Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle-ARC Read online

  She would bet her last penny that neither one of them had any idea that the other was holding the memories of the same person, too. And if either of them figured that out…

  Wonderful. As if this wasn’t already a fun-filled excursion…

  The stress built, and she threw up in the toilet. Again. When the spasm was over, she flushed it and clung to the sink for a long time, weak and shaking, before fishing the bottle of mouthwash out of her pocket and using it.

  Now they would both probably think she was bulimic.

  It just got better and better.

  * * *

  Echo had taken over one of the older French Quarter hotels for crew quarters, and it was still worse for wear from the hurricane. The hurricane and the invasion had hit the Big Easy with a one-two punch from which it would probably never recover. There were more National Guard, Blacksnake, insurance adjusters and journalists than tourists on the streets, and most of the hotels were three-fourths empty. Small wonder Echo had been able to take over this hotel. The room Vickie got was tiny, but at least it had a working shower and she didn’t have to share it with anyone. She took down the mirror in the bedroom and put it behind the dresser, taped a towel over the one in the bathroom, showered and changed again, and washed her own clothing out in the sink, hanging it to dry in the shower stall. No way in New Orleans was she going to allow anything personal of hers to leave the room in the hands of a stranger. She left orders with the staff that her room was strictly off-limits to maid service, and put magical wards around it to ensure no one could get in—or if they could, at least she would know that they had.

  And as for ordinary access, she had ways of dealing with that, too. The hotel might have been old, but it used mag-strip key cards. With a feeling of weary amusement, she unpacked her laptop and her road kit, and after a half hour of hacking the hotel computer system, made certain no one could get into her room with any key card but hers. The Echo people here had left some gaping holes in their security, relying on the hotel computer to control access to the rooms like that. She was only a midlevel hacker, after all, when you discounted what she could do with a magic interface. She made another mental note to leave things in better shape before she went home.

  She looked with longing at her antianxiety meds, but didn’t take any. They interfered with her ability to use magic, and to see the otherwise unseen. She’d have to tough this one out. But at least now she knew why Djinni was being an asshat, and as always, knowledge gave her a kind of defense. Maybe even a touch of sympathy. Whatever had happened, it was pretty clear Djinni and this woman had not parted company amicably, and he was still raw over it.

  Bulwark’s contact was a woman named Mel, who tended bar in the Quarter. They found her chewing out a pair of men in Blacksnake uniforms, which brought a smile to Bulwark’s face, and when she had thrown them out and turned her attention to them, Bulwark had gotten down to the business of asking questions. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been a lot that Mel could tell them. The best she could do was to send them to two little shops, off the tourist maps, where the local practitioners got their supplies. Careful inquiries there yielded nothing, although at Bulwark’s insistence, it was Vickie doing the asking, and not either of the two men. In keeping with the way a local would, she left her cell phone number on a piece of paper—not a card—to be passed on to Jacob Stone, but she rather doubted anything would come of it. It was not as bad as it could have been. Bulwark’s presence kept pretty much everyone at a respectful distance. But she was still cold and shaking when they returned to HQ.

  Meanwhile, Djinni was off on his own trail of inquiry, which she presumed to be among the criminal element. Until he came back, she did what she did best—research, via her cell modem and her laptop. Her road kit, assembled before her interesting times, held ziplocked bags of carefully coiled jumpers, probes, specialty tools and splicers, soldering gear, clips and patch cables, crossovers, quasilegal tone generators, and even an acoustic coupler powered by a 9-volt battery. There’s no school like old school, her old code-wizard pals would say. She still had a certain number of contacts and favors owed at the FBI, which meant that a lot of information she might not otherwise be able to “see” was available, if you were clever enough. When Djinni turned up again, his manner was still sullen, so she guessed he hadn’t had much success. Fortunately, she had.

  They retired to the suite Bulwark shared with Djinni. Until this moment, she had done nothing an Echo detective with an understanding of the occult underground couldn’t have done. But the sooner they found Tomb, the sooner she could get home, away from both of them, and hide in her sanctuary again. So it was time to do what she was here to do, whether Bulwark knew he needed this or not.

  “I can find Tomb for you,” she said in a flat voice, before Bulwark could start in on some new plan to hit the streets, which was the last thing she wanted to do. “But I need something of his. A signature would do. I did some research; he had a bank account at the Gulf Coast Bank and Trust. His signature card should still be on file in the French Quarter branch.”

  Djinni stared at her blankly; Bulwark, speculatively. Neither said anything, as her nerves stretched and frayed. “I’m not sure I understand what you want us to do,” Bulwark finally said.

  “Get me the signature card!” she snapped. “Get that, and I can find him!”

  “But it’s after-hours—” Bulwark began.

  Her temper disintegrated. “And he is a professional thief!” she hissed, pointing at a startled Djinni. “How hard can it be to get a signature card out of an unsecured area in a small branch bank?”

  “Why don’t you just magic it out?” the Djinni sneered.

  A vein in her temple started to throb, and she clutched the table as a wave of nausea assaulted her. “Because there are rules to how this works, and I can’t,” she replied through clenched teeth. “I don’t do breaking and entering. You do. Just get me the damned card.”

  And with that, without another word, she shoved herself violently out of her chair and staggered out the door and down the corridor to her own room. She managed to get there without throwing up for a third time, and she sat in the bottom of the shower with hot water drenching her until she was sure she wasn’t going to. Then she wrapped herself in the hotel robe and shivered under the covers until she was sure she wasn’t going to have a crying jag. When the knock came at the door, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  “It’s Bulwark,” came the voice, before, shaking with reaction, she could ask who it was. “I have the card.”

  It took a moment before she could answer. “Shove it under the door,” she said in a choked voice.

  There was a soft sound of paper over carpet. When she peeked out from under the bedspread it was there, next to the door. She closed her eyes, and took long, deep breaths. Then she got up and went to work. And when she was done, she dressed in her black coat of mail, her heavy leather combat pants and boots, picked up her kit, and headed for the suite.

  The arguing was audible halfway down the hall. She almost turned back around and went back to her room, but—the sooner we get this guy, the sooner I can go home. That was enough to keep her going. She longed for her sanctuary as saints were said to long for heaven…The door to the suite wasn’t quite shut, so she shoved it open with her foot since both hands were full of laptop and mage kit. Harder than she intended to, as it turned out, or else it wasn’t as jammed against the carpet as the one in her room. It slammed open against the wall, effectively putting an end to the argument and putting her full in the glare of Djinni’s outraged stare, and Bulwark’s frustrated one.

  “Fat Markey’s Bar, on Peachtree between Wayon and Beau Sol,” she said.

  “What?” Djinni demanded, as Bulwark said, at the same time, “Tomb’s in a bar?”

  “I told you. I found him. That’s the good news. The bad news is that his brother almost certainly knows I was looking for him and he’s probably on his way to warn him or protect him or both.” The
wards on Tomb Stone were very good, and she had been in a hurry. She had likely tweaked them. Not enough so that Jacob Stone would know who had been looking, but enough for him to know that someone had been.

  “Let’s move.” Bulwark was on his feet and reaching for his kit, as Djinni impaled him with a glare.

  “You believe this crap?” he shouted in outrage. “You’re going to send us out on a wild goose chase into the middle of gang territory because some bulimic tea-leaf reader says our man’s in a—”

  Nerve and temper snapped at the same time, and temper won. “Shut the hell up!” she shrieked, almost losing the grip on her laptop. “I don’t answer to you. I answer to him! And I want to go home!” The last came out in a wail, and tears of anger streamed unheeded down her cheeks. “I don’t care what you think! What I do follows laws and logic, and works, and I will be damned if I let the target get away and end up here for weeks because you are too fricking stubborn to believe someone who has done this all her life and done it for the FBI is a useless crackpot!”

  Her voice spiraled upwards with each word until it cracked on the last one.

  Absolute silence. Both men stared at her with eyes gone wide, and a little shocked looking.

  “Now get your gear and get the car and get in the car, because we have maybe twenty minutes to get to him before his brother does!”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Bulwark, and he did a quick pat-over of his equipment.

  Between the welter of emotion and all the stress, Vickie went a little blank for a moment, because the next thing she really knew, she and her kit and laptop were in the front seat next to Bulwark, with the Djinni in the back. Her laptop was open and running on the cell modem. The GPS rig was giving him directions to the bar, while the cantrip packet linked via a USB cable to her dowsing program was giving her a steady blip, still, on the dot that was the bar. She may have blanked, but it seemed she had been giving the men sensible answers, because her awareness picked up in the middle of one.

  “…agion. That means that anything that has been in contact with someone before is always in contact with him. Of course, that can wear away—if something passes through enough hands, it’s like a scent that wears off. In fact, that’s a good analogy, because if you know what you’re doing, or you know someone who knows, you can ‘wash’ that scent right off of things. That’s why mages are more careful about Contagion than serial killers are about leaving their DNA lying around.” She took a deep breath, blinked, and kept on. “That’s why I went for the bank signature card. Not too many people handled it, it’s old, and I was gambling that Jacob completely forgot about it. And I was right. This”—she pointed to the cantrip packet, in the center of which was the card, folded in an intricate pattern—“works just like an antenna for my dowsing program.”

  “Wait, wait, you use a program?” The Djinni sounded a little dazed.

  “I’m a techno-shaman. It’s what I do.” Her head was pounding now. Her stomach was in knots. “A lot of great magicians were the rock-star scientists of their day. Wizards and witches using magic in the old days were like modern researchers discovering how stuff all around us works. What looks like quaint bone-rattling to you now was the CSI of its day. And it still works. Some of it gets updated though. Almost all my investigative magic interfaces in some way with modern technology. That’s why the FBI still uses me. Like they did before…” She gulped, as the old pain threatened to engulf her, and she fought her way through it. “…before I got…hurt. With the things I do, people like me, we don’t…we don’t heal up like other people do. Some things just don’t get better. Our wounds are more like soul damage or brain damage than…” She took another deep breath to steady herself. “It doesn’t matter right now. What matters is those—”

  Scattered red and green dots were moving on the blue one that was their target. “The red ones are djabs. The green ones are loas. There’s either one or two voudoun workers out there, heavily cloaked, and I can’t tell if it’s a bocor that can control both djabs and loas or a bocor and a houngan, but in either case, we are going to reach Tomb about the same time they do.”

  She heard the sound of—something odd—going on in the back seat. “Then let the games begin,” said the Red Djinni, with grim elation. “It’s about frickin’ time.”

  “You let me handle the spirits,” she said sharply. “You take them on only if they possess someone.”

  “Hey, the spooks are your problem, darlin’, just like you say.”

  She kept her eyes on her laptop screen. They were almost there…and so were the spirits.

  Bulwark spoke as the bar sign came in sight. “Djinni, go in the bar and try to talk to Tomb. I’ll go around the back in case he tries to make a break that way. Nagy, do…” She glanced at Bulwark, who shrugged helplessly. “Do whatever it is you do.”

  She shut the laptop and shoved it under the seat. It was not going to help her now. Now…it was time for old-fashioned combat magic. She hoped she would not have to call on Gaiaic magic too; it was crude stuff, good for use in the open, between two large opposing forces, but woefully unsuited for use inside a building—unless you wanted to bring the building down.

  She and Djinni flung themselves out of the car as Bulwark slowed it, but didn’t stop. With a shriek of tires, he spun it around the corner, heading for the alley behind the bar. Djinni bounded inside. Vickie pulled her atheme from her boot and followed. She stopped at the door, called up energies from the Earth, and sketched a series of lines and glyphs in the doorway with her knife. They hung there, glowing, for just a moment. If Djinni had been looking at them, he would have actually seen them. He wasn’t, of course. He was peering into the darkness of the bar as the jukebox wailed Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.”

  When he saw who he was looking for, he straightened up from his crouch, and strolled in a leisurely fashion to the sole occupant of the farthest table. The jukebox chose that moment to quit, and the Djinni’s voice, though soft, seemed very loud in the silence. “Hey, Tomb.”

  Tomb Stone looked up.

  That was when all hell broke loose.

  Tomb threw his table at the Djinni, and made a break for the back door. Djinni vaulted the obstacle and went after him. The front door was assaulted by half a dozen men, of whom four crossed the threshold and dropped like someone had smacked them with a two-by-four as the spirits controlling them were stopped by Vickie’s protections, but two more stumbled through and kept coming. One lurched for Stone. The other grabbed a chair and threw it at Djinni, and a bizarre sound like a half-dozen wet switchblades came from the red-wrapped man’s direction.

  What the—

  Vickie didn’t wait to figure it out. She yelled. Djinni turned in time to see the attacker, and that was when she saw what she must have heard. The Djinni’s hands had sprouted long, sharp claws on the end of every finger. He slashed before she could warn him that the person the spirit was riding was probably innocent—then, as the claws hit, she saw what he had probably already seen, the gang tats on the man’s biceps, neck and bald head.

  No, he was certainly not innocent.

  The man screamed—and the djab burst out of his open mouth, just as another man—and something else—made it through the front door.

  This man was bare-chested and tattooed too, but no street gang had ever invented these tattoos. Vickie’s guess as to the identity of the man was confirmed when Tomb shouted his brother’s name, and scrambled to his side. Jacob Stone and his giant companion stepped to protect Tomb and to face down Red Djinni.

  “You—” said the magician, coldly. “You are a murderer and a thief. You stink of the blood of the innocent. You are lawful prey.”

  Djinni sneered and crouched. Wait, wait—blood of the innocent? Lawful prey?

  Vickie had no time to think about that, for the strange-looking creature at Jacob’s side lunged for Djinni. It was crudely man-shaped, a thing that looked as if it had been constructed from a mishmash of found swamp objects. Twine and wire bound
together cypress knees, Spanish moss, bits of boat and trolling motor, planks and fishing poles, rope, and more. It may not have been fast, but there was no doubt that it could hit like a tank. It shattered the nearest table with a fist instead of shoving it away, creating a spray of splinters rather than just breaking it. That was when Vickie knew with despair that she was going to have to wreck the bar.

  She called the Earth, and the Earth answered.

  New Orleans was built on swampland, so what came to her call this time was not an upthrust of rock, bursting through the floor of the barroom, but a geyser of mud. It knocked the magician off his feet. It plastered his creation to the ceiling; then when Vickie released the Earth again, dropped it into the hole she had created. It thrashed. She told the muck to become a sucking mire. It thrashed more, and the more it thrashed, the more it sank, as Jacob Stone cursed and looked wildly about for the magician that had entrapped his magic-born servant.

  But now the bar had been invaded by the next wave. One lot assailed the front door and about two in every six made it inside. More were trying to come in through the back. With one eye on the thing sinking into the pit she had created, Vickie cast a wary eye at the back, which was being blocked by Bulwark. There was a glossy bubble around him, just filling the space in the doorway, though the wood of the doorframe bulged and was creaking a bit. Men ridden by spirits pounded on the bubble with fists, bits of wood, and machetes, none of which got through, though they were inflicting plenty of injury on themselves and their fellows as their blows rebounded uncontrollably. Djinni was piled on by three men, each wielding machetes in one hand and chair legs in the other. But that was, by far and away, not the worst of the assault.