Gremlin Night Page 16

  A bizarre conversation, but pretty much par for the course in my line of work.

  I zigzagged around a line of cars and drove into the St. John’s neighborhood. The bridge loomed in the distance, with the forested west hills behind it, on the far side of the river.

  I was back at the river. Rivers were also sources of mana and the magic that flowed from the interaction between that mana and the collective human subconscious.

  Cathedral Park was beneath the bridge, beneath the soaring cathedral like bridge.

  I rode the Ducati through the streets downhill at sixty miles an hour, and skidded to a stop beneath the bridge.

  Suddenly the Ducati and I flashed back into sight. My breath came out in frosty gouts. My heart pounded in my ears.

  My knees went wobbly and I nearly fell. I had broken heaven only knew how many traffic laws and risked death the gods only knew how many times to get here.

  Get a grip, Liz, I told myself. The bridge span was overhead. The huge concrete pillars holding it stood in the green of Cathedral Park. I started the Ducati up, and drove onto a path into the park. No doubt I was breaking a park rule, but had bigger troubles to deal with. The spell thread from my binding knife trailed off uphill to the east. It began to fade. I needed to anchor it.

  “Do you see the mana well?” I asked the shadow slug, because, try though I might, I didn’t.

  It’s the middle pillar. See?

  But I didn’t. I squinted. Stupid of me, really. That didn’t help.

  “Show me.” I was suddenly very tired. I didn’t have time to be exhausted. I need to deal with the gremlins, and then reconnect with Tully, who hopefully had a Restore potion. Then I could learn what he’d been up to.

  You need rest.

  “Tell me about it.” I yawned. “But there’s no time, no time at all.” I giggled. I took a deep breath. Exhaustion made me silly, and I had no time for silly.

  I strode to the pillar, and placed the point of my binding knife against the concrete. I could barely see the thread. This close to the pillar, I could see the faint purple glow from the mana well inside. I swallowed.

  But how to connect it? The shadow slug gave me the means. It wasn’t much, but it was all I had to work with.

  I glanced down at my hip. “Hey, Shady, I’m going to have to bind you.” The shadow slug was a new manifestation, a Level 1 verging on a 2, which is the only reason I could try this stunt.

  But I said I’ll help you. The shadow slug whined like a four-year old being told to go to bed.

  “And you will be,” I said. “Please.”

  I don’t want to be spelled.

  “It will only sting a moment,” I said. Lame joke. “Please help me.”

  Okay. The shadow slug’s voice quavered in my mind.

  I began muttering a binding spell, “Essential Compliance.” I didn’t come up with the name, I was just stuck with casting it. I decided to go with ancient Sumerian. I’d sweated this spell out in the Academy. Not an easy spell to learn, especially in that language. I’d just about broken my brain learning it then. I had also given myself a first-class hand cramp.

  I always cast Essential Compliance with my left hand, to give it extra potency. Going with my opposite hand made it more challenging, and thus gave the spell more potency. The bandage made it harder. I nearly the fumbled the spell, twice, before finally casting it.

  The spell made a loud pop. The stink of sulfur and rotten eggshells filled the air. I fought not to gag. Yuck. I hated the stink of Essential Transformation. A wisp of green smoke floated around me.

  I continued murmuring in Sumerian. Strands of green light appeared from my fingers. I looped the strands together until the joined glowing spell strands were the thickness of an electrical power cord, very large in comparison to the slug. Purple haze grew around me as the spell pulled the neighborhood mana in. Slow, the casting ritual was slow. I ached to give it a boost, but I stuck with the ritual. I had no idea what turbocharging this casting with blood magic would do. The temptation grew in me to try. I forced myself to continue with the ritual.

  The spell coiled around the shadow slug. Its shadowy form quivered against me. Afraid. Don’t destroy me, it wailed.

  “I won’t,” I said. I tugged at the spell.

  Protean was a word that had been thrown at me a hundred times back at the academy. Mana was protean. Magic could be protean. Some manifestations even could be protean. People never were. Except, according to Wanda, my tight-assed teacher, my emotions. Screw her.

  Most manifestations were fixed from the moment of creation. But a few weren’t. Tonight, here in Portland, there was also the Gremlin factor

  But I couldn’t see enough detail in the shadow slug. I’d bitten off more than I could chew, magically speaking.

  Please don’t destroy me! The shadow slug wailed.

  “I won’t, I promise.” I brushed hair out of my eyes, squinted, but of course that didn’t help.

  It was like focusing a microscope. An intricate trace work of glowing gold-green lines surrounded the shadow slug, which suddenly revealed far more detail inside its body. It looked like polished obsidian, with edges that just wouldn’t quit. I could lose myself in those edges. Polyhedral instead of being a lump of shadow.

  I want to be me!

  The web work inside the obsidian polyhedron was so intricate, layered. Like a recursive Escher painting. I peered deeper into the slug.

  There. At the center, a photo negative of an ink blot-like shape throbbed. The manifestation’s heart. I just needed the shadow slug to reach. I began drawing a tight circle in the air, looping the spell thread from the tip of my binding knife around the heart of the shadow slug.

  The shadow slug quivered in my mind, whimpering softly.

  I began chanting in Sumerian again. The shadow slug pulled away from me, growing larger until it was a human-sized figure, a bizarre split image of a blacker-than-night shadowy form, looking in one eye-blink like a dark side bedsheet ghost and a many-sided obsidian abstract sculpture in the next.

  A surge of energy swelled from the pillar. All the hairs on my arms and legs stood up. My eyes widened. The air rustled.

  I pressed myself against the huge concrete pillar. The steel struts underpinning the span hummed. A river of golden light flowed from the pillar. The spell. The shadow slug reemerged from the concrete, now small again, and pressed itself back against my hip, whimpering.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  Purple mana lighting flashed around us.

  The spell thread was now a golden ribbon. An image of the gremlins, dozens of them, racing through a gulch toward me now, like a tsunami. I slumped to the ground.

  Come on, Liz, I told myself. Get up. I forced myself to stand, fell. The gremlins would be here in moments.

  I pushed myself up. “I’d better get ready,” I said aloud.

  “Or else let me have them,” a familiar voice said.

  I turned around with a start. The trickster in its top-hat-and-frock-coat guise leaned against a nearby tree, smiling at me.

  The trickster arched an eyebrow. “How do you plan on destroying the oncoming gremlin horde?” it asked. “The power of their chaos will cause the bridge above us to collapse.”

  I stood up straight, facing it. “I’ll do what I have to.”

  “Brave words from an exhausted sorcerer out of her league.” It laughed sadly. “How will you manage to destroy these gremlins? There are so many of them, you are out of spells.” His voice was gloating.

  I gritted my teeth. The trickster had a point.

  “I take it you have a way to deal with them.”

  The trickster’s smile widened. “Of course. Give the spell to me and I’ll make sure you and the bridge survive, intact.”

  “This was the plan all along, wasn’t it?” I demanded.

  It nodded. “You can’t be faulted for failing to see it. You aren’t a supernatural, after all.

  “You’re doing this for Rudy Gott.”
The mystery wizard of the hour, once David Marks, who obviously wanted power, and lots of it.

  The trickster shrugged. “I aid him.”

  Time to stab with a verbal knife. “I thought true ancients served no one.”

  The trickster’s eyes widened and it lifted its chin. “I serve no one.”

  “Not from where I’m sitting.”

  “The lady has a point,” another familiar voice said beside me. The fox stood next to me.

  I narrowed my eyes. “How can you be in the same place at the same time in two guises?” That was supposed to be impossible. Manifestations couldn’t do it any more than people could.

  “I’m not.” The trickster-in-top-hat-and-frock-coat leaned toward me, ignoring the other voice. It didn’t seem to register the fox at all. “You’ll die if you don’t give me the spell.” It pulled out a brass pocket watch, dangling on a chain from a vest pocket, and checked the time.

  I rolled my eyes. Talk about a flair for the melodramatic.

  “One-minute left for you to live. One-minute left to decide,” it said.

  I looked at the fox, raised an eyebrow.

  “I’m the free part of myself,” the fox explained. “Gott couldn’t hold all of me.”

  A purple glow grew in the sky over the hillside above us, eastward, in the direction the gremlins were coming from. They had to be racing quickly.

  I turned to the trickster-in-top-hat-and-frock-coat. “If I give control of the spell to you, then you give all this oncoming chaos magic to Gott.”

  It shrugged, the top hat bobbling. “That’s not for you to worry about.” It reached a bony hand toward me. “All you have to do is hand me your knife, and I’ll take over.

  I glanced at the fox.

  “There’s another way,” the voice of the fox said in my ear.

  Sparks began jumping from the tip of my binding knife. The air was hot, filled with onrushing power, like the feeling you get right before a thunderstorm hits and the skies open up. The power cables overhead began to spark, an electrical echo of the arcane sparking from my knife. The golden ribbon was now a net.

  “Looks like the gremlin express is about to roll into the station,” I said.

  “Give me the knife!” The trickster-in-top-hat-and-frock-coat commanded.

  “Strike me,” said the fox’s voice in my ear.

  Street lights popped. The houses around us plunged into darkness as their lights went out. A car alarm began playing what sounded like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Another car joined in, then a second, until there were at least a dozen alarms all playing that.

  “At least it’s not soft rock,” I said, trying to sound glib. My palms were slick with sweat.

  The purple glow broke over the hillside above us, now a violet blaze of mana, as the gremlin wave rolled down the hill, blue-black figures racing toward me.

  Forty at least. That had to be a record for an outbreak in one place.

  A tree split in three. A lamppost popped off its base and hopped for six feet before toppling to the ground. The gremlins passed hurricane fencing, which came apart like tissue paper.

  My stomach had turned to lead. The chaos magic surrounding the gremlins strobed green and purple. It looked powerful enough for the bridge to crumble. The gremlins swarmed closer. A half dozen abandoned shopping carts hurled after them.

  “Give it to me!” The trickster-in-top-hat-and-frock-coat thundered.

  The air wavered, like water. The fox had rolled over on to its back, exposing its chest.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  I held the knife in my hand, then plunged it into the fox, and let go of the hilt, jumping away.

  The trickster-in-top-hat-and-frock-coat’s mouth formed a huge ‘O’. Blue smoke poured from the open mouth and its ears, and the manifestation dissolved into nothingness.

  The knife was buried in the fox, the golden ribbon now a net connecting the gremlins rushing at us. They pelted into the fox’s body. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the resulting arcane flash was an actinic flare that left me blind.

  A wave of mana went through me and I gasped, stumbling. Then it was gone, leaving me gasping for more air. Rattling sounds grew close, followed by clattering and crashes, then silence.

  I blinked, trying to see.

  Finally, my vision returned.

  A black cloud rose, shot through with purple lightning, like an arcane version of a mushroom cloud, fading moments later.

  “Thank you,” the voice of the fox whispered in my ear. “In death, I am free at last. Perhaps, I will be reborn. Someday.”

  I lowered my head, blinking at the tears. The trickster had been a prisoner of Gott, who never should have had the ability to capture an ancient. Yet he had. Somehow. I needed to meet up with Tully, find Gott, and stop him before his actions wrought more destruction and death.

  I felt a shivering against my hip. The shadow slug had survived.

  “I’ll bring you to justice, Rudy Gott,” I whispered. “I swear.”

  I trembled with the force of my vow.

  14

  I left Cathedral Park and drove up to Richmond and the deck of the St. John’s bridge. I needed to get to the R.U.N.E. garage in Northwest quickly and use the relay there to contact Tully. I needed to find out what he’d learned, and tell him what I’d discovered about Rudy Gott and the mana harvesting.

  Turns out things were even worse than I thought.

  When I’d returned to my Ducati, got in the saddle, and, almost as an afterthought, checked my watch, what I saw hit me like a lightning bolt. What seemed like a half hour in the park had been much longer. Magic can distort time. Illusions definitely mess with your time sense, and I’d gotten a double dose of both. It turned out I’d been there for a few hours. It was now after three A.M. Dawn was only a few hours away. What seemed like a very low priority was now a very real threat.

  Dawn.

  It was still a few hours away, but the daylight divide loomed ahead, when the ebbing nocturnal magic transformed into daytime magic. Normally, the transformation was a quiet, subtle thing, like a soft fluttering of wings.

  The solstice night, the longest of the year, had the sharpest transition. The mana Gott had been siphoning and using to build up whatever massive magic he had planned, loomed like a thunderhead. When daybreak hit, that mountain of nocturnal magic wouldn’t just ebb into the dawning light of the new day, as the R.U.N.E. saying went.

  If nocturnal magic was powerful enough, fueled by enough mana, it wouldn’t transform into day magic. Instead, it would rage into the daylight, trying to spread darkness to protect itself.

  It would be like an eclipse crashing into an arcane hurricane, and the Hidden would be thrust into the consciousness of the ordinary world. Magic would be out in the open, exposed for all to see. Tonight’s outbreaks would be the merest echo compared to the hurricane of manifestations that would roar into existence in Portland.

  I gunned the Ducati as I crossed the bridge. Clouds scudded low overhead. It looked like more rain. Always more rain in Stumptown. I was born here and it was one thing I didn’t miss when I was away.

  Something black and oblong flitted past me. I thought I heard a high-pitched buzz, but it was hard to tell with low rumble of the Ducati’s engine. I darted a glance over my shoulder.

  Light reflected off rapidly beating giant moth-like wings. The creature swooped up in an arc behind me, and flew back in my direction. Huge multifaceted eyes, like giant opals, shone in the dark. The manifestation sped closer.

  I accelerated.

  The light at the west end of the bridge ahead was red. A panel truck slowly moved through the intersection. I leaned hard to the right, swerving around the truck. Time seemed to slow as the truck’s back end grew larger and larger. I slid past it, then righted myself and opened the throttle as the Ducati drove onto Highway Thirty.

  I was heading toward the Garage, and the industrial area where I’d nearly fallen to my death earlier tonight, saved only by t
he fly-by-night that could have been cousin to the thing chasing me.

  I glanced back a second time. The creature swooped down on me, four human-like arms unfolding beneath it, two pairs of hands reached for me.

  Curses! I twisted away from the creature. The Ducati started to weave. I swung my head back around.

  A black SUV with dark-tinted windows was parked across the highway just adownhill, beside an ancient boat building.

  Strong hands grabbed me under my shoulders and pulled me up. I fought to stay put, my thighs gripping the motorcycle’s seat but the manifestation yanked me skyward. The Ducati drove forward for another twenty yards, then tipped over and crashed into the pavement, flipping over and over, a shower of sparks trailing behind it. The bike hurdled off the road, down a weed-covered embankment and plunged out of sight into the river. Water fountained up. I gulped.

  So much for my awesome ride.

  I stopped trying to fight the manifestation that held me. The highway was twenty feet below me. We flew down to the black SUV just as its doors opened. Three big men in black suits got out, followed by a blonde in a pantsuit and an annoyed looking red-headed guy, also in a black suit, holding a silver rod.

  My feet reached the pavement and the manifestation released me just before I smacked into the SUV. Two of the big guys grabbed me from either side.

  “You’ve been a busy little criminal,” Dara Kind said, looking daggers at me. “That ends now. You are under arrest for magical crimes.”

  The red-head holding the silver rod was Dara’s partner, Riley. The cords bulged in his neck, and his lips pressed into a hard line. He pointed the rod at my chest. The two big guys holding me pinned my arms behind my back while a third patted me down, taking my binding knife, and reaching into my biker jacket.

  “Hey!” I tried to squirm away from his grabby hands, but no luck. He found the blood amulet and yanked it out. He held it out to Dara.

  “Dabbling in blood magic. I knew it!” Dara snapped.

  “You don’t have any authority to arrest me, even if I had committed a crime,” I protested, as the two big guys holding my arms hauled me up to the SUV.