Spellbound: Book II of the Grimnoir Chronicles

  “What was that?”

  “Headquarters blew up! Look out.”

  There were slaps and splashes as debris fell out of the sky. Francis unconsciously scrunched lower against the wooden seat.

  “Hell. That had to have taken out the big Dymaxion. We should head back.”

  Francis hurried and checked his Power, but there was still nothing.

  “Proceed with the plan. They’ve still got the portable units, same as I’d—”

  CRACK!

  This explosion was much closer—so close in fact that the impact knocked Francis off his seat and pelted him with stinging bits. The boat shuddered and lurched. Cold water came washing over the side. Francis felt a moment of terrible panic about going in the water with his hands tied behind him, but the boat stayed upright.

  His ears were ringing, but somewhere behind that he could hear screaming; then there was a loud splash as that man fell overboard.

  “What the hell!” There was creaking and banging as the men tried to take cover. “Where’d that come from? Are we under fire?”

  “No. Griffin’s chest just popped! What was that?”

  “I don’t know. What are you waiting for?” the man closest to Francis shouted. “Get us out of here!”

  “Shouldn’t we pull him out?”

  “Water that red? He’s dead. Go already!” The motor roared and they were moving, bouncing against the current.

  Fuller had said that when that spell hit them, the Dymaxions would blow up. Francis checked again, and almost couldn’t believe it. His magic was back. Yes! Buckminster Fuller, whatever Ray paid you wasn’t nearly enough.

  First things first. He was sick of being tied up. Francis focused on the cords around his wrist. He didn’t even need to see them. Being a Mover was like having a bunch of invisible extra hands, and he could feel the shape of the knot in his mind. It had been tied fast, simple and sloppy. Francis started picking it apart. A few seconds later the ropes fell away.

  He’d only heard three voices, and one of those had the misfortune of having a Dymaxion in his pocket. That left two. Piece of cake, but for this, he’d need to be able to see. Francis concentrated on the burlap sack and it flew off.

  The OCI man sitting across from him had a revolver in his hand. He saw the bag go flying and realized what was happening. The muzzle moved toward Francis as the trigger was pulled, but Francis was already concentrating on stopping the cylinder from turning. Just like using your hands: if you want to stop a revolver that hasn’t been cocked, just grab the cylinder.

  The G-man’s eyes widened as Francis threw a bunch of extra Power against the gun. Might as well, he’d been saving it up for days and felt like he had plenty to spare. The man fought, but the revolver gradually turned in his sweaty hands until the muzzle was pointing back at his face, then Francis let go of the cylinder and concentrated on the trigger. “No! No!” BLAM.

  One down.

  Francis turned just as the man at the motor realized what was going on and went for his gun, but it was too late for him too. The first agent’s revolver leapt into Francis’ outstretched hand, and he managed to fire twice before the last OCI goon tumbled over the side to disappear into the Potomac.

  The shore was near and the lights of Washington were behind it. The boat had been pointed at this particular patch of shoreline for a reason. A big delivery truck was parked there, and he saw a shape pass in front of the headlights. Francis concentrated his Power on the motor, grabbed the stick, and kept them on course. That truck was probably OCI and related to Carr’s mystery attack. He sure as hell wasn’t going to let that happen on his watch. There were certainly going to be more gunmen there, but Francis had three bullets and a whole lot of Power. This was about to get ugly.

  Faye’s job was simple. Mr. Sullivan had told her to be herself.

  So that meant causing lots of trouble.

  Unable to spot Francis or Heinrich amidst the confusion and the swirling magical oddity at the bottom of the main building, she picked the room that had the most people in it. From the way Lance had described the place, this was the OCI’s command center. That seemed like a relatively safe place to raise a ruckus. Sure, there were a bunch of folks in it who wanted to shoot her or send her to prison, but none of them were actively launching bullets at the moment.

  Traveling to the back of the command center, Faye found herself in a confused scene. The room was filled with so much smoke and dust it was hard to breathe. There was a bank of radios on one wall, but they were wrecked and dripping sparks, and a big piece of the roof had caved in. She was a couple floors under where the big Dymaxion had been, but Faye could smell it burning with a sort of noxious chemical stink.

  A few of the people in this room had been injured in the blast, but several of them were still up and scurrying about. Some were shouting orders, others had guns and were watching out the broken windows or guarding the door, a few were pulling papers out of some filing cabinets and throwing them into a fire that had been started inside a garbage can.

  “Grims are in the courtyard, sir.”

  “What happened to that fool Crow?” asked a fat old man who was holding a handkerchief over his face. “I swear he’s failed me for the last time. The robots are prepped? Very well. Send them in.” One of the men picked up a phone, cranked a charge handle, and started giving orders. The fat man turned to the ones at the burn barrel. “Make it snappy. I’m going to sue Dymaxion into the poorhouse for their faulty workmanship! Years of work ruined . . . I was mad to ever listen to Crow’s ideas, luring these damned wizards here. I want everything sensitive eliminated, including the experiments in building two.”

  That made one of the burners pause from his shoveling of papers. “But . . . those are—”

  “People?” The fat man strode over to loom over his subordinate. “They’re science projects! Nothing more!”

  “Sorry, Dr. Carr.” The OCI man bowed his head and went back to throwing papers in the fire.

  Science projects? Lance had said there were other prisoners. Were they doing things to them like they did in the Imperium? The possibility made Faye extra mad.

  Nobody had seen her yet, but she was fed up with listening to these jerks, so Faye lifted her shotgun and pointed it at the nearest enemy. She hadn’t really thought this part through. She was extremely good at killing folks, but these had information that could clear her friends’ names, so just shooting them, especially the fat one, was out of the question. “Reach for the sky!” Faye shouted, because that was what they said on the cowboy radio serials when they captured outlaws, and it seemed as reasonable as anything else.

  It didn’t work nearly as well for her as it did on the radio, though.

  “Traveler!” Carr shouted, and ten men all decided to shoot her. Faye pulled the trigger. She was so close that the buckshot didn’t even separate. She simply blasted a big hole through the first man, then she Traveled to the opposite side of the room. She’d killed a second one before any of them managed to get a shot off, and that was aimed at the spot she’d just left. Faye ran to the side, jerking the trigger on her automatic shotgun, and as soon as they focused on her and her head map screamed danger incoming, she instinctively Traveled away before bullets filled the air where she’d been standing. Glass shattered and lead ricocheted off metal.

  Faye hit the ground and rolled under a desk. She waited a moment and let the bad guys do her job for her. Panicked, confused by the smoke and the flickering lights, with their imaginations filling in grey-eyed killers popping into existence everywhere, they began to shoot at anything moving, which was mostly their friends. Faye grinned as she pulled shells off her bandoleer and stuffed them into her shotgun. She loved her job.

  Seeing a pair of legs coming close, she blew his knees off, and then she shot him in the chest when he got to her level. Then she Traveled out from under the desk to the far wall, where she shot another man in the back, jumped to the other corner and had to fire several times to finally ge
t enough lead to go through a filing cabinet to hit a fellow that thought he could hide from her. Shotgun empty, she pulled her .45 with one hand while stepping through space, appeared behind somebody who was shouting profanities, and put a single bullet in the back of his neck. His buddy turned toward her and she shot him in the chest four times before he could even lift his pistol.

  Faye paused to check her head map. There were bodies strewn everywhere. That’s what they got for not reaching for the sky like she’d told them to! Except for the crackling flames, the room was deathly quiet. Did I kill everybody already? So much for confessions. But happily, her head map told her that the fat doctor in charge was limping down the stairs. Her head map also said that whatever the oddness was below, it was getting bigger, right quick, and it wasn’t like anything she’d ever felt before. Instinct told her that if she Traveled next to that thing, there would be no coming back.

  She’d deal with the doctor in a minute. It wasn’t like anybody could outrun her. Faye went over to the filing cabinet and pulled out some of the papers that they’d been trying to destroy. There was lots of writing and it seemed to be in code, which meant it must be super important, so Faye gathered up as much as she could possibly carry in both arms and Traveled away.

  “What the hell are those?” Dan asked as he risked a glance around Sullivan’s shoulder.

  Grey metal forms were marching out of the main building and across the hard-packed dirt of the OCI compound. These machines were similar to the one that Sullivan had met at the EGE factory, with rounded bodies and ungainly limbs, only these were slightly bigger and each one had a single glowing blue eye in the center of their rectangular heads. It reminded him of an illustration from a Popular Mechanics article about the future of warfare, only this was right now, and these things belonged to the secret police rather than the Army.

  “Mechanical men,” he muttered, then he raised his voice so the rest could hear. “Take cover!”

  The knights had come through the hole in the wall and used the outbuildings and parked vehicles to cover their approach, but the robots were blocking their way. The roof of the main building was on fire, and it provided enough illumination to see at least half a dozen of the things. The automatons all froze in place at the same time. A beam of light, bright as the headlamps on a car, erupted from each mechanical man’s eye, and the heads slowly began to turn side to side like a searchlight.

  Toru crouched off to the side. “So you Americans have gakutensoku of your own? I was not aware of this.” Before Sullivan could respond, Toru stepped out from behind cover, held his machine gun at his hip, and fired as he ran to the side. Bullets sparked against one of the robots. Three of the blue headlights locked onto the Iron Guard and three arms rose simultaneously, returning fire just as Toru dove behind the corner of another building. “Ours are faster”—Toru shouted as a bullet punctured the wall next to his face—“and more accurate.”

  The robots let loose a torrent of machine gun fire, working their flashing arms back and forth, piercing the knights’ meager cover. A bullet went through a car door and Simmons’ leg went out from under him. The Torch seemed surprised as he hit the ground and a torrent of blood spilled from the jagged exit wound. Heedless of the danger, Dianatkhah crawled to Simmons and went about trying to save his friend’s life.

  “Cover the Healer!” Sullivan picked a robot and the slow thunder of his BAR began. He worked the gun across the metal body, burning just a bit of Power to make the gun heavier and more controllable. Sullivan was an artist with a machine gun and he picked different spots—legs, arms, joints, neck, the head—looking for a weakness. The light of the single eye went out just as it was able to swivel over to shoot back. Bullets ripped a line up the dirt several feet away. “The eyes are how they aim,” Sullivan shouted as he pulled back to reload. It sounded rather simple when he said it that way, but you never knew until you tried.

  Off to the left, three of the blue lights went out simultaneously as Diamond used his Power to hurl debris against them. They continued shooting, but wildly, flinging bullets everywhere.

  One of the blinded robots lifted its other arm. With a roar, a gout of flame rolled past, forcing Sullivan to retreat to avoid being engulfed. “Flamethrower!” The robot turned, casting a wide arc of destruction, igniting vehicles and buildings.

  But not men. Their wounded Torch lifted one bloody hand from his ruined leg and extended it toward the fire, which recoiled, stopped, grew, and then was forced back against the pressurized jet. The fire climbed back into the robot’s arm and ignited the fuel stored inside.

  The explosion rocked the courtyard. Fire washed over several of the other mechanical men. One of them ignited, wobbled a few steps on its duck feet before it too exploded into a cloud of shrapnel and bolts. The others must not have been packing flamethrowers, since they caught fire, but didn’t burst. A flaming robot charged Sullivan, the rounds for its machine gun popping as they cooked off inside its arm. Sullivan hit it with a wave of gravity and sent it tumbling away.

  Mottl used his Ice magic and hit a few of the robots with a burst of extreme cold. The humid air froze and clung to them in a sparkling sheen. These seemed to grow sluggish and confused. Apparently, robots weren’t that resilient against temperature extremes, but before Sullivan could yell encouragement to Mottl, the Icebox caught a bullet in the stomach. On the right, the robot that had shot him lurched as Ian’s latest Summoned collided with it, took it down, and hammered its gigantic fists against the robot’s head. A line ruptured and hydraulic fluid sprayed across the Summoned’s pale flesh.

  The Summoned was knocked over by the impact of an explosive shell. Another robot had clanked its way through the drifting smoke, and this one had a recoilless rifle mounted on one shoulder. As it turned his way, Sullivan shot at it; Diamond put out its eye with a brick, but it still got off a blind shot. The wall next to Sullivan turned into an expanding cloud of shrapnel and he went rolling through the dirt. The Healing spells on his body were burning, trying to keep up with the cuts and abrasions. By the time he lifted his face out of the mud, Toru had knocked the robot down and was beating it savagely with what appeared to be a bumper torn off a car. Dianatkhah was dragging Mottl away.

  It was chaos.

  Dan appeared next to Sullivan and shouted between bursts from his Thompson, “Times like this . . . can make a Mouth . . . feel a little inadequate!”

  “So let’s go find you some bad guys made outta meat.” Sullivan slammed in a fresh mag as he got up. “I’m heading for the command center. Cover me.” He ran for it while Dan emptied the remainder of the Thompson’s drum. Sullivan slid in behind a disabled, ice-crusted robot just as a blue targeting light swept overhead. The freezing cold of the metal could be felt through the rough fabric of his coat. He waited for the light to pass, then sprang up and continued on.

  A robot lumbered out from behind a burning truck. Sullivan ripped gravity to the side, and the top-heavy thing toppled onto its back, only to be immediately engulfed in magical fire. The next robot that appeared through the smoke was speared by a steel bar that Diamond had hurled across the compound, and as it stumbled back, a blast of ice struck it in the head.

  Sullivan reached the mechanical man, grabbed the steel bar protruding from its chest and ripped it free in a spray of hydraulic fluid. He swung hard, and the iced-over head shattered like glass.

  The robots were outmaneuvered, outfought, outwitted, and their numbers were dwindling rapidly. They were no match for the combined Powers of the knights. They shouldn’t have sent a machine to do a man’s job. Ian’s Summoned tackled the last visible mechanical man and began to pummel it into scrap. “Diamond, see to your wounded and clear this compound. I’m going in.”

  As he reached the large door the robots had filed out of, Sullivan took cover to one side and risked a peek. Inside was a wide-open, pitch-black space. He went around the corner and— Wham!

  Tasting blood, he hit the ground hard. The robot had been just
on the other side of the entrance and it had nailed him with one big metal arm. Dazed, Sullivan gathered his Power to knock the robot aside, but the machine gun arm was already coming up. A terrible blue light scalded his eyes.

  The machine gun roared. Sullivan flinched, but death didn’t come. There was a horrendous racket as metal was shredded by bullets. The blue headlight turned away enough that he could see again. Partially blinded, it took Sullivan a second to realize that the robot’s gun arm had been twisted back against its own torso. A figure, dwarfed by the immense robot, was shoving it back. “Get up, Heavy!” Toru shouted.

  The Brute slammed his fist against the robot’s chest, and the huge dent indicated that he was burning his Power hard. The robot crashed back into the warehouse, and Toru immediately clambered up its side and drove one hand through the narrow gap between spindly neck and armored chest. His fist came out clutching a handful of wires and a hose squirting oil. The robot’s legs collapsed and it toppled over, but Toru wasn’t finished. He grabbed the rectangular head in both hands and wrenched it around backwards. Metal tore and rivets popped, until the head was hanging loose and useless. The light flickered and went out.

  Toru stepped off the dead robot. “You call this garbage a mechanical man? Cumbersome, slow, poorly balanced . . . The Tanaka Engineering Works’ gakutensoku is superior in every way. Your Cogs should be ashamed of this inferior design.” Reaching down, he took hold of the machine gun arm and pried open the metal casing. “I need this more than you do, my metal foe. Hmmm . . .” Toru tore out the Browning 1919 machine gun and a long belt of ammunition. “Though, I must admit that you Americans gave yours a bigger gun,” he admitted begrudgingly.

  The Healing spells on his chest were certainly earning their keep tonight. Sullivan got to his feet. The lack of noise from the courtyard indicated that his team gotten all the mechanical men. “Thanks.”