"For what?"
"To use power. If we trigger the alarms now, by the time we get downstairs it will all be sealed. We'll have a much harder time getting in and out. Let's try the other end."
"It's just as likely to be locked," I pointed out.
As we turned to go back the way we had come, an Asian woman stepped out of the offices ahead of us."
"Chris? Terry? What are you doing? That's the restricted area. You can't go in there." Her accent was Indian, educated and resonant with authority.
"There's been a break-in upstairs. We're checking to see if the security doors are locked." Raffmir glanced at her and then at the security ID badge dangling on a lanyard around her neck.
"A break-in?" She looked around disbelievingly. "Why haven't the alarms gone off?"
Raffmir stepped up to her and grasped her head with both hands. She gave a strangled squeak as he lifted her on tip-toe. He jerked her head sideways and there was a wet snap. Her body went limp and fell to the floor.
"For God's sake, Raffmir! Do you have to kill everyone? What's the matter with you?"
"Check to see if the office is empty." He said, gathering her limp form under the arms.
I ran forward, leaned around the door and found the office from which she had emerged empty. I swung the door wide and Raffmir dragged in the body. He tugged at the ID card around her neck and pulled the lanyard free.
"How many of them are you planning to kill?" I asked, looking down at the woman. She looked strangely peaceful, though the angle of her neck was all wrong.
"As many as I have to. Remember, these people have been systematically killing your mongrel brethren. They have no scruples and there are few things indeed that they would not do."
"So you can just kill them."
"I don't have the attachment to them that you do, Dogstar. To me they are mere curs, yapping at the moon." He took the ID card and returned to the secure door. It beeped once as he presented the card and the door clicked open. He went through and I followed, closing it behind us.
The offices on the far side were identical, leaving me wondering what the extra security was for. We walked past an office where two men argued. They sounded tired and irritable, but they did not notice us. That probably saved them, though they did not know it.
Further down the corridor was another electronically controlled door. This one had a proximity reader, but also a numeric keypad. I glanced back to the office where the men still argued. Maybe they were not so safe after all.
"Remember why we are here," said Raffmir. "Do not be distracted by trivia. When the alarm signal is triggered their reaction will be swift. In and out. That's all that concerns us."
I nodded.
Raffmir placed his hand on the keypad and the light blinked green twice. The door clicked open. He strode through, his pace quickening.
"If it was that easy," I asked him, "why didn't we do that before? We didn't need to kill that woman. We could have just locked her in her office or knocked her unconscious."
"We do not have time for that. The door will open to my command, but by which token I cannot know. The magic finds the easiest route, the path of least resistance. It's like water running through soil, it goes where it can."
"And why is that a problem, exactly?"
We passed the lifts and came to the double doors leading to the downward stairway. Raffmir placed his hand against the keypad again and the light blinked green.
"It will not last. The locks will open to a valid identity, but there is another system that monitors who has access and when they use it. It's part of the security system."
A loud siren suddenly started emitting a piercing whine. Red lights flashed down the corridor. The keypad on the door blinked red, but the door was already open.
"It has just worked out," said Raffmir, "that we shouldn't be here."
He led the way, descending three full levels before he halted. "Wait here," he said.
"What are you going to do?"
"Below us is the guard station for the secure levels. I will deal with the guards."
"Can't we…"
He literally vanished from sight in front of me, fading into the stairway as if he'd never been there. "Raffmir?" I was talking to the empty stairway.
I gritted my teeth. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
There was a series of staccato eruptions from below, followed by the dull boom of a shotgun in a confined space. Screams and shouts echoed up the stairway with the acrid smell of smoke and discharged gunpowder. There was a final percussive shot and then silence.
A breath of air below me turned back into Raffmir. "The way is clear. Come."
He led me down another level to a bend in the corridor which opened out into a space covered by guard posts on either side. One had the menacing muzzle of a machine gun poking from it while the other had thick glass, now smeared with a red stain. Dead bodies were strewn about the floor, blood pooling beneath them, their weapons lying with them where they'd fallen. The smell of blood and guts was mixed with acrid smoke, making me retch.
"How many did you kill?" I asked.
Raffmir shook his head. "Are you keeping score?"
"No, but I need to know what this has cost."
"Even if it were a hundred, would you not pay that price in battle to have your daughter back? Blood calls to blood, Dogstar. It always has."
A young soldier behind a barrier had been rammed into the concrete face first, leaving his features unidentifiable. "This wasn't a battle. You slaughtered them."
"They prepared to fight the fey – mongrels, half-breeds, the ill-bred and misfits. They have not faced the true fey for centuries. They have become arrogant and complacent. It is their weakness." I noticed then what had been bothering me. The whole area was peppered with iron. The guards had been using iron in their ammunition. Raffmir was right when he said that they had prepared.
Beyond the guard station was another set of double doors. He put his hand over the keypad, but it flashed red three times and the door didn't open.
"Now what?" I asked.
He took hold of the metal bars of the door handles. With alarming strength, he ripped the doors apart. Once he had a gap he used one to lever against the other until the frame screeched and the hinges buckled, leaving the doors hanging limply and leaving the way down open.
"Bloody hell," I said.
Raffmir grinned at me. "The strength of the true fey is something to behold. You begin to appreciate the differences between us." He stepped through the gap. "The system triggered the alarm, but they still don't know what they're dealing with. The cameras are useless to them, they will show them nothing. We still have the advantage of surprise."
I followed him through what remained of the doors. Beyond them was a reception area with comfortable leather chairs and a water cooler. A middle-aged woman in a white coat was trying to barricade herself into a glass-walled office by pushing a chair under the door handle. If she'd seen what Raffmir had just done to the security doors, she would not have bothered.
There were three sets of opaque glass doors arranged at each corner of the area, leading further into the complex. On each door was a letter – A, B and C. Raffmir ignored the woman in the room, who was now hiding under her desk, and went to the door marked B.
"This way."
As I followed there was the sharp double crack of pistol shots. The opaque glass door to the right shattered in a shower of glass. Alarmed, I leapt aside and pressed myself against the wall, out of the line of the ambush. Raffmir pushed through, there was a dull thud and then a man in a security uniform was hurled backwards through the other door, shattering that too. He bounced once on the floor and rolled across the carpet, groaned and lay still.
I stepped gingerly across the glass-covered carpet to where Raffmir was sweeping fragments of glass from his sleeve. The acrid smell of gunfire hung around him. There was a black pistol on the floor, and I reached for the gun.
"Leave it," he said. "Its sound will only betray our location. Your sword is cleaner and more certain."
"Were you hit?" I asked.
He shook his head, but the smile had gone. "The time has come," he said, "to show them what they are dealing with."
He shifted form back to the long coat and ruffled shirt. As he did so the air chilled suddenly and the lights flickered and dimmed.
"Do likewise," he instructed. "Take as much power as you can. Together we can absorb all they have. Without power or light they will be unable to respond."
The well of darkness within me dilated and I drew in power. The room temperature plummeted and the lights winked out. There was a crackling, splitting sound as the water in the cooler froze and split the container. My hands and fingers were outlined in a white nimbus. The sirens faltered and then subsided into a muted beeping. Emergency lights flickered on then faded to blue and died.
"Keep drawing power. They are not creatures of the dark like us. We will have the advantage as long as we can hold it. Together we can deny them light, while we can still see."
He gestured around him and I found I could indeed see, even beyond the faint outlines illuminated by our flickering nimbus. The real world was in darkness, but the shadow world overlaid upon it was like glowing smoke.
He walked on into that spectral dark, and I followed.
TWENTY-FOUR
I followed him into the shadows, seeing beyond the walls into offices and corridors. Shadows shifted in those spaces and I realised there were people, moving shadows of smoke within a misty framework of walls and doors.
Amidst the misty world were things that stood out, stark and grey. We approached a vertical rectangular grid. It resolved in the faint light of Raffmir's nimbus into a barrier of iron bars.
"The door is reinforced iron, designed to be proof against our power. The lock is iron too, so our kind cannot affect it."
"Can we get past it?"
He grinned and in answer his glow intensified for a moment and then he vanished. There was a moment of deeper darkness and then his glow reappeared on the other side of the door and he began drawing power once more.
"It seems," he said from the far side of the bars, "that there is a chink in their armour."
I followed his example and gathered power into me. I could see the iron bars of the door, the impervious nature of it, standing stark where all else was smoke. Between the bars, though, was space, and space was ours. I didn't go through the door, but simply stepped around it, moving from one side to the other without passing through the distance in between. Where we could see, we could go.
Beyond that door was a short corridor and then another door, identical to the first.
As we approached the second door there was the loud crack of another pistol shot. This time Raffmir jerked at the impact. Behind him, I dodged sideways, avoiding the line of fire as bullets sprayed into the space, showering us with chips of plaster and paint. The ringing of the pistol shots, the muzzle flash from the gun, the smell of cordite and gunpowder catching in my throat, made the confined space suddenly claustrophobic. Raffmir flattened himself against the wall.
"Are you hurt?" I asked.
He smiled grimly, then pressed his hand against his shoulder and opened it, showing me the blood.
In the darkness beyond the door, a man crossed the corridor, trying to gain a clear shot where I was pinned against the wall. I watched in slow motion as he raised the pistol and aimed at my head.
Instinct saved me as I slid behind the curtain of reality, emerging in the corridor behind them. The shot was still ringing in the corridor as I emerged.
"Shit!" The man said. "He vanished."
As I drew my sword, they realised at once that the danger was among them. There were three men. The first, the security guard who had aimed at me, turned to point his weapon. My sword arced down, blade flashing in the dark, severing the arm at the wrist. The weapon fell and bounced off the carpet, the hand still grasping it. The second guard raised his gun and my sword swept under his chin. He stopped and shuddered, and his head snapped back as a fountain of blood erupted from his neck. The third stepped back clear of his comrades, trying for a shot. I closed the distance in a single long thrust. The sword thudded under his breastbone. He jerked, the hand with the gun flailing, colliding with the wall. The gun clattered heavily to the floor. He gave a wet cough and slid backwards off the blade on to the floor, red blooming across the front of his white coat. He looked down at the spreading blood, his chin unshaven, his eyes wide with surprise. Then his head fell back and his eyes glazed.
Looking down at him while he died, I could see that he looked like a medic. I had just killed a doctor. What kind of doctor carried a pistol?
The fight was over so quickly. All those months of training, long hours of step and parry, turn and slice, and the real fight was over in seconds. It was unreal.
I was standing over him, trying to stop my hand from shaking, when Raffmir appeared beside me. I still held the sword in my hand, watching the blood drip from the end of the blade on to the medic's coat. I could feel my heart thumping now that the adrenalin had nowhere to go.
"That was nicely done," he said. It was the first compliment he had ever paid me.
He shrugged out of his coat and let it fall on the ground. Underneath, the blood was soaking into the shirt around the gory hole in his arm. He glanced down.