The Pretender (The Soren Chase Series Book 2) (31 page)

Rakev held the knife in the air and then drew it across his hand, surprising the crowd as he sliced into his palm.

He started to mutter in a language long forgotten by the race of men. As he did so, the knife in his hand started to glow a deep blue, the color of the bottom of the ocean. He propped the knife on the conductor’s podium so the crowd could see it.

“Feel free to panic and call your loved ones,” Rakev said to them. “For most of you, these are your last, few, miserable moments of life. But look on the bright side—you were pretty much just wasting time here anyway.”

He turned back to the musicians, still huddled behind him.

“Oh, and you guys, strike up the band,” he said. “I’ve got an urge to hear some Quiet Riot. Come on, feel the noise, boys and girls. It’s time to get wild, wild, wild.”

Soren stepped over the body of a dead cop and nearly slipped in the blood.

The stairway to the concert hall was littered with corpses, but they hadn’t been there long. Around them, the fire alarm was blaring and other parts of the Kennedy Center were being evacuated. Soren could hear sirens outside drawing closer. From the sound of it, the entire DC police force was now on its way.

There was no stream of people coming out of the concert hall, which meant that Rakev had already taken control. Soren looked over at Friday, who was leaning over one of the police officers. She had taken the form of a female EMT shortly after they’d brought Alex into the hospital. Unfortunately, that meant she was pausing to check the status of the fallen cops.

“Friday,” Soren said. “They’re dead. We need to get in there.”

Friday reluctantly pulled herself away and stood next to Soren.

“Police will swarm this area with everything they’ve got in about thirty seconds,” Soren said. “Any ideas?”

“We’re outnumbered,” she replied. “Best tactic is to trim the numbers as far as we can before somebody notices.” She turned, and gave Soren a fierce smile. “We hit them sideways. That’s the doppelgänger way.”

Soren nodded. Infiltration and execution. It was what pretenders were made for.

“We should split up,” Soren said. “We make our way to Rakev, wherever he is. But Friday? If you get there first, he’s fast. From what Glen told me, he’s some kind of demon made of wind or smoke. I don’t know how to kill him.”

“I do,” she replied. “Get the gun he’s carrying. It will kill anything.”

“You sure?”

“Based on everything I’ve heard.”

“Okay,” Soren said. “You start at the top; I’ll start at the bottom.”

She nodded and headed up the stairs. Soren walked toward the doors in front of him.

“Soren?” Friday called to him, and he turned toward her. “Remember what I taught you. Your emotions can enhance your powers. Pull from the strongest memories and feelings.”

“You could have just said, ‘Remember your training. Save you it can.’”

“You told me you didn’t know any pop culture,” Friday said.

“Doctor Cortez loves
The Empire Strikes Back
.”

Friday disappeared up the stairs to the upper tiers, and Soren walked to one of the main doors on the right. The ushers were all missing, likely herded into the concert hall by Rakev’s men.

Soren walked up to the door, and paused to take a deep breath. Looking down, he adjusted his clothes, making them black tie so he’d blend in as much as possible. He reluctantly made his sunglasses vanish. He was Soren again, a trick that seemed easier to pull off each time he did it. He’d barely vanished inside Doctor Cortez, but was more or less conscious of himself the whole time. He was as ready as he was going to get.

He pulled on the door slightly, resisting the temptation to yank it open and storm in. The direct approach had gotten him nowhere the last time he faced Rakev; it was time to try something else.

But the door was barred. When Soren tried to pull on it, it gave somewhat, but there was clearly some kind of bar placed through the handles, preventing them from opening.

He looked down at the bottom of the door and wished he could evaporate underneath it. Friday had said such a thing was theoretically possible, but suggested that only the greatest of the pretenders, the pretentiously named Magnus, had been able to do it. And Falk had killed him. Yet another costly decision that Soren could add to the list.

He couldn’t break open the door without revealing an incursion. Deception. The solution was deception, not brute force. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

Looking at the door, he thought of another idea and knocked softly on it. He pulled on the doors in an obvious fashion so the guard would know somebody was there.

“The show is closed,” a voice came back, the guard mistaking him for a concert patron trying to sneak in.

“It’s me, ya fookin eejit,” Soren said, doing his best impression of an Irish accent. “Let me in before the cops get here.”

Soren was helped by the fact that the guard couldn’t see him.

“The boss said not to let anyone in,” the guard said, his voice uncertain.

“The boss didn’t mean me, ya fooker,” Soren said. “Let me in now or I’ll tell the boss to draw and quarter ya.”

Rakev clearly hadn’t picked guards for their brains. Soren heard the sound of something being slid out from the doors, and crouched outside. When it opened a hair, he reached inside and up. If it was a stoneskin or shirken, Soren would have had to fight it to get in. But it was fortunately one of Rakev’s human employees. Soren aimed directly for the guard’s face. He connected immediately, feeling his hand melt into the guard’s mouth before he could scream a warning.

Soren had no trouble in this man’s mind palace. He found the man at the end of a mental construct of a pier. He knocked him into the water, grabbing the fishing pole from his hands. That was all it took before he accessed the man’s memories.

His name was Adam Hume and he’d worked for Rakev for the past three years. Soren waited for his body to take Adam’s form, the skin bubbling up and bursting all over him. He didn’t come close to passing out this time, but felt only a slight headache that passed quickly.

Soren withdrew his hand from the real Adam and opened the door the rest of the way, slipping inside. The actual Adam Hume collapsed to the ground, and Soren stepped over him. He looked up to see if anybody noticed his entrance, but all eyes were on the front of the stage, as Rakev was talking to a scared young woman standing by his side. Soren quickly dragged Adam’s body behind the seats, stuffing him as far into the shadows as he could.

The concert hall was a long, narrow space, sloping gradually to the front stage, which was set up for an orchestra and dominated in back by a row of massive organ pipes. It had three main seating areas and four walking aisles, two for the center row of seats and another two on the far left and right. Because the focus was on acoustics rather than views, there were even two rows of seats on the left and right walls that faced toward the center of the room. Soren plucked the name for these, Parterre Boxes, from Adam’s memory, wondering why he would know such a thing.

Above them were three large balconies stacked on top of one another that wrapped around the edges of the room all the way to the stage, meaning the concert hall was four stories high.

Soren had walked in the back, right doorway, one of two main double-door entrances. But there were also exits all along either side of the left and right walls, interrupting the Parterre Boxes. It was a hard space to secure, but Rakev had made it happen. By each door was either a man holding a gun or a creature standing guard. He could see the same was true on the upper balconies. There were monsters also periodically standing ahead in the aisles. Soren thought the presence of supernatural creatures should have attracted more attention, but everyone was watching the stage, even most of Rakev’s henchman.

Rakev stood like a showman in front of the room, with three dead bodies at his feet. The woman on stage with him kept glancing at them. She was having trouble looking away. Rakev held a microphone to her lips in one hand, and a sharp, serrated dagger in the other.

“What’s your name?” Rakev asked, sounding to Soren like a game show host.

“Betty,” the woman stammered. “Betty Jakes.”

Rakev beamed at the crowd.

“And where are you from, Betty?” Rakev asked, his voice coaxing, almost gentle. Soren noticed he didn’t hold the microphone to his lips, but his voice carried throughout the hall.

“Fredericksburg,” she said.

“Okay, we’re going to give it a go here,” Rakev said, smiling wide at the crowd before him. “Strike up the next selection, boys. Let’s give Betty ten seconds.”

The band behind Rakev started playing a song, but Soren could barely focus on it. He noticed the knife was glowing a strange, blue color. It was a dark blue, but looking at it made Soren nauseous. There was something wrong with the light that pulsed from the knife.

Rakev gestured abruptly with his hand, and the music cut off. He put the microphone to Betty’s lips.

“Now, Betty, can you name that tune?” Rakev said.

Betty look terrified and confused. She whispered something, but Soren couldn’t make it out.

“What’s that, Betty?” Rakev asked. “You don’t know?”

He put the microphone closer to her lips.

“Please don’t kill me,” she said, and started sobbing.

But Rakev kept right on grinning.

“How about I give you a hint?” he said. “It made it all the way to number twenty-one on
Billboard
’s singles chart in 1984. It was this band’s only top forty hit. Can you play it again, boys?”

The musicians looked a mix of terrified and outraged, but they struck up the song again another ten seconds before Rakev gestured with the knife to cut them off.

“Care to take a guess, Betty?” Rakev asked.

But Betty just kept crying and shaking her head.

“Oh I’m sorry, but it was ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ by Twisted Sister,” he said. “If that’s your best, Betty, your best won’t do.”

Rakev abruptly jammed the knife into Betty’s throat. She didn’t even have a chance to scream, but just fell to her knees as the crowd inside the Kennedy Center started screaming. Rakev pulled the knife out. The blue light emanating from it glowed noticeably brighter. Rakev smiled at the crowd.

“What? That was an easy one,” he said. “Come on, people, get your heads in the game. Who’s next? Come on down! You’re the next contestant on
The Knife Is Hungry for Blood
.”

Soren felt anger pumping through his veins. He’d been strategizing, counting the enemy numbers, and assessing where to attack first. There’d been no way to help the woman onstage short of launching a full frontal assault, and that wouldn’t last long. Soren and Friday were badly outnumbered even if he discounted Rakev himself, and he doubted even the strongest of feelings could help him overcome that.

Rakev pointed into the first row of seats and beckoned a middle-aged man to the stage. When the man didn’t move, Rakev gestured with his hand and pulled the man toward him like he was yanking on a rope attached to him. But because of the memories he’d tapped into, Soren knew now it was wind. Rakev had created a funnel of air that sucked his victim toward him, just like he’d tossed Soren around in the warehouse.

“Uh oh, it’s magic,” Rakev said. “When I’m with you.”

Soren tore his eyes away. He crouched down to search Adam Hume’s body, finding his weapon, a small, concealable assault rifle that he’d been holding in case the crowds gave them trouble.

Soren at least knew the plan now. Rakev wanted everyone kept in their seats as long as possible. One of his men had orders to call in a bomb threat, and warn that he would blow up the entire theater if anyone tried to enter or exit the building. That explained why the rest of the Kennedy Center was already being evacuated when Soren arrived there.

Soren looked down the aisles and saw so many of Rakev’s men and creatures out there that he began to despair. The men were primarily the ones guarding the doors, while the monsters took up positions farther down the aisles. Soren couldn’t just stealthily creep around and take them out. Easily a dozen different henchmen would see it if he did. And he couldn’t call for help from Friday, either, who presumably had her hands full with the guards on the upper balconies. He had to come up with a better plan.

He considered the problem. Rakev’s strength lie partly in his ability to command unwavering loyalty from most of those who worked for him, with Lochlan a notable exception to this. The reason was simple—they were scared of Rakev. From Adam’s point of view, the boss had almost godlike powers. As a result, none of his employees dared to disobey his orders. And in that, Rakev’s strength was also his weakness, as Soren’s ability to fool Adam Hume had just proved.

Soren walked confidently to the left, finding a muscular human guard standing in front of the other main exit. He knew most of the names of Rakev’s men. “Tom,” Soren whispered. “There’s a problem outside. Lochlan wants us to get six guys together and take care of it. The stoneskins will watch the door.”

“I didn’t even see Lochlan,” Tom said uncertainly. He clearly didn’t know whether he was more likely to anger the boss by dropping his current mission or refusing to accept a different order.

“He’s outside, running interference for the boss. I didn’t even know he was fucking there until he started talking to me.”

Tom visibly relaxed at that explanation, so Soren pressed his advantage.

“Grab Hugh, Victor, and Sean over by the boxes and bring them out; I’ll get Mick and Peter,” he said.

“What about the doors? We can’t just leave them unguarded.”

“Does this crowd look like it’s going anywhere?” Soren asked. “Besides, Lochlan said he’d talk to the stoneskins.”

When the guard hesitated again, Soren pushed. “This is what Rakev wants, Tom.”

Invoking Rakev seemed to be the right strategy. Soren watched as he walked over to the Parterre boxes, approaching the men standing at the exits. Soren hurried toward the men on the right side of the concert hall, repeating the same story. They all accepted it with as little argument as Tom. Rakev had told them any mistakes would be severely dealt with, and nobody wanted to know exactly what that meant.