The Last American Wizard (34 page)

Steve jumped as a car horn blared right behind him. When his heart resumed beating, he turned to see that it was Hans–his armor covered in an inch-thick layer of gray-green ooze. Obviously, a hundred feet of water and a river bottom composed of raw sewage from DC’s archaic sewer system weren’t enough to stop this vehicle. Steve decided that Hans could be from Germany if he wanted–he’d earned
it.

The driver side door opened and Ace got out. Steve felt an enormous smile blossom on his face and he took a quick step in
her direction. A single glare from the SEAL was enough to stop him cold as he fought to bring his face back to a carefully neutral expression. He said casually, “Hey, Ace. You
OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, I’m not asking for your life story, but come on, a few more details,” Steve said. “The last time I saw you, you were on a ballistic trajectory over Mason’s Island. You’re not wet so you didn’t land in the river. What
happened?”

“Oh, I trained with the SAS in the tree-jumping techniques they used in the Malaysian campaign. They would go in low without parachutes and depend on tree limbs to slow their fall. I
did
a
midair
flip
so
that
I’d
hit
the
branches
with
my
back
and, when I’d slowed enough, grabbed a pine tree. Then it was a simple abseil with the coil of paracord on my key chain. I ran into Hans as he was coming up the bank near the parking lot.” She made a dismissive gesture. “Has anyone got a real idea? We’ve done all
the damage we can to that guy. I swear, if we ground him to pebbles, they’d throw themselves at the
building.”

Steve put the cell phone back on his belt and tried to sum up the situation. “The Knight, the Queen, and the Prince of Swords
are in there now, but I told them to concentrate on getting people out since we can’t seem to stop the son of a bitch. The rest of us
are right
here.”

“OK, we’re not going to win this, but I’ll be damned if we lose a couple of thousand people and not try everything.” Ace thought for a second. “As soon as we see Lincoln through that lobby door, we form up and hit
him.”

“I was a pretty bad general, but even I can tell that we’re simply not going to be enough,” Albert Pike said. “Is this to be a Forlorn Hope,
then?”

“Possibly.” Ace scowled. “Hell, probably. Frankly, I’d prefer to die fighting than have to live with the knowledge that I walked away.”

She turned to look at the building and said in a low voice, “No one else has to
come.”

A moment passed in silence–except for the sounds of
smashing inside the building. Suddenly, the lobby door burst open, the statue’s broad shoulders broke through the windows on the second floor, and what was left of Daniel Chester French’s magnificent creation stumbled out onto the sidewalk. Any resemblance to the former president had disappeared–it looked more like an enormous Ken doll that had been stolen and tortured by a younger
brother.

Nevertheless, it was still standing and was apparently quite ready to take down another building. Behind him, the groans of the bending girders were rising in pitch and an increasing number of loud bangs signaled where the abused supports shattered under the strain.

Ace screamed, “You motherless son of a
bitch!”

Pike shouted, “Fraternity forever!” in his bell-like
basso.

Carlos howled wordlessly, and they all raced across the
street.

Steve thought for a moment and then said in an ordinary voice, “Oh, what the hell.” He walked after the
others.

“Fool!
Fool!”

Steve looked to his left and saw Hamilton Jones, the young avatar of the Hanged Man, shouting as he raced towards him. Steve slowed and turned to listen.

“Phone,” Jones was shouting. “Get the
phone.”

Steve was irritated. There was no one he wanted to talk to at this point–not even Barnaby. The truth was that he didn’t want
to be found texting while
dying.

“The phone!” Jones screamed with his hands making a megaphone in front of his mouth.
“ATFC.”

Steve furiously wrenched the smartphone out of its belt
clip with every intention of hurling it at Jones. At the last
minute, he decided to answer it and brought it up to his
ear.

Nothing
happened.

He brought the cell phone down and looked at the screen. It was black. There was no
picture,
no
indication
of
an incoming message. No blinking. No vibrations. No silly
music.

He half turned to face The Hanged Man, which put the rear of the phone pointing directly at the giant statue. He watched as Hamilton Jones stopped, looked around–first in curiosity and then in increasing terror–then turned and ran off in the direction of Key Bridge.

He realized that the Hanged Man had abandoned the young man in its usual abrupt fashion. “Well, can’t expect any more helpful hints from him tonight,” he thought. “But if the Hanged Man abandoned ship, wouldn’t it be because he’d completed his message?”

He stood in the middle of the street and contemplated Send Money. “Hey,” he yelled. “You awake in
there?”

A cartoon of a window shade snapping down behind an old wooden door flickered to life on the screen and then a hand appeared with a “CLOSED” sign, hung it on the door, and
slammed it shut. The sign swung back and forth a few times and then the whole scene faded to
black.

“Wait a minute,” Steve said aloud. “You’ve got that damn light! The super-special magical searchlight with all the Yuds in it! You remember all those damn Yuds. Let’s crank ’em up and see what they do to tall, pale, and homicidal over
there!”

The screen remained black. It vibrated very softly. Tom had a strange feeling that the young Chinese ghost was simply trembling in fear. He held the phone to his ear and thought he could make out the sound of weeping over the chaos all around him.

“What would make the kind of kid who would jump into suicide nets for fun so scared?” He
wondered.

He tapped the screen and tried to bring up the flashlight icon, but the image only flickered briefly and went back to black.

Still thinking, he turned to face the melee at the front door.
The statue was straining and writhing like Frankenstein’s monster in the black-and-white version, batting blindly at his attackers. Ace was in constant motion as she pulled out one deadly weapon after another and sent them whipping into the crater where the beam had hit. Carlos and Albert Pike were each hammering on a separate ankle, but Steve could see that the damage they were inflicting was too little, too
late.

He
made
a
decision,
stepped
forward,
and
screamed,
“Stop. Stop
fighting!”

Ace turned to him with surprise and a bit of contempt on her face.

The contempt
hurt.

He continued. “There’s no freaking use fighting it. Concentrate on getting the people out before the damn thing goes down!”

Ace said something he couldn’t hear, but her gesture to the statue made her meaning
clear.

“I’ll deal with it,” Steve shouted. “Get everyone out!” Ace turned to Carlos and General Pike, shouted some quick orders, and they disappeared into the wreckage of the
building.

“Yeah, I’ll deal with it,” Steve said to himself. “Just look for me on the bottom of one of his
shoes.”

For a couple of minutes, Steve just stood there staring at the white line in the street, developing and discarding ideas one after another.

He realized that even though he hadn’t had much time to learn how to use his Power, a great part of what he could have learned, he’d blocked with his relentless
cynicism.

It was just so damn hard to believe that he was a magician. Even harder to admit he was the most powerful magician in
town.

He shook the tension out of his shoulders and looked up at the eidolon. It was time to put up or shut up. What was it that Jones had
said?

“Remember, the light in the darkness isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.”

The old software joke. Well, it made sense, from the
beginning of this little adventure, everyone had been telling him that Send Money’s LED light was their biggest weapon. The ghost had always shown he had courage–why was he hiding now? What was he so afraid
of?

“Wait a second,” Steve thought. “That wasn’t exactly what the Hanged Man said. I made a joke about his British slang. What did he
say?”

“Remember the light in the darkness isn’t a bug, it’s a bloody feature.”

Steve looked at what was left of Lincoln’s statue as it headed for the second building. The lights in the windows showed that there were people still working in the upper floors. There would be more
deaths.

More blood for the damn Illuminati. “A bloody
feature.”

It wasn’t British slang. It was the
answer.

Blood
magic.

Every time he’d done blood magic before, it was with his own blood. No wonder Send Money was so afraid. Steve was going to drench him in the blood of innocents…make him an unwilling partner in
abomination.

He looked at the eidolon again. There wasn’t much time
left.

He held up the cell phone and whispered, “I’m sorry, little buddy.”

He concentrated on the Fool. This time, the card that appeared in his mind was covered in gold leaf and the Fool was dressed in clothing of all colors with a hat that stood up in peaks with bells at the ends–he looked like a cartoon of a classic King’s
Joker.

He
Studied
the card and saw that the figure had his hands covering his
eyes.

He
Understood
that this Fool could only see Darkness. He
had cut himself off from the daylight and beauty of the world around
him.

He sank deeper into the darkness and felt it smear and tarnish something deep inside. He
Realized
that it was his soul, and although it was only a bit smudged, he could see how quickly it was
blackening.

He could feel his emotions hardening, things like music, joy, and beauty seeming to draw away from him in
revulsion.

Well, if the cost of defeating a monster was to become a monster, that’s what it was. Steve accepted the shadow inside himself and reached out into the smashed building in front of
him.

He began to find the dead as soon as his perceptions crossed the threshold–security guards smashed to the floor, a young
woman screaming as she was crushed in an slowly-collapsing elevator,
two
twisted
bodies
of
men
with
sledgehammers
in
their hands–custodians who had tried to stop the statue, only to be kicked
aside.

Steve
Pulled
at them,
Called
on their blood and–no matter how hard he wanted to reject the fact–
Demanded
their souls. Slowly, agonizingly, the remnants of people–the brave and the terrified, the young and the old–began to move toward
him.

He continued to search until he had what seemed to be bright cords connecting him to dozens of bodies; until he simply couldn’t bear finding another crushed scrap of a person who’d awoken to the sun this morning with no expectation of how dark it would be by
evening.

Steve kept one hand firmly in place over his eyes. He knew somehow that this had to be done in darkness; it was a lonely ritual where he pulled all the pain inside, and held it until he felt his skin would burst with the
pressure.

Then he began to braid all the love, the loss, the hopes, the bravery, and the simple joys of a day like any other. The pain, fear, and sorrow he kept to himself, forcing it down until it felt like a thousand knives ripping into the deepest part of
him.

A golden string began to emerge from his chest. Yes, damn it, it was coming from his heart. He’d have bet anything that he didn’t have a heart, at least not in the sense of an emotional and spiritual center.

Man, that pissed him
off.

Steve forced himself to
Believe
in a soul and a heart and the essence of human virtue, putting all his doubts and cynicism aside. Taking the thread, he held it and focused into it all the raw power of innocent blood that he could feel tingling through his body.