Proven Guilty (26 page)

Though the sun had set more than an hour before, the crowded convention hall had remained stuffy while its air conditioners labored in vain. I got my bearings and headed for the kitchen. As I did, the air temperature plummeted, sending the hotel’s climate from near-sauna to near-freezing in a handful of seconds. The suddenly cooled air could no longer contain the oppressive humidity it had been holding, and this resulted in a sudden, thick fog that coalesced out of nowhere and cut visibility down to maybe three or four long steps.

Dammit. The phages that had appeared so far seemed to be specialists in the up-close-and-personal venue of violence, whereas wheezy wizards like me prefer to do business from across the street, or down the block, or maybe from a neighboring dimension. Farther away, if possible. Wizards have a capacity for recovering from injury that might be more than most humans‘, but that was a long-term deal. In a bar fight, it wasn’t going to do me any good. Hell, I didn’t even have my duster with me, and now that the cold had rolled over the hotel, I missed it for multiple reasons.

I put my amulet back on, then shook out my shield bracelet and readied it for use, creating a second source of glowing blue light—though by accident, not design. The silver bracelet I used to focus magic into a tangible plane of force had been damaged in the same fire that took most of my left hand, and sparks of blue light tended to dribble from it whenever I moved my arm around. I had to be ready to use the shield at an instant’s notice. It would be the only thing between me and whatever might come rushing from the fog.

I went with my staff in my right hand. When it came to taking apart rampaging monsters, I preferred my blasting rod, but I’ve had an incident or two involving buildings and fire. If I went blazing away at the thing in a crowded hotel and burned the place down, it would kill more people than the rampage would have. The staff was a subtle tool, not as potent a weapon as the blasting rod, but it was more versatile, magically speaking.

Plus, in a pinch, I could brain someone with it—which isn’t subtle, but sure as hell is reassuring.

The emergency lights hadn’t snapped on, so either someone had sabotaged them or there was enough raw magical energy flying around to take them out. But as I moved out toward the kitchens, I didn’t feel anything like the kind of ambient energy it would take to blow out something as simple as a battery-powered light. That meant that someone had deliberately taken the emergency lights off-line, by magical means or otherwise, and it wasn’t hard to guess why.

Gunshots rang out, weirdly muted by the building’s acoustics; flat, heavy sounds like someone swinging a baseball bat at a metal trash can. Screams and sounds of confusion, fear, worry, and even pain continued all around me as people fumbled in the dark, tripped, fell, or collided with furniture and one another. The building was already emptying, at least here on the first floor, but the sudden darkness had resulted in a panicked stampede, and people had been injured in the crush. The darkness had created confusion, slowed the intended prey from fleeing, and left wounded behind who could neither defend themselves nor flee the building. Their helplessness would be driving them mad with fear.

It would make them juicier targets for the phage.

A metallic, piercing shriek hit my ears in a sudden, stunning shock wave, and my legs stopped moving. I didn’t choose to do it. The sound just hit something primitive in my brain stem, something that made my instincts scream at me to freeze, to not be seen. I dropped to one knee, terror suddenly falling onto my shoulders like a physical weight. In the wake of the shriek, I could hear human throats screaming in fear, nearby to me, and I could see the shapes of people moving around, lumpy shadows in the faint light from my shield bracelet.

A flame suddenly appeared ahead of me, and I got a look at a young woman who crouched down, holding up a cigarette lighter in a hand that shook so badly that it seemed a miracle the lighter stayed aflame.

“No!” I screamed at her. I rose to my feet and lunged toward her. “Put out the light!”

Her face swiveled toward me, ghostly in the light of the tiny flame, her mouth working soundlessly—and then something the size of a mountain lion hit her across the shoulders and flung her to the ground. The lighter flew from her hand, the little lick of flame showing me something black and gleaming and spattered with scarlet gore.

The woman screamed. The dark hallway became a river of terrified people plunging through the darkness. Someone fell against me, and as I stumbled away from them I stepped on someone’s fingers in the darkness and tripped when I tried to pull my weight off of them.

I snarled, slammed my back against the wall, held up my staff, and called up Hellfire.

Power flooded down the length of the carved oak, its sigils and runes filling with red-white liquid fire that ran from the base of the staff to its head in a ripple of energy. The crisp, clean scent of wood smoke filled the air, tainted with the barest hint of sulfur, and lurid light washed through the hallway.

I saw people scrambling, screaming, weeping. They were moving away, taking advantage of the light while they had it, and the hall around me cleared rapidly. It left the woman with the lighter. She lay on her side, curled into a fetal position, her arms clasped around her head while… the
thing
mauled her.

It was equal parts feline and insect, all lanky arms, powerful legs, and a whipping tail tipped with a serrated point. Its skin was a black, shining carapace, and it had an elongated, eyeless head ending in viscous, slime-covered jaws full of teeth. Though it had no eyes, it somehow sensed the light of my powered staff, and it whipped around toward me with a hiss, body tensing in sinuous grace, jaws gaping, slime dripping from its teeth while a slow, enraged hissing sound emerged from its throat.

I stared at it for all of a second in the shock of recognition. Then I gritted my teeth, got my feet underneath me, pointed the end of my staff at the creature, and snarled, “Get away from her, you
bitch
.”

The phage shifted its position, the wounded girl now forgotten, its limbs weirdly jointed, its motion sinuous and eerie. It hissed again, louder. A second pair of jaws emerged from between the first, and they too hissed and parted and drooled in challenge.

“Is this gonna be a standup fight or just another bug hunt?” I taunted.

The phage leapt at me, faster than I would have thought possible—but that’s how fast always works. Lots of people and not-people are faster than me, and I’d learned to plan for it a long time ago. A lot of people think that, in a fight, speed is the only thing that matters. It isn’t true. Oh, sure, it’s enormously advantageous to have greater speed, but a smart opponent can counter it with good footwork, calculating distance to give him the advantage of economy of movement. The phage was fast, but it had to cross eight or nine feet of carpet to get to me. I had to move my hand about ten inches and harden the shield before my left hand with my will. It wasn’t that fast.

The phage hit my shield, bringing a ghostly blue quarter dome into shape and sending a cascade of blue sparks flying back around me. At the last second, I turned and angled the shield to deflect the creature’s momentum. It caromed off the shield and went tumbling along the hallway beyond me for a good twenty feet.

“You want some of this?” I stepped into the middle of the hall to put myself between the phage and the wounded girl. The phage rose, turning to flee. Before it could move I thrust the end of my staff in its direction and cried, “
Forzare
!”

I hadn’t ever used quite that much Hellfire before.

Power rushed out of my staff. Usually, when I employed it like this, the force I unleashed was invisible. This time, it rushed out like a scarlet comet, like a blazing cannonball. The force dipped at the last second, then came up at the phage. The impact threw it against the ceiling with bone-crushing force, and at least twice as much energy as I’d intended. The phage came down, limbs thrashing wildly, bouncing and skittering frantically, like a half-smashed bug.

I hit it again, the runes in my staff blazing, bathing the whole length of the hall in scarlet radiance, slamming the phage into a wall with more crunching sounds. Yellowish liquid splattered, there was an absolutely awful smell, and sudden holes pocked the wall and the floor where the yellow blood fell.

I cried havoc in the hellish light and hit it again. And again. And again. I bounced the murdering phage around that hallway until acid burned a hundred holes in the walls, ceiling, and floor, and my blood sang with the battle, with the power, with triumph.

I lost track of several seconds. The next thing I remember, I stood over the crushed, twitching phage. “It’s the only way to be sure,” I told it. And then, with cool deliberation, I slammed the end of my staff into the thing’s eyeless skull, muscle and magic alike propelling the blow. Its head crunched and fractured like a cheap taco shell, and suddenly there was no phage, no creature. There was only the damaged hallway, the tainted smell of hellish wood smoke, and a mound of clear, swiftly dissolving ectoplasm.

My knees shook and I sat down in the hallway. I closed my eyes. The red light of Hellfire continued to pulse through my staff, lighting the hall, illuminating my eyelids.

The next thing I knew, Mouse pressed up against my side, an enormous, warm, silent presence. Bright lights bobbed toward me. Flashlights. Footsteps. People were shouting a lot.

“Jesus,” Rawlins breathed.

Murphy knelt down by me and touched my shoulder. “Harry?”

“I’m okay,” I said. “The girl. Behind me. She’s hurt.”

Rawlins stood shining his flashlight on a bloody section of the hallway. “Jesus Christ.”

The phage had killed three people before I got there. I hadn’t been able to see much of them during the fight. It was a scene of horror, worse than any slaughterhouse. The phage had taken out a cop. I could see a piece of shirt with a bloodstained CPD badge on it. The second victim might have been a middle-aged man, judging by a bloodied orthopedic shoe that still held a foot. White leg bone showed two or three inches above the shoe.

The third victim had been one of the little vampire girls I’d seen the previous evening. I could only tell because her head had landed facing me. The rest of her was hopelessly intermixed with the other two bodies.

They’d need someone good at jigsaw puzzles to put them back together.

Murphy went to the girl with the lighter, and knelt over her.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Gone,” Murphy replied.

I blinked. “What?”

“She’s dead.”

“No,” I said. I was too tired to feel much of the sudden frustration that went through me. “Hell’s bells, she was moving just a second ago. I got here in time.”

Murphy grimaced. “She bled out.”

“Wait,” I said, staggering to my feet. “This isn’t… She shouldn’t be…”

I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach.

Was she still alive when the phage had turned to run? Could I have stopped or slowed the bleeding, if I had let the thing retreat to the Nevernever?

I thought of the fight again. I thought of the satisfaction of turning the hunter into prey, of extracting vengeance for those it had slain. I thought about the power that raged through me, the sheer, precise
strength
of the Hellfire-assisted assault, and how good it felt to use it on something that had it coming. I’d barely given a thought to the girl’s condition.

Had I let her die?

My God. I could have let the phage run.

I could have helped her.

The girl’s body lay curled up, still, like a sleeping child. Her dead eyes were open and glassy.

I lunged for a potted plant near me and threw up.

After I did, Rawlins observed, “You don’t look so good.”

“No,” I whispered. The words tasted bitter. “I don’t.”

Mouse let out one of his not-whine breaths and laid his chin on my shoulder. My eyes couldn’t get away from the dead people, not even when they were closed. The hellish light in my staff slowly faded and went dark.

“I’ve got to organize this clusterfuck,” Murphy sighed. “Rawlins, keep an eye on him.”

“Yeah.”

She nodded once and rose, briskly moving away, snapping orders.

“You, you,” Murphy said, pointing at two nearby cops. “Get over there and help the wounded. Airway, bleeding, heartbeat. Move.” She raised her voice and shouted, “Stallings! Where the hell is my ambulance?”

“Two minutes!” a man shouted down a dimly lit hall leading to the lobby. It looked like someone had pulled a patrol car or three up to the front of the hotel to shine their headlights into the darkened building.

“Clear them a path and call for more EMTs,” Murphy barked. She took her radio off her belt and started giving more orders.

Rawlins looked at the remains, and at the acid-scarred walls and the enormous areas of smashed drywall and ceiling that looked like they’d been kissed by a wrecking ball. He shook his head. “What the hell happened here?”

“Bad guy,” I said. “I got him. Not fast enough.”

Rawlins grunted. “Come on. Best we get up to the lobby. Until they get the lights back on, it might not be safe out here.”

“What happened on your end?” I asked.

“Damn candle blew up in my face. Then the lights went out. Thought for a second I’d gone blind.”

I grunted. “Sorry.”

“Some of the civilians were carrying. That howling thing went by in the dark and everyone panicked. Stampede in the dark. People got trampled and scared. Civilians opened fire, cops opened fire. We got one dead and a couple of dozen wounded by one thing or another.”

We reached the lobby and found more police arriving along with the emergency crews. The EMTs set up shop at once in a makeshift triage area, where Murphy had brought most of the wounded. The EMTs started stabilizing, evaluating, resuscitating. They had the worst cases loaded in the ambulance and rushing for the hospital within six or seven minutes.

Murphy’s stream of peremptory commands had slowed to a stop, and she stood near the triage area. I sidled over to her and loomed. Mouse pushed his head underneath her hand, but Murphy only patted him absently. I followed her worried blue gaze. The EMTs were working on Rick.