The script on the demon’s skin now pulsed green as the tendrils danced across the surface of its body, pulsing in time to the buzzing energy. More tendrils exploded from the surface of the wall, blowing free plaster and marble, leaping from pillar to pillar, to slam into the onyx creature.
The demon groaned as the buzzing became a roar. Its back arched, as the substance of its body began to shake. The black-green glow pulsed more intensely as the tendrils, whipping and dancing, pulled the thing off its feet. The demon, body shaking and whipping around with the tendrils of energy, rose until it was in the center of the great room.
For a moment, it seemed as if Hephaestus was about to win.
Then the onyx demon froze in the midst of its seizure. The green tendrils of energy suddenly seemed to stretch and vibrate like elastic bands. The green in the demon’s skin faded, and began pulsing red. The red leaked from the script carved in its skin to bleed into the suddenly taut, linear bands of energy connecting it to the walls of the room.
When the red reached the walls, the walls exploded. A cascading disintegration of fire, stone, and smoke, that rolled counterclockwise around the inner surface of the chamber tearing off every finished surface, crumbling stairs, burning tapestries, and imploding pillars. The force of it blew me back, rolling across debris, causing blinding pain in my shoulder and arm.
I blinked the pain and smoke out of my eyes and found myself facedown at the edge of the tower stair, looking down through blowing snow at the faint image of the Cuyahoga River.
I slowly rolled on my back.
The great entry hall had been blown apart. The interior had been razed to the outer stone walls, the great pillars blackened stumps, every surface steaming, the floor blasted, cracked and covered with ash.
If anything, Old Scratch seemed even bigger.
“Tasting your flesh will please me.”
“OBSCENITY!” The sense of the word shook the tower to its nonexistent foundation.
The ceiling erupted. The arching dome collapsed, shedding blocks the size of large SUVs to crash into the floor around Old Scratch. The demon knocked some of the stones aside as they fell, sending one smashing through the skin of the tower wall to tumble into an imperceptible infinity between us and the Cuyahoga below, into a dimension I couldn’t point out.
Something screeched from above, and the dragon Hephaestus flew down out of the descending rubble, flames belching forth to fill the room below him. The great lizard fell through smoke, and rubble and the burning remains of the library above. The wings of the dragon stretched from wall to wall in the remains of the great hall.
Hephaestus reached down into the pool of fire with taloned hands and scooped up the demon’s body and slammed it into the floor. As the flames cleared, I could see the crater formed by the blow. In it, I could just see the remnants of crumbled bat wings.
Hephaestus slammed the demon down again.
Even though I saw a black leg snap completely off, I knew that Old Scratch wasn’t beaten. Couldn’t be beaten.
As if it sensed my thought, the demon started laughing.
Hephaestus brought the broken remains of the demon up for another blow, and the demon’s arm shot out impossibly far, impaling the dragon’s chest. Gouts of blood sprayed from the wound as the demon dug into the dragon’s body.
A spasm racked the giant form, and Hephaestus crashed to the ground. The impact shook the floor, and as I looked up, I could see great cracks forming in the edifice of the tower itself, as if the dragon was part of the building’s structural integrity.
Hephaestus’ grip went slack on the demon, and the onyx creature, broken, humpbacked and laughing, attached itself to the dragon’s wounded chest like a twisted lamprey. It wasn’t even a laugh anymore, it was more a perverse childish giggle.
“Oh, yes. Such a feast. I shall wear this flesh.”
The area around the wound began glowing red as the demon burrowed, spreading blood and gore. Above everything I could hear the fabric of the tower split and crumble.
Hephaestus’ great head lay on the ground, and it shifted slightly to focus one gigantic eye on me. And, I could swear I saw the dragon smile, right before the great body vanished.
“What?”
The demon, suddenly alone in the center of the tower, tried to stand, but its body was half formed, fleshy and larval.
“Brace yourself, Mr. Maxwell.” Dr. Shafran ran toward me, diving. He grabbed me and we rolled off the edge.
Suddenly in free fall, I tumbled under the tower. Dr. Shafran was gone and the wind whipped by me as I fell toward a river I knew I’d never reach. Above me, the great tower fragmented, the upper stories falling. For a moment it was exactly the image on the tarot card.
I felt more than heard the demon’s voice, “No!”
The tower itself began twisting, the broken remnants turning in on themselves, the space it occupied whirlpooling in on itself as if everything was being sucked through a cosmic drain. The whole edifice folded into nothing.
Something swept by me and a clawed hand bigger than I was scooped me out of the air. Something twisted, and Hephaestus and I were flying over a normal Cleveland skyline.
A draconic chuckle shook the fillings in my teeth and made my injured arm ache.
“And he said I focus too much on the body.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
MY desperate plan had worked better than it had a right to. It had relied too heavily on Old Scratch’s weakness—a desire to dominate that went beyond any reason. I had been betting that giving the demon the chance to defeat a longtime enemy would preoccupy it, and it wouldn’t consider the fact that, if Hephaestus created a Portal to a private retreat, it could just as easily close it.
However, almost everything had gone like clockwork. I had led him to Hephaestus’ doorstep, and my strategic revelation of the tower’s nature caused Old Scratch to show up “in person” without giving the bastard the time to consider the possible consequences. Arrogance and overconfidence led the way from there to Hephaestus’ doorstep. And while the dragon’s continued assault on the demon’s physical body might not have been effective in terms of damaging his adversary, it was a pretty damn good distraction, preventing Old Scratch from picking up on the fact that he was in the middle of a trap, and it was closing shut on him.
It helped that I had told the dragon what was coming when I phoned him in his Dr. Shafran form.
As we flew through the biting winter air, I screwed my watering eyes shut.
There was only one major flaw in the execution of my plan.
“Sarah . . .” I whispered.
My arm hurt as the dragon laughed again.
“Damn it! I lost my daughter!” I spat at the gigantic creature that dragged itself through the air.
“You believe I do not honor my agreements?”
Hephaestus rose above the Cleveland skyline, dodging downtown skyscrapers and the federal building as he aimed toward the Erie shoreline west of the river.
“What are you doing?”
Hephaestus laughed again, as the ground below whipped by faster than I could make sense of it. The dragon aimed like an arrow right at a spit of land that stuck out paralleling the shore.
As we shot by it, I saw a cluster of dwarves by the roadside look up toward us. Ahead and below, on the icy surface of the lake, something appeared, a sphere unfolding from the same nameless dimension the tower had been sucked into.
“Wait, I can’t go—-”
We hit the sphere, and the wind ceased. Our motion had stopped, and we were no longer flying over the lake. We were in a cavern, a familiar one . . .
A vast floodlit chamber, a vast space of unfinished walls leading toward a carved building formed into incredible pillars, vaults, and arches. I could study the statues this time, and I could see dwarven bodies twisted into all forms of obscene agony.
“This was his cathedral.”
Unlike my vision, the space wasn’t empty. Dwarves crowded around the fro
nt stairs of the facade, facing us. They all stared at Hephaestus as he set me on the ground.
I looked at the dwarven faces, and saw fear.
I limped forward.
One of the dwarves stepped forward. I recognized Samanish Thégharin, my cab driver. “You cannot be here.”
“My escort says otherwise.”
“A human cannot live in these halls,” Samanish grabbed my jacket. “Leave for your own sake, and before his wrath comes down on us all.”
I pulled away. “He is gone.”
“What?” Samanish’s eyes widened.
“The one you will not name. The one whose existence poisoned the mana in these halls. The one who dedicated this hall to himself.”
“I am here for my daughter.” I started walking toward the great Gothic arch ahead of me. After a moment the dwarves parted in front of me. As I closed, I could see the facade crumbing. The statues seemed to dissolve into powder, the stained glass fading and flaking into gray dust.
Hephaestus must be enjoying himself.
I could feel the mana around me, subliminal, at the corner of my awareness, like at the Magetech complex. This time, there was no foreboding to it, no evil weight . . .
Perhaps that was as good a sign as any that Old Scratch was gone.
I stumbled forward through the vast Gothic doorway. Before me was the great hall, its benches filled with hundreds of dwarves watching me. Obscene decorations crumbled around us as I limped up the aisle toward the high chair next to the altar.
As I reached the chair and reached for my daughter, the altar crumbled.
“Sarah!”
She yawned and stretched, blinking. “Oh, shit, Dad?”
“Are you all right?”
She looked me up and down, eyes wide. “All right? Dad? What happened to you?”
“Let’s get you home.” I led her out of the cathedral with my good left hand.
Not one of the dwarves moved as I took her out of the cathedral, which was in the midst of becoming little more than another unfinished cavern. “What’s happening, where am I?”
“You might not remember it, but you were kidnapped.”
“What?” she gasped as we walked through the doorway. Ahead of us, past a semicircle of dwarves facing the remnants of Old Scratch’s cathedral, the massive form of Hephaestus sat on his haunches, arms folded. His great Escalade-sized head nodded down toward us on the serpentine neck.
“Do I not keep my word, Mr. Maxwell?”
Sarah shook her head. “Oh. My. God.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I owe you.”
Hephaestus snorted. “Nonsense. You provided defeat for my adversary of an aeon. The books are balanced.”
“It’s talking to you,” Sarah whispered.
“And it is a pleasure to meet you as well, Miss Maxwell.”
Sarah gasped and grabbed me. It was all I could do to keep from wincing when my injured arm moved. “It’s okay,” I said through clenched teeth. “He’s a friend.”
“Shall I take you from this place, or do you prefer to walk?”
I looked at the dwarves surrounding us and swallowed. “Perhaps we should go.”
I took a few steps forward, and Samanish Thégharin stepped between us and Hephaestus. I stared down into his wrinkled face and felt my good hand ball into a fist. “This isn’t a good idea,” I told him. “I’m taking my daughter.”
“Please,” he said. “Forgive us.”
“Just let me go-—”
He rested a wrinkled leathery hand on my arm. “We saw what happened to our greatest benefactor. Mazurich’s death is the shame of all our clans. We did not want you to follow him. Ossian, Teaghue, they tried to push you off the path He was driving you down. It cost us, and we found it cost your daughter as well.” He looked at Sarah. “This wasn’t our intention, but when He saw we tried to influence your father, He made us take you.”
I removed his hand. “It’s over now. I just want to take my daughter home.”
“You’ve broken the chains binding our clans,” he said. “Honor demands we repay you.”
I looked across at the dwarves. All I could think was, what a damn mess. Even if I didn’t break the story, it was probably too far gone for anyone to stop. Samanish Thégharin thought I delivered them from bondage, but I doubted that anyone beyond the people in this cavern would accept what they had done under that bondage. I looked around and thought of the trials, the scandals, and the innuendo that would decimate these clans.
Will you thank me then?
Fact was, I don’t always love my job . . .
“Is there anything we can do?”
“Yes, actually, there is . . .”
EPILOGUE
ON top of everything else, dwarves make good medics. I had a decent cast on my arm as I dove Sarah back to our hotel. She started apologizing profusely when we passed the remains of my Volkswagen. I told her, honestly, that all that mattered to me was the fact I got her back.
I called Margaret and had the pleasure of handing my cell phone over to Sarah. I didn’t even wince when Sarah started going on about how her dad was friends with a dragon.
I called St. Vincent Charity Hospital, and was relieved to find out that Nina had come out of her coma. I had hoped that with Old Scratch’s influence gone from the local ether, she might wake up, but I hadn’t been sure.
The snow had stopped, and the roads were clear, so we got back to the hotel by 8:40. I wasn’t that surprised when I opened up the door, and saw Blackstone and Special Agents Levi and Francis.
“Well,” Blackstone said, “if it isn’t the prodigal fucking journalist.”
“You’re early,” I said.
“Yeah, and I’m having some doubts,” Blackstone said. “I see you found your daughter.”
“Who the hell are you?” Sarah snapped at him. “What are you doing in our hotel room?”
“Mr. Blackstone here,” I said to her, “is our local federal pain in the ass.” I nodded at the two others. “His friends are Special Agents Levi and Francis. FBI.”
“Assigned to your kidnapping, Miss Maxwell,” said Agent Levi. From his expression, I think he took my little walk out of the hospital personally.
“Oh,” Sarah said.
“Francis?” Blackstone said. “Will you and Levi take her in the other room and get a statement. And for God’s sake, keep an eye on her.”
“Dad?” Sarah looked at me.
“It’s okay, they’re cops. And I need to talk to Mr. Blackstone.”
“Damn right you do,” Blackstone said.
I watched Francis and Levi lead Sarah out of the room. When the door closed, Blackstone looked at me. “Okay, I’m not heartless. I know you scammed me so you could get your daughter. If it was me, I’d probably pay anything to get her back. But now she’s back, and you better come clean with me. What did you pay, and to whom, to ransom her?”
I limped over to one of the chairs and eased myself down into it. I sighed.
“Christ, what happened to you?”
“Blackstone? I told you, you’re early.”
“Don’t start playing games now, I could—”
There was a knock on the door. Blackstone stared at me.
“You gave me until nine AM.”
The door knock sounded again.
I smiled at Blackstone, “Maybe you should get that. It’s nine o’clock.”
Blackstone looked at me, shaking his head. “I don’t believe this,” he muttered as he walked over to the door.
He opened it, and a line of solemn-looking dwarves walked into the room. “What?” Blackstone said.
The first dwarf stepped forward and nodded his head in a short bow. “I am Gwentarian of the clan Parthalán. I bring the board of directors of Magetech, Inc. We wish to offer the federal government a deal.”
Blackstone turned toward me and said, “You bastard, how long have you been sitting on this?”
“You better get negotiating,” I told him. “T
hese guys are used to making deals with the Devil.”
S. Andrew Swann, Dragons & Dwarves
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