Dragon Knight (The Collegium Book 3) (18 page)

Portal travel to Mexico City and a helicopter flight from there. Gina’s family background in hotel-keeping around the world gave her a good grasp on geographical realities. “Someone must be closer than that.”

“I have some friends.” Steve stepped out of the room, pulling his phone from a pocket.

“What good will weres do?” Neville sneered.

Fay stared at the senior geomage. “Mexico has active volcanoes, earthquakes.”

Neville paled. Then he pushed roughly through a knot of three people and out the door.

About half the room stared then followed him, hopefully alerted to their own responsibilities. They were far from powerless, if they acted now.

“For anyone wondering what help weres can be,” Fay raised her voice. “Steve has fought demons. He can’t banish them and nor can his friends, but they can and will fight to give the children a chance to escape.”

Shawn, standing quietly beside Gina, swore under his breath. “I hope they get there fast.”

Gina glanced at him, then followed his gaze to the television screen. So did others. The volume went up fast as the scene imprinted on them.

Mérida’s main plaza. In the late afternoon heat it should have been mostly empty. Instead, the young people from the conference had spilled into it, ignoring the wilting heat to create a map of the world from the millions of paper flowers that children from everywhere had made and sent in. Children like Gina’s young cousins. Each flower held a wish. Color-massed, they created continents and seas. It had been an undertaking promoted months in advance. Schools around the globe had collected recycled paper for the effort.

And now…

“That’s not a demon,” Kora said. Her tone was stunned.

“The fifth group member hires mundanes as well as mages,” Gina said. Fear, the devastating wrongness of what she saw, and her sheer helplessness froze her with a piercing emotional cold. “I’d say the demon hired terrorists.”

News crews braving the afternoon heat to record the growth of the paper world turned their cameras on the horrifying centerpiece.

Four children, ranging from about twelve to seventeen, filled the screen. Gina’s language skills failed at Arabic and Chinese, but the other mages could read the notes written large and pinned over the children’s shirts. Over the bombs strapped to them. The same message in Spanish, English, Arabic and Chinese.

“We are living bombs. We will blow your world apart.”

Fay and Kora ran out of the room. Kora was on the phone. Fay grabbed Steve’s arm.

“I saw,” he said.

Gina ran with them to the elevator. Its doors opened, closed.

“We should have built the Collegium headquarters over a portal.” Kora bounced on her toes, eyes on the numbers as the elevator descended.

They exited out a side door where a car waited, engine running.

“Streets cleared?” Kora snapped the question at the driver.

“Yes.”

A second car arrived, and guardians and Gilda climbed into it.

“Go!”

“Should you be with us?” Fay asked Gina, squashed between her and Steve in the backseat.

Gina nodded. As much as she loved Lewis, this was about more than him. “Everyone underestimates a house witch, but I can help.” At a minimum, her magic could tidy the chaos of the square. At a maximum…if only she could translocate. Explosives were just chemistry, and at its heart, so was cooking. Her house witchery could disable the explosives, but time was against her. “What about healers?”

Kora answered from the front seat. “Standard response to terrorism. The Mexican healers embedded in the medical system will be mobilizing.”

And Lewis? What was Lewis doing?

Lewis crouched on the balcony of one of the grand colonial buildings that framed Mérida’s main square. The heat was intense, the hot tropical sun baking his back and head, while the tiled balcony radiated up reflected heat. Below him the children’s hours of effort showed in a global map composed of flowers. The children chatted, laughed, shouted and walked around their work, beginning to fill in the last narrow paths between colorful continents and blue oceans. They worked out from the center, intermittently interrupted by pockets of adult activity: television news crews and knots of parents fussing about hats, sunscreen and drinking water.

The happy buzz silenced in a spreading wave as four children walked into the square from four different directions. They walked stiffly, unnaturally.

Lewis recognized the explosives strapped to their young bodies before one girl came close enough to the balcony for him to read the cruel sign taped to her back.

“We are living bombs. We will blow your world apart.”

His muscles tensed for a second before he controlled his response. He had anticipated an attack here, the pieces of the puzzle locking in his mind an hour ago. He could have alerted the Collegium, but that would have given the unidentified fifth member of the Group of 5 a warning. Lewis doubted that the fifth group member had allies within the Collegium, but monitoring the Collegium’s activities could reveal almost as much.

Guardians decamping for Mexico would have revealed that they’d anticipated the next attack. But that might have simply pushed up the timetable of events. In acting, the Collegium could have precipitated tragedy.

He’d made a split second decision to keep silent, and then, had nearly an hour to second guess it.

Guardian training and experience had taught him how to slip into that zone where you waited on high alert, yet passively. The result could be an unexpected clarity of thought, with random data connecting, disconnecting, and reforming into a meaningful picture.

He’d let his gaze slide into clarity of sight. Over the hour, the silver energy had shimmered and shifted. The guardian-trained part of Lewis had noted the movement of children and adults in the plaza, alert to anything out of the ordinary. The other part of him, the part that had experienced the otherness of the Deeper Path, concentrated on something else.

It started as a shimmer, as if the hot Mexican sunlight kissed the silver energy. But as Lewis directed a degree more attention to it, he peeled away a layer of the silver and there, at that precariously balanced point, he saw an energy unlike both the golden threads of magic and the silver sheen of the Deeper Path.

This energy was mother of pearl. It was the light of dawn through a white mist. And it flowed into the square like a river.

It came, Lewis realized, from the wishes written on the paper flowers sent by hundreds of thousands of children around the world. The old plaza in front of him filled like an ethereal swimming pool with that pearlescent energy, and in some form, the children sensed it. Their laughter rang with a poignant hopefulness. It underscored their enthusiasm. It literally charged the air.

The entrance of four terrified children, turned into living bombs, into living death for other children, was a foul assault on that energy.

Lewis didn’t have the magic to use a search spell to find the people responsible, but the mother of pearl energy did that for him as it pulled away from four men. Four putrid green blots on the shimmering landscape.

Lewis
moved
.

Gina grabbed the door handle and held on as the car hurtled around a corner. A spell had been used to clear a lane of traffic to ensure the swiftest journey to the New York portal. She could see the golden glow of it at the edge of the street if she slipped into mage sight. And mage sight was easy to slip into since she was so stressed, on the edge of desperation.

No matter what they did, they wouldn’t be in time. The demon had been diabolically clever, and Lewis was alone. A solitary man against a demon’s long-term plan.

“Jim.” A bubble of silence abruptly enclosed Fay. Whoever Jim was, she wanted privacy to speak with him on her phone. Two minutes later, as the cars stopped outside Paul O’Halloran’s apartment building and portal, Fay released the bubble of silence. She spoke as she got out of the car. “There’s a portal in Mérida. The town is a center of Maya culture, and civilizations often coalesced around portals, whether they were consciously aware of them or not. The porter of the Mérida portal is reclusive, but my stepfather, Jim, is a friend and a porter from Australia. He’ll meet us at Paul’s portal and take us through. In this emergency, Luis won’t protest the use of his portal or its revelation.”

Kora obviously had questions, but she bit them back.

They ran down the steps to the New York portal.

A late middle-aged, stocky and resolute man stood to the side of the portal talking with Paul. He gave Fay a quick hug and Steve as well. “Hold hands, people, and I’ll lead you through the in-between to Luis’s portal. I can’t contact him, but he’s probably out caving. I have his permission to enter the Mérida portal and I’ll bring you with me. If you release each other’s hands in-between, you’ll stay lost there. No time for baby-sitting, today.” The laconic Australian accent emphasized Jim’s urgency.

Gina gripped Shawn’s hand and Steve’s. Steve held Fay’s hand, who held Jim’s.

The in-between swirled and tip-tilted them, disturbing and unsettling their senses. They walked quickly through a space where gravity clutched, released and attacked from all directions. A green light shone in the distance, darted to their right, then steadied and opened into a portal. Jim led them through.

They emerged into a cool, dim space lit by the shimmering green of the portal. Tiny stone carvings ringed the portal, repeating figures painted on the walls of the space. Ancient, yet still vibrant, the paintings were Mayan.

“A temple.” Gilda, the chief demonologist, gazed around, enthralled.

“A cellar,” Jim corrected. “A bunch of colonizing Spanish monks, I can’t remember the order, built their monastery over the portal, claiming it. Upstairs. It’s a house, now. The main plaza is only one street away. If you run…”

Steve was already at the top of the stairs. Fay and Chad were at his heels. Shawn stayed beside Gina, matching pace.

“I don’t need a baby-sitter,” she said, borrowing Jim’s scathing phrase. She could look after herself.

“I’m sticking by you because you know more than anyone,” he said.

She stumbled on a step.

He caught her arm, lifting her up and on without pause. “You know more about what Lewis can do with his new power. And maybe, you’ll be the one he contacts.”

“I don’t think so.” They ran along the shadowy hallway of a private house and out the front door as a single stream of fast-moving humanity. There they hit a milling crowd of panicking civilians and two policeman shouting in a doomed attempt to instill some sanity in the mob.

Mob or not, people hurried aside for the group of mages and Steve.

Gunfire cut the air.

Lewis was grateful for Sven. Not that the older guardian was present, but that he’d insisted all guardians study mundane weaponry. As a result, Lewis could defuse a simple bomb, and the explosives strapped to the children were simple.

A touch of his translocating power, flicking it out in a needle-like action, detached the detonators on all four children. The children and everyone around them wouldn’t know, but death was no longer imminent.

In that breathing space, Lewis translocated to behind the first of the four men watching from hiding. The man hadn’t even registered Lewis’s presence when Lewis jabbed under his jaw. Five quick, ruthless jabs to certain pressure points and the man collapsed unconscious. He’d wake to a world of pain, his limbs unable to obey him for hours.

Two minutes later and the men were all crumpled, their guns and other technology useless to them. Let the Mexican police find them. The assumption would be that foreign secret service operatives had acted to disable the terrorists. The assumption wouldn’t be far wrong.

The immediate danger had eased, but there was still the threat of injuries as people stampeded out of the square. However, inhabitants of the buildings framing the square seemed to be dealing with that. Doors opened everywhere, ushering children and their accompanying adults to safety. Others ran down narrow streets. Only up one street, the traffic was coming the other way.

Fay and Steve—and Gina’s red hair glowing like a beacon. Other mages surrounded them.

A sense of hope, of having allies, lifted Lewis’s mood.

He translocated into the shadows of the street through which the group had entered. “I’ve disabled the detonators on the bombs strapped to the children. The terrorists behind this are unconscious.”

Gina spun around and hugged him. Everyone else was more disciplined. Lewis ignored discipline and returned Gina’s embrace, but he remained watchful.

Steve spoke to someone on his phone. “Ric. A jaguar-were in the local SWAT team,” he said in explanation when he’d passed on Lewis’s message. “It doesn’t look like you need us.”

Three men ran down the street, past them, but only the one in the lead seemed to see them.

“That’s Ric,” Steve said. Which explained things. One of the mages had had the sense to cast a look-away spell to hide the group’s presence. Since magic didn’t work on weres, the jaguar-were had seen them, anyway.

“I appreciate your support,” Lewis said. “But explanations of how you came to be here have to wait.” He was curious, but the clock was ticking. As bad as this situation was, likely it was a distraction or the spark for something worse. He had to go. This had to end, now. “I know who, or what, the fifth member of the Group of 5 is. It’s a demon.”

Gina looked up at him with wide eyes. “You know?”

“Where is it?” Fay demanded.

Lewis looked across the main square of Mérida where the four children were in floods of relieved tears as the SWAT team divested them of the bombs and paramedics stood by to assist them. The paper flowers had been scattered and trampled into a jumble. But the flowers were only a symbol of how much worse things could be.

“The demon is here,” Lewis said. “It never left Mérida.”