Black Magic (28 page)

He edged into Zach’s house. He passed the couch where he’d spent countless hours hunting aliens and bad guys in video games. It seemed like a thousand years ago.
 

Zach’s room was at the end of the hall. The door was open and the blue-white light illuminated a rectangle in the hallway. Inside the light lay Zach’s parents, mother sprawled face up on top of Zach’s father. Both had bullet holes in their foreheads and ragged exit wounds from the back of their skulls. Looked like Zach had borrowed his father’s pistol.

Ricky crept down the hall. With each step he took, the magic within him ticked up a notch as he tapped into the current Zach’s conjuring had aroused. The hairs on his arms stood straight up. The air smelled like melted wiring. He held his breath as he peered into Zach’s room.

Zach sat on the floor, legs crossed like some Eastern mystic. His head twisted back in an unnatural angle so that his cobalt eyes stared at the wall behind him. Both his arms stretched upward, fingers splayed wide apart. His hands were bone white, the blood drained from them long ago when he locked into this position. His mouth was an open smile.

The rings danced over his head like a trio of halos in a figure-eight race. Blue-white light pulsed from each one. On the floor at Zach’s feet lay the pistol that had felled his parents.

Zach was gone around whatever bend the magic took him. He looked beyond coming back. But Ricky didn’t know how bad he’d looked himself when the cards had a hold of him. He might have looked as bad as Zach. He might have looked worse. Angela brought him out of it. Zach’s parents obviously failed to snap him out of it, but his parents were jerks. Maybe he could bring Zach around and not have to…

“Hey, Zach dude,” Ricky said.

Zach’s head pivoted toward Ricky in an independent motion no vertebrae would ever allow. His eyes were solid, burning blue. His face didn’t show a hint of recognition. He lowered his hands to his lap. Then his right hand reached out for the pistol.

Zach brought the gun to bear on Ricky. The black barrel looked like the mouth of hell.

Ricky snapped into action. He let the magic charge the cards and they turned hard as steel. Like a Vegas dealer, Ricky spun two cards in Zach’s direction.

The pistol barked, but the bullet barely cleared the barrel when one card intercepted it with a resounding ping. A second card flew by and severed Zach’s right hand at the wrist. His hand seemed to hang suspended in the air for a second and then hit the floor, pistol still firmly in its grip, severed wrist cauterized clean.

Zach had no reaction, no cringe on his face, no scream of pain. He just raised his left hand and waved the rings toward Ricky. They flew to the doorway.

Ricky flicked cards forward like machine gun fire. They sliced through the rings but the rings did not stop. The rings dove for Ricky’s head.

At the last millisecond, Ricky ducked beneath the whizzing steel and rolled headfirst into Zach’s room. Two rings flew by, but one dropped lower. It passed through his left arm like a circular saw. Pain screamed up through his shoulder. His arm locked in place.

He came up on his knees and whipped a card at Zach’s exposed neck. It went through it like a guillotine. The blue fire left his eyes. His body hit the floor.
 

Behind Ricky in the hallway the three rings buried themselves in the drywall and went still. The blue-white light winked out.

Zach’s supercharged magic retreated from the room. Ricky let his magic seep back into the earth. He fell back against Zach’s dresser. From across the room, the cards flew back to the deck in his hand. Some were coated in blood. The cards turned back into laminated paper and slept.

His left arm was on fire. He couldn’t move it. He crawled across the floor to Zach’s body and pulled the final coin from his dead friend’s pocket.

He gave his locked arm a tug with his right hand. Nothing. He crawled to the wall and lay down.

At least I stopped the magic,
he thought.
I saved the town.

But the storm didn’t stop. Outside, an outbuilding toppled over. Wind filled it and exploded it from the inside out. Something else was keeping this hell on earth going. No,
someone
.

Ricky hauled himself to his feet. He had a good idea where that one person would be. He left Zach’s house to cut the magic off at the source.

Chapter Sixty-Five

Like spying an old girlfriend he hadn’t seen in years, the first sight of the Apex Sugar plant brought back a rush of good memories. Shane drove the car down the potholed drive to the main parking lot, just as he had most days for decades. The shadow of the radio tower in the lot was new, but the plant was still there, just like old times.

“Damn, Shane,” Denny said. “How long has it been?”

“Too long.”

Just short of the parking lot, the wind and rain cut off to near nothing, like some big screen filtered almost all of it out save a hazy mist and swirls of ground fog. Shane hit the brakes. Above them bands of blue pulsed from the tower outward like electrical shockwaves across the bruised sky.

“What the hell…?” Chester said.

“Shane,” Denny said, “this doesn’t look good.”

“Shut up you two,” Shane said. He knew it looked good. Perfect, in fact, just like the vision he had.

Inside the plant, Lyle’s eyes snapped wide open. He cut off the incantation he’d been chanting while standing at the center of the circle on the plant floor. The abrupt end to the inflow of magic felt like someone had cut off the water in the middle of a shower.
 

In the plan for the Grand Adventure, it made no difference. The energy stored within the cavern below was more than enough to sustain his new girlfriend Rita. But the end of the flow was unexpected. The magic stream should have engulfed his four apprentices as they played with their little toys, used them as a conduit for the trip to the Apex plant. In a perfect world the four useful idiots would starve to death after days in the throes of ecstasy. Yet, one by one, the four stopped producing.

He could rationalize that the storm had cut them off, perhaps destroyed their homes. Or perhaps in a strange twist, their parents actually took an interest in what their outcast children were doing and got in the way. Neither explanation held water. The storm was least intense at Citrus Glade, though a true eye had yet to form, and the magic had enough control over the boys that parental intervention would be suicidal. No, something had gone wrong outside of the Apex plant, and it was inevitable that the same something would make its way here.

But two thousand years of experience counted for something. His next line of defense was just outside the production floor and on the way in.

“Shane and Company,” Lyle called out. “Come in from the rain.”

Shane stepped out onto the production floor, cane at a jaunty angle across his shoulder. “If it isn’t the magician.”

Lyle flashed his most disingenuous smile. “Sorcerer, if you please. And ready to make what you have now permanent.”

“So I have you to thank for my renewed mobility?”

“And your benevolent attitude toward your fellow man,” Lyle said. He nodded toward the shadows. “You brought some friends?”

Lyle gave his cane a forward flick. Denny and Chester advanced into the wavering circle of light. Lyle waved them to come closer.

“Step on up, gentlemen. The more the merrier. Stand by a candle.”

The three men took positions behind a candle at the circle’s edge. Denny and Chester exchanged confused, excited grins. Shane stared straight at Lyle.

“You know this place used to be our turf,” Shane said.

“Then you’ll be motivated to defend it,” Lyle answered.

Lyle extended his hand before his face. Three shimmering black raven’s feathers lay in his upturned palm.
 

“
Katsumi kimionis,”
he said.

He blew across his palm and a feather flew to each of the three candles before the Elysian Fields escapees. The feather hit the candle’s flame and burst into a sparkling transparent blue mass. The little fogs enveloped each man’s head and then split into wisps that penetrated through ears, nose and mouth. Each man shuddered and his eyes turned bright blue.

“Now, defend the room.”

The three men moved to be equidistant around the circle, turned outward and waited.

Lyle closed his eyes and searched the land outside the plant. He found Vicente approaching the tower. Excellent. Lyle’s last line of defense surrounded him in the plant. Now to work on his first. His next spell would strengthen the one outside the plant whose
whapna
he had awakened, just as he had bolstered his three new minions inside the plant. But while the three in here would not share Lyle’s authority, the sorcerer would see fit to share a bit of that with the one outside. After all, a first line of defense that consisted of one person wasn’t much of a line of defense at all.

“
Katsumi kimionis,”
he said and began the last steps to ensure the completion of his Grand Adventure.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Vicente spent a good deal of the slow drive to the tower cursing the missing Squirrelly Jones. Well, he’d seen Squirrelly install the skimmer. He’d have to just figure out how to uninstall it.

As he approached the Apex property, the storm disappeared. At the parking lot’s edge, it was like he drove through a curtain. The rain shrank to a fine foggy mist. Black roiling clouds still filled the sky, but the wind dropped down to near nothing. The shock was the sight of the NSA tower.

Bands of thin blue energy emanated from the tower’s tip. The widening circles rolled across the sky like ripples in a pond. Squirrelly’s skimmer wasn’t making that happen. He parked his truck by the tower gate.

Suddenly, he was filled with an upwelling of power, as if he’d absorbed energy from the air around him. He felt wide awake, his senses turned up to full. The realization dawned on him that he came here for the wrong reason. He wasn’t here about the skimmer at all. He was here for the tower itself. It had to be protected, not from the storm, but from people. Others would want to destroy it and it must be preserved, so that it could deliver the blue energy pulses to the world. He didn’t know how this important mission had escaped him earlier. In fact, all the concerns he had when he arrived: the Colombians, the storm, the coke, all passed into irrelevance. All there was in the world was this tower. This tower was the world.

This mission was too important to undertake alone. But, he would not have to. In the swamps around the plant he could sense hundreds of specks of life, like pinpricks of blue light through a black sheet, and they awaited his command.

“Come,” he called out.

All around the plant rose a noise that could even be heard above the roar of the wind and rain, a simultaneous splashing and rustling and bursting of earth. Pairs of tiny cerulean dots winked into existence all around him in the fog. They moved closer and Vicente could feel vibrations through his feet. Yards away, they paused and he could make out what they were. Alligators. Snakes. All with blue glowing eyes.

Low scrub at the parking lot’s edge shook and two massive feral hogs burst onto the cracked pavement. Mud matted their long coarse hair to their sides. They stood waist high and each easily weighed more than two hundred pounds. Foot-long tusks curved from their upper and lower lips. They grunted and the blue in their eyes pulsed deeper.

“Defend,” Vicente said.

The two pigs snorted and charged off into the mist toward CR 12. The reptiles faced outward and waited.

Whatever’s out there,
Vicente thought,
hasn’t got a chance.

Chapter Sixty-Seven

The view from the cab gave Andy chills.

The two-vehicle convoy rolled down CR 12 as fast as the poor visibility would allow. He had a perfect view of the pickup truck ahead, with Walking Bear in the driver’s seat and Autumn in the passenger side. The pickup had the high beams on, but all that did was light the sheets of rain into a bright reflective wall. Everything more than a few feet from the side of the road was just a gray mass.

The whole thing was way too familiar. A lead escort vehicle. A hostile environment. The unseen enemy close by. Being surrounded by steel but feeling helplessly vulnerable. He had to put the steering wheel in a death grip to keep his shaking hands under control.

“Are you alright?” Dolly asked.

“Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.”

“I don’t think any of us are ‘fine’ right about now.”

“No, I guess not.”

The selfishness of his reactions hit him. He was reliving the past while everyone around him was struggling with the present and needed his full attention right here, right now.

“Are you up for this, Mom?”

Dolly patted his arm, the same reassuring gesture she gave him when he was a child. “Absolutely. In my dream I crossed a hawk’s feather and pruning shears, and the NSA tower went down. It said I needed to bring you and Walking Bear here.”

“You need to stay safe,” Andy said.

“That’s always been the plan.”

The pickup’s brake lights painted the front of the dump truck red. Andy made a hurried downshift and hit his brakes. The old Apex Sugar sign peeked out from behind a screen of young cabbage palms on the left. The pickup swung down the cracked two-lane driveway.