Vintage soul

EIGHTEEN

Deep in the secret heart of the Tefft Complex, beneath the chamber where Vanessa had been held captive, but far above the ground floor lobby, a larger space had been created. The elevator appeared not to stop on this floor, and the only other access was by certain passages not obvious to the average eye. There were other safeguards. Ezzel knew that the wards he’d placed weren’t going to stop anyone truly determined to get in, but at this point it didn’t matter. He didn’t need them to be stopped, only slowed. When he stepped from the elevator, he sent it upward, and with a short phrase, he locked it in place. This elevator was a mechanical device, but it responded to other controls as well, and it was these less mundane methods he now employed.

The center of his private floor was another round chamber, and it was there that he gathered the items he’d spent such time and effort gathering. They were spread over the top of a long altar table, which itself sat in the center of a wide circle that had been first carved, and then burned into the floor. The braziers that would have to be placed at the compass points in a less permanent circle were imbedded in the stone floor. The room was designed with a single purpose in mind.

The inner circle was also cut into the floor, but it was narrow, and shallow. Ezzel stood within, pouring white powder from a vial around this smaller circle. As he passed each of the braziers he lit it and spoke the invocation, then continued until he reached the final brazier. A ring of symbols had been carefully drawn between the concentric circles, and when he reached the southernmost point on the circle, he would close it, seal it, and light the powder. He’d run through this with meaningless elements a thousand times. He’d repeated the ritual, breaking it into pieces so that he set no random power loose on the room, nor created any anomaly accidentally, and he’d committed every motion, and every word to memory.

In the center of the altar, the ancient journal rested on a wooden stand. It was open to the first page of the ritual. Ezzel didn’t need it. In fact, if he’d still needed to read the instructions or the words of the ritual from that book, he would not have been ready to complete the process at all. The timing of each segment was critical. He just felt it was proper that some portion of Le Duc join him at this penultimate moment — the culmination of something begun centuries earlier. Le Duc had met his untimely end trying to secure the vampire’s blood necessary to complete the ritual. Ezzel had been more careful, and more patient.

The urn with Father Vargas’ remains stood off to one side, beyond the circle. He had extracted the ashes he needed the moment it was in his possession. At the bottom of a chute he used to dispose of garbage, the corpse of the collector, Jasper Windham, had begun its long courtship with rot and maggots. Loose ends were not acceptable, and even though Ezzel knew he was no longer operating in secret, he saw no reason to change the rules of the game now. Windham couldn’t be trusted — it was obvious in the way he’d betrayed DeChance, and with a very long lifetime ahead of him, Ezzel intended to surround himself only with those he could trust. The rest would be eliminated, or brought in line.

The room he’d prepared for his ritual was awash in color. Tapestries hung from the walls, depicting astrological signs, chemical formulas, arcane symbols and images from the Tarot. It was mostly an affectation — but it was one that he enjoyed. The entire room — the building surrounding it — the melodrama of the kidnapping and thefts — none of it had been specifically necessary. He could have spent the time and money to range further and find the ingredients he needed. He could have taken a different vampire, one with fewer connections and less beauty. He might even have found one whose people wouldn’t have been sad to lose them. In some ways he wasn’t so unlike the pretender he’d slain, Cornwell. He liked the idea of who, and what he was and saw no reason not to surround himself with the symbolic trappings.

Ezzel didn’t want his triumph to be a secret. He didn’t want anonymity, or silence. He was about to complete something that had never been completed. When the ritual was finished, he would be immortal. He would have lifetimes without end to enjoy every pleasure the world had to offer, and he didn’t want that feat to go unnoticed. If he could have performed the ceremony on top of the most prominent building in town with an audience of his peers watching him become more than their peer, he would have done so.

For the moment, all of that was incidental. He concentrated carefully and made his way around to the final compass point. He lit the brazier, watched the white, scented smoke rise in curling tendrils to join that from the other braziers. With a quick flick of his wrist, he completed the inner circle and stepped back. He took a deep breath, and inventoried his equipment for the thousandth time. Everything was in place, and had been in place for a week, but there was no turning back once he lit the powder. He had cast the wards, but the circle remained open. He could step across that line, never speak the words, and walk away. He even thought he could get out without being caught, and disappear from San Valencez.

He glanced down at the ring. Between two of the carved characters the Timeline Crystals winked back at him with reflected brilliance. They were set into the stone of the floor, ready to form the portal. It would be the last point through which he would pass as a mortal. He thought of Amethyst, imagined the shocked, angry expression she must be wearing, and almost laughed. Yes, he could go now, take the crystals, and leave it all behind.

For a moment, he pretended to give the notion serious consideration. He remembered the desert near Cairo, and the years he’d spent studying scrolls and crawling the tunnels of pyramids. He thought of Jerusalem, the temples and the mosques, and the secrets still buried in caves from the Dead Sea to the holy city itself. He thought of Asia and Europe, even the hills and mountains of California and Tennessee. Each held memories, and each held bits and pieces of the trail that led to this moment. None of those he’d met on the road had believed in the formula — not the way Ezzel believed in it. They knew legends. Some of them knew Le Duc’s name. One even had a single page transcribed from the journal, enough to state the purpose of the ritual, and to name it, but not to reveal any of the necessary elements.

It had been a long, hard, intriguing journey. Even the gathering of the final elements had been entertaining. DeChance was not to be taken lightly, and walking into the den of one of the vampire council members, stealing his lover from under his nose, and draining her slowly had been Ezzel’s gift to Le Duc. In his way, it was a tribute. Le Duc discovered the formula, but failed in the collection. He’d been a great alchemist, but not particularly powerful in other elements of the craft, and the vampire he’d chosen had bested him easily. Nothing more had ever been heard of him, but the journal survived.

Now it rested on the altar behind him, and the circle was complete. Ezzel closed his eyes, whispered a quick and meaningless charm for luck, and lit a large, sulfur match. He dropped it into the white powder, and the flames shot around the circle. They flashed to blue flame, leaped and danced, and then settled. Smoke rose in an even curtain that closed him from the rest of the room. At first it was thin and translucent. The colored tapestries and metaphysical paraphernalia he’d gathered were visible through the haze as vague lumps and dangling shadows.

Then the smoke thickened and he stood within a cylindrical white wall. He watched it for a moment, turning in a slow circle and examining the protective ring carefully, but he knew he’d find no weakness in it. It was perfect. He turned to the altar, stepped closer, and began.

It took Amethyst longer to find the maintenance passage that reached the two private elevators than it had taken Vein, but she was more careful. Once she was in the first floor passage she stopped and established a tight web of protection around herself before moving on. She reached the elevator shaft, and began to climb. She didn’t have the advantage of a Thunderbird bag, but she did have an amulet consecrated by rites sacred to air and wind, and she made good time.

Under other circumstances she might have worried that the elevator would descend, catch her between floors, and crush her, but she’d seen what Ezell planned. The one elevator would not leave the top floor by his hand, it was meant as a death chamber for the vampires, and it needed to remain in place to keep them trapped. Ezzel wouldn’t be leaving until he’d finished what he started, and that meant he needed the second elevator for his escape. She saw the bottom of the car far above. She climbed as quickly as she could, and as she did, she thought about what to do when she reached the top.

Ezzel had posed as her apprentice, and during the time he’d spent with her, she’d shared a lot of her knowledge with him. There might be other things he’d taken, and there was no way to know what he might have stolen from her books and papers when her guard was down. It was infuriating, but she couldn’t afford to take any chances with him. Whatever she used he might be ready to counter. She’d have to dig deep and be resourceful. Thankfully, everything she knew had not been shared, and not everything she owned that was powerful was stored in the single vault he’d stolen the timeline crystals from.

She stopped a floor below where the bottom of the elevator car hung over her head. Clinging to the maintenance ladder, she leaned out and breathed a handful of dust on to the crack in the center of the door in the side of the shaft. As that dust settled, she spoke a short charm. The doors slid open. She swung out on the ladder, away from the door, and then used the momentum of the return swing to flip in through the opening. She landed heavily, but without injury, and rolled to her feet. She pressed to the wall, slipped to the first corner, and then stood very still.

She didn’t really expect to meet anyone in the hall, but she was in no mood for further mistakes. If Ezzel completed this ritual, part of the blame was hers, and if she couldn’t stop him, she intended to let him know she was there. It wasn’t so much the ritual, or his thievery, or even the deaths he took so lightly. It was the fact that he’d lied to her, fooled her, worked with her and gained her trust.

She rounded the corner and began checking doors. All were locked until she reached the last. It hung open, and she saw dim, flickering light in the dark opening. She moved very slowly up to the edge of the door frame and stopped. Then she took a deep breath and glanced inside.

At first she saw only shadows. The walls were stone, and the only light was from a couple of guttering candles that had nearly burned themselves out. There was very little furniture. She saw a cot along one wall. There was a small table. She saw and sensed no one.

Once inside, she moved along the wall carefully, searching the barren room for shadows and finding none. Then she reached the cot, and when she did, she noticed something dangling from the wall just beyond it. It wasn’t very large, and at first she thought it might be empty chains, or a torn tapestry. She stepped closer, looked, and reeled away, gagging. What hung from the manacles on the wall and leaned precariously over the lip of the metal collar was barely recognizable as human. The skin was like leather worn so thin and brittle it could have been paper. The eye sockets were empty pits. Bones jutted and threatened to release their tenuous hold on one another.

“Vanessa.” Amethyst whispered the name, but she didn’t look back. She knew what the remains hanging on the wall meant. Caution was no longer a viable option. She needed to find Ezell immediately, and probably that wouldn’t be soon enough.

She pulled a small yellow crystal from her pocket and tossed it in the air. Before it could fall she snapped a command and whipped her finger in an intricate spiral between herself and the door. The crystal fell about a foot, wobbled in the air, and then hovered. It pointed toward the center of the building, and down. She snatched the crystal and took off at a run.

She didn’t bother to follow the hallway around to the end; that was where the other elevator would end, and that was where Donovan would enter. There was no way to know how he intended to get in, but since the wall was solid, and the elevator was apparently strong enough to hold adult vampires against their will, it was unlikely to be a good idea to be on this side of the wall when he decided to drop in.

As she ran, she let the yellow crystal hover just above the palm of her hand, and a moment later she was back at the first elevators shaft. There were no stairs. She leaned out through the still open doors, grabbed the maintenance ladder, and swung back into the shaft.

The crystal led her down two levels. There was a door, but it was not readily visible. She had to search, then close her mind and visualize it, before it shimmered into view. She wondered for just a moment why the car was all the way at the top. If she’d wondered another second, it would have been too long. She leaned out, blew the powder into the crack of the door and gripped the ladder. There was a grinding roar, and without thought she swung out and whipped herself through the air. As she moved, she screamed the opening charm and prayed it would work quickly enough. She launched herself at the doorway. Even as she slid through the opening, barely clearing the sides of the half-open door, hit the floor and rolled, the elevator ground to a halt. The inner door opened with a snick.

Amethyst glanced back, shuddered, and then turned to scan the hall. There was no one in sight, but she no longer needed the crystal to guide her. There was only one large, ornate doorway. A glow slipped out around the cracks. She stood still and closed her eyes. The shimmering vibration of the timeline crystals shivered through her pores. They were approaching resonance — the point when the radiance Ezzel had drawn from the depths of each would blend with that from the other until they formed a portal between them. At the final point of the ritual, he would step out between them, pass through that radiance, and the effects of the formula would become final and irreversible. In that small nexus of power, the past, present and future would be one single moment, and beyond that, the effects of the passage of minutes, hours, days and centuries would have no further affect. That was the theory.

She didn’t want to see it tested. She cleared her mind, drew in what energy she could from the air, from the amulets and crystals she wore, and even from the vibration of the timeline stones themselves. They were her crystals, after all, and they had been hers for many years. She’d spent time with them, studied them; a part of her was imprinted in their depths, and in the frequency of their vibration. Ezzel might have cleansed them before putting them to use, but somehow she didn’t believe he’d done it. He knew a lot, and he had talent, but no one knew everything, and crystals were her specialty, not his. These were very powerful, very delicate artifacts, and he’d have to travel a long way to find another pair their equal. If he cleansed them improperly, he could disturb the balance, and the repercussions wouldn’t quiet for months. If he was smart, he’d left them alone and taken his chances. She hoped it would be enough.

She crossed the hall and tried the knob on the door. To her surprise, it wasn’t locked. She turned it, peered through the crack, and gasped. The circle was immense, and it was active. The smoky cloud that obscured it was thick and dense. She couldn’t’ make out what was happening on the other side, and though she knew she was equally obscured, it did little to calm her nerves. This was powerful magic, and once the circle was in place, it was beyond foolish to try and cross it, or break it. The purpose of the circles of protection was to protect those inside the circle from what they summoned, and to protect those outside the circle from the energies contained within. Any sudden, unexpected break could destroy whoever stood inside the circle, or whoever stood outside. If it were powerful enough magic, it could be worse.

She took in the room at a glance. It was nothing like she’d expected. She’d known Ezzel for months, but as her apprentice, a quiet, soft-spoken man who was eager to do whatever she asked, and who might as well have been part of the wall when she wasn’t working with him. This room, this explosion of wealth and power and ostentatious — nonsense — didn’t equate with the man she’d thought she knew.

She approached the circle carefully. There were was nothing to see from where she stood, but she caught the scent of the incense he’d used to set the wards, and she felt the crystals, warm and shimmering, beneath that curtain. He hadn’t placed them inside the inner circle. They had to be mounted side by side in the center of the concentric rings to form the portal.

That was good. Amethyst wouldn’t break the circle. She knew the danger, and she wasn’t going to send the building and herself crashing into the pits of hell if she could help it. It was possible, though, that if she concentrated she could disrupt the vibrations in the crystal enough to prevent the formation of the portal. If she managed it, Ezzel would be trapped inside his own circle. It might not last, but it would buy them some time. It might be all that she could do.

She stalked around the outside of the circle. The more she thought about the theft of the crystals, and the quiet, handsome man who’d fooled her so completely and then taken advantage of her with such cold, unfeeling arrogance, the angrier she became. She pressed the palms of her hand as close as she dared to the whirling mist. She felt forces alive and powerful, just beyond her touch. Their aura shivered along the outer edge of the circle. She felt their awareness as well. Ezzel would have no concentration to spare for her, but the spirits he’d summoned were under no such constraints, and they wanted out. As long as they sensed that she might work to break the circle, they would only watch her. She knew that didn’t give her much time.

On the far right of the circle she felt the direct presence of the crystals, and she stopped. She stood very still, willed her mind to seek the twin vibrations, and sought to match them. She felt the spirits within the cloud drawing near, hovering and watching. They knew she could break the circle by attacking the crystals. What they didn’t yet know was her purpose, and she knew she’d have to act very quickly to succeed.

The vibrations rippled through her, and she willed one of the smaller crystals she wore around her throat to match that shivering warmth. She drew it in slowly and tried to keep the intrusion as inconspicuous as possible. She would have one moment to strike, and she waited for it as long as she dared.

With a lash of will she shifted the vibration of her smaller crystal, fighting to keep it bound to the larger, stronger timeline crystals. The spirits in the circle snatched her intentions from her thoughts and pounced with shrieks of anger and rage. Something dark rose behind her, but she didn’t see it in time. She concentrated and forced her will into the aura of the combined crystals. The darkness folded over and bent double, and then struck like a snake. It wrapped around her and dragged her from her feet, driving the breath from her lungs in a savage wrench.

She screamed and clawed at the writhing shadow, but the link with the crystals was broken, and now she fought for her life. The thing that held her was dark, and the stench it released engulfed the room, blotting out even the hint of incense. She fought to breathe, but it squeezed inexorably, driving the air from her struggling lungs.

Within the circle, Ezzel sensed a shift in the rhythms of the circle. He could not react, but he was aware. If he let his concentration waver for even a moment, he would be destroyed. Still, the disturbance itched at the back of his mind. It was the crystals. Their vibration had shifted very slightly. If they shifted more, he might not be able to bring them back into alignment — he might never escape the circle with his life.

Then, as suddenly as the disturbance had intruded, it was gone. He saw nothing but the table before him, the elements of the ritual, and the inviolate white smoky ring surrounding him. As he worked, he smiled.