throat came a guttural sequence that sounded as though he were on the verge of vomiting. In fact, he was speaking the demon Malphas’s true name.

  The effort was painful, but already the blood in the symbol was bubbling and turning black. Smoke rose, congealing into the form of a dark specter with savage red eyes. A dark, taunting voice uttered Arnaud’s true name.

  His demonic name.

  “Long have I waited to hear from my servant,” he said, “my capable servant, only to find him hiding in a hole like a shithouse rat.” Malphas’s laughter was malicious and sent a rake of chills down Arnaud’s back.

  “Yes, I hadn’t the power to summon you until now,” he lied.

  “Or were you preparing to turn your back on our agreement?”

  “No, never! I exist only because Malphas wills it. I serve you and no other—not even myself!”