Con & Conjure

Chapter 9

Screams came from the main stairs and the floor below us. For the first few seconds, those screams were because of the dark, the base fear we all have of the unknown. But panic in a pitch-dark building—where getting out meant going down flights of stairs—could be bad, worse than bad. I’d seen the aftermath before.

I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. How far was it to the service stairs door? Twenty steps? Thirty? The goblins around me went completely silent, and no one drew a weapon. Good. Blades in the dark and in close quarters meant accidents of the fatal kind. Goblins wouldn’t be scared of the dark because they could see in it. I couldn’t see, and I was scared. I also wanted to see where I was going and what might be coming after me almost as badly as I wanted to get out.

I wanted out, but this was only the beginning of what Balmorlan had set in motion because I was in here. And I was in here because he knew I could handle it.

But only with the Saghred.

I backhanded that thought out of my mind.

Light, Raine. One thing at a time; get yourself some light.

I held my hand at what I thought to be level with my face, palm up, and summoned my magic. Normally, a bright lightglobe would instantly spin itself into existence. All I got now was sputtering sparks, their light going only a foot or two in front of me, but it was enough for me to see that the lightglobe set into the wall nearest me hadn’t gone out.

It’d been smothered.

Just like the next one and the one after that.

A black fog covered everything, sliding against my skin like an oily darkness. The air quickly grew cold and thick; trying to lift my arm was like being under water.

Muffled magic, smothered lightglobes, greasy air. Only one thing could do that.

Magic of the blackest kind.

Who or whatever was behind this spell didn’t want us getting out of the hotel.

Who or whatever could bite me. I gritted my teeth and pushed my way through the murk toward Mychael.

I could barely see Imala at the edge of my light. She spat out a low curse. “What the hell is this? It doesn’t smell like smoke.”

“It isn’t,” Tam said, his voice tight. A red lightglobe struggled to life above his outstretched hand. More red orbs of light bloomed as the goblin mages followed suit. None of them did much to cut through the oily murk.

“Where’s it coming from?” Mago’s breath came on a plume of frost.

Only then did I realize that I was shivering. I thought I was just scared. I was, but I was also freezing. “It’s cold enough to hang meat in here.”

That earned me a dark chuckle from the goblin guard closest to me.

“We’re out of here,” Mychael told us. “Now.”

A goblin was pushing his armored shoulder against the stairwell door. “Sir, it won’t open.”

A second guard joined him. They were big, but that door wasn’t budging.

With a visible effort, Mychael waded through the magicthickened air and the goblins made way for him. “It shouldn’t have a lock.” He laid his hand flat against the door’s wood and the iron bands that wrapped them and I could literally see the surge of Mychael’s power go into the door, power that should have blown the thing off its hinges.

It didn’t budge.

It should have done a lot more than budge. I’d seen Mychael disintegrate doors sealed shut with Level Twelve wards.

The door began to glow and hum, getting brighter and louder.

Oh hell.

“Down!” Mychael shouted.

He shoved the guards away from the door and flung himself down the corridor and against the wall. I covered Mago and me with the best shield I could manage on short notice.

The door exploded outward in a scream of tortured iron hinges, its splintered wood now deadly stakes flying down the hallway.

Doors couldn’t absorb magic and spit it back. That was impossible. Though the smoking black hole where the door had been clearly said otherwise.

I scrambled to my feet, pulling Mago with me.

Whether the door had been blown out, blown in, or blown up didn’t matter. It was gone and we could run through the hole that was—

Filled with a monster. Not just filled, packed.

Even in the dim light, there was no mistaking what that thing was.

A buka.

The nine-foot-tall, hairy, long-fanged, and longer-armed mountain monster out of goblin legend.

The creature had to duck and twist to get its thick body through the door opening. Its roar was deafening in the confined hallway, drowning out any shouts or commands. For the first time ever, I heard a goblin scream.

The buka was fast, faster than any living creature had a right to be. Goblins were quick, but for the ones closest to the door, the only thing they did quickly was die. With two swipes of one of the buka’s long arms with its claw-hooked hands, screams became feral shrieks as dark goblin blood spattered against the walls and ceiling.

The buka had appeared, attacked, and killed in less than five seconds.

The goblins instantly went from forced calm to near hysteria, but they didn’t stampede. The cries and shouts from the lower floors redoubled, probably at the sight of their own bukas—or things even worse.

A panicked scream came from the main stairs. A man was scrambling up them, his face a terrified mask. An enormous gnarled hand reached up from the gloom below and grabbed the man by both legs at once, jerked him off his feet, and snatched him down the stairs. There was a quick, wet snap of bone in the dark, and the man’s screams rose to an inhuman shriek. Two more snaps and the shrieks stopped.

The buka looked directly to where Chigaru’s guards supported the prince against the wall, one on either side. The buka roared, baring fangs the length of my fingers, and lunged toward him. Mychael threw himself between the monster and the prince, the steel of his sword infused and glowing with magic. Tam was next to him, his unseen power adding to Mychael’s strike. Between the two of them, they gave the bastard something to really roar about.

Or they should have.

The thing ate Mychael’s magic like candy and Tam’s like a sugar topping. Absorbed. Gone. The sword didn’t even part its fur.

“Raine, get him out of here!” Mychael shouted.

I knew he meant the prince. “I’m not leaving without—”

“We’ll follow!”

“If we can” went unsaid.

Imala shouted to the prince’s guards. One got in front of Chigaru and the other behind, and pushed their way through the courtiers, toward Imala and me.

I looked down the stairs. Just because I couldn’t see the giant hand and the nightmare it was attached to, didn’t mean that it wasn’t down there waiting with its closest monster friends. Terrorizing a hotel packed with people wouldn’t be a solo effort. The sounds of screaming, running, and panicked people coming up from below proved it.

Imala, Chigaru, and his guards reached us.

Mago clutched my arm. “I have a ladder in my room. If we can get there, we can get the prince out through the window.”

I had a surge of hope. Mago’s escape ladder, in his luggage . . .

Luggage that Balmorlan had ordered taken.

I swore. “It’s not there. Balmorlan took—”

Mago bared his teeth in a fierce grin. “I keep it under the mattress in case of emergency.”

If this wasn’t an emergency, I didn’t know what was.

Make it down two floors alive instead of four. Sounded like better odds to me, though it depended on what hell spawn was waiting on the fourth and third floors. Mago’s room was at the end of the freaking hall. One death trap at a time, Raine. One at a time.

“Let’s go!”

We went down the stairs as quickly as the darkness and probable presence of monsters would allow. Imala and Mago were on either side of me. Chigaru was moving on his own, but his guards were sticking close, as were two of his mages. Other goblin courtiers brought up the rear. I didn’t see Mychael or Tam.

Chatar was one of the prince’s mages.

Great. Monsters weren’t bad enough, now I had a mage accused of murder because of me close enough to shoot one of his poisoned darts into the back of my neck. There needed to be a revenge timeout until we were out of here.

Mago tripped, the gilt railing the only thing that kept him from falling into the stairwell. “What the hell is—” He looked down at the carpet and sucked in his breath with a hiss.

A foot. A man’s foot.

The shoe was still on, but the rest of the body was gone, though not without a trace. Blood and gore soaked the carpet in a dark trail down the next dozen or so steps.

Visuals to go with the sounds we’d heard.

Chigaru stepped up beside me. “What lies below, seeker?”

The prince was simply calling me what I was. No insult or slight intended. He was standing beside me, in the glow of what light I had.

He was a target in more ways than one and he knew it.

“Whatever waits for us was sent here because of me,” he said quietly.

He was only partly right, but I wasn’t going to be the bearer of that bad news.

The prince’s ramrod straight posture told me more. He wasn’t going to let any more of his people be killed trying to protect him. When he had stood on the bow of his yacht, he had been trying to draw out his assassin. Now, he was using his body as a shield for his people, some of whom were probably plotting to kill him—and one of them was standing not five feet away.

A noble Mal’Salin.

Icicles must be forming in the Lower Hells. Big ones.

Focus, Raine. Bukas and monsters with giant, peoplesnatching hands didn’t just jump out of a black mage’s twisted imagination. I picked up the pace as much as I could in the thickened air. The slower we moved, the faster we could find ourselves eviscerated and eaten, and not necessarily in that order. One of Chigaru’s guards walked directly in front of him, so the prince didn’t have to force his way through the air. Having to slow down for the prince—or worse, having to stop for him—could be fatal for all of us.

Imala’s red lightglobe reflected off one of the hotel’s mirrors. Mine shone on what was sprawled at its base.

The mirror may have been warded before, but it wasn’t now.

At first glance, someone might think the body had been torn in half. This was worse, if that was possible. From the waist up, the man was on the floor. From the waist down, he was inside the mirror, wherever the monster that had grabbed him had come from—and where it had gone back to, trying to drag its prize with it.

Imala snatched some kind of metal sculpture off a small table next to the mirror. “Shield your eyes,” she ordered. With one smooth move, she hurled the sculpture into the mirror, shattering it, and exposing nothing but a wall behind it—with half a body lying at its base. That shut one door to Hell or wherever that thing had come from, but it left entirely too many more on this side with us. I swore if I lived through this I was going to shatter every mirror I saw for the rest of my life.

Mago swallowed with an audible gulp. “So much for where the buggers are coming from.”

I hustled our little party the rest of the way down to the fourth floor. Chaos reigned. Judging by the screams coming from down the darkened corridor, a lot of people hadn’t made it past the doors to their rooms before they were attacked.

Imala hissed in frustration.

If we stopped to help, we stopped to die. She knew it and she hated it. The odds of us making it out of here ourselves weren’t too gre—

Pain, like a hammer to the chest, sent me to my knees.

My mouth was open, but no air was making it in or out. I tried to speak, struggled to breathe, my hands joining my knees on the floor. Pain, sharper than the first, sent me facedown on the carpet. Power surged in my chest, alternating with the pain. At each surge, I gasped a little air. The power was the Saghred.

So was the pain.

I knew it. I didn’t know how, but I did.

The Saghred twisted and jerked against my chest. It wanted to stay here. Badly. To stay and to feed. Dying people released souls, souls the rock wanted, needed like it needed nothing else.

Its need became mine.

I raised my head and saw them. Souls fleeing dying bodies, their last moments of life spent in terror and screaming, in a hotel turned hunting ground, a slaughterhouse for the demons and nightmares that came out of mirrors, through walls and up through the floors.

“Raine?” I heard Imala call as if from far away. “Raine!”

All I could manage was a head shake, which was what the rest of me was doing. I forced myself to breathe slowly. In. Out. Just keep the air moving. All I got was a lot of rasp and too little air.

“You!” She shouted to someone, sounding closer now. “Help me.”

Strong hands locked around my upper arms, pulling me to my feet; another arm went around my waist, supporting me. Mago’s arm.

“Are you all right?” he asked, even though he knew I wasn’t.

I couldn’t answer. I hissed air in and out between my teeth to keep control. The rock wasn’t taking me, not now. Another punch to the chest made me stagger, but the pain was milder. The surging, swirling power was taking its place. The pressure on my chest suddenly lifted, and I sucked the cold air into my burning lungs, cooling, calming. “I’ll be fine . . . when we get out.”

Imala’s small hands gripped my upper arm; Mago took over where one of Chigaru’s guards had hauled me to my feet.

“I’m here, Raine,” Imala said. “We’re getting out; just keep moving.”

I managed a nod, my vision starting to clear. My steps were like lead; I didn’t know if it was the spell-thick air or the Saghred’s desperation to feed. It coiled tightly inside of me, its rage building. I knew what it was about to do, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t warn Imala.

The Saghred struck her. Its power surged down my arm and into Imala.

She screamed, but she didn’t let go of me. Exactly the opposite—she tightened her grip. The rock had bitten Justinius Valerian before; he’d held on to me, and like Imala, he didn’t let me go until he was ready to. The old man was the most powerful mage in the world. Imala wasn’t. But latching on harder when the Saghred struck sure as hell qualified her as one of the most gutsy.

The rock could have killed her—could have done worse than kill her—but it didn’t.

“Sorry,” I managed.

The goblin flashed a pained smile. “That rock’s not going to tell either one of us what to do.”

What felt like an eternity later, we reached the third floor.

We weren’t going to get anywhere near Mago’s room.

It was on fire.

That entire end of the third floor corridor was engulfed in flames, flames moving so quickly even the smoke couldn’t keep up.

There was nowhere to go except down.

The fire rolled its way across the ceiling beams, tongues of blue and gold flame licking their way around the wooden columns, the gilt paint melting in the heat, running in golden rivulets down the scorched wood.

“That’s not just fire,” Imala said.

“No, it’s not.” It was magic, magic of the most exotic and deadly kind.

A wall of flame parted, revealing a man standing in front of the mirror on the third-floor landing. His robes were on fire, spirals of flame licking his face, his hair . . .

And not consuming, not burning any of him.

Oh hell.

A firemage. An elven firemage.

The demons and monsters were just to trap us in the hotel while a firemage burned it down around us.

Some mages could use fire, but firemages could morph themselves into fire, into living torches. They could burn a building from the inside out, walking through flames of their own making, spreading the fire, the death.

Shouts and screams—and heat—swirled up from the lobby below. The entire hotel was on fire.

“Run!” Imala shouted.

Downstairs, the lobby was a hysterical mob scene. Those who had lived long enough to get downstairs were surging for the front doors, crushing, trampling in a blind panic. Flames covered the carved banisters, blackened the edge of the pale marble staircase, but the center was still clear. We ran for it.

Imala turned toward me and shouted something.

Her words were lost in a roar of fire from overhead. A support beam cracked and broke, showering us with sparks. Mago yanked me toward him; Imala dove in the other direction as the beam and a chunk of the ceiling crashed to the floor.

We couldn’t get to Imala and Chigaru, and they couldn’t reach us.

Dammit.

Mago pulled on my arm. “This way!”

A shriek came from the front doors as a javelin of fire struck a goblin in the chest, burning a hole completely through him. A second fire spear sent the goblin behind him up in flames.

There was another firemage outside, probably on the roof of an adjacent building, and the bastard knew what he was doing—if killing everyone inside the hotel was what he wanted.

If you tried to escape, he just killed you faster.

There weren’t but a handful of true firemages in the entire world, and Balmorlan had brought at least two of them here.

I couldn’t stop the fire. The Saghred probably could, but I had no idea how.

I could stop those firemages. Under their flames, they were just as killable as the rest of us.

Mago and I ran toward the back of the hotel, to the door we’d used to get in. He got there first and pushed against the door, flinging it—

“No!” I screamed.

A fire javelin missed him by no more than an inch, slamming into the wall behind us. The fire instantly caught and spread. We couldn’t go back. This door, covered by another firemage sniper, was our only way out.

I knew what I had to do.

People were dead. They were being murdered, slaughtered by nightmares made real. Unless I killed the killers, it wouldn’t end until they ran out of victims. I had no choice. I didn’t know what would happen to me, what the Saghred would do to me.

Taltek Balmorlan was about to get his show.

The Saghred’s power pulsed eagerly inside of me. Eager to kill, to destroy.

Mago met my eyes and he froze. I didn’t know what he saw, and I probably didn’t want to know. He probably saw power, raw and primal. And deadly.

“Raine, no. Don’t do th—”

“Stay behind me.” My voice was tight. It was all I could do to hold the rock back.

Then I stopped trying, stopped fighting. I didn’t struggle against its power.

I embraced it.

Smoke poured out of the hotel. Out on the street, people ran through the smoke, blinded, choking.

I did neither.

I could see through the smoke as if it weren’t there. I knew where each firemage was, the paths of their magic a glowing, pulsing line from their targets right back to them. There were four firemages in sniper positions in buildings in front of the hotel. I didn’t have to see them; I knew where they were. Three were on either side of the building, and one had just tried to kill Mago.

Eight outside, at least one inside—and all of them were elves.

If I didn’t stop them, hundreds of innocent people, including Mychael, Tam, and Imala, would be burned alive inside the hotel.

That had been Taltek Balmorlan’s plan all along.

If I stopped the firemages, Balmorlan got his show. If I failed, every goblin who threatened his war with Sathrik died. The bastard won either way.

No.

It stopped and it stopped now.

I stepped through the door and right into the sights of the firemage sniper on the roof. I felt her gathering power, gathering fire to incinerate me and Mago where we stood. She took her best shot.

It was her last.

The Saghred’s magic surged through my body and out of the fist I punched skyward at her killing perch. I didn’t know how to take down a firemage, but the magic inside of me did.

The bitch had it coming.

My body blazed red with the Saghred’s power, its magic and mine slamming into the mage, turning her body into a screaming ball of fire arching out over the roof’s edge and down five stories to the street below.

When I’d used the power the Saghred had given me before, it felt like the power was using me. Not this time. We worked in perfect partnership; I visualized what I wanted to do and it happened. Immediately. No thought, no hesitation.

No mercy.

I heard screaming. It was me. I knew it was me, but I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t screaming in fear at what was happening or horror at what I was doing.

I was screaming in pure exultant triumph, the joy of battle, of power unfettered.

“Raine!”

I felt the heat coming before Mago screamed my name. My magic met the flaming javelin sent down from the roof of the next building, met it and rode the firemage’s power back to the mage who’d launched it, engulfing him in his own fire and mine. His body fell like a flaming comet to the street.

Time was a blur, so were the screaming people in the streets. There were other firemages. I couldn’t see them, but my Saghred-fired senses knew they were near, that they still lived.

I hunted them down.

A firemage was in a building directly across from the hotel’s entrance. I couldn’t see him, but I didn’t have to. His magic heated the air, leaving behind a wavy trail, leading from the hotel doors to the window on the fourth floor. I used his magic’s trail like a fuse to a bomb. The firemage was gathering his power for another strike. I didn’t know if he realized Death was coming for him.

I didn’t care.

I lost track of the next few minutes.

The other firemages tried to escape.

I couldn’t stop if I had wanted to.

And I didn’t want to.

I only stopped when the last firemage was dead. By my hand, my magic.

People in the hotel streamed out of the front door, out of the door Mago and I had come through, and from around the far corner. No firemages had them pinned inside.

They were all dead. Burned. Destroyed.

And I’d done it all.

I took two steps back from the curb and threw up. The smoke started choking me, strangling me. Strong arms scooped me up.

Mago.

People were drawn to the fire, the chaos; their curiosity drew them in, shouting, jostling. Mago went around and through them. They took one look at the two of us and got out of our way.

I started shaking, tears running in hot trails down my face.

“Easy, cousin,” Mago said against my hair. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Mychael.” I coughed. “Tam . . . Ima—”

“I’m sure they got out.” The only person Mago was worried about was me. He was scared for me.

I was terrified of me.