Island of Time, page 22
‘I’ve been wondering about that as well.’ Jackson pulled down a fresh cup from the shelf and poured a coffee for Krys. He refilled his own and then pulled his chair away from the table. Making room between them for all the questions. ‘For the Peerless to make that full-on attack, they had to be preparing long before we even knew we were going.’
‘So we’re assuming the attack had nothing to do with us?’
‘That doesn’t work either. It’s too coincidental. Field officers hate coincidences. It implies motives and actions we’re not taking into consideration.’
She frowned as she typed. ‘Like what?’
‘I have no idea. But we need to keep an open mind. We can’t become so focused on one construct that we lose sight of other possibilities. For example, Luca assumes Riyanna is behind it all. What if he’s wrong? What if Bernard is the real enemy?’
Krys pondered that a long moment, then resumed typing. Jackson checked the clock and decided, ‘I’m going for a quick shower.’
As he was finishing, she called from the bottom of the stairs, ‘You need to hear this.’
Jackson slipped on jeans and a sweatshirt, and went barefoot back downstairs. As he entered the kitchen, Krys said, ‘I decided to check with our Sardinian friends before signing off on the report. Asila wasn’t available. Carule’s on the line.’ She lifted the phone and said, ‘Jackson’s here now. I’m putting you on speaker.’
Carule asked, ‘Is this phone secure?’
‘Luca set up wards,’ Krys replied.
‘What do you hear about the attack on the Institute?’
Krys looked a question at him. Jackson pointed at her. Telling her to handle this. Krys replied, ‘The news is quiet. I’ve just checked online. There are some unconfirmed reports. A couple of websites said they had videos of an attack, but I couldn’t download them.’
‘They are being magically erased,’ Carule said. ‘We have heard the same from allies around the globe. The Institute has been completely repaired. It looks as though nothing ever happened. The police have been ordered not to pursue inquiries. We lost twenty-nine Acolytes, eleven Talents, four Adepts, and three Directors. They have officially been declared victims of a terrible disease.’
Krys asked, ‘Are you safe?’
‘For the moment. Our opponents are so busy building this elaborate lie they have no time to bother about us. Asile thinks they have counted us among the dead. I hope she’s right.’ Carule paused, then added, ‘We will soon need money.’
Jackson said, ‘You heard Luca. Whatever you need. Can I tell him what it’s for?’
‘The Sardinian Institute is a boiling hive of discontent. More disaffected students are leaving every day. A few senior Talents as well. We need a safe haven large enough to take them all. We’ve located a farmhouse in the Corsican highlands, much land, good water. Asila has gone to check it out.’
Ten minutes later, Krys was still typing. She felt his gaze and said, ‘Almost done.’
‘Luca’s late. That’s never happened. The man has an inherent Swiss respect for time.’
‘So call.’
‘I have. Twice. He doesn’t answer.’ Jackson felt a faint crawling sensation of unease. ‘Another first.’
Jackson walked through the front rooms, checking the windows. The forecourt was empty. The day was beautiful, the sunlit waters sparkled, the mountains rose in silent majesty. The thick glass reduced the highway traffic to a gentle hum.
He decided to give Luca another five minutes, then head over and make sure everything was OK. No matter how morose the guy might have been, Jackson could not imagine he would renege on an appointment. He re-entered the kitchen and said, ‘Luca might have given us a crucial piece of the puzzle. The resting place for the Ancients’ scrolls and artifacts.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that.’ Krys revealed the ability to type and talk, something that Jackson had never managed. ‘Like the caverns where we found our treasures.’
Jackson started to remind them both that the treasures were not theirs, legally or otherwise. But he merely said, ‘Maybe Bernard Bouchon discovered the location of the scrolls’ resting place.’
Krys stopped typing and looked at him. ‘Something you said that first day, when you walked me into the downstairs office. You said Luca read from scrolls that weren’t there.’
‘He just read the one scroll on top. The other two were underneath.’
‘Right. Three scrolls that had already gone back to their resting place. He was reading just the residue.’ She shook her head. ‘I wish I could have seen that.’
Jackson started to say this was behind them and they needed to focus on the scrolls’ location now. Then the idea hit him, strong as a slap to his face. Bam.
Jackson hurried from the kitchen and was midway across the front foyer when Krys called, ‘Wait!’
He stood there, poised like a hunting cat ready to pounce. Knowing the whole case was about to blow wide open. He was not halted by Krys’s request, but rather the fact that he was still missing that one element to bring it all together. He needed, he needed …
Krys rushed up and said, ‘I’m your partner. Tell me what you’re thinking.’
Jackson forced his mind to slow down enough to frame the words. ‘The obelisk.’
‘Right. So?’
‘Bernard Bouchon did not erect the obelisk. We know this how? Because if he had—’
‘Of course,’ she said.
‘It would have vanished with everything else of his.’
She opened the front door. ‘It was there all the time.’
Jackson said, ‘And something more.’
‘What?’
‘It remains as a conduit for magic.’ Jackson recalled climbing up there for the stroke of midnight and watching a new reality unfurl, one only visible while he gripped the black stone. ‘Luca said an obelisk like that is mentioned in all the accounts he’s read of the island’s appearance. But no one knows for certain why.’
She gave him a minute, then pleaded, ‘Talk it out, let me help.’
‘The same is true for the desk. Luca said it was probably carved from rock the house stands on. I’m thinking for the safe as well.’ Jackson described observing the ring of fire rimming the safe while Luca had read the scrolls. ‘Luca ordered me to ignore it. As far as he was concerned, nothing mattered but the scrolls.’
‘You think he was wrong.’
‘What I think …’ A growing unease tightened his gut. Jackson did not mind the pressure. It amplified the sense that the case was reaching the juncture when the swirling events coalesced into a logical pattern. He reached for his phone.
Krys asked, ‘Who are you calling?’
‘Luca. If he doesn’t answer, I’m heading over there.’
‘Right.’ She opened the front door and stepped outside. ‘I want to take another look at the fountain.’
Jackson hit the connection and was put straight through to voicemail. Luca’s message was one word long, ‘Speak.’
He started to say he was driving over. Then a shadow crossed the front windows. Swift as a bird, but large enough to blot out the sun from an entire room.
Then Krys screamed.
FIFTY-ONE
The instant Jackson bulleted out of the front door, Krys shredded the blue-sky day with her second scream.
‘That’s right, my lovely.’ The woman’s voice was slightly distorted, as if it was being played through a faulty loudspeaker system. ‘Tell Luca it’s time to come out and play.’
Jackson made it to the first step before a second attacker swatted him to the gravel. The force was strong enough to rattle his brain. The massive weight landed on his chest and pinned him to the rocks.
The gargoyle with Riyanna’s voice snarled, ‘Where is Luca?’
Jackson was having difficulty getting air into his lungs. The weight shifted slightly, and he heard the gravel rustle, as though a heavy load was being maneuvered. He was clenched in what felt like a fist of branding irons. He could feel his clothes smolder as he was hefted aloft. He gasped, ‘Not here.’
Riyanna held Krys pinned with one set of talons as she lifted her head and howled. Jackson felt the visceral screech in his bones.
He willed his wand to appear. Nothing happened. His struggles only caused the gargoyle holding him to tighten its grip. Jackson watched Krys struggle and fail to light her ring. ‘Let her go!’
There was no real body to the gargoyle, not in the sense of blood and flesh. Jackson faced an image forged from pure energetic potency. He smelled his skin begin to blister. He had never felt so helpless.
Riyanna’s shape showed hard human traces embedded into perilous fury. She remained poised like a bird of prey over Krys. Riyanna looked from Jackson to her captive and back again, savoring their vulnerability. Then said, ‘I want you to deliver a message to Luca.’
Jackson watched as one of her talons grew into a curved red blade as long as his arm. He realized what she intended and did his best to shout, ‘No!’
‘Tell Luca this is the fate that awaits—’
A third gargoyle leaped through the front gates and swiped Riyanna with enough force to send her tumbling. ‘Tell him yourself.’
FIFTY-TWO
Everything about Luca was an astonishment.
The gargoyle holding Jackson flung him aside, a casual gesture that sent him flying across the forecourt. Jackson hit and rolled and came up in one continuous motion, not wanting to take his eyes off the unfolding events.
This newly arrived gargoyle was definitely Luca. And yet the man had changed. The difference went far beyond how he wore an electric skin and a monster’s form.
Luca’s gargoyle had eyes.
Gone was the reticent blind man best suited for the back row.
In his place stood a beast with yellow lightning strips over his back and shoulders. Luca leaped at the gargoyle that had pinned Jackson and smashed him back through the house’s front portal. The creature took out the door, the frame, and the two side windows.
Luca’s head reappeared in the demolished entryway. He said, ‘Run.’
Riyanna shrieked her war cry, gathered her limbs beneath her, and pounced. Luca caught her, flipped her high overhead, and then he roared.
Luca’s cry carried a blast of force that blew Riyanna higher still. She crashed into the wall bordering the property and took out a fifteen-foot segment. Luca tracked her with a snarling leap of his own. The gargoyle who had gripped Jackson emerged from the house and raced after them.
Krys clutched her chest with one hand and fumbled for a grip on the gravel with the other. Jackson lifted her and scrambled for the house. As he passed through the mawing gap where his front door had stood, he heard Riyanna shriek, ‘Sisters! To me!’
But there was no safety inside the sunlit house. The foyer was filled with rubble from the creatures’ impact. They picked their way carefully towards the stairs. Jackson could hear Krys grunt softly from the pain of breathing and assumed she had several cracked ribs.
‘Cellar,’ he said.
There was an almighty crump from overhead, strong enough to cause the home’s steel-and-concrete foundations to shake. Then a second blow struck the roof. Actually, Jackson decided, it was four together, but so close they felt and sounded like a single elongated blast. Ba-ba-ba-BAM.
All the glass walls on the main floor shattered.
The impact sent Jackson tumbling. Krys managed to stay partly upright by gripping the stair railing, though the motion caused her to gasp with pain.
Jackson regained his feet, looped Krys’s free arm around his shoulders, and together they stumbled down the steps. More blasts struck the roof, the garage, and then directly in front of the house. The last sight Jackson had of the main floor before rounding the corner was of two gargoyles slamming into what was left of his front portico, tearing away the entire wall. Overhead, they could hear the upstairs exploding. A cloud of dust powered down the steps after them.
They were coughing and limping as they struggled across the downstairs landing, through the office, and into the vault. Jackson eased Krys to the carpeted floor, coughed against the dust, and asked, ‘Can you try your ring?’
She remained crouched on her knees, coughing feebly and then gasping against the pain, her right arm wrapped around her chest. Streaks of burn marks creased her from neck to waist.
Jackson heard a series of shrieks from out front and knew Luca faced an entire army of gargoyles. Jackson’s gun and Taser were both upstairs. If there was any upstairs left. The vault was filled with dust and the rending screech of his house being torn apart.
Then Jackson spotted the blade.
He had placed Asila’s resolza on the top shelf across from the artifacts. He brought down the knife, pulled off the sheath.
He had to try.
Krys coughed, then managed, ‘Jackson …’
Jackson drew out his wand. ‘Luca needs me.’
He touched the wand to the blade.
FIFTY-THREE
Luca’s wards worked well enough to keep the house’s central pillar intact. The stairs were a jumble of concrete, knotted together by twisted steel and what was left of the carpet. Overhead, the house groaned in mortal agony as it kept taking direct hits. But Jackson couldn’t worry about that now.
As he passed through the remnants of his front foyer, he caught sight of his reflection in what was left of a tall mirror. He glimpsed a warrior of old, dressed in gleaming silver armor. He held a long, curved sword of blue fire in a two-handed grip. His head was encased in a helmet encircled by what might have been a golden ringlet. Jackson’s mind flashed back to his boyhood dream of fighting the Barbary pirates and their evil mages. Then he was out of the door and into the battle.
Luca was almost lost beneath a furious swarm of gargoyles. He and Jackson exchanged a single look, then Luca flashed yellow fire that seared through the two gargoyles crouching to the left of the demolished front stairs. The remaining foes gave a unified howl of anguish as the pair disintegrated into crimson dust.
Jackson launched himself into the fray. He knew he was yelling, but he could hear nothing so clearly as the blood singing through his veins. He sliced the sword at claws reaching toward him and took the limb off cleanly with one stroke. He swung the blade in wild arcs, taking another two creatures with the next blow, a third, a fourth. On and on he powered into the mob with Luca at its center.
Riyanna clawed her way to the top of the band fighting Luca. She shrieked at her enemy, and one talon grew to the length of a venom-laced spear. She shrilled again as she rammed the blade through Luca’s hip.
Luca howled in pain, then swiped and took Riyanna’s talon off a hand’s breadth from her claw. But the spear remained embedded in his flesh.
Jackson used two of the gargoyles as a launching pad and leaped on to Riyanna’s back. She was busy growing another talon, or else she would have eliminated Jackson in the instant he required to gain his balance. When she did turn to him, however, it was too late.
He yelled as he swept the blade in a vicious arc and took her head in one stroke.
Riyanna turned to crimson dust. Jackson tumbled and righted himself and took another gargoyle off at the knees.
But there were so many.
An electric red army howled from the roof of his demolished home. Each blow connected, and each wound carried the force to eradicate another beast. Yet there were more. Always more.
Jackson felt himself take a hit. A talon managed to pierce between the juncture where his neck met his shoulder. He chopped off the claw and drew the talon from his flesh. Jackson felt no pain. But he could feel his blood draining down warm and wet inside his armor.
The entire forecourt was ankle-deep in silt the color of drifting rust. And still they came. Jackson knew Luca fought bravely. Every flash of yellow fire took out more of the beasts. But the two of them could not vanquish an entire army.
Gradually, Jackson felt his strength begin to ebb with the blood that now dripped between the armor plates and stained the rust at his feet. Then he discovered he was on his knees.
How he had arrived there, he had no idea. Only that his sword had become impossibly heavy. It lay there in the dust before his face, and yet he could not grip the haft and raise it. Not even when a new gargoyle launched itself in for the kill.
Bernard Bouchon’s gargoyle was a head taller than the others and held an electric parody of the man’s original face. He lumbered across the forecourt, shoving aside the last remaining fiends. Aiming for Luca.
Jackson’s friend and ally knelt in the dust, chest heaving, and watched helplessly as Bernard strode forward. ‘We meet at last.’
Jackson willed himself to rise. Join battle with their nemesis. But his body refused to obey.
‘This one is mine.’ Bernard’s elongated talons readied for the kill.
Then a new scream froze the entire battle. A sweet sound, despite its harsh note. Jackson managed to lift his head. Krys stood with her ring-hand stretched overhead while the other gripped her ribs. The light flowed from her ring and surrounded her entire being in a shimmering golden shield.
Krys did not try to aim her force. Instead, she stabbed the sky.
All around Jackson, the air caught fire.
That was how it seemed to him, as though the only safe havens were the tiny spot where he knelt and the one to his left where Luca sprawled. Everywhere else became encased in flames.
Shrieks and wails rose all around him, but Jackson remained untouched. The destruction carried a whirlwind force, a raging tumult that spun all about the three of them.
Then it was over.
When Krys released her flame, there was nothing left save drifting clouds of pale red ash.
Jackson felt his body grow so heavy that all he could do was accept the earth’s embrace. His last images came together in a confused muddle – Luca slumped in human form just beyond the reach of his left hand, Krys stumbling towards Jackson and calling his name, and police sirens on swift approach.
