Dragons & Dwarves (59 page)

Authors: S. Andrew Swann

BOOK: Dragons & Dwarves

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Ahead, beyond the vans barricading the shop, I heard the sound of wood breaking, then a small explosion. I couldn’t see much past the vans, but white smoke began drifting up from the building. The door on the last van slid open, and Blackstone stepped out, talking on a cell phone. He stepped around the rear of the van, looking past the three vans at a commotion I couldn’t quite see.

“You bastard.”

In the best of times I didn’t like Blackstone. Now he was stepping all over the one lead I had to where my daughter might be.

I jumped out of my car and started running toward him. I can honestly say I had no clue what I was planning to do when I got there. Events made up my mind for me, just before I reached him.

Something exploded out of the scrap heap next to Teaghue’s shop. I saw a flash of motion, and then something large flew toward me, Blackstone, and van number three. I dove, knocking Blackstone out of the way, as a V-8 engine block slammed into the front driver’s side of the van. The entire front end of the vehicle crumpled inward in a shower of safety glass. The whole van rocked back on its tires, the impact driving it back a foot or two.

“What the—” Blackstone started talking, spitting slush out of his mouth. I couldn’t hear the rest of what he said, because gunfire erupted from every corner around me. It came from inside the building, and from all three vans.

The focus of all the gunfire was another zombie. The same wire-sewed flesh that had been in my nightmares. Like the thing that had wrecked
Thor’s Hammer,
it was wearing a trench coat. It could have been the same one.

While bullets slammed into and through the thing’s body, it picked up a wheel rim from the debris around it. It threw the rim like a lethal Frisbee, catching one of the armored Feds full in the face.

Blackstone had completely forgotten about me. He pulled himself up behind one of the vans and grabbed a walkie-talkie.
“Use the phosphor rounds! Burn the thing!”

Phosphor rounds? That sort of thing was military ordnance, not standard SWAT equipment, even for federal counterterrorism units.

The gunfire stopped and I was able to hear a hollow
thump.
The sound was followed by a glowing trail that ended in zombie-boy’s chest cavity.

The trench coat went up like a sheet of flash paper and the skeleton stood there, backlit from inside. The smell was horrible, like a cannibal hibachi grill.

However, zombie-boy wasn’t easily discouraged. It actually reached inside itself, fished out the glowing round, and threw it back toward the building. Its throw was short and I could see several half melted wires dangling from its throwing arm.

Several more
thumps.

I glanced back at the building, and saw a short silhouette climbing out of a window on the side opposite the scrapyard.

“Teaghue!”

I didn’t even wait to see if anyone paid attention to me. I got up and ran.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

T
EAGHUE ran straight for an alley, and I was right behind him. Above me I heard the helicopter.

I dodged trash bins and old tires as he led me behind several old industrial buildings. In the half minute or so it took me to catch up with him, I had time for one main thought.

The guy makes weapons for a living and is strong enough to coldcock me bare-handed. What do I do when I catch up with him?

Answer?
Fight dirty.

Teaghue ran up a frost-covered pile of broken concrete, and jumped onto a chain-link fence ahead of me. He managed to grab the twelve-foot-high fence almost halfway up. He started scrambling faster than anyone with his length of limb had a right to. I ran up the concrete after him, knowing I had no hope of scaling the fence or making it over the barbed wire on top.

So, instead, I reached down and grabbed a chunk of concrete the size of a two-liter bottle. It was so cold it numbed my fingers.

I brought it down as hard as I could on the back of Teaghue’s right hamstring.

He cursed something vile and guttural in his native tongue as he slammed into the fence. I brought my concrete-laden fist up into where a human kidney would be.

“What are you doing? You misbegotten bastard!”

He was hanging only by his hands now, scrambling to get a foothold. I jumped up and struck him on the side of his head.

He fell off of the fence, rolling, stunned, facedown, at the base of the pile of concrete. I fell down on him, before he could recover. I put my knee down in the small of his back and stopped with a jolt that sent the concrete sailing from my hand.

It had become slippery, mostly from my own blood. At this point, I didn’t feel much from my gore-stained hand as I wrapped it in Teaghue’s hair.

“Tell me where my daughter is.”

“You don’t know what you’re doi—”

I slammed his face into the ice.

“Tell me where my daughter is!”

“You can’t—
He
will kill us.”

I pulled back on his hair while holding the back of his neck with my opposite forearm.
“I’ll kill you.”

“No,” Teaghue sputtered.

I slammed his face down again, hard enough that my wrist made unpleasant noises. I ignored the spasm of pain and repeated,
“Tell me where my daughter is!”

“
He
has her!”

“Who?”

“The one I cannot name!”

“Don’t fuck with me!”
I was shaking, and if I had a gun,
I would
have killed him.

“No, he knows when you speak of him. There’s no protection here. None. A thought could bring him—”

Teaghue choked and sputtered. I felt his muscles tense, and he began bucking against me as if he was having a seizure. I let go of his head, and he began slamming his own face into the pavement.

“Teaghue!”

I got off of him and rolled his body over. His back arched and he started groaning. The atmosphere around us darkened.

A bolt of energy arced from Teaghue to the fence, and I could smell an awful mixture of static and brimstone.

Teaghue sat up facing me. His eyes were open, but they were dead and sightless. His cracked lips smiled and he opened his mouth to speak in a voice that was too familiar.

“Good help is so hard to find.”
Teaghue laughed, spraying gobbets of blood and mucus.

“What have you done with my daughter?”

“If they hadn’t tried to warn you, this all would have been much less unpleasant.”

“What are you? Where is my daughter?”

“She is quite safe, and quite unaware of what is happening.”
Teaghue laughed again.
“But, Mr. Maxwell, when I come to ask something of you, it would be good to remember what I am capable of.”

Still grinning, Teaghue reached up to his face. Before I realized what he was doing, he had hooked his fingers into the orbits of his skull. His laughter quickly turned to screams.

“Great work, Maxwell,” Blackstone fumed as a medic taped my injured hand. “Tell me one thing, did you save my life just so I could witness how you screwed up my investigation?”

Another set of medics was busy zipping Teaghue’s remains into a body bag.

“Blackstone,” I said, “my daughter is missing.”

“Yeah,” Blackstone watched them take Teaghue away. “And you think this helped her? What the fuck do you think you were doing? You, of all people, ought to know better. Corner a suspect with no backup, no kind of protection. Not even a goddamn rabbit’s foot. You’re damn lucky he didn’t kill you.”

I rubbed my bandaged hand. “Yeah, lucky.”

“If you’re not careful, you’ll make me think you took him out on purpose.”

“Blackstone, can we cut the crap? Am I disappearing into your little federal black hole? Or am I free to go?”

Blackstone paced around me, his shoes making sucking sounds in the slush. “As much as I’d like to put you on ice for the next decade or so—I think the people we want are going to try and contact you again.” He waved over a couple of suits. “So I’m letting you go with an escort. Special Agent Francis, and Special Agent Levi,” he indicated the two new people.

“Mr. Maxwell,” they both said in unison. If it weren’t for the fact that Francis was black, they could have been clones of each other.

“Follow him to his hotel room and sit on him.” Blackstone turned toward me. “And don’t worry about your apartment, we have a few agents keeping an eye on it for you.”

I sighed.

“Oh, if you’re wondering about local police,” Blackstone handed me a sheet of paper, a copy of a fax stamped with a time early this morning. “I made a point of getting all the paperwork nice and tidy. We trump Caledvwlch’s little circus of sideshow freaks.”

I handed the warrant back and looked at my new federal baby-sitters.

My federal escort took me back to my hotel room. It was about this time that I had the sick realization that I hadn’t called Margaret. There’s only one thing worse than having to tell your ex-wife that your daughter might have been kidnapped—and that’s not being the first to do so.

“How could you not tell me!”

Margaret was hysterical, and I wasn’t doing the greatest job of keeping my own composure. I stood in the bedroom while my bookend Feds stood in the suite’s living room doing a lousy job of pretending not to overhear us.

“What was I going to tell you? I had evil premonitions—”

“There are FBI agents in my house!”

“I know, they’re here, too.”

“Why would someone take Sarah?”

“We don’t know for sure that anyone’s taken her.”

“Bullshit,
Kline. You’re a terrible liar.” There was a pause. “I’m coming down there.”

“Margaret, I know how you feel—”

“I want my daughter back!
I’m getting on the next flight.”

I rubbed my temples. “I don’t think the FBI will think that’s a good idea.”

“Fuck the FBI.”

“Please, Margaret, they’re trying to find her.” I almost choked on the phony sincerity of that line. I knew, intellectually, that Blackstone was trying to find Sarah, if only because of her tie to his investigation. But I didn’t believe in it any more than Margaret did. “They’re going to want you to stay there, in case they try and contact you.”

“What if there’s no ransom? If it’s some psycho predator? You have black mages and Satanists—”

“I don’t think that’s what happened.”

“How the
hell
do you know?

I swallowed. “I think they’re trying to get to me.”

“They? Who
are
they?”

“I wish I knew.” I looked off into the living room. Francis, the black one, caught my gaze and quickly looked away. “But I think they’re trying to blackmail me.”

“Kline, if anyone hurts her because—”

“You should probably keep your phone line clear.”

“In case they call,” she said flatly.

“Or Sarah,” I said, exhausting every remaining fragment of optimism.

She hung up.

I sat on my bed and stared at the receiver. I don’t know what I expected . . .

We used to be married; shouldn’t we be able to comfort each other?

I felt empty, used up, and helpless. I didn’t know if my daughter was alive or dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Worse, what I
had
done only seemed to have made things worse.

Margaret was right. Sarah was gone because of me, and if anything happened to her . . .

“Mr. Maxwell,” Special Agent Levi stepped into the bedroom doorway. “Are you okay?”

“What do you think?” I slammed the hotel’s receiver back on the cradle hard enough to set my hand and wrist hurting again.

“Can we get you anything?”

“No,” I snapped.

As he turned away, I got a better grip on myself. “Hey—”

“Yes.”

“Sorry for the outburst,” I told him. “Not your fault.”

“No problem, you’re entitled.” He shook his head. “If I thought that dwarf had taken one of my kids—believe me, I know where you’re coming from.”

“You have kids?”

“Six and nine.”

“Around here?”