Vintage soul

SEVENTEEN

Donovan remained pressed to the wall, out of sight. The footsteps drew closer, and then a furtive figure slipped from the alley, staring up at the huge building, as if studying it. He couldn’t help himself; he gasped.

“Amethyst,” he said softly.

She spun, saw him leaning against the wall but didn’t immediately recognize him, and drew something from her pocket. Instinct took over, and Donovan pushed off from the wall, diving and rolling to the side. At the same time, he prepared his defense, cursing himself under his breath. The first thing that came to his hand was the green crystal pendant — a gift from the woman he was preparing himself to defend against. Perfect.

Amethyst drew back her arm, breathed something into the air, and was about to bat it toward him when she stopped. She let out a startled gasp of recognition and pulled back. The cloud spun lazily in the air, and Donovan saw what was about to happen.

He drew the pendant, held it in his palm, breathed a short incantation over its surface, and then, with a flip of his wrist, he let it fly straight toward Amethyst’s face. She wasn’t watching him any longer. Once she’d realized who she was attacking, and stopped her charm, things had gone south for her very quickly. She stared at the hovering cloud, which seemed to be made up of flitting, buzzing insects. She spoke, too low for Donovan to hear, and the cloud wavered, but did not disperse. Instead it spun, coalescing into a solid point at one end and stretching back in a tornado-shaped funnel. The tip of that deadly whirling mass took aim on her face and dove.

Donovan watched, frozen in place by a combination of fascination and horror. There was nothing more that he could do from where he stood, and probably nothing he could have done if he’d been closer on such short notice.

Before the whirling plague could strike, the crystal he’d thrown whipped across the gap separating that whirling darkness from Amethyst’s face. The pendant was an emerald blur. The black gnat-cloud struck it, spread out, whirled together again as if it might burst through, and then — miraculously, dispersed. Amethyst had recovered her senses when the crystal spun into place, and she took control of it without hesitation. Using it as both shield and weapon, she shredded her own backfiring curse until nothing remained but the psychic echo of expended energy.

It was very quiet on the street. Donovan stared at Amethyst, who stared right back. She held the crystal loosely in her hand and he wished, suddenly, that he’d taken the moment’s opportunity the short battle had presented him to reach for something else to defend himself with. He knew the thought was foolish, but he couldn’t understand why she was here, and there were still nagging doubts in his mind about the theft of her crystals.

His mind raced. He had no idea what she might be doing here, but it occurred to him that he’d been very trusting. Over the past several years he’d grown to know her pretty well, but trust was another matter. He really had nothing concrete upon which to base that trust, just intuition, and intuition had failed him in the past.

He thought about the crystals. All the security she’d claimed to have, and yet they’d been stolen easily. No record that could be seen in her crystals. No indication of how the case had been opened or the crystals themselves removed. Was it possible, or had he just bought into her story and been duped? He didn’t have much time to consider all of this before she started walking toward him. The green crystal dangled from her hand, and he thought about how it had dispersed that cloud. He was pleased to know, at least, that when he’d chosen to defend himself with it, it would have worked, but that was small consolation. Amethyst hadn’t been any more aware of who she was attacking than he’d initially been aware of who he was defending against.

“Kind of late for a lady to be out walking the streets,” he said, standing very still.

She must have seen something in his stance. She drew nearer, and she slowed her steps. She didn’t smile. Donovan’s heart slammed in his chest. His thought whirled with incantations and wards, but none of them made it to his lips. She stood about a foot away from him, her head cocked, and her hand balled into a fist and pressed into one hip.

Then she smiled, and she held out the crystal to him.

“What’s the matter, Donovan,” she asked. “Trying to decide if I came here to make a deal with the devil?”

He started to answer, then clapped his mouth shut guiltily and took the crystal pendant. He didn’t fully let down his guard, but he found he could breathe again, and it was a start.

“It occurred to me,” he said.

Amethyst glanced up at the Tefft Complex, soaring high above them into the low hanging clouds. She frowned.

“I was a fool,” she said, turning back to him. “It’s Lance, my apprentice. Here I was thinking myself an amazing teacher, proud of his accomplishments and leaving him in charge of things I should never have relinquished control of for a moment. He was there under my nose all that time, even after the crystals were stolen, and I still didn’t see it.”

“Lance?” Donovan said. He turned and followed her gaze up the outside of the huge skyscraper. “Lance Ezzel? Who is he? I mean…”

“You mean,” She replied, “that no apprentice could have engineered all of this. You mean that someone who was still learning the arts wouldn’t have a fortress like this to hide away in, or the knowledge to put together a ritual like the one he’s about to perform. I wish I knew the answer to that. When he came to me, he showed some talent, but he must have dampened it for my benefit. I didn’t check — why would I? Someone with this sort of…”

“He wouldn’t have needed to sneak in,” Donovan finished.

She nodded. “He must have been planning this for a very long time, Donovan. He played me from the start, and he’d met you — through me — and well as others. All the connections he’d need, in fact, if he were a very powerful magician moving into our territory from…somewhere else. We handed it to him and shook his hand as he took it.”

“There isn’t much time,” Donovan said. He shook his head to clear the confusion of thoughts. “Whoever he is, he’s got Vanessa in there, and he’s got everything else he needs too.”

“The bone marrow dust?” she asked. Her voice sharpened. “How?”

“It was a setup,” Donovan replied. “I think the collector, Windham, was in on it, but there’s no time to worry over him now. They got the dust, and they think they got away. In fact, they would have gotten away, except for that damned crow, Asmodeus.”

Questions danced in Amethyst’s eyes, but he waved them away.

“All of that can wait. How do we get into this place?”

“Well, we could hang around out here and wait for an invitation,” she said, “But I’ve always preferred a more direct approach. There’s the front door, but somehow I can’t imagine that the main elevators reach the floor we’re after.”

“Back down the alley,” Donovan said, and started off at a trot. Amethyst followed quickly, and in moments they were back at the chain link gate. Donovan opened the lock the same way he’d opened the padlock at Shady Grove, pressing the small, round pendant to the rear of the lock. It snapped open without protest.

“That was easy,” Amethyst commented, staring down at the lock dubiously.

Donovan shrugged.

“He may not be expecting intrusion from this direction. Maybe he thinks we can’t find him. Who knows?”

Amethyst didn’t look convinced, but she followed him through the gates and up to the door marked Service Entrance Only. Donovan stared at it for a long moment, but he didn’t touch it.

“Won’t that amulet work on a door lock?” she asked him.

“It will,” he said, “but there’s something…wrong…about this door. I can’t explain it, but I have the feeling that opening it is exactly what he hopes we’ll do.”

They stood and stared at the door a moment longer.

“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said at last. “Step back.”

Donovan started to protest, thought better of it, and flattened himself against the wall on the opposite side of the door from where Amethyst stood. She reached into the front of her blouse, an act that on any other occasion would have gotten an interested stare from Donovan, and pulled out a dark blue crystal that protruded from the center of a gold sphere. Staying against the wall herself, she held the amulet out in front of the door and spoke a single word.

The door exploded from its hinges and flew off down the service drive. It slammed into the fence with a nerve-jarring clang. Smoke rose from the point where it had been ripped from the wall, but otherwise, there as no indication of a threat.

Donovan saw Amethyst push off from the wall, and he moved.

“Not yet!” he cried. Before she could step in front of the door, or peek around the corner, he was moving. He launched himself in a headlong dive, and that single, quick motion saved her life.

Amethyst stepped toward the now open doorway, and Donovan collided with her, wrapping his arms around her legs and dropping her back heavily. As he passed the entrance, a stream of sound and color rushed out, growing wider and brighter and louder with each passing second. It cleared his back by inches, riffling his jacket in passing. Loud, angry cries filled the air. They heard the beat of heavy wings.

Donovan rolled over out of the direct line of fire. Amethyst stared upward for a second, gasped, and then reached for the amulet she’d used on the door. Without pretense at careful aim, she fired a blast into the air over their heads.

Dragons peeled off in either direction with a loud screech. When they’d cleared the door, they couldn’t have been more than a foot tall and a couple long, but they grew with astonishing quickness until they filled the sky. Amethyst’s blast missed the first two, but when they split, it smashed into the pair following and drove them back into the final creature with a crunch of bone and the hot smell of burned flesh and sulfur. Donovan reached to his boots, drew forth two odd, half-moon-shaped blades, and leaped to his feet. He didn’t look up at the dragons as they rolled majestically and plummeted back to the attack.

He drew back his left arm, let the blade fly, whispering a short charm under his breath. It whipped through the air, curved to the right, straightened out, and just as one of the dragons gave a loud roaring cry and dove for his throat, the blade passed cleanly through, like a flashing guillotine. Donovan didn’t stop to check his handiwork. He threw the other blade and dove to the side. He caught the second dragon as cleanly as the first, but it was only a few feet from the ground when it died, and the impact of its collision with the concrete drive shook the foundation of the building.

Amethyst had taken out two with her initial blast and was sighting in on the last.

“Get in there,” she cried. “I’ll take care of his pets. Get in and stop him.”

He didn’t hesitate. He slipped through the door into the passage beyond, hit the ground again and rolled in case something else waited there, but he saw nothing. The corridor he stood in had several doors leading off from it. At the far end of the passage, on his right was the door to an elevator. He ran for it.

When he reached the sliding doors, he saw that they were closed tightly. Two crystals were imbedded in the wall, one on each side of the door. One was dimly lit and glowed rose red in the semi-darkness. The other was clear and unlit. Donovan considered the two for only a moment, then reached out and touched the unlit crystal. It glowed immediately. There was a grinding sound, and then it stopped. The glow dimmed, and the rose-red crystal remained lit.

He considered breaking through the doors and climbing. There were ways he could ease and speed the ascent, but it was too risky. The fact that Ezzel had locked the elevator in place on the top floor seemed to indicate he either knew he had company, or had expected it. If Donovan allowed himself to be found out while in that shaft, it would be a simple matter to lower the elevator and crush him.

He turned and ran back to the door to the alley. Amethyst stood outside the door. She leaned heavily on the wall. There was no sign of the dragons…nothing moved, and the carcasses that had steamed and released their foul order moments before had dissolved into pools of a black, sticky substance Donovan didn’t recognize.

“The elevator is sealed,” he said.

She glanced up, and he followed her gaze. Near the top of the building something glinted, and he frowned. He glanced back into the darkened doorway, then back up the wall.

“Whatever that is,” he said, “is directly above the elevator. Could the car be stuck up there?”

Amethyst reached into her pocket, pulled out a green satin bag. She untied it and shook a small, clear globe into her hand. As Donovan watched, she breathed on the ball, closed it between her palms and closed her eyes. She said something under her breath and opened her hands.

The crystal globe had gone smoky, and as they watched, it slowly cleared. When the last of the mist had disappeared from its depths, an image shimmered into view. At first it wasn’t clear, but Amethyst whispered something, and it came into focus.

They saw the top of the Tefft complex. The moon had dropped nearly off the edge of the skyline. Dawn was approaching fast. They looked closer, and saw that the glint they’d caught before. It was a window of some kind, a single glass pane on the stone face of the building. It was near the top. Amethyst spoke again, and the image shifted closer.

“Damn them,” Donovan said. He saw Vein and the others, staring out defiantly at a sky that would soon fill with sunlight and incinerate them.

“It’s a trap,” Amethyst said.

“Of course it is,” he sighed. “And I still can’t leave them there. I’m being paid by their council to save one of their own…I doubt if they’d consider it much of a service if I let that whole group of idiots die in the process.”

“There’s not much time,” she said softly.

“How do you know?” he asked.

“The crystals,” she said simply. “He took my crystals, but I still feel them. He’s set them in place. The ritual is beginning now, and once he’s started, he can’t stop. They can only be used once every cycle of the moon. If he tried it again before that, the crystals would shatter. It’s one of the reasons they are so rare.”

He stared at her, then back up the wall of the building.

“How long?” he asked. “How long before it’s too late and he’d have to wait?”

She closed her eyes. Something her skin shimmered for a moment, as if encased in a sheath of light. Then she opened her eyes and met his gaze.

“An hour, maybe two, but it won’t be any more than that. If he waits longer, the ritual will fail, and the crystals will be destroyed.”

She fell silent, and Donovan turned away toward the building. She reached out and gripped his arm. He turned back.

“If that happens,” she said, “if he destroys the crystals? You don’t want to be in the building. You probably don’t want to be on this block, but you definitely don’t want to be in there. It won’t exist.”

“They’ll explode?” he asked, frowning.

“No,” she said. “They are timeline crystals. If they are destroyed, whatever they have the strongest link to will draw them along with everything and anything near them through time, space, and dimensions — whatever is between them and their source. Donovan, whatever is too close to them may not be destroyed, but it won’t be here, and there won’t be any way to get back.”

“Then I’d better hurry,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“If I can’t go up the inside,” he replied, I’ll have to go up the outside. If I can blow the outer door off of that elevator, they’ll have a chance, and they’ll have to take it. I’ll be going in that way and going after our boy Lance.”

“I’m going in the front,” she said. “I think I can trace your friends up there,” she pointed at the trapped elevator. “They must have found a way in. If you make enough of a disturbance blowing the side off the wall, maybe I can slip in under his guard. One of us has to get through.”

Donovan nodded. He stepped forward impulsively, and she almost stepped back, but he was too quick. He pulled her close and slid his fingers into her hair, feeling crystals slide over his fingers. She pressed against him, and they kissed. He let the moment linger for a heartbeat, and then stepped back.

“Be careful,” he said.

“I’ll try, she replied, grinning at him, “but I’m kind of pissed off right now.”

He stared at her, glanced up at the building, and then laughed. “I bet you are at that,” he said.

She winked at him, turned, and was gone, running back around to the front of the building. He watched her go until she was out of sight, and then turned back to the wall. It wasn’t going to be easy, but he’d come prepared to climb the inside of the elevator shaft, and the exterior wall wouldn’t be that much different. There would be wind to contend with, but he thought he could manage, as long as he reached them before the sun crested the horizon.

The charm was simple, but he took his time. This was one tall building, and though he might find a way to survive a fall, he’d never make it up the side twice in the time allotted to him. He drew a leather bag from his jacket pocket. It bore a beaded design in the shape of a thunderbird, and the top was tied closed with drawstring straps. The bag was old and slightly brittle, and he handled it carefully.

As his fingers brushed the old hide, images floated through his mind. He saw an old man with gray hair. Feathers and bones were woven into that hair, and the eyes that stared at him over a hawk-like nose were slate gray and piercing. Across time and death, he felt the old shaman’s presence, and he breathed a prayer of thanks. The images dispersed, and he continued.

He opened the bag and drew out two feathers and a beaded necklace. The necklace was a string of claws, more feathers, painted beads, and stones. Donovan slipped it over his neck. He quickly removed his boots and placed one feather in each, then laced them back up.

Working quickly, he shuffled in a slow circle and recited the incantation he’d learned so long ago. He closed his eyes and pictured the old Lakota’s face once more. He felt the rhythm shiver through his bones, and felt the familiar lightening, as if the air around him had permeated his skin, soaked in and drained back out, taking his weight and his mass with it. He continued until he actually felt a breeze through his heart.

“One with the wind,” he whispered. He didn’t hesitate. He turned, and like a large insect, he scuttled up the side of the wall. The cracks and niches he used for steps and grips were narrow. They shouldn’t have held his weight; but they did.

As the sunrise seeped closer to the horizon, he climbed, repeating a soft prayer to the thunderbird as he went and wishing the ancient god could grant him its wings.