“Are you willing to use your siren abilities as well? Kevin told me you were horrified by what you did to Eirene’s followers.”
That stopped me cold, because Kevin was right. In the struggle to keep myself and Emma alive and keep the greater demon from being loosed, I’d mentally fought a siren queen for mental control of her men. Eventually, there was nothing left of their minds to follow either of us. It had eliminated them from the battle, but I’d sworn I’d never again manipulate a person. I swallowed hard and tried to think what others would do in my place. Bile rose into my throat and I forced it back down. “Can you manage it without me?”
“Sneak in, without using violence, and remove someone without alerting trained magical guards?” He let out a snort that might have been loud enough to hear if there was anyone close. “Not bloody likely.”
So I could have a violent, bloody confrontation where I would probably have to kill someone or a quiet, sneaky rescue where I’d probably have to manipulate people into doing what I wanted and risk them becoming brain-dead. Great. Just great.
Maybe there was a third option. The fly was working fine, but it was slow. We were losing too much time while it searched. I concentrated, then whispered into the darkness, “Vicki? Ivy? Are you guys out there?”
The air cooled noticeably enough for even Jones to look around. “What the hell?”
I pulled a penlight from inside my vest and held it where nobody outside our little group would see it if it lit up. “Vicki, is that you?”
The bulb flicked on once. One blink meant yes. Two meant no. It was a crude method of communicating, but it worked. Ghosts stay on this plane of existence when they have unfinished business, finding their murderer or revealing information to a loved one. I wasn’t sure exactly why Vicki had stayed behind, but so far she had been acting as a sort of resource when I needed eyes on the ground. Vicki wasn’t the only ghost in my life; there was also Ivy, my little sister who’d died violently when we were children.
“Can you find Kevin inside here?”
One blink. Vicki had known Kevin as long as I had. Plus, she’d told me once, she’d seen him in animal form. That would be helpful if he wasn’t human at the moment.
Jones sounded both confused and annoyed when he whispered, “What the hell are you doing, Graves? Who are you talking to?”
“Vicki Cooper. Remember her? My clairvoyant friend from Birchwoods?”
“Yeah. She’s dead.”
“Mostly, yes. Say hi, Vicki.”
Edgar made an odd sound and handed me the night-vision contraption. There was an amused expression on his face. Strange to see a vampire with a smile. “Here, take a look.”
As the goggles spun my way, I had to smile. I turned them around so Jones could see the lens, where, in tiny little print, a reversed Hi! :) appeared in frost.
I raised my brows and probably had a triumphant expression on my face. “Now it’s time to play the game my way. Vick, can you find the fly attached to this joystick and take it to wherever Kevin is? Maybe flick a light in the room or something if it’s on an outside wall?”
One blink of the flashlight.
“Is Ivy here, too?”
Two rapid blinks. I don’t know why that worried me, but it caused me to ask a stupid question about a ghost. “Is she okay?”
A series of rapid flashes didn’t make any sense to me. Maybe I needed to learn Morse code. It might be that Vicki didn’t understand the question or it was too complicated to answer. “Never mind. Not important right now. We’ll talk tomorrow. For now, find Kevin. ’Kay?”
One blink. And then the temperature returned to normal.
Jones was shaking his head silently, disbelief plain on his face. It made me shrug and comment, “Hey, you’re a mage, he’s a vampire, and I’m vampire-siren-human. Why not ask a ghost to help free a werewolf?”“Freaking unbelievable.”
Jones, Edgar, and I huddled around the tiny screen. At first there was no change. The fly hovered in the air, waiting for instructions. Then a wind caught it and began to propel it down the hallway. The night erupted with howls from inmates who could either see or sense Vicki’s presence. Guards, alerted, could find no cause. No sensors were tripped, no lights glared red, and a fly floating on a breeze was ignored.
Sights moved past too quickly to identify, though I glimpsed a couple of stairways and various doors that might or might not lead to the outside. But I knew the fly was storing the images for later viewing. I wasn’t sure how big the hard drive was, but I was betting there was at least a gig or two of memory.
Finally the fly came to rest in a room and we got our first look at Kevin. He was stripped naked and chained to a table. He wasn’t dead—his chest was moving—but his limp position and slack face told me he was unconscious. “Did he have those bruises and cuts when you went in?”
Jones shook his head grimly. “Those are all postcapture. Normally, they’d have healed by now.” Normally, werewolves heal quickly, almost as fast as vampires. Something was keeping Kevin from healing himself.
The light began to flick on and off in the room and we all raised our eyes to the wall in front of us to see a corresponding flicker on the third floor, at the far end of the building. “Edgar, can you carry a person in flight?”
He gave me a small smirk. “I think there was a children’s movie once that said it best. With the extra weight, I can’t fly. But I can fall with style.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. I’d seen the same movie. “Jones, can we do any magic once we’re inside the barrier? Will my boomers or charms work in there?”
He thought for a long moment, tapping his index finger on the side of the fly remote. “The barrier’s goal is to prevent any magical tampering with the security of the facility—any magic that’s categorized as an attempt to effect an escape, for example. But there may be a chance to enhance the security system to our benefit.”
Ahhh. “So if we made the barrier stronger in certain places—”
He completed the sentence with a smile. “Like in front of a breach to the wall for example … then yes, it might divert power from the rest of the barrier.”
Suddenly the fly’s control screen flashed red. Apparently the fly had a feature Creede hadn’t mentioned. The word “Demon” was blinking in red at the bottom of the screen. A demonic presence had walked into the room. She had taken the form of a doctor’s aide or nurse if the uniform was any indication and was carrying a skill saw. If I could pick the least likely place for a construction saw to exist, it would be an infirmary. She stared at the unconscious werewolf with undisguised glee and then plugged the saw into an outlet.
Fuck a duck. Our deadline had just moved up.
Jones apparently agreed. “We’re going in. Now.”
Edgar was already moving toward the hole under the wall and I followed with as much mobility as my trapped-for-too-long legs would muster. Thankfully, Vicki isn’t just any random ghost. The lights went out in Kevin’s room as we raced the length of the building, which was a good block long. Edgar had just started to float up the three floors to the darkened window when a metal chair crashed against the bars, shattering the glass and showering it down on me and Jones.
Of course that set off the alarms, but it was too late to stop the party. I was still carrying the fly remote and glanced down to see Vicki create a wind that whipped the cord out of the wall and repeatedly slammed the plug against the nurse’s face. When I moved the fly so I could see Kevin, the nurse noticed it.
She plucked it out of the air and stared into the two fly eyes, which put her whole face on one side of the screen. While there was no sound pickup on the device—which I’d suggest to Creede as an improvement—there was no mistaking what she said: “Hello, Celia.”
I dropped the remote as I felt a stabbing sensation in my chest. Not long ago, I’d had an exorcism done to sever my ties to a particular demon. It had left scars on my chest that looked like claw rips. At first I’d thought the scars were burning, but the feeling went deeper … like something had grabbed my heart and squeezed. Not good.
I’d known there was the possibility that the same greater demon might be behind this, but running into him so soon after my death and resurrection by doctors and priests was terrifying.
Part of me wanted to freeze and scream, but training and common sense overrode the impulse. Guards were running in our direction. By sheer instinct I pulled a boomer from a vest pocket and tossed it while I scooped up the remote. The boomer went off with an effect that was closer to a party popper than the deafening, blinding incapacitation that I’d become accustomed to. Damn. But it wasn’t the only thing in my arsenal. I tossed a mudder. Full of concentrated water, it created a three-foot-square patch of thick mud. The guards stumbled and fell to their knees, the ground literally stolen out from under them.
As Edgar began to pry the bars away from the concrete window frame, Jones pulled the pin on a military grenade and threw it at the wall, simultaneously casting a spell that silenced the explosion.
The barrier reacted to the explosion by sealing the breach, taking power from everwhere else in the system. I could feel the pressure against my body lighten and I could move almost normally.
My next boomer worked perfectly and the guards were down for the momentary count. I looked at the screen to see the possessed nurse flying around the room. Let’s hear it for ghostly tornadoes. I needed to wake Kevin and get him ready to go. Because none of us were going to be able to carry him once he was on the ground—we were all going to be watching our collective backs.
“Cover me, Jones!” I called, but because of the silence spell no sound came out of my mouth. So I tried the siren trick I’d learned on short notice while on the Isle of Serenity. I stared at the back of his head as he pushed air around, making it impossible for the guards to get off a shot at any of us. Jones, I thought. He flinched and turned his head slightly. I’m going to try to contact Kevin. Keep them off me. I won’t be able to see them coming when I’m concentrating.