No Quest for the Wicked (32 page)

Abruptly, his bland, neutral face twisted into a mask of sheer hatred, his eyes narrowing, and furrows appearing in his forehead as his lips thinned to a harsh slit. “What do you want with the Eye and its power?” He spat the words at Owen.

“I want to keep it out of the wrong hands,” Owen said with his characteristic crisis calm.

“Not to mention foiling an evil plot to stir up the magical world,” I said, moving to sit beside Owen in a show of solidarity. Sitting may not have been a position of strength, but it was stronger than falling, which was what might have happened if either of us had tried to get up and run. “You aren’t another one of those magical puritans, are you?”

“I have nothing to do with those fanatics,” the man said with a shake of his head.

“Then who are you?” Owen asked. “What do you want with me?”

“My name is Raphael Maldwyn.” He paused for a moment, like he was waiting for Owen to react. When Owen showed no sign of recognition, Raphael went purple with rage. “You don’t know who I am? My name means nothing to you?”

Owen shook his head. “I’m sorry, nothing is coming to mind. It’s been a really rough day. How about a hint?”

His name didn’t mean anything to me, either, but I finally realized where I’d seen him. “Hey, you were in the coffee shop! The one sitting by us who had a coughing fit. You must be the person Sam thought was tailing us. You were using illusions and Sam noticed the magic.” I wondered if I’d seen him anywhere else, but as busy as we’d been, chasing and being chased, I doubted I would have noticed any individual who hadn’t physically attacked us. Was he the man I’d seen outside 21? I hadn’t had a good look at his face, but his coat was familiar. Then again, it was just a bland, generic trench coat.

“Following you has been a challenge,” he admitted. “You’ve been on the move all day, surrounded by your guards, and then there were the other people following you.”

“Yeah, if you wanted to follow us today, you’d have to take a number and get in line,” I said.

“Since you have the Eye, I can prove that you’re up to your parents’ tricks, and then you will be dealt with,” Raphael said.

“I never even knew my parents,” Owen said, his voice heavy with weariness. “I think my father died without knowing I’d been born, and my mother gave me away as soon as I was born. They didn’t get a chance to influence me.”

“And yet you have a weapon pointed at me.”

Owen’s gun wavered. He was in a no-win situation. He couldn’t exactly protest his innocence and pure motives while holding someone at gunpoint, but without the gun, he was vulnerable to the madman with a vendetta.

Taking advantage of Owen’s moment of hesitation, Raphael moved his hands in the form of a spell as he muttered words. I felt the magic building around us. He kept at it until beads of sweat formed on his brow. When several minutes went by with no result, he finally gave up and stared at Owen. “How do you resist me?” he asked.

“No magic. Not even enough to allow you to use magic on me. The Eye doesn’t do me any good.
Now
do you believe that I don’t want it for myself?” Owen very deliberately put his gun down and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

“This is a trick!” Raphael shouted. Before either Owen or I had a chance to react, he lunged forward, grabbed Owen, and jerked him to his feet, shaking him violently. He was half a head taller than Owen and not nearly as weary or as badly hurt, plus he was crazy, so he was at a distinct advantage. I was afraid he’d kill Owen with his bare hands.

That wasn’t something I could just sit by and watch happen. Forcing myself to my feet, I took the gun from my purse and aimed it at Raphael’s head. “Let him go!” I commanded. The order didn’t make its way through the fog of crazy. I thought about firing a warning shot, but I wasn’t sure I could do that without causing a ricochet or drawing a security guard who’d ask questions we couldn’t answer. Instead, I stepped forward and ground the barrel of the gun into the back of Raphael’s neck. “I said,
let him go
.”

That got his attention. Unfortunately, it didn’t get his obedience. He did take one hand off Owen, but only to gesture casually. The gun jerked in my hands, like it was trying to escape my grasp. I held on as tightly as I could, my knuckles growing white with the strain, but it was no use. The gun slipped out of my fingers and flew into Raphael’s hand.

“Damn!” I muttered. I was so used to magic not working on me that it hadn’t occurred to me that magic could work on objects I held. That perhaps explained why weapons weren’t used too often in magical fights.

Raphael shoved Owen roughly against the nearest pillar and pointed my gun at him with one hand while frisking him with the other. “Where is the Eye? What have you done with it?” he demanded.

“He doesn’t have it. He never has,” I said. “If anyone’s power hungry and holding onto this dreadful eyesore, it’s me, not Owen. And in case you’re worrying, I have no plans to give it to him.”

“Yes, she has been very stubborn about it.” All three of us turned to see who’d spoken. The puritans had caught up with us. They must have tracked the Eye like magical bloodhounds. The mad professor led the group. “It took us some time to find you,” he said. “I see you’ve taken the Eye back from that foolish woman.”

He came toward us, ignoring Raphael, and although he claimed that the Eye didn’t affect him, I thought his eyes had a suspicious glint in them when he got close to us. “Yes, I believe the girl has it once more. Give it to me, young lady, and things will go much better for you.”

“Keep away from her!” Raphael said in a commanding tone, much to my surprise. He released Owen and stepped in between me and the puritans. Owen moved around to my side, and we exchanged a puzzled look. “You have no right to the Eye,” Raphael continued.

“Neither do you,” the lead puritan said.

“I’m not trying to take it.”

“Then may I ask what your interest in the Eye is?”

“I am not interested in the Eye. My interest is in bringing Owen Palmer to justice.”

“Then I would think you’d want to get the Eye out of his sphere of influence. He may not be holding it, but his girlfriend is, and do you have any doubt that she’d comply if he told her to give it to him?”

While they debated, Owen bent to whisper in my ear, “When you get a chance, go into the tunnels and hide. You know which ones are safe.”

“I’m not leaving you here with these lunatics,” I said.

“You agreed earlier that the important thing is keeping the brooch safe.”

“It doesn’t seem to be in immediate danger,” I said, not budging from my position.

“We don’t want these people getting their hands on the Eye,” Owen said. “So, go. It won’t be long until we have help.”

“The puritans would just chase me, leaving you alone with the guy who hates you,” I said. “I’m not seeing an upside to leaving you, for either of us.”

“Katie, go!” His voice was sharp with urgency.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m not going anywhere. We’ll get through this together, and if we’re lucky, they’ll take each other out.”

During this whole debate, another one of the puritans had edged his way around the platform, and he made a lunge at me. I jumped out of the way, protesting loudly. That got Raphael’s attention. He hit the attacker with a burst of magic, then held his hands over his head and said something in a foreign language. “He’s setting wards,” Owen whispered to me.

“Well, maybe he’s not so bad, aside from hating you,” I said.

But it was too much to hope that we’d be safe for a moment. Raphael glanced over his shoulder at us, and then his eyes changed. He already had the mad gaze of the fanatic, but then he took on a look I knew all too well after the events of the day. The Eye had its hooks into him. It really seemed to love a fanatic. This would have been a great time for that protective box to show up, I thought.

But because we were apparently not allowed to do anything the easy way, the box didn’t magically appear. Raphael turned and came at us. “I could use the Eye to bring about justice,” he said softly, his eyes boring into me.

Owen and I backed away from him. “Okay, maybe I should have run,” I said. “Now what?”

Owen didn’t get a chance to answer because Raphael was on me, moving so quickly I couldn’t jump out of the way. I lashed out with my feet and elbows, but it didn’t help. He got his hand into my pocket and came out with a brooch, then raised it over his head in triumph.

“Oh no, not again,” I moaned.

“This time, I don’t think it’s such a good idea to let someone else have it,” Owen muttered.

Then Raphael lowered his hands to peer suspiciously at the brooch. He must not have got the real one, and while he was still figuring that out, we made a run for it.

Raphael didn’t notice us escaping, but the puritans did. They came after us, and Raphael was too distracted by trying to channel the brooch to maintain his wards. We were soon surrounded.

“Katie, give me the brooch and get out of here,” Owen urged.

“Are you insane?” I protested. “For one thing, they’d kill you, and for another, that would be playing into that psycho’s hands. You’d prove him right if he thinks you’re taking the Eye.”

Raphael gave a cry of agony. At first I thought it was because he’d realized that he had a fake brooch, but then he grasped his head with his hands, like he was in pain. “No!” he cried. “I have evil in me! I should have resisted temptation.” He threw the fake brooch on the ground. Most of the puritans dove after it, scuffling with each other as they fought to get to it first. The mad professor and a few others weren’t fooled. They kept my arms pinned. Owen and I struggled, but we were both hurt and exhausted and they were crazed with power lust.

Suddenly, my arms were free, though I kept swinging them for a few more seconds before it dawned on me that I’d been released. Raphael stood behind the puritans, holding his arms out and chanting something that seemed to have frozen our assailants.

“Thanks!” I panted.

“I will resist!” he said. I wasn’t sure whom he was addressing. Probably himself, I thought. His hair was damp with sweat, and his face showed the strain he was under.

But his eyes had that odd gleam in them. He blinked it away a few times, but the lure of the Eye was too strong. He lowered his arms and approached me. Owen took my arm, and together we backed away, down the platform. The spell broken, the puritans were moving in on us, as well.

We were almost at the end of the platform, and I could have sworn I heard a distant shrill voice from somewhere down the tunnel shouting, “Where’s my brooch?”

And then they were all on us. “Go! Into the tunnels!” Owen shouted as the puritans swarmed him. I didn’t make it to the platform edge before the puritans, sensing the brooch’s departure, left him to go after me.

“Wait a second! I know what to do!” Owen shouted. “Katie, toss me the brooch.”

Squirming in the grasp of one of the puritans, I yelled, “I thought we discussed this.”

“I think I can destroy it.” I followed his glance and saw the “high voltage” sign near the tracks. I suddenly knew what he had planned. They hadn’t had high-voltage electricity back in Merlin’s day, so it might do the trick to destroy the Eye.

But the puritans had my arms pinned, so I couldn’t throw it. One reached a hand into my pocket. Then there was a loud popping sound, the puritans literally fell away from me, and I was free. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but I didn’t wait to find out. I grabbed the brooch from my pocket, rushed to the edge of the platform, then threw the brooch as hard as I could, aiming to slide it under the third rail. Thanks to having to play pitcher for my brothers’ batting practice, my aim was true.

A second before it landed, Owen shouted, “Get out of the way!”

The brooch was sparking ominously under the edge of the rail. With no puritans hampering me, I spun away from the platform’s edge, but Raphael stood poised there, like someone working up the courage to jump off the high dive. His face was a mask of agony, twisted into revulsion. “I am wicked. I have failed,” he said, his voice flat with resignation.

I realized what he was about to do, and Owen must have come to the same conclusion, for both of us lunged toward him at once, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him back from the edge.

A second later, an explosion rocked the platform. The blast knocked me off my feet and up into the air. I hung suspended in space for what felt like forever. When I hit the ground, it was with a force that knocked the breath out of me.

As I lay on the platform, fighting to breathe, something landed on the ground beside me. I was barely able to focus my eyes enough to see that it was a small wooden box lined in velvet.

Then everything went black.

Chapter Twenty

I woke gradually and reluctantly, at first aware only of being terribly uncomfortable, but too tired to do anything about it. Every bone, muscle, and joint in my body ached so badly that lying on a warm cloud probably would have hurt, but I was lying on something cold and hard. I thought I’d feel better if I could move to a more comfortable place, but the signals wouldn’t travel from my brain to my body. The most I could manage was a twitch or two. Maybe if I rested awhile longer, I could get up, I thought. Or, if I was really lucky, someone might come along and move me. At the moment, I didn’t much care who it was, so long as they moved me somewhere soft and warm and didn’t expect me to do anything for a long, long time.

At the same time, I felt an odd tingling resonating throughout my body. It was like I was lying next to the speaker towers at a rock concert, but I didn’t hear any noise. There was only a faint background buzz that might have been voices, or it could have been a really loud fluorescent light fixture.

Gradually, the buzz modulated until it made sense. It sounded like a name—my name. “Katie! Can you hear me?” the buzz said.

“Go away. It’s too early to get up,” I mumbled, trying to roll over and curl up into a ball.

Something stopped me, gripping my shoulder to keep me in place. It felt as cold and hard as the surface beneath me, not like any human hand. That was weird, I thought, weird enough that I needed to see what was going on.