Chapter 19
In which our hero finds out some truths and ends the matter, for now
The huge black wolf leapt in through a smashed second storey window before the temporary fog dissipated finding himself in a smoky hell that still echoed with the crack of gunfire from the floors below and above. There were seven dead humans, one who had died as a werewolf, on the mostly open second floor of the old building. There were two large open stairwells bracketing what were now loading docks on the plaza side of building, what had been the front of the building in the war years of the middle twentieth century.
The wolf’s nose was in many ways more sensitive than a real wolf’s, more important it was backed by an intelligence and knowledge that was able to discriminate among the almost innumerable chemical traces it found. The were had been one of the men Elgin had met back in Beauty, not a surprise. Three of the dead were wearing modern urban combat gear, including body armor and night vision systems, they were all recent immigrants from the far east, probably Hong Kong. So they were probably Alicia Pi’s men. And he could faintly scent Alicia, maybe a secondary, or maybe she was here, dead or alive was unclear.
In the half hour since his first touchdown the Iffrits nanite infestation of the building’s structure had progressed to every floor of the building providing the wolf an almost supernatural ‘vision’ inside and out. The infestation had also found and converted every key structural element of the building, it could be collapsed into a hole in the ground on a few moments notice.
But with a dozen innocents at risk Elgin and Cutter would not allow the Iffrit to collapse the building into its basement and then set it on fire which was what the coldly practical war machine would have done.
The wolf quartered the second floor, reviewing the tactical situation. The floor above had four humans and a were keeping the police and other forces of human order at bay. Alicia Pi and her watcher - boyfriend Jason Hu along with four surviving ninja’s were barricaded in what had once been an underground garage that took up a quarter of the two storey basement. Cocooned in thick concrete they had managed to survive, and kill at least ten of the defenders, one of them a were. But that left four weres, a vampire and a BabaYaga disguised as a human witch as well as four humans any of whom could be more than they appeared.
The BabaYaga or one of the others had set up a suppression around its position, the spherical field was eighty feet in radius, a hemisphere intruding into the second storey where the wolf prowled. It prevented anyone from approaching through the shadow realm, warned the creator of any intruder while also limiting the ‘magic’ available to any user inside its effect. It also had the side effect of destroying any of the more sophisticated, semi magical, nanites that it touched.
The suppressor had been established near the center of the basement, so its effect didn’t go outside the walls of the building, which would have potentially given its presence away to a passing magic user. Thinking about that the Iffritt realized that the field had been there for some time, which meant it was tied to some powerful focus...which might well be the Cauldron.
The wolf jumped down the open stairwell onto the still tiled loading dock floor and headed for a narrow doorway down into the garage section. As he reached the door the wolf turned to smoke and folded into a human figure.
Elgin opened the door and went down, there was no light but he was as sure footed as if the narrow greasy metal steps had been a formal staircase in the daylight. The bottom of the staircase was the final resting place of a ninja and one of Viktor’s thugs, lying in each others arms as if they had been lovers, their blood pooling on the slightly sunken floor. The door had been booby trapped but the nanites had dealt with that and Elgin pushed it open and stepped across the red pond.
He could hear the radio whispers of the Ninja’s headsets, the “intruder” warning told him he’d been spotted.
“Alicia Pi...we need to talk,” he called out.
“Freeze,” one of the ninja’s shone a laser on Elgin’s forehead as another moved forward with a zip strip to bind Elgin’s hands.
Essentially simultaneously the laser flickered then went out, the man with the zip strip collapsed unconscious and the walls, ceiling and floor began to glow with a pale but revealing light. The ninja with the carbine pulled the trigger, to the dead click of a firing pin hitting a dead round, his pistol made the same sound, then he collapsed, Elgin having lost patience with him.
“Hold your fire, stand down everyone.” Alicia was much the worse for wear, a cut on her cheek, evidence of a bloody nose, a bruise beginning to well around one eye, her hair pulled out of its intricate ‘do’ and held back by a clasp at the nape of her neck. Her leather and fur coat was filthy and her leggings were more ladder, dirt and blood than original material. But the silenced machine pistol and night vision goggles pushed up on her forehead gave her a certain deadly dignity. Jason followed, limping, a bloody rag wrapped around his leg.
Alicia stared at Elgin, made a casting pass as her lips moved, a softly glowing ball of light left her hand and flew towards Elgin, it blazed up and died as it passed into the invisible cloud of nanites swirling around him.
Her mouth was a thin line, “You are a powerful something sir, I am afraid you have the advantage on me?”
Elgin bowed, “I am a bit of a Geek, I could not resist the line, All these worlds are yours to use as you see fit, except Io, Io alone you will not approach or land on....”
Alicia paled, “You said you destroyed the Palace?”
“I destroyed it and the seeping evil the mad fool had created.”
There was a rustle of movement among the other soldiers at this interchange.
“How did you get down here?” Jason asked, looking at the door that stood a little ajar now.
“Your enemy is no longer holding the upper floor, they are in the process of escaping through the sewers. Or at least they will soon. Their ill luck is that Viktor’s greed has infected them all and he’s wasting time tying up the girls so he can drive them through the sewers like an old slave caravan. I can block the sewer but I would rather let them escape that way, for a little while. But I will need help taking down the guards, the BabaYaga has a sphere of suppression , Viktor will take it with him. That will leave it clear for me to take the BabaYaga, her last vampire and the weres.”
“Why shouldn’t we just shoot you and escape up the stairs you say are open now.” Jason Hu challenged.
“You will not escape that way, the police, FBI, BATF, Coast Guard and if I’m not mistaken the US Air Force have this building completely blockaded on the surface. They will take you prisoners or kill you for sure. Cooperate with me and I will help you escape, otherwise I suggest you leave your weapons here and walk up the stairs and out the loading dock with your hands up.”
“The werewolves are almost impossible to kill, you want us to face them in the open?” The senior ninja asked.
“The weres will not be the first out, the humans will be, Viktor among them. The BabaYaga would not be able to control the vampire, perhaps even its own appetites, if it travels with the humans in the sewer. The Alpha has much the same problem with the weres.”
“The walls of this parking structure are thick, are they going to be coming this way to get into this sewer you speak of?” The ninja leader asked.
An apparently solid tinted glass model of the basement and sewers formed in the air between them. “The old sewer runs next to the building a few yards behind that wall,” Elgin hooked a thumb at the wall behind him. “It’s an open storm drain and it’s partially filled but the main channel isn’t full yet. It runs all the way to Central Park, though bits of it have been modified and there are various lift stations and diverts along the way. Viktor tunneled into it here and into the basement of a row of stores three quarters of a mile from here. Well outside of the police cordon.” Sections of the model flickered as he made his points.
As he finished a section of wall fad
ed out existence leaving a dark tunnel, there was pulse of chill damp air from the mouth of the new tunnel, carrying with it the fetid stink of a sewer.
The ninja leader, Alicia and Justin had all moved closer to the model, Alicia looked at Elgin, “What’s to stop us simply taking the opportunity to head for Viktor’s escape hole?”
Elgin smiled, “Because I trust you don’t want to irritate me that much.” He started to turn, “you have a couple of minutes before Viktor’s caravan starts out, I suggest you move out and get into position a few hundred feet up tunnel from here.” He walked past a couple of the soldiers who moved out of his way; the nano generated light in the old garage began to fade, the shadows drawing in from the far corners. The Chinese gangsters including the ones he’d paralyzed were through the tunnel before Elgin, or rather the huge black wolf, reached the barrier wall.
The wolf turned and trotted along the wall and down a ramp into the lower level. Near the back of the garage section a door had been cut between the garage and the main part of the basement, it was sealed with a heavy metal door, and ninjas’ had brought down part of the archway around it to jam the door with heavy slabs of concrete.
He was nearing the core of the suppression field, magic was damped here. The BabaYaga knew he was here now, he could feel her drawing and shaping magic, as she called on the vampire and weres to get ready. The vampire was nearby, its psychic power leaking through the thick concrete.
The wolf slowed to as stop and bowed his head as the Iffrit summoned memories from a far distant past. Memories from long before Cutter had been his human half, a time when the world had been wild and human hunting clans had been few and far between. He drew up memories of what was now called Great Bear’s Den, of a time when the great carved stone cauldron sat on a ledge high above the almost perfectly circular bay, when it had been the center of important and usually peaceful dealings.
Evil usually assumed, or wanted to believe, that the great totems, focal objects, were passive reservoirs of power. They were right in the sense that the totems couldn’t prevent the use of the power they focused for evil, but the objects were often capable of much more than passively siphoning power from the substructure of the universe. But the totems wouldn’t release that additional capability to evil.
Now the Iffrit touched the essence of the cauldron, it had been a life icon for humans for ten thousand years. It understood evil, had experienced evil, it understood the nature of the BabaYaga and its ilk.
-o-
In a chamber on the other side of the blocked door way the BabaYaga had filled the cauldron’s hollow with water and placed a candle between the three stumpy legs as part of a sympathetic magic spell. Now the water began to swirl as if ladles were stirring the water, and it began to steam as if the cauldron had stood in the middle of a wood stoked fire for days. A faint thread of steam rose from the water and curled up and then to the door, seeming to stroke it. Now the air, cold and damp cooled and dried out.
The iron door was rusty, now the rust thickened, flakes of rust began to fall from the door, as oxidation ripped through the weaker crystals. The door creaked and great scabs of rust buckled and fell away, the door screamed, buckling, splitting, throwing off showers of oxidized iron.
Then the top of the door exploded inwards and a huge black shape landed in a shower of red dust. The vampire, free of the bloodlust confusion of too many walking meals, attacked with a scream of pure delight, it could feel the powerful life force burning in the black shape.
The wolf twisted to meet the attack, but it was like moving in thick treacle, the BabaYaga’s contribution. At the same time a wall of weres hurled themselves at him. The vampire sensing threat was fast, it might have been fast enough to get its arms around the wolf’s neck even without its mistress’s help. Fingers as strong as steel pinchers, arms as strong as a backhoe’s grasped the wolf’s thick throat, then the vampire deployed its main weapon, its jaw gaped as if unhinged, its fang filled mouth, like a lampreys grinding sucker, attached itself to the black wolf’s throat.
The wolf howled in pain as the vampires jaw began to rip into it’s throat, poisonous, liquefying saliva melting fur and flesh as the fangs worked their way in and the monster sucked, wanting to pull in the flesh, blood and soul of its victim.
The werewolves fell on the great black shape with fangs and claws, ripping and tearing, ripping out great slabs of black fur in sprays of red blood. They howled and screamed in victory as the horse sized wolf went to its knees then began to roll over.
Then the wolf turned to smoke. The vampire fell back arms grasping gray nothing, sucking mouth pulling smoke into its lungs, the werewolves fell on each other and the vampire, held up by nothing, falling through the smoke, breathing it in.
There was the briefest pause. Then vampire and werewolves screamed with one voice. They smoked and then began to burn, flame erupting out of their mouths where they had breathed in the smoke. They tried to rise, tried to crawl, tried and failed, to survive. The flames ate through them like they were sheets of oil soaked paper and in a few seconds they were nothing but swirling smoke.
Sot seemed to swirl from the smoke, it gathered and then reformed into a man.
Elgin stood in his usual jeans, check shirt, cowboy boots and cowboy belt buckle shiny as if ready for Sunday service. He held his Stetson in his hands, his head bowed as if he was praying, for the souls of those the Iffrit had killed so quickly, so mercilessly.
After that moment he looked up, his face was grim, his blue eyes narrow slits of rage. His fingers brushed over the stone cauldron as he walked by, he felt a flash of warm recognition and gratitude. The water swirled and bubbled and the steam rose to curl among the pipes and conduits cluttering the ceiling, miniature clouds forming up into a storm front.
There were only four living creatures in the basement now, Elgin, Elgin’s uncle Claw, Claw’s right hand man Movie Star and Dmitri Andropov. There was no sign of the BabaYaga and Viktor was long gone.
“Nephew, you continue to surprise me.” Claw said with a smile. Movie Star snarled, the huge fifty caliber revolver in his hand like a prosthesis.
“Ah, Mr. Walker, you had not told me that Mr. Chalmers was a relative,” Andropov whined with a very ugly expression.
“The son of a bitch is my brother’s get, his mother was the woman my brother took from me, the only thing he ever won from me, fair and square.” He smiled cruelly at Elgin, “If you look in the club cemetery, in the pet section you’ll find a marker, Beauty, Best Bitch Ever, that’s where she ended up.”
Elgin stared at his uncle, and realized that his father had known that the Claw had killed his mother all along. And it had been Jess Beauty’s murder that had killed his father as Claw had intended. There was something very wrong with his uncle, but that should have been obvious for a long time.
Dmitri Andropov had taken a couple of steps forward, “Mr. Chalmers, you seem a reasonable sorcerer. Except for the unfortunate support of the totem you are essentially cut off from your source of power. We are standing here, three magic users, in our core of power, and the building around you has been wired for destruction. We can all leave, in our different directions and live to perhaps meet another day. Or you can die here and now.”
“Where is the BabaYaga?” Elgin asked, there was something wrong, some powerful distortion in this reality at work.
“The witch? She left some minutes ago; you know what that sort is like. Flighty and self centered without understanding the power of finance in this new age.”
Movie Star was an impatient type, “Fuck this shit,” he snarled, stepping forward he put the muzzle of his pistol to Dmitri’s head and pulled the trigger. Blowing the Russian financiers head apart like an orange cored by a rifle bullet. The headless corpse pitched forward as the big pistol swung to Elgin and roared again.
The Cauldron blushed orange and vanished.
The building shivered and dust fell from the ceiling. br />
Elgin stood and watched as Movie Star came to the realization that he’d missed and that something much worse had also happened. A pressure wave built up around them, a roar so loud that it was no longer sound, the air filled with dust and falling debris. Movie Star looked up mouth open, eyes bulging, every muscle tense with the knowledge of impending oblivion.
The building collapsed on them.
When it was all over they stood under a dome of rubble, roughly centered over Dmitri Andropov. Movie Star was on his knees, his hands over his mouth. Claw was still smiling grimly.
The headless corpse of Dmitri Andropov climbed to its feet hands seeming unbothered by the bodies headless condition reached and pulled at its shirt. With a rip the shirt, and the skin under it opened as if along a seam. In a moment the BabaYaga, almost as tall as the original Dmitri, and massing several times as much, climbed out of Andropov’s skin.
Dropping the skin to the floor she waddled over to the horror frozen Movie Star. She stared down into his terrified eyes for a moment. Then hands that looked pink and puffy except for the four inch claws, grasped him by the back of the head and jaw, and pulled his head off like some movie prop. The fountains of blood attested to the brutal reality of the act.
Like her vampire creations her mouth gaped, she popped Movie Star’s head in and swallowed. “I hate being murdered.” She smacked her lips, “and I like a little head every once in a while, especially from a pretty man.” She giggled like a little girl.
“Cute,” Elgin said disgustedly.
“You’re next pretty boy, I’m fed up with playing with you smelly human sorcerers, Myyr lured me out with promises of lots of good meals, and there, that was the first good snack I’ve had in weeks. Is that fair I ask you?”
“What about my delightful uncle,” Elgin asked pointing at his uncle who was still smiling.
“He’s a different case, hardly smelly at all and he might be useful.” She made a spell pass and the rubble around them shifted, a passage opened up, leading towards the tunnel to the sewer. “Go, I will deal with your troublesome nephew.”
Claw gave Elgin a cruel smile, “Sorry boy, guess I gotta go, I’ll tell your lawyer girl friend that you tried your best.”
Above them the rubble was glowing, fire spreading quickly in the pile of wood concrete and brick.
Elgin felt the stroke of a soft fur against his hand and looked down at Humph, “I was wondering if you’d turn up, I had a back up plan but it wasn’t as elegant.”
Big blue eyes looked up at him reproachfully, “Yowrup?”
“Where did that creature come from?” The BabaYaga pointed at Humph, the cat looked back at the creature that looked like a fat old woman and hissed, the hair on his back standing straight up.
Claw’s eyes had gone round, he turned to run, but the passage caved in and with a growing roar the bubble of rubble began to collapse inward. Claw came to a halt, hands over his head, and began to stagger backwards in front of the falling rubble.
Elgin called out over the growing rumble in the BabaYaga’s language, “Zyyr, you should have remembered that when the cauldron vanished so did your suppression field and core of power. As I told your sister, you really should have hewed to your pledge to me.”
The BabaYaga’s eyes bulged, “You are dead!”
“That’s what Myyr said. You were both wrong.”
Elgin grasped Humphs tail and they walked out of the roar of falling rock, the wave of furnace hot gas. It was black for a moment and then he was standing in the cold and snow, not far from the wreck of a police SWAT team van and what had been a shiny black Mercedes.
Elena’s eyes were huge as she looked at him, down at Humph, then across to the fire filled rectangular pit. “You really have to stop collapsing buildings Elgin!” She whispered as tears began to well in her eyes. He stepped forward and swept her into his arms and their lips met.