Palace of glass, p.21
Palace of Glass, page 21
“Is she trying to talk to us?” McKay asked.
Jo shrugged.
On the other side of the table, Alexei had taken a few steps toward the door, his expression now stony.
As they watched, both guards walked off down the hall with a couple of waves. The one in front practically jogged away, a sense of urgency on his face that she hadn’t noticed before.
Eric and Aeryn watched them go, smiles frozen on their faces.
The second the two guards turned the corner, her cheerfulness dropped like a stone. She turned to Eric, whispered something, and opened the door.
She gave them all a brief survey, then jerked her head.
“Let’s go,” she said.
Chapter 26
They stopped in the first stairwell they found and formed a small huddle on the landing as Aeryn dropped to the concrete floor and opened her tote. She handed the first gun to Alexei, who was closest, and the next ones to Jo and Buck, who had lost theirs shortly before they had all been escorted to the new room.
For safety, the Mageguard had said—but all McKay had seen was confirmation of their prisoner status.
When she got her gun, the metal was warm to the touch. Orange-red color flared on its side, glowing faintly.
Magic. Like the last one.
“Aiden sent a message,” Aeryn said shortly, pulling her hair into a knot on the back of her head. “We have to get out.”
The group absorbed this with a ripple. Brows furrowed over already-stony faces. A jaw muscle tightened in Jo’s cheek. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but Mieshka’s father beat her to it.
“My daughter—is she okay?”
Aeryn regarded him with a critical gaze. Her nose, which had a strong, hawkish tilt to it, gave her profile a severe, cutting edge. “Aiden didn’t say. I assume yes.”
His face, which had been carefully taut before, crumpled. “But—”
“The people who took her will not hurt her,” Aeryn cut in. “But we, here, are a liability. We need to get out of this building. I don’t have time to explain further.”
He frowned. “Why should I believe you? Trust you?”
Aeryn held his gaze, opened her mouth part-way. By the expression on her face—impatience and borderline exasperation—she was considering the pros and cons of dragging him as unconscious, quiet, weight.
Unfortunately for Jean, his small frame and lightweight appearance was making that prospect more appealing.
“Amerand has a giant murder cat. Trust her, not him.” Jo half-turned to the wall, checked the gun’s magazine, and shut it with a click. She raised an eyebrow to Aeryn. “What’s the plan?”
“Garage. Fast.” Aeryn straightened smoothly, checked the safety on her own gun, then tossed the tote bag over the railing. “And hope we don’t run into an Earth Mage.”
“What about other Mages?” Jo asked, following her. “How good are you guys?”
Aeryn paused on the edge of the first step. When she looked back, a bitter, sad smile pulled grimly across her lips.
“I guess we’re about to find out.”
They took the stairs two at a time, and the only sounds were the cacophony of their shoes and boots—like heavy rain on a metal roof—and, after the first minute or so, the sound of heavy breathing.
They were so loud, and they moved so fast, that McKay didn’t hear the door open above them.
But the Mages noticed.
Between one heartbeat and the next, magic erupted in the stairwell.
Eric fired first, a burst of Electricity that ripped through the space behind her. The air hissed and popped, and a backsplash of static raked over her skin, making all the hairs on her arm stand on end.
Above, someone gave a yell—and an answering attack.
Raising her gun, she looked up in time to see a spell smash against Eric’s shield. The air lit up in blue like a wave—identifying the Mage above them as Water, not Earth. Her gun silhouetted against it, hard metal edges making clean lines on the roiling magic that concussed around her. The deep blue of what she understood was the enemy’s spell rolled outward in ripples, magic runes flashing like violent, sharp fish. The whole thing glowed like bio-luminescence in a stormy sea.
Underlying it all, the dizzyingly-quick, hot-wired snap of Eric’s shield chased under the blue with runes of its own.
It took McKay a full second to see the second Mage, barely a smudge of shadow on the other side of the barrier. Another ream of static rushed up her arm, making her fingers tingle as she brought her gun up, aiming unerringly as the Water Mage’s head.
She hesitated. Would a bullet fire through the shield, or would it rebound?
A moment later, it didn’t matter. Aeryn joined the fray.
Heat pulsed, erupted from the next stair down like a fragment of the sun. It baked McKay’s skin as it shot past, leaving the afterimage of Mage runes burning on the insides of her eyelids.
Her first attack blasted through the other, then hit a second shield above them—not Eric’s. A second attack, full of Electric energy, crackled up in its wake and smashed through it like a glass ceiling.
The Water Mage—a woman, McKay decided—gave a strangled yell. Her shape vanished from above.
McKay reactivated the safety back on her gun, and when Jean Renaud moved too slowly in front of her, turned the muzzle away and pressed the butt of the gun into the edge of his shoulder blade. “Go, go, go!”
Aeryn had already moved ahead. McKay caught a glimpse of her on the next flight, her skin aflame with glowing, half-made spells.
God, they are so powerful.
This wasn’t, technically, the first time she’d seen Mages fight. She’d seen snatches of battle magic before, once at the front, and more than once in the Underground. But this was the first time she’d seen them so close, so intense.
It was enough to make any normal soldier reconsider a lot of things.
Instead, she pushed her hand into Jean’s shoulder again, then caught his arm as he overbalanced off the railing on the next turn.
“Come on,” she said, breathless. “Two at a time.”
They ran the rest of the way down, pushing past the missteps, reeling around railings and half stumbling, half pushing themselves off the walls at landings like a pair of bad ice skaters trying to find balance.
Eventually, they came to a door.
“Are you sure there’s no one there?”
Jo’s voice, like everyone’s, was breathless, but McKay thought her friend was recovering faster than the rest.
They all stood against the concrete walls of the landing in various states of repose. Buck, Jo, Alexei, both Mages—they’d all clung to some martial dignity, assuming more-or-less professional positions with their backs against the wall, using the rest break to recheck their firearms. Jean Renaud, however, had practically collapsed to the floor, sucking in deep, haggard gulps of air. Sweat slicked his forehead, and it had started to seep through his neck line. His muscles shook. Probably felt like molten lead, if she’d judged his condition with any degree of accuracy. He’d even coughed a few times.
The two Mages leaned against the wall on either side of the landing’s only door in almost identical poses with their feet splayed, guns out and cocked to the floor, and no spells glowing on their skin. They’d been that way for roughly two minutes now.
At Jo’s comment, McKay thought she saw a flash in Aeryn’s eyes.
“That’s not how it works. Only Earth Mages can tell like that. We just—”
“Think extra hard,” Eric finished. “With our magic brain.”
Jo lifted an eyebrow. “Magic brain?”
“Our Elements,” Aeryn corrected, rolling her eyes at Eric. “We can detect if there is any active magic—Fire or Electric—in the area. Or, if they’re particularly careless and haven’t—”
“They aren’t,” Eric said. “Not the ones left, anyway.”
“They better not be,” she retorted. “That’d be sloppy.”
A brief silence came across the room. Jo glanced between them, her lips pursed closed as she thought. “So, if they don’t have active spells?”
“They could be sitting out there, having a read-a-thon on top of the cars while they waited for us for all we could tell. So long as they aren’t using either of our Elements…” She glanced down, tilting her gun and nodding toward the tinge of red on its end. “I imagine they’ve switched out these, too, if they’re smart.”
“So, is there anything preventing there being an army on the other side of that door?” Alexei asked. “Did you do anything?”
Aeryn exchanged a look with Eric. When she spoke, there was a reluctance in her tone. “We arranged something, but if Dinay didn’t…”
“She said she would,” Eric said. “Said she was loyal to Ivern. Spoke of it a lot.”
“I don’t think there’s a Mage in this building who wouldn’t say that, considering he’s supposed to be dead,” Aeryn said. “I don’t hear any alarms.”
“Maybe she was caught.”
“Either way, we can’t and won’t know, and we have to move. Now.” Aeryn straightened and studied their group. Her gaze lingered on some longer than others. “I take it you have experience in these kinds of matters?”
Jo, standing nearly opposite McKay on the wall, her chosen career never absent from her movements, smiled a slow, cunning smile. “You could say that.”
“Good. Well—stay behind us,” Aeryn said. “And shoot at anything that moves. There will only be Mages down here, and these guns won’t kill a Mage—but they will give them something to think about.”
“And if the lot’s empty?” Buck asked. “Where are we going?”
“If we are that lucky, and no one has figured out this half-assed plan, head for the back corner, to the right.” Aeryn indicated the direction with her head. “Eric has disabled the cameras in the other sections, but not this one—decoy trails, you know? I’ve parked my car in a blind spot.”
Decoy trails, she could understand. Disabling the cameras in other sections would lead security astray, away from them—maybe he’d done other things with the building’s electrics, to the lights or the fire panels. Since he was security, he had an inside knowledge of how it would work. And Aeryn was clearly a competent badass who knew what she was doing.
Maybe this plan would work.
Or maybe they’d open the door and find an entire regiment waiting for them on the other side.
Either way, it looked like they were moving.
McKay gritted her teeth. Then, she bent down and touched Jean on the shoulder. He was still hunched over, his thin T-shirt now clinging to the two pronounced ridges of bone that stood out on his frame, and her touch didn’t seem to have registered to him, though she detected a resignation in his stillness.
A few seconds later, he moved. Still shaking, he straightened to his full height and gave her a hard, curt nod.
By the door, Eric and Aeryn were exchanging another look.
“Ladies first?” Eric suggested with a smile.
Aeryn’s brows shot into her bangs. Then, she took her hands, made a fist, and lifted it into the air almost like a salute.
Eric mirrored her.
Before McKay could parse the action, they both pumped their arms.
Rock, paper, scissors.
Aeryn won.
She took point by the door, glancing back at the group.
“Wait here,” he said.
And, with a click that was loud in the quiet stairwell, Aeryn slipped through the door and was gone. They heard her boots tap on the concrete as she walked away. The room went dead quiet, suddenly full of held breath, straining to listen.
McKay’s heart quickened. She tightened her grip on the gun, her pointer finger sliding along its side, and felt the latent burn of the magic imprinted into its metal. She took a deep, long breath, steadied the rush of adrenaline against the slow, internal tick of seconds she tracked in her mind.
One, two, three, four…
Aeryn’s footsteps, however quiet they were, faded from her ears. She focused on the floor, straining to listen. Her finger curled around the trigger guard, touched it once, twice—an old habit.
From the other side of the door, the footsteps returned.
She straightened, looked to Eric, watched his face.
Aeryn, or someone else’s?
As the thought jumped into her mind, a small ball of Fire shivered into life in front of the door, bobbing in the air.
“That’s her,” Eric said. “Come on.”
The door clicked again. A draft brushed her arm as it opened, and a trickle of something else ran up her skin like a shimmer of electricity. She frowned, glanced up at Eric—but he was already through the door, and the rest were following.
She nudged Jean with her elbow. “Come on. Let’s go find your girl.”
She said it to spark a smile, or at least some change in his face, but the words fell flat even as they came out of her mouth.
Jean’s mouth twisted. The muscles in his jaw tightened, then relaxed, a habit she’d seen in Mieshka.
He said nothing, but his expression left a sinking feeling in her gut, and, as they walked out the door and into the muggy, unconditioned air of the underground car park, it twisted with a sudden clear, dark certainty.
Things were not about to go as planned.
Chapter 27
The warm air felt close to McKay’s skin—sticky and languid, like a jungle atmosphere steeped through oil-stained concrete. The parking garage was not as large as she would have expected for a building of Finnevar’s size. Perhaps it was some effect of the low ceiling and the thick, square-edged support columns that seemed to block most of her view, but it seemed a little too narrow to her eyes, as if the driving lanes had been cramped down in size. There were three of them, with four parking lanes—six if one counted the double-stalls in the middle. Except for the fleet of obvious Mageguard vehicles, the lot sat largely empty.
Everyone has probably gone home for the night. Although, when she thought about it, it didn’t make sense. There were obviously quite a few Mageguard in the building. They had to park somewhere, right? Unless they had all teleported in.
Maybe their cars had been relegated to a lower level. Maybe this level was for official vehicles and VIPs only. Most of the spots seemed to be painted in either yellow or blue, which seemed to support that theory. A few bright green spots, for electric vehicles, and several wheelchair access spaces, stood close to the elevator well halfway up the parking spaces.
She zeroed in on that.
Another potential exit, should things go south in a desperate, run-for-their-lives kind of way.
She pushed the thought back and gave herself a shake, a tingle of energy crawling up her spine. It wasn’t like her to get pre-fight jitters. She was weird that way. For her, they came after, when all was said and done. Kind of like a weird crash of nerves chasing the echo of her adrenaline. She took a big, grounding breath and straightened her shoulder, re-adjusting her grip on the gun, then hooked a finger around Jean’s elbow and pulled him to where the Mages had already spread out.
“Back corner,” Aeryn repeated as they walked into the open. “Black SUV. Government plates.”
McKay spotted the car under a dingy light. A camera sat directly above it, but it seemed to be pointing at an odd angle—as if it were trying to capture the entire parking garage rather than its own specific area. Aeryn had said it was a blind spot, right?
Following the Mages’ lead, she and the others veered to the right, stalking up the wall and then across the open road where a down-ramp curled off to their right. A fleet of similar-looking vehicles, all shiny black metal and polished chrome, lined the wall farther up the garage, toward the exit, each parked in such a uniform, exact way that she wondered if the Mageguard had a policy on that.
Her gaze wandered to their tinted windows.
Had Aeryn checked them? It didn’t feel like she’d been gone long enough for that.
A soft, electronic beep turned her attention back to the car. The driver’s door opened with an internal click, and Aeryn slipped into the front seat. She lifted a hand over the edge of the open door, her pale fingers a contrast against the black exterior. “Keys?”
“Why are you the one driving?” Eric grumbled as he handed them over.
“Because I’m better at it.”
“You have one point on me. One point.”
Aeryn grunted, ducking her head to frown at the dashboard. “You can always retake the test.”
Behind her, Jo lifted an eyebrow toward Buck, upticking her chin to get his attention. They’d fanned out at the rear, making a three-point guard with Alexei at the right. Jo didn’t say a word, but Buck seemed to understand her question. He gave his head a small shake, then indicated the two Mages in the car.
A series of clicks came from the SUV. When McKay glanced back, Aeryn’s frown had deepened. “Did you put it in team mode?”
“I’m not that stupid.” Eric leaned in, his face turning dim through the tinted window as he peered at the dashboard. “There are no engine lights.”
“Doci. Mother of all ilia Hienlin.” Aeryn’s face twisted. The clicks came again, louder this time, with more intensity.
At the same time, that little ripple of energy shivered up her spine again. She spun around, scanning the parking garage. Some combination of stale air and dry light made her eyes itch, and she squinted against it, forcing herself to search into the lot’s grimy shadows, to scrutinize every distant smudge and oil stain like one of those hidden-picture things. The soldiers here—the Mageguard—were trained. They would know what attracted the human eye, and would know how to counter it to make themselves unnoticeable. Hell, some of them could literally make themselves invisible, though she understood that particular Elemental gift was a rare power.
Suddenly, green flared in her vision, coming from the ground under the SUV. The floor gave a loud crack.
McKay jumped back on instinct, dragging Jean Renaud with her as she spun out and away. As she ran, the whole place trembled and shook. A low thrum reverberated through her bones, rising in pitch and strength. In the corner of her eye, a flare of orange erupted from the SUV’s driver’s seat. Fire runes spidered across the vehicle’s black exterior like blown sparks, then dropped to the floor, forming a circular web. Aeryn scrambled out of the SUV and back into the garage, casting more and more runes onto the vehicle’s hood, making it look like some weird, fiery birthday car.
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