6

ASSUME THE EXPOSITION

Someone opened those black tinted doors and let us into a lobby where three guards in red suit jackets waited. They looked like a cross between movie ushers and Navy SEALs. There was also a receptionist and a custodian visible, both of them suspiciously fit-looking. One of the guards was a werewolf from the Round Table too, which I guess was progress. Whether it was or not, we had to leave our weapons behind while we went through a five-foot-long checkpoint that involved an x-ray scanner, a metal detector, a black light, some covert holy symbols, and a test involving a little cup the size of a thimble with a tiny needle at its base. This had become a standard security precaution once the knights learned that some kind of skinwalker cult was working with or for the School of Night. Skinwalkers can imitate anyone by making a magical suit out of the victim’s peeled skin, but the magical suits also function as a kind of armor. They don’t bleed easily, if at all.

“Just don’t prick the middle finger,” I said as the guard obligingly put the cup over the tip of my pinky. “I may be using it soon.”

The last step was a thorough frisking by a very large man who smelled hostile. His little plastic nameplate had a brass-looking sticker on it that said MARK. His groping was both impersonal and a little too personal, but at least it wasn’t a first date. I had seen Mark once before, carrying a golf bag for Simon at a Templar-owned country club in Boston. Mark was much more convincing as a security type than as a caddy; he looked like he used to play throwback for Charles Darwin.

“I’d better get some flowers after this,” I said as the frisking continued a little longer than seemed necessary.

Mark didn’t respond.

“Has something made you guys step up the security?” Sig was being searched just as thoroughly, though by a woman.

Still no comment. These people had a non-answer for everything. I gave up and stared at the doors beyond the receptionist’s desk while “Mark” went through my guitar case. The Knights Templar usually prefer to spread lone members of the blood around in a wide number of legit enterprises, but sometimes the Order likes to staff and run an entire business so that nobody has to tiptoe around the bullshit. The receptionist could probably fire on us with a rocket launcher, and no one would say anything except, “Herb! Get the pressure hose.”

When Mark gave me a temporary ID, I noticed that the knuckles on his right hand had been skinned recently. Probably from dragging on the ground so much. “Does this mean you’ll answer our questions now?” I asked.

“It means I might tell you to stop before I shoot,” Mark rumbled. We didn’t get our weapons back, but Mark led us past the lobby to a large warehouse floor full of rows and rows of office types working side by side on computers with no cubicles to hide their screens from each other. The segmented line of white plastic monitors created a giant spine where uniform rows of people made small motions and constant clacking noises. It reminded me of insects stripping a corpse clean.

“What are they doing?” Sig asked me in a low voice.

“How would I know?” I whispered back. “The last time I was a knight, Pong hadn’t been invented yet.” Maybe these Templars were doing whatever legit job was their front, or maybe they were busy inundating the Internet with outlandish conspiracy theories and wacked-out claims that made the supernatural seem ridiculous. Or maybe they were posting articles and blogs claiming to prove that real supernatural events were hoaxes, or even planting viruses or posting objectionable material that would get real sites taken down. Maybe they were scanning for real warning flags of supernatural events, looking for grains of sand in the digital desert that they were helping to create. Can you say Sisyphus?

“We call this place the hack factory,” Mark contributed, then shut up as if afraid we might ask him to do it again.

We eventually reached the back section of the room where a series of small offices made mostly of glass were located. Simon Travers was in one of them, watching our approach with his implacable brown eyes, and Kasia was sitting in a rolling chair next to him. Simon made some minor adjustments to make sure no one could see the weapons beneath his expensive beige suit and stepped out to meet us. At middle age, Simon is what you’d get if some mad scientist spliced Brad Pitt and Jude Law together, but even though he’s smooth and creamy on top, you can see where the veneer is starting to wear away from hard use. The skin beneath Simon’s eyes is ever so faintly scarred, and his nose is oh so slightly imperfect from being broken and expertly reset more than once. Simon still manages to make the imperfections look rakish, though. Like the minor flaws give him character and set him apart from all of the perfect, pretty male actors in Hollywood who can’t understand why their action roles keep getting stolen by Australians. He smells like an odd combination of skin moisturizer and hair dye and excess testosterone.

Simon’s greeting wasn’t as urbane as usual. “I expected you half an hour ago.” Just for the record, we were ten minutes early.

I held my arms open. “What, no hug?”

Behind us, the man who might have been named Mark made a sound like he was choking on something, probably the hot blood of an enemy.

Simon gave Sig a curt nod. “Miss Norresdotter. Lovely as usual. I’m hoping you can be helpful again.”

Sig was staring at Kasia. “You’ll have to tell us what’s going on first.”

“That’s the very first order of business,” Simon promised.

Molly stepped forward and held her hand out to Simon. “Hi. I’m Molly Newman.”

Simon finally remembered to turn on the charm. He flashed a smile that should have had a kilowatt ranking and took Molly’s hand. “Simon Travers. Delighted to finally meet the rest of Team Charming.”

“If you call us that again, I might just punch you,” Sig advised. “I’m not saying I will. I just can’t promise I won’t.”

Simon seemed amused. “Team Norresdotter doesn’t have much of a ring to it. What would you rather I call you?”

“A cab,” I said. Oh, Groucho. I miss you.

“How about the Mollifiers?” Molly suggested.

“Not happening,” Choo said curtly.

Simon returned his attention to Molly. “Please ignore anything John has told you and make up your own mind about me.”

“I never ignore anything John says.” Molly had a pretty bright smile of her own. “And I try to make up my own mind about everyone.”

“And I love Molly,” I told Simon. “So remove that manicured claw and stay ten feet away from her at all times, you oozing suckhole.” Except I said it with a look, not actual words, and I reluctantly took Molly’s cue and introduced Simon to Choo. Choo took Simon’s hand warily. Both men said a few words and neither said they were pleased to meet the other.

At some point, Kasia had followed Simon out of the office. “Sigourney.”

“Kasia.” Sig might have moved her head a fraction of an inch. I can’t swear to it. “I’d introduce you to Molly and Choo, but apparently you’ve already been spying on my friends.”

Kasia sliced off a smile so thin that her mouth barely moved. “Does anyone really know who your friends are, Sigourney?”

Oh, good. There wasn’t going to be any weird tension after all.

“The kresniks sent Kasia here as a courtesy when they started having visions about this city all the way across the ocean,” Simon explained. “They chose her because some of the visions had you and Kasia in them, Sig, and you two used to work together.”

“We never worked together,” Sig corrected.

Kasia was in complete agreement: “We briefly worked with Stanislav Dvornik at the same time.”

“Can you be more specific about this vision?” I asked.

Simon grimaced. “Not really. Sig and Kasia were in some sort of tower surrounded by pale white statues. It was dark, and there was a feeling of great significance.”

“A dark tower,” I repeated. “Were there any French knights or novelists from Maine involved?”

“No, but we’re trying to discreetly check out every skyscraper in New York.”

Sig and Kasia were continuing to have their own conversation as if no one else was in the room. “What was up with Clayburg?” Sig asked. “Were you trying to warn me away or get me involved or just messing with me?”

Kasia regarded her with a strange blend of amusement and hostility and indifference. “The last thing I owe you is any explanations for my behavior.”

“If you wanted to let me know you were around, you could have just sent me a text,” Sig said. “Or even arranged to meet me for coffee. Why turn this into some big dramatic fucked-up thing?”

Kasia’s lips showed a little more range of motion by twisting. “When I knew you, your whole life was some big dramatic fucked-up thing. Has that changed?”

“I’ve changed,” Sig said.

“I have not.”

“Kasia’s a professional.” Simon mentioned this as if he was reminding Kasia of that fact. “I wouldn’t have let her in on this, kresniks or no kresniks, if she didn’t have a reputation for getting the job done. She’s been very useful hypnotizing eyewitnesses into forgetting what they’ve seen recently, too.”

Kasia wasn’t the type to sigh, but her eyes took on a brooding simmer. “I am willing to work beside you, Sigourney, since Ladislaw seems to think it is important that I do so.”

That never got explained fully, but Ladislaw was apparently some kresnik psychic whose word meant something to Sig. Did I mention that I hate prophecy crap? Sig nodded reluctantly, and I addressed Kasia. “Let’s cut to the chase. If some butt-uglies with spells coming out of their who-knows-whats attacked us right now, would you have Sig’s back?”

Kasia gave me a look that suggested I was being tiresome.

“It happens all the time,” I assured her. “Hell, that’s where I get my mail.”

“That’s true,” Simon said. “It’s why I call John when I want to flush out an enemy who’s proving hard to find. Charming has a real talent for making people want to kill him.”

“I always do what I say I am going to do,” Kasia said. “Sigourney will tell you that much.”

Sig still hadn’t taken her eyes off Kasia. “Kasia sticks to the letter of her agreements even if she doesn’t always honor the spirit of them.”

“And I can always kill you later if you piss me off too much,” Kasia added.

Simon didn’t waste any more time on unpleasantries: That’s one of the few things I like about him. He just started walking briskly away. “Come on.” Mark started to follow us, but Simon called back without turning his head: “You can stay, Mark.”

“I think you’re supposed to throw him a banana when you say things like that,” I suggested helpfully, and Sig gave me a light punch in the arm, though her lips finally twitched. Simon didn’t respond. Instead, he led us to a set of stairs that had one door leading to a basement level and another metal panel door, the security kind that is slightly recessed into a wall and usually leads to janitors’ closets with lots of toxic chemicals. Simon unlocked the latter.

It looked like a normal storage niche to me. It was dark and full of mops and brooms and buckets and rolls of brown paper towels and various containers of disinfectants, but Simon went on in and said, “Close the door behind us.” We did, and when Simon reached a fuse box on the back wall, his hands did something with the switches. There was a pneumatic hiss, and the section of floor we were standing on slowly dropped with a tired sigh.

“No way,” Choo muttered, but the floor descended anyhow. We traveled maybe twenty feet, and suddenly we were facing another small room about the size of a storage closet, but this one led to an iron spiral staircase going down. Everything was faintly lit by light from below.

“Thank God,” I said.

Simon looked at me warily. “What?”

“I was afraid there was going to be a set of Batman and Robin costumes waiting for us.”

“That’s not as funny as you think.” Simon didn’t elaborate. When we moved forward, the section of floor we had ridden down began to rise again. I could see that it was basically a concrete platform on a thick segmented metal pole like they have beneath barber chairs. The platform could probably be jacked up manually by some kind of hydraulic lever in a pinch. Knights spend a lot of time around power outages.

We went down through service tunnels full of wide halls, thick walls, and heavy metal doors. There were guards in Templar field armor, a weave of Kevlar and spider silk that looks like something between a B-grade science fiction movie and an S&M fetishist’s wet dream. Small dense plates made out of space-age plastics covered vital organs and nerve clusters to provide additional protection against impact and sharp edges, and the riot helmets had visors of dark glass with an infrared option. The guards were armed with pump-action shotguns and cattle prods that could probably kill a human and shock a buffalo into unconsciousness.

We reached a vault door that had a combination lock as well as several keyholes. There were no doorknobs, unless you counted the two guards on either side of the entrance. Simon turned to me. “Just remember: You asked to involve your friends.”

That was still a bit of a sore spot, and Sig interceded before I could say whatever I was going to say. “We were told you were about to contact John, anyhow.”

“I was considering it,” Simon admitted grudgingly. “Charming is good at moving through supernatural communities where normal knights can’t tread lightly, and this case is unusual.”

“Maybe you should consider keeping me a little better informed in general,” I said. “It seems like whenever we get involved in something, we’re running around trying to deal with all kinds of crazy stuff breaking out and having to piece together the story behind it as we go along. It’d be nice to be more than one step ahead of an avalanche for a change.”

Choo grunted agreement, but Simon didn’t quite see it that way. “You don’t get to spend most of your life hiding out in the middle of nowhere and then complain because you’re not on top of things. That’s by choice.”

Huh. That had an uncomfortable ring of truth to it. On the other hand, it’s also true that Simon desperately needs to spend a few days in some comfortable pajamas, watching bad television and eating things that aren’t good for him until he finally breaks down and starts sobbing inconsolably.

Simon couldn’t quite stop there. “You don’t get involved with anything from our world except your Valkyrie unless it finds you first or you run smack bump into it.”

“My name is Sig,” Sig reminded him. “You said this case was unusual. How unusual?”

“It will save time if I just show you.” Simon went through the laborious process of opening the door, and we wound up in a hallway leading between rows of observation cells. There was a stationary guard on the other side of the door and two roving ones.

One of the roving guards approached and became our escort as we walked down the corridor. Each cell had steel walls and a door made of thick security glass. Said glass was molded around metal bars about the size you’d expect to see in a rhino cage. Some of the prisoners were manacled to the walls, some wore chains that sank into holes in the floor, and some wore collars with digital readouts that wouldn’t work if there was a massive magical surge.

One extremely attractive woman in a hospital gown was trying to form words around a tongue that had obviously been mutilated, and maybe with a larynx that had been removed too. Another prisoner was a satyr out of legend. Not that I had ever seen a satyr, but he was a burly man with goat horns whose hooved legs were completely covered in fur. Unlike most cartoons and illustrations I’d seen, this satyr had a large and way-too-visible penis. He seemed very fond of it.

Something that looked humanish but on a large scale was sleeping on the adjacent cell floor instead of a cot, swaddled in the kind of chains that anchor aircraft carriers. Another cell was full of mist, and the next had an occupant whose faceless skull was completely hairless and egg-shaped. One of the roving guards joined us along the way, and we all wound up standing in front of a cell that had little brown bubbles visible where the glass door had been caramelized. I moved forward to peer at the bubbles more closely. Simon explained: “That thing in there can generate fire out of a third eye.”

That “thing” appeared to be a normal man in a T-shirt and boxers. He was either in his forties or his thirties and not aging well. A beefy guy, Caucasian, unshaven, just a little over six feet tall, with big shoulders, a potbelly, and thick arms that suggested he still liked to bench press or curl iron or did some job that involved a lot of lifting. Something about his skin tone was screaming for vitamins, and his eyes were exhausted sinkholes. His hair was brown with patches of grey, cut cheaply and short over a flat slab of a head. He looked mean and stupid but not particularly noteworthy.

“I don’t see any third eye,” Sig said. “Do you mean the psychic kind?”

“Just wait.”

The man seemed to notice us. His expression became alert and completely impersonal at the same time, his head slowly swiveling toward us as if on gears. That already-sallow skin began to lose color, leaching into an ashen grey. Sagging flesh didn’t disappear but tightened, as if someone were pumping air into him. The pupils and irises in his eyes turned red, and folds of flesh in his forehead parted to reveal an opening the size of a golf ball. The eye behind that opening was entirely red, and it spit a small sphere of fire. The spark enlarged rapidly until it exploded against the cell door in a bright, hissing fireworks display.

“The hardest part is keeping the oxygen level in his cell consistent.” Simon almost made the remark sound conversational.

“Pyrokinesis?” I wondered. It’s not like that red eye had tubes or nozzles.

“Who the hell knows?” Simon’s lapse into mild profanity was another bad sign. If I got any more, I was going to have to start counting them on my toes.

“Does he know?” Molly asked. “Is this some weird kind of possession?”

“We think so, but traditional exorcism techniques don’t seem to have any effect.” Simon gestured vaguely. “Before it started changing, that thing used to be Randy Prutko. He worked the night shift stocking a grocery store. He’s single, divorced, has two DUIs and several marks on his record that involve violence.”

“What kind of violence?” Choo wanted to know.

“Bar fights, domestic abuse, and you can throw ignoring a restraining order and resisting arrest in there too,” Simon answered. “Randy’s the one who went crazy in a grocery store and kidnapped a female stock clerk after setting the place on fire.”

Molly gave Simon a sharp look at that, but I stuck to the facts. “This girl Randy kidnapped. Was she a pretty young virgin?”

“I don’t know if she’s a virgin, but she’s young and pretty. A knight managed to intercept Randy in a back alley while he was carrying the young lady to his apartment. Randy killed the knight, but fortunately, this is New York.”

“Why is that good?” This from Choo.

I answered absently. “In big cities, knights are as thick as a Brooklyn accent.” I was about to ask another question of my own, but then, for a brief flash of a second, it looked like the prisoner was wearing black armor. Not Kevlar. Black medieval armor. But as soon as I tried to study it, the armor blinked out. Everyone else was staring directly at the prisoner too, but they didn’t seem to see anything. That kind of thing has happened a few times since I took a trip to the Dreamtime with Sarah White, and every time it does, I pretend it didn’t. The man opened his mouth, and what came out was a sense of impact rather than a sound. I know that doesn’t make sense, but the lights dimmed briefly before coming back on, and the air pressure changed. My ears popped even though I didn’t see the cell door shake.

Sig and Choo and Kasia reacted more visibly and staggered backward. Choo leaned groggily against the wall for support. “What was that?!?”

Simon had the grace to seem mildly embarrassed. “That was a word of power. I didn’t think it worked through soundproof glass.”

“You did not test that first?” Kasia snapped. Whatever her liaison status, she wasn’t armed any more than I was, and Simon apparently hadn’t brought her down there before.

“How was I supposed to test it? Whatever it is, the power word doesn’t work on knights because we’re all protected by a geas.” Simon glanced at Molly, who seemed unaffected. “It doesn’t seem to work on Miss Newman, either.”

Sig gestured at the prisoner. “What is that thing?”

“As far as we can tell, he’s a maladin.” We must have looked confused, because Simon added, “A maladin is a paladin that’s gone bad. It’s basically a rip-off of an anti-paladin or a death knight or a doom knight. Randy was dressed in a full set of black armor when we found him.”

“I’ve never heard of any of those things.” I sounded a little accusing. How had I not heard of any of those things?

Molly seemed more fascinated than alarmed. She was staring into the cage as if there were a leprechaun there instead of a fat freak in boxer shorts. “They’re from video games.”

“Old-fashioned role-playing games too,” Simon added. “The kind involving dice and tables. But the point is, they’re modern fictional creatures, not mythical.”

I just stared at him.

“They don’t really exist,” Simon clarified. “They never did.”

I turned and focused my stare back on the prisoner. He looked real enough to me.

“You see my problem,” Simon said.