Elgin

  *She’s not quite gone, her heart just stopped, hold still* Cutter said and Elgin felt as well as saw the flow of nanites falling from his skin and jacket and sinking into her skin.

  There was a crash and the door smashed inwards, “Police, Hands up!” the black clad swarm that erupted into the room moved with professional precision.

  Somebody stepped on Humph’s tail or that was what the horrendous yowling scream seemed to indicate as the huge neo Siamese exploded into view and dived under some piece of furniture. In the blink of an eye, when everyone’s attention was distracted, Elgin ‘Twisted’ and he was in silence. His hand on Zeph kept her unconscious body in the shadow realm. An instant later Humph appeared and trotted over to nose Zeph’s face, then lick it with his big rough tongue, before looking up at Elgin with worried eyes.

  “She’ll be Okay Humph, thanks for finding her.” Elgin rubbed his friend’s head and one of the elegantly pointed ears, Humph closed his eyes and seemed to sigh in relief.

  There was a little gasp from nearby, Zeph moved, moaned, her eyes, which had closed blinked open, she stared at the cat, “Humph?” it was a thread of a whisper but a relief to both Elgin and Humph, who gently butted her head, then licked her cheek again with a soft, “Mrow.”

  “Oh my God, it is you Humph!”

  “He led me to you.” Elgin said quietly, patting her arm gently.

  She tried to twist but was too weak, “Elgin?”

  “Yeah Zeph, don’t try and move, you’ll feel better in a few minutes.”

  “Oh thank God, I thought I was dead Elgin.”

  “Humph got us here in time.” He decided she didn’t need to know how close run it had been.

  Her eyes had closed again but her breathing was getting steadier and deeper,*She’s asleep, the serious damage is fixed and the minor but wide spread trauma is being dealt with.*

  Elgin looked up and around, the shadow room was little different from the one in the real world. Just a lot more decrepit, the windows let in very little of the orange half light. He looked at Humph, “Can you get us back to my room?” feeling almost silly but he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that although Humph was still a cat he understood what was being said at something close to human comprehension level.

  Humph stood up and extended his tail, Elgin gently shifted Zeph, the holes in her blouse were sealed and the blood was gone. He lifted her, surprised at how light she was, she had so much presence and force it seemed like it should make itself felt by weight. Humph’s tail curled around his hand and pulled and this time Elgin didn’t stumble as he walked into the dark stillness. An instant later he was standing in his Air-Stream back in Beauty, having crossed the country in something like five steps and fewer seconds.

  He had meant his hotel room, but Humph’s solution was probably better, he carried Zeph over to the neatly made bed and lay her on the top, he made sure she was comfortable then set about making some coffee and food.

  -o-

  “Where are we?” it was getting on for morning in Beauty, two hours ahead of New York, Elgin was sitting with his feet braced on the counter, the chair back on two legs.

  He let the chair down gently, “Back in Beauty, my trailer.” He replied quietly

  Her eyes opened wide as she looked around, taking in the reality, “How long?”

  “It’s only the morning after,” He grinned crookedly at her astonishment, “don’t ask, I don’t understand myself right now.”

  She sighed leaned back, “Can I have some of that divine smelling coffee, and anything halfway edible in your fridge, I’m starving.”

  He served her coffee and some eggs and spam he’d made from the long storage life stores he always kept in, in case he got snowed in for a week or two. She wolfed it all down, then leaned back, “Oh, wow, that was wonderful Elgin.”

  “You’re welcome ma’am,” he replied with a laugh, “Though hunger makes just about anything taste pretty good.”

  She nodded, leaned back, “Damn it Elgin, I screwed up, I screwed up really badly.”

  “Okay, tell me what happened, we’ll go from there.”

  -o-

  Zeph was leaning back in her chair reviewing the markups on the contract when she saw an unusual hustle in the hallway outside. She was about to call Barb and ask what was going on when Allen Curtis, hot shot lawyer, partner in the firm, frequently seen in the company of a certain Zephyr Smith-Samson, waved from the hall and made a quick pass in sign language saying that there was something really bizarre happening over Chinatown.

  Her heart began to beat irregularly, and without really thinking she grabbed her cell phone, her heart sank to a new low when the ‘out of service’ message flashed up when she tried to call Elgin. She was beginning to really hate the no tolerance anti gun laws in New York city, however much she understood the feelings driving them.

  She circled the building and found a small crowd in one of the conference rooms and the ‘sitting room’ - some spare space set up as a holding area or spare discussion space during complex multi-party negotiations. Allen was in the forefront with a couple of other partners. The sky was blue with a few puffy white clouds except for a squall line that seemed to have rolled over Chinatown. The clouds hid any building higher than a couple of stories, and towered into the sky, mushrooming out to a puffy white cap.

  “Came rolling in getting higher and higher, blacker and blacker like it was aiming for something.” Allen said into her ear. His office was on this side of the building giving him a perfect view. There was a flicker of lightning high up in the dark column and then it lit up and a stroke of lighting danced around the crown of lighting rods on a building a block away, the ripping crash of thunder sent people staggering, covering their ears.

  The cloud glowed an ugly green, then lit with a weird, and for Zeph far too familiar orange glow, sheet lighting ripped this way and that inside the belly of the cloud, only occasionally letting out a long stroke into the clear. But even the occasional strokes did damage, a transformer in flames on a building top here, and antennas hanging down over the side of a mid rise there.

  “Damn its almost as if something in Chinatown is keeping the storm cell sitting there!” Allen whispered into her ear. The cloud line did extend beyond but it faded rapidly.

  Zeph had her arms crossed, rubbing her upper arms, trying to keep the chill of something like fear at bay. She knew that whatever Elgin was these days he was powerful and what was going on out there had to involve him, but the raw power involved here had to be more than just his.

  There was a yelp, “Hey I saw something in the....” The window lit up as the column of black cloud lit up from inside, turning brilliant, awesome, golden white for an instant, before snapping back to black.

  “Jesus...”

  The column of cloud rippled and shivered as if being slashed from the inside. It lit up again this time with a much dimmer yellow green glow that seemed to reach a few hundred feet and then fade away. Under Zeph’s feet the building swayed, glass rattled and then they were hit by an ear stabbing crash followed by an unearthly roar that did not stop. People were yelling and screaming, some running for the emergency exits.

  Zeph just stood there, knowing that if things were really bad one place was as good as another till you understood the situation. She also prayed for the safety of her friend.

  Then things began to fall out of the sky, she saw what might have been a block of masonry fall on a building roof not far away and exploded in brick dust, punching down and blowing out windows in the floor below. Then something hit the window nearby with a nasty cracking sound.

  Now it was time to move, she walked back, away from the window, back to near the core of the building, but still standing where she could see the outside, the tall column of black cloud. A cloud having its guts blown away by a vast jet of superheated gas. The cloud formation was fading fast, loosing cohesion as winds at different levels started to pull it apart.

&nb
sp; The roar faded, faded...was gone after one final thump. The yellow green glow was gone, the rain of gravel faded and was gone, a last thud, crash tinkle of shattering glass and silence fell. It lasted a few seconds before a hubbub of voices filled the building, seeming louder than the catastrophe they had just observed.

  An hour later Petters, Petters, Faulken and Christchurch was closed except for a few paralegals and clerks left to man the phones and pass any important messages on to one of the partners. Reports of damage and casualties filled the air, but there had been few deaths reported, at least so far.

  Elgin’s phone was still off the air and his hotel told her he was not in his room, had apparently not slept there last night.

  Unable to do anything in that regard, she tapped Rachel and Olga’s number, they should be at the little efficiency. The cell net was clogged so it took her several tries but finally she got through to the land line she had insisted on, there was no answer, neither was there an answer on Olga or Rachel’s cash and call cell phones. By which time Zeph was already in a taxicab.

  The girls were sharing an efficiency apartment in an old tenement building in a part of town that was relatively safe and completely out of Bruno’s stamping ground. Zeph was subsidizing their meager pay for now, with the hope the girls could get on their feet eventually. She had even contemplated paying for them to move to Beauty, the pay for a good, and good looking, waitress was enough to live reasonably but she wasn’t sure how the girls would adapt to country life.

  The door to the apartment appeared normal enough until she got close enough to see a scuff on the paint near the lock. The scar of a kick, a kick that wouldn’t have opened a locked door, but might have ripped the security bar off the frame.

  She knocked, without expecting, or receiving an answer. The door was locked but her passkey opened it. The room inside was dark and still, a lamp lay on the floor along with some books from Rachel’s accounting class and a plastic mug with a damp stain showing it hadn’t been empty when knocked over.

  On the tiny breakfast bar mounted to the wall by the kitchen alcove were a line of three phones. The land line, its handset shattered, Olga’s pink cell, broken in half, and Rachel’s metallic blue one, set apart with a white note folded like a place setting.

  Ms. Z.Smith-Samson your meddling is unacceptable. You will receive a call on this phone regarding your future actions regarding the Bear Den Contract negotiations. Remember knowingly harboring illegal aliens can get you disbarred, and their futures depend on your obedience.

  She blinked at the message, it was not at all what she had been expecting. In some ways this was much worse than Bruno. Elgin’s revelation that the negotiations were under surveillance and someone, probably the Russian financiers, were playing for complete ownership, hadn’t fully sunk in. Now she knew someone was after something and maybe it was for darker reasons than just money...as dark as that could be at times.

  She pocketed the note and the phone, then, repressing the neatnik instinct to clean up she went back out the door. The landlord had heard nothing, seen nothing, his surveillance cameras had seen nothing, because after the men had passed his desk they had carefully covered each camera before proceeding on, they had removed whatever it was as they had pulled back. All very professional, not at all what she would have expected of Bruno and his hangers on.

  But Bruno was the only lead she had. Or maybe not quite, there was Dmitri Andropov and Double Eagle financial, who were certainly involved.

  She went back to her apartment to do some more research on both Bruno the Rumanian and Dmitri the Russian. Despite a couple of hours of work it was human relationship that got her anywhere, and that was only Bruno’s probable location. Allen had introduced her to Mary Goldsmith one of the assistant DA’s on the vice task force and the two had struck up a friendship, Mary gave her the number of a policewoman working on the task group responsible for Bruno’s harem, she told Zeph enough for her to find Bruno’s address.

  All this took time so it was already ten when she arrived at Bruno’s hang out, what had once been the owners apartment above a bar. The bar was incredibly noisy, the sound making the space uninhabitable for normal living, but nearly ideal for the type of business that Bruno carried out.

  It was only when she walked up the stairs and came face to face with one of Bruno’s enforcers that she started to have second thoughts about her course of action. Rather typically far too late to change the plan. The thug had obviously never heard of dental hygiene, “You’re a new one, you a specialist? What’s your specialty, hey?”

  She reached into her clasp bag and if she had had a gun he would have been dead, instead all she had was pepper spray, which would probably just irritate him, and the card she extended, “Zephyr Smith-Samson, attorney, here to see your boss.”

  He looked at her slack jawed for a moment before taking the card and examining both sides, obviously at a loss as to reading it or interpreting its meaning. So Zeph helped him out, “I’d like to talk to Bruno, I think he’s wading into deeper waters than he intends.”

  The bruiser looked her over with a frown, “Not sure what your game is girl but Bruno doesn’t like being threatened. He ain’t here, but he will be, you can wait for him, inside.” He pushed the door open, reached out grabbed her arm and all but threw her inside.

  The room was louder than the hall, the thump of heavy metal, the growl of voices, screams, yells, howls, sometimes all at the same time with the crash of falling furniture and bodies. This was an extremely lively place, she’d heard that the police had been trying out the strategy of allowing a few small self regulating, near free fire zones, because the decreasing crime rate of the Bloomberg years had been going backwards fast recently as the criminal element mutated in the new age.

  The furniture was old fashioned and dirty except for a big leather recliner, probably Bruno’s throne. She sat down gingerly on the brocade settee, the seat area almost looked like leather, the caked on dirt was so thick.

  It was after midnight when Bruno burst into the room, he wasn’t what you’d expect of a pimp and human trafficker, a slim balding man with black rimmed glasses, you might mistake him for an accountant, unless you looked into his startlingly yellow eyes and saw the black void behind them.

  Bruno had her card in one hand and a pistol in the other and he was obviously already enraged. “Where are they you bitch!” He waved the pistol at her, “How dare you come and threaten me...those goddam whores are my property and you are not going to....”

  He came at her waving the pistol, Zeph had come off the couch the instant the door banged open then closed. She and Bruno were alone, he was in a rage and he was waving a loaded and probably ‘live’ pistol at her. Her reaction was instinctive, as he came at her, she blocked and duck rolled. He still had the gun, but now had a surprised look, that mutated to utter rage, he did not give her another chance, he straightened and fired once, twice.

  At first she thought he’d missed, then she realized that the numbness, spreading through her body was a bad sign. So was the sudden look of something like fear on Bruno’s face. Her knees failed her and she fell, she didn’t feel the impact of the floor, just saw it come up and the dust puff out of the carpet. She tried to push herself up, but her arms were not working. She was cold, so very, very cold. She rolled over, but it was someone else, pulling her, She looked at Bruno’s point toed shoe, a knee, felt warm fingers on her neck.

  She realized that if she could she would have begged him not to leave her, not to leave her to the cold and the dark that was creeping into her field of view. She was still breathing, could feel her heart thumping but the heart wasn’t beating right, and the shallow breaths were harder and harder to summon.

  The fog was drawing in and as it did her thoughts circled around, Oh God, I don’t want to die, not now, not yet. I am so sorry I didn’t save the girls, I’m sorry, sorry I got myself killed like this, mom....dad.... I’m sorry....sorry abou
t the grandkids you wanted. Allen, damnit, Allen, we had plans...

  She lay there and at some point she was inside her head and the infamous light in the darkness seemed to show the way forward as her memories swirled around her.

  -o-

  Zeph sighed, picked up the cup of coffee the quietly attentive Elgin had poured, “So I guess the old, go to the light line has a basis in fact, I was pretty damn close to dying.”

  “Supposedly there’s a scientific explanation for it,” Elgin agreed, he was leaning against the cabinet by the door and stroking his huge cat’s mocha colored ears.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Humph knew something was wrong, and he knew where to lead me, you’re one of his people, he just appeared in my room and led me to you. Don’t ask me how, but it’s a useful talent for a cat.”

  “Yowp,” Humph agreed sleepily.

  Having been saved by Humph once before she wasn’t going to argue.

  She looked at Elgin, “It was you who blew a very large hole in Chinatown yesterday, right?”

  He frowned, looked down, “I’m afraid so...I wish some other solution had been possible, but the problem was a lot worse than I imagined when I went poking around. The fool had been misusing magic for a long time without understanding what he was doing. Unfortunately instead of just killing himself and a few unfortunates he was on the edge of destroying the city and possibly a large section of the east coast.”

  He rubbed his face, “I killed a dozen in that damned building, all of whom you could at least say were tainted, the thirty four killed by falling debris were innocents. And all I can cling to is that a hundred thousand could have been killed if that thing had finished developing and gotten loose.”

  “I’m sorry.” Zeph knew it sounded inadequate, it was inadequate but what else could she say? After a little more silence she spoke again, “I thought that magic wasn’t that powerful?”

  “It normally isn’t, this was a mix of exo-biotechnology and magic, a very nasty mix.”

  “Exo?” Zeph squeaked, “As in from outer space?”

  “Yeah, as close as I can figure, a bit under ten million years ago an alien culture tried to seed Earth with a bio weapon intended to re write Earth’s biosphere. In the anchor world the Iffrit destroyed the carriers but in some of the mirror realms that seeding succeeded to one degree or another. A magician in ancient China found a path through the shadow realm into one of the mirrors where the alien biology took hold and discovered one of the outcomes of that rewriting. A poison thorn, called the Green Fang, it kills almost instantly and then proceeds to turn the victim into a nutritious plant food for the Green Fang plant. The plant food is a bio artifact not natural, it’s lethal poison to anything from the Earth’s natural biosphere, it and the plant’s sap, are an extremely good single element liquid rocket fuel, and it’s a complex protein with some similarity to DNA, it can be used to store information. In large quantities and with the right magical stimulus it can develop into a lifeform...it’s happened before on a smaller scale.”

  Zeph shook her head, “I’m going to have to think about that one, it’s a lot bizarre.”

  Elgin grunted, “Yeah,” he chewed his lip for a moment, “So I lost my phone the night before last and forgot to do anything about it till after Humph lead me to you in Bruno’s safe house. That evening I was intercepted by an extremely attractive Russian girl who purported to be a prostitute, probably is one, but also works on the side for the Russian intelligence service.”

  Zeph looked him over, “A prostitute, Elgin, you don...”

  He held up his hand, “I was feeling like crap, she was very good looking, I took her to the Empire State Building observation deck and a couple of other tourist traps then had a light snack and sent her home.”

  “Sorry.”

  Elgin shrugged, “Why? I don’t know why I did it myself or what I would have done if her boss hadn’t called her off. I think she was a honey trap, with the intent of getting compromising pictures. I was dancing with fire, because I felt like crap about what had happened in Chinatown.”

  “You said she was Russian? Not Chechen or one of the other Slavic failed states?”

  “The Iffrit did a background check on her, Russian, parents of the wrong politics, killed in suspicious circumstances, the girl sold to white slavers and apparently picked up by the Russian intelligence service as an agent. She was well armed, considering what she was wearing.”

  Zeph frowned, “This is really messed up. I screwed up big time. Approaching Bruno was kneejerk idiocy. He wouldn’t have had a clue about the girls being snatched, and he certainly wouldn’t have turned in any of the major actors, he’d be dead the next day if he did.”

  “And the big boy didn’t know you were dying when he called Loretta, the girl, off of me.” Elgin frowned at the floor, “Will Bruno have told his boss about you?”

  “About shooting me, yes, he’d be stupid, probably dead, if he didn’t.” Zeph looked at her watch, “Damn its already eight o’clock.” She began searching for her cell phone, Elgin handed it to her from where he’d put it on top of her coat.

  She smiled her thanks and made a call, “Allen? Hey love, yeah I was busy. Look, I’m in the hole again, there is no way I’m going to be able to make it over to your place later.” She nodded at the phone, “Yeah I know everything’s slipped a day but things are not going well in regards to the Pro Bono case and I probably need to work on the Bears Den case.” She listened for an instant, her cheeks reddening, “No, or rather yes, I will be spending the evening with the blond cowboy hunk, but he’s a friend, more like a brother.” She grinned faintly as she listened to the response to that, “Okay I’ll take you up on that, I doubt I’ll be tied up in the evening beyond the next two. We can spend a calm quiet Friday evening together, maybe the whole weekend.” The smile got wider, “Okay sounds good, love you, bye.”

  She didn’t look at Elgin as she started another call, “Barb? I’m going to be late. I need you to...”

  Elgin turned away, the discussion with ‘Allen’ had not come as a big surprise, but it hurt a little, mainly because of the crush he’d had for Zeph when they were kids, rather than their more recent adventures.

  He turned to look at Humph, “How the heck do I get you to take me back to my hotel room boy?”

  Blue eyes cracked, “Mrop?” there was not a lot of interest in the cat’s voice.

  “About what I suspected.”

  *Cutter?* Elgin subvocalized.

  *Not a lot of choices, if Humph can’t take us the Iffrit’s going to have to wing it, the trip won’t take long.*

  Elgin didn’t ask how that was possible, he knew that while the Iffrit ‘flew’ like a soaring raptor on short hops he was not any kind of bird and wasn’t limited to bird aerodynamics, *We need to take Zeph.*