The Magic's in the Music (Magic Series Book 5) (6 page)

He’d lose any control over his life, even if the only control he could find right now was to throw himself on Morgan’s pyre and let it consume him.

The pain in his gut ramped up. He needed music. But he wasn’t going to risk meeting that girl again, just in case she was the One.

Diamondback. He’d been there last night. No one looking for him would be back there tonight. Everybody knew he didn’t go to the same club twice in a row. The place would be a graveyard.

How appropriate.

*

Jason went into
battle mode and threw up a Cloak over Morgan, Duncan and Rick as they all came out of the ravine. The world went red. Presto, change-o, they were invisible. The moon was an icy orb hanging in the sky above the desert mountains. The drab concrete of Ulaanbaatar was more than two hundred kilometers behind them. Jason steeled himself against the icy wind that whistled off the steppes and right in under his coat, making it feel far colder than the twenty-eight degrees he knew it was. “Everybody know their role?”

“I levitate,” Duncan said. The reedy geek needed either some shampoo or a buzz cut.

“I rust,” Rick smirked. Jason wondered if the kid was ready for how brutal this would be.

No one had to ask Morgan if she was ready to use the Wand. “We sneak in. We sneak out,” she said. She needed quiet for her ‘performance’ tonight. Other than that, Jason knew she didn’t care how many people got killed.

They headed toward the compound. It seemed a miracle to Jason that they’d found the place. It had been hidden for centuries. The Onan river had been redirected over the gravesite in the Thirteenth Century. Genghis Khan’s soldiers had killed the two thousand people who’d come to the funeral, and were themselves executed in turn. But time had changed the river’s course and new imaging technology—magnet-something, and sonic stuff and satellite pictures—made searching more practical. Voila. Archeologists had found the tomb in time to provide Morgan with another genius general to add to her collection.

Guys in fatigues stalked around the fence with automatic weapons. He couldn’t read Mongolian, but danger signs on the fence for electricity were universal. Pickups and Humvees patrolled, loaded with tripods that held WWII-era Brownings. Searchlights crisscrossed the compound. Outside the fence many tents served as a bivouac for the soldiers. Piece of cake.

Silently, they made their way toward a gate, stopping to let vehicles pass. They waited until the two sentries crossed in front of them, saluting, then slid between their retreating forms.

Duncan lifted one hand. They rose evenly, as though they were a single being, and drifted over the electrified fence to land lightly on the other side. Duncan looked smug, the creep.

Inside it seemed the army hadn’t thought guards were necessary since everyone here was dead. The treasures had been removed over the last months and were under the highest security at an unknown location in Ulaanbaatar while they were cleaned and catalogued. The rumor mills agreed it was a trove of unparalleled wealth.

What had been left at the actual gravesite were the chaotic holes of the digs and some random equipment. Stakes connected with lines marked the locations of long gone walls and structures. A light shone through the dirty windows of a shack where they’d probably packed up the treasures. A silhouette moved inside. Someone was working late. No. Two someones.

“I’ll take care of them,” Jason whispered.

“No,” Morgan hissed. “We need them to pinpoint the location of Genghis Khan’s remains.”

Jason couldn’t help his anger. The defenses were primitive, but tanks and machine guns could still kill you. “How do you even know the guy’s bones are still here?”

Morgan strode toward a smaller hole in the ground. The others struggled to keep up. “The new Minister of Antiquities told me they thought the remains were best left where they were—no one wants to offend the spirit of Genghis Khan.”

“So why, exactly, did the minister tell you how to find the remains then?”

The small hole revealed steps of new wood descending into the darkness. Jason heard Duncan and Rick gasp. Morgan just smiled. This was it. Jason was damn sure they could all feel it. An aura of power drifted up out of the abyss.

“The minister had a dead wife.”

Jason took two slow breaths. Morgan had the ultimate bribery tool. Or threat. Jason had felt its power, in a bad way. She’d brought back to the living the last person in the world he’d ever wanted to see. Jason had been forced to kill his father all over again. Not before she let the old devil have his way with Jason, though. How many times had he killed his father now, in real life, not just in his nightmares? Too many. He pushed those thoughts aside. Just do what she wanted. That was the lesson here.

“Now get me one who knows where they’ve left the remains. It will save time, Morgan hissed.”

Jason ducked out from under the Cloak. He slipped up to the little shed and peered inside. Channels of light crisscrossed the sky overhead. Inside the hut, a younger man and a woman in dirt-smeared lab coats bent over what looked like clods of dirt on a table.

He pulled his Sig Sauer and fitted it with a silencer. One kick and the door practically came off its hinges. The kid gasped. The woman stepped in front of the kid They both had the broad cheekbones and high foreheads of the steppes. The woman started speaking rapidly.

But they’d already told him all he needed to know.

He put two quick bullets in the kid’s forehead and grabbed the woman. By the time the kid hit the floor, he had the older woman out the door and was hustling her over to where a faint ripple in the atmosphere outlined the Cloak. He kept the Sig tucked against her ribs. He jerked the woman under the Cloak.

“She’s the boss. She’ll know where the grave is,” he reported.

Morgan smiled. He felt the woman flinch. Not many could see Morgan smile without an instinctive recoil. “Do you understand English?”

The woman nodded. A black trail of blood wound down from her temple.

“Good.” Morgan led the way down the stairs, the Wand thunking on the steps like a hiker’s staff. “Rick, some light. Jason, lift the Cloak.”

Rick’s beam flicked on. It revealed rough-hewn rock and dirt walls close on each side of the narrow stair. Good thing Jason didn’t have claustrophobia. At the bottom, an excavated room opened out into darkness. It smelled of damp earth and rot. Rick shone his light around. The place was chaos. Fallen scaffolding cluttered the edges. Lights on stands, dark now, and piles of dirt were surrounded by discarded baskets that must have been used to take excavated debris up the stairs.

Morgan turned on the woman. “Where is he?” she hissed, her eyes glowing both from the light of Rick’s flashlight and a frightening inner excitement.

The woman’s knees gave out. Only Jason’s grip kept her from falling to the dirt floor. “My soul is forfeit if I betray Genghis Khan,” she sobbed.

The woman would shortly be useless with hysteria. Morgan set her lips. “He is Genghis Khan no more. His armies are gone—his title means nothing now. But the man who held that title, Temüjin, he would want me to disturb him. His spirit will thank you for your service.”

The woman moaned, shaking her head. “He wants rest.”

Morgan laughed. “If you think that you must not know Temüjin, for all your study. He wants to conquer. He wants to live. He wants to again be Genghis Khan, and I—only I—can give him that.”

That stopped the woman’s heaving sobs. “Live?”

“Live.” Morgan bore down on the woman. “Don’t stand in the way of Genghis Khan rising again.”

The woman glanced nervously to the left. Jason jerked his attention to follow her stare to a raised area about two feet high that ran along the east wall of the excavation.

Morgan’s head turned slowly in that direction. “I’m done with her.” She stalked away. The wrought silver of the Wand gleamed in the light.

Jason put two bullets in the woman’s head. The Mongol scientist collapsed to the ground. “Duncan, get the work lights functioning.” Duncan took off. When Jason reached the raised area, Morgan was standing over a hole in the dirt. He peered down the beam of Morgan’s light.

What was that? Rotted wood? The boards had been heavy, almost beams they were so thick. They looked porous now with age.

The work lights flashed on, flickered once and stabilized, blinding after the darkness. The coffin was broken in several places, revealing only darkness within.

“Break it open,” she said her voice hoarse with anticipation.

Jason heaved in a breath and stepped up. He grabbed a pickaxe leaning against the dirt wall. Heaving it up, he brought it down on one end of the rude inner coffin of a king. The wood didn’t so much split as disintegrate. He didn’t raise the axe again. Instead, he heaved on the broken beams. They splintered and he tossed the shards up and out of the hole. When Jason had revealed the interior of the coffin, it was as he’d suspected. The earth in Mongolia this close to the river wasn’t dry sand as in Egypt. The wrappings were moldered and largely disintegrated. The flesh had rotted away rather than mummified. Even the skeleton was only partially intact. Morgan’s light played over bones that poked up at odd angles through damp silt that might be dirt or the sludge of flesh that had succumbed to the attack of time, insects and rot. The skull’s jaw was long ago detached, leaving only empty eye sockets and jutting random upper teeth.

So much for the invincible Genghis Khan.

Jason looked up at Morgan. Her golden eyes gleamed with intensity. If anyone here was invincible, it was Morgan. She motioned Jason impatiently out of the grave. He’d seen her act several times now. That didn’t make it easy to watch. She went quiet as she raised the Wand.

It began to glow. Slowly, the glow enveloped Morgan. It was as if she was becoming one with the Talisman. Jason raised his arm to shield his eyes. The light grew more intense. He turned to the grave. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.

The feeling of power hung heavy in the damp air. The mustiness of bones and rot infused his senses. The glow expanded, enveloping the grave. The skull rose to hover over the shards of the coffin. Various pieces of bones floated free of the sludge in the grave. A rib reassembled itself from sharp, small pieces. A thigh-bone, mostly intact, found a hip socket. The process began to accelerate. Splinters of bone whirled up from the coffin in a dark haze. The skeleton began to take shape out of the fog of biological goo. That wasn’t the best part. Here it came. The sludge at the bottom of the coffin almost exploded as it began to hang itself over the skeleton, creating organs and layers of raw muscle over the structure of the bones. The whine of power in the air assaulted his eardrums. There was a ripping, tearing feeling in the room. The dirt walls began to melt and drool. The metal of a light stand sagged.

Morgan said all that the fallen warrior had been was still in the smallest remnant of his DNA. Using that pattern, her power pulled elements from the surrounding earth and air and metal to fulfill that plan again, like using building blocks removed from the last project to create the new construction.

Before his squinting eyes, skin and hair were added. The figure resolved itself into a naked man with the slanting eyes and broad cheekbones of a Mongol. Thick black hair with graying streaks was pulled back into a queue. A similarly colored beard trailed down his chest. This process didn’t make anyone young again. But whatever diseases or wounds that person had experienced in life weren’t part of the DNA and weren’t recreated. The guy would be in much better shape than he’d been at his death. The man who’d once been named Temüjin had been muscular, especially for his age, but then he’d been a warrior as well as a general and an administrator. He had an impressive organ, too. It made Jason believe Hardwick’s report that six percent of modern humanity was genetically related to this man.

Morgan sucked the glow back into the Wand, leaving Temüjin wavering on his feet as he stood in the grave that had housed him for nine hundred years. The warrior gave a piercing shriek. Jason lunged forward and collected Temüjin just as he collapsed. Laying him on the dirt next to the grave, Jason glanced up to Morgan. She leaned on the Wand. Using that much power took it out of her, too.

He slipped the pack off his back, got out the telescoping litter and the thermal blanket. “Get him on the litter,” he ordered Rick and Duncan. “We’ll have company any minute.”

Jason heard a scuffle of boots on the stairs to the surface. He glanced at Morgan. She shook her head. Okay. She wasn’t strong enough yet to use the Wand on the intruders.

“Rick, you’re up,” Jason said to the younger man as five or six guys in fatigues clattered down into the dig, crouched over their Uzis. Rick jerked a nod.

The lead guy sprayed a string of sharp Mongol words that had to be the equivalent of “Stay where you are.”