Death Blows: The Bloodhound Files-2 (34 page)

“He may not be wearing the armor,” Cassius says. “It’ll impede his shapeshifting ability.”

“Don’t forget about Transe’s magic gem,” I say. “It’s probably the most powerful item of all.”

“And the best encrypted, magically speaking,” Cassius says. “He hasn’t used it so far, near as I can tell. Pray he doesn’t.”

The chopper’s coming up on Renton now, and I can see the rectangular, block-long buildings of an industrial park. It’s well lit, but there’s a jagged scar of light emanating from one of the roofs that doesn’t look like it belongs. “Set it down there,” I yell at the pilot.

“I can’t land on that roof!” he yells back. “I don’t know if it’s strong enough!”

“Then just get us close enough to jump!”

He does. Cassius leaps out, nimble as a cat, while Charlie makes a landing just as graceful but a lot more solid. I manage not to hurt myself.

The hole in the roof is the size of a Buick. Impenetrable force field plus mass of stone body times velocity equals sudden improvised skylight.

“Stay back,” I tell Cassius. “If he is wearing the armor, you can’t get anywhere near him.”

“I’m aware of that,” Cassius says. He doesn’t sound happy.

Charlie and I peer inside. What we see is a large industrial space, the floor three stories beneath us. Lots of high-tech equipment around the periphery, but what’s got my attention is the large, distinctive shape in the middle of the room.

A rocket.

Guns—except for mine—don’t exist here, due to a magically induced blind spot that affects everyone on the planet. Missiles—in the sense of pointy-shaped things that blow up on impact—don’t exist, either. But rockets, the kind that put satellites in orbit and men on the moon, that they have no trouble with . . . and it seems I’m looking at some sort of prototype right now.

“What’s he doing?” Charlie whispers.

“Fueling up,” I say. “Those are tanks of liquid oxygen.”

The rocket is on some kind of mobile gantry, currently in a horizontal position. The nose cone is configured like a clamshell, and it’s wide open.

And then I hear it. A thin, heartrending wail. Gretchen’s baby.

She’s lying in the middle of the nose cone, strapped in to some kind of jury-rigged harness. Stone’s busy with the hoses feeding the LOX to the rocket’s fuel tank.

There are two dead security guards near the door. I wonder if they’re the only ones.

The good news is that he isn’t wearing the Centurion armor. The bad news is that the sky-shield is parked only a few feet away, a large oval shape hovering about two feet off the floor. From what I understand, anyone traveling on the thing is pretty much invulnerable, plus it’s smart enough to let things—like arrows—out, while not allowing any projectiles in. Not sure how it’ll affect hand-to-hand combat, but if Stone hops aboard he could probably just ram us to death.

“We have to get the baby to safety
and
keep him away from the shield,” I whisper.

Cassius is abruptly next to me. “Correct. Charlie, target Stone. I’ll get the child.” And with that, he jumps through the hole.

Charlie’s fast. He puts one of the silver-coated steel balls he keeps in a spring-loaded holster up his sleeve into the back of Stone’s head while Cassius is still in the air. It’s enough to take out a thrope, a pire, or even most lems.

But Brother Stone is something else.

The ball bounces off his skull with a
klang
! loud enough to make my ears ring. It gets Stone’s attention—his head snaps around just in time to see Cassius, now about fifteen feet off the ground.

Stone points at him, in the most extreme sense of the word—his entire arm lengthens into a silver spike ten feet long, one right beneath Cassius’s falling body. Cassius manages to twist his torso enough that the spike misses his heart when it impales him, going in just under his ribs and out right next to his spine. Because Cassius wasn’t directly over Stone when he leapt, the spike curves halfway down its length, thickening toward the base where it began life as Stone’s right arm. Cassius actually slides halfway down the rod running through him, like an impaled worm at the bottom of a fishhook.

I jump a second later.

I don’t have any time to think, I just act. Cassius’s body is between Stone and the shield now, and I hope that’s enough to keep the monk from doing the same thing to me that he just did to
oh God I
forgot he’s ambidextrous
.

Luckily for me, so is Charlie.

Who would have thought falling three stories could take so long. I’m almost bored by the time it’s over, if by bored you mean so frightened I’m paralyzed and I think I forget how to breathe. I have more than enough time to get extremely annoyed by whoever has decided to start up that jackhammer, though—

That would be Charlie. Raining ball-bearing destruction down on Brother Stone with both arms, metal on metal mayhem as fast as a Gatling gun. If at first you don’t succeed, ramp up the firepower and try again.

It keeps Stone off balance long enough for me to complete my trajectory, which ends exactly where I was aiming: on the shield itself. I’m gambling that either the force field will interpret me as some kind of attack and bounce me off—force fields are soft, right?—or it’ll think I’m just a rider in a hurry leaping into the saddle like the Lone Ranger with a two-for-one coupon for Tonto chow.

Okay, that came out a little more racist than I intended, but I have
no time
to tell my brain to shut up because now that the shield has caught me like a cradle catching a baby I have a much less metaphorical baby to rescue. One that’s too far away unless I can somehow make this damn thing do more than just hover—

Stone makes a motion as if he’s flicking a booger off his finger, except his finger is ten feet long and shiny and the booger is Cassius. Surprisingly, this doesn’t work, though Cassius does go sliding to the end of the spike—where he stops himself by reaching out and grabbing it, like a confused and suicidal fireman. For a second I think he’s actually going to start hauling himself back the way he came, handover-hand, but then I realize he’s pulled something out of his pocket.

It appears to be a small pump-action bottle of window cleaner. Of course. That spike is looking
awfully
tarnished, not to mention covered in bits I don’t want to look too closely at. Cassius gives it a good spraying.

“Giddyup!” I blurt. “Open Sesame! On Cupid! Shazam!”

The shield stubbornly refuses to budge. I abandon the verbal approach, grab an edge with either hand, and
will
it to move toward the nose cone.

It moves.

Unfortunately, it picks the quickest and most obvious route, which is right past Stone. He’s kind of busy, though, screaming in agony as whatever Cassius sprayed on him is apparently a little more corrosive than your average cleaning product. His metal skin bubbles and hisses, vapor curling off it, and then Cassius drops to the ground as the chemical eats right through. He’s still got a chunk of metal lodged in him, but he’s free and Stone’s lost some body mass.

I’m past him and to the nose cone, the shield halting when I want it to. I start to fumble with the baby’s harness, then draw one of my scythes and snap the blade out. Cut her free and worry about nicks later.

Right about then is when Charlie, now out of ammo, draws his
gladius
—that’s a Roman short sword he keeps tucked into a scabbard in the lining of his jacket—and does his own leaping. He manages a much better landing than either of us, planting his knees squarely on his target’s shoulders and knocking him to the ground. He drives the blade two-fisted into the back of Stone’s neck, no doubt hoping to separate his head from the rest of him.

Good plan, but flawed in execution. I’m chopping away at the straps with the scythe, and I’ve almost cut the baby free when Charlie comes flying past me. I look back to see Stone, sword still sticking out of his neck but on both feet and looking very upset.

“You will not interfere with the Divine Will of the Multiverse,” Stone says. His voice is intense, full of righteous fury. “I’m retconning it all, don’t you see? Going backward so we can start
all over
again, and do it
right
this time.”

“I never was much for revision,” I say. “More of a first-draft girl, myself.”

If I can just get the baby free, the shield will protect both of us. Unfortunately, Stone knows that, too—

which is why he ignores me and does something to the control panel at the side of the gantry.

The nose cone starts to close. I manage to hack through the last of the straps, spilling the baby onto the floor. She shrieks in pain and fear, though I figure as a pire she isn’t actually hurt. I jam my scythe between the closing clamshell doors, keeping them open—and then the rocket itself starts to move. He’s raising the gantry, trying to point the thing at the sky. I scrabble for purchase, but I can’t grab the scythe because it might pop free, and the surface of the nose cone is too slick to hold on to. The rocket tilts higher and higher, and I slip back and onto the shield.

Down below, Cassius and Charlie are advancing on Brother Stone for round two. Cassius has pulled the spike out of his gut, but he’s in bad shape; he’s moving slow and has one hand pressed against his stomach. Charlie’s out of ammo and has lost his sword.

And if we don’t stop him, Stone’ll launch this rocket as soon as it’s fully upright. It probably won’t clear the hole Stone made when he broke in, but I doubt if pointing that out will stop him; he seems to have a very nonstandard take on the whole cause-and-effect thing.

Up
, I think, and the shield rises. Think I’m starting to get the hang of this. I’m going to have to circle around to the other side to pull the baby out—can’t risk knocking the scythe free—but I can do this.

Cassius and Charlie are out of my line of sight. I make a long arm, reach inside the nose cone and snag the kid. We should be all right now—

That’s when something slams into the bottom of the shield,
hard
, and when I discover an interesting fact: While the shield will protect whoever’s riding it from harm, its magical mojo doesn’t do squat for falling off the damn thing.

I do my best to shelter the baby when we hit. Only from around a dozen or so feet up, but it’s a concrete floor and I land on my back. All the air goes out of me with a grunt, and pain rushes in to fill the void.

Got to get up
, I think groggily. I took a pretty good whack to the skull, too.
Got to—

“You’re not going to ruin this,” Stone says calmly. He grabs the baby away from me with a hand like flows like molten metal, wrapping her in a shiny silver cocoon. “You can’t.”

I’m on the other side of the gantry now, and so is Stone. No sign of Charlie or Cassius. Very bad. I consider drawing my gun and realize it’s probably pointless; I doubt it could do enough damage to stop him.

“I don’t understand,” I say, very clearly and calmly. You’d be amazed how often that gets them to talk; sometimes the most important thing in a fractured world is finding someone who
does
understand. The real question is, is he desperate enough to try to explain?

“I became a monk for the stillness,” he says. Ripples of color and texture are moving in slow sine waves across his face, his body; copper and granite and iron and jade, like some kind of humanoid ultimate lava lamp. “For the quiet contemplation of the universe. But when he approached me, asked me to work for him, I couldn’t say no—there was too much at stake. It was too important. And terrible things happened . . .”

“I know. I’ve seen your shrine.”

“I just wanted the voices in my head to stop. I couldn’t talk to anyone, not without revealing what I was. So I thought—maybe I could just leave. Go somewhere where this hasn’t happened yet.”

“Another reality?”

“Yes. And I knew someone, someone who might be able to get me there . . . but he had a price. I had to do things for him. Get things for him. He told me that when he had enough power, he could help me . .

.
cross over
. But that doesn’t matter anymore.”

Uh-oh. “Why not?”

“Because he showed me that I can never
have
stillness. I can never have peace. He showed me
his
world, showed me it with his mind, and the scales fell from my eyes. Clones of men bitten by radioactive spiders who make deals with the devil. Mutant rock stars who can teleport to Dyson spheres in other galaxies. Asgardian thunder god frogs. Transsexual shamans who travel in time, green shapeshifting child actors battling blood cults and the Wrath of God creating a giant duck that gobbles a mobster alive . . . and all of it, always changing, past and present and future, shifting and contradicting itself and never, ever staying the same. It was absurd. It was horrifying. It was beautiful.”

Tears run down his face, little mirrored blobs of mercury that explode into a thousand shiny beads when they hit the floor. I wonder if that’s why we found traces of quicksilver at one of the murder sites.

“It changed everything, because I saw that everything
is
change. I couldn’t go somewhere else, somewhere perfect, because there is no such place. What I had to do was make changes
here
. Make the right changes, and everything will shift. That’s what magic
is
.”

The gantry stops, locking into place with a loud mechanical
chunk
. It’s fully raised now, the nose pointing out the hole in the roof.

“I get it,” I say. “You just want to fix things. But you’ve made a mistake.”

“No. I haven’t.” His body shifts, extending upward into a growing pillar. It’s a solid gray color now—

granite, I’m guessing. He puts the baby back in the nose cone, then pulls my scythe out. The clamshell whirs the rest of the way shut.

I risk a glance around the gantry. Both Charlie and Cassius are down, a black spill of volcanic sand seeping from a wound in Charlie’s chest. I have no idea what that means, how hurt he actually is. Cassius seems to just be out cold.

I draw my gun, then think better of it. Rocket fuel and bullets are not a good combination. I wish I could just T2 his shapeshifting ass with some liquid oxygen, but this isn’t a movie—I’d just wind up blowing all of us sky-high.