The Agency, Volume V, page 24
Nava climbed over the chair and joined them. A moment later, Ness appeared, out of breath and disheveled. “What the hell is going on?” the Director demanded.
Nava steered Mellis onto the bed and started checking her vitals. She looked up at Ness. “Rowan escaped.”
“What about the failsafes? Why didn’t the tech knock him out?”
One of the other Agents poked his head in from the outer chamber. “He knocked her out first,” the Agent said. “He overpowered the Healer before the doors were even shut, shoved the chair in, and then knocked Miss Nations unconscious before she could even hit the button. The monitors automatically sent up the call as soon as his signal disappeared.”
Ness turned to Beck. “Find him,” she ordered. “Get the Eyes, Ears, everyone—scan the whole building. Turn out every room and get this place locked down.”
Beck’s mind went on auto pilot, and she nodded once and then darted from the room, snapping her Ear in place and barking out orders to the network. The base doors were locked, outside security tripled and heavily armed. Local law enforcement was put on alert.
Even in the midst of doing her job, however, Beck was very well aware that they weren’t going to find Rowan until he wanted to be found, if ever. He was no fool, and he was ten times more powerful than before. If he could bust out of a holding cell, there was no way they could contain him if they caught him.
She didn’t especially care if he was gone. But he might hurt a lot of people, depending on how batshit he was now. Someone was going to have to bring him down if all else failed.
Beck paused halfway to the elevator, considering. There was only one Agent who could conceivably track Rowan through the building and who had a connection to him.
She pounded on Sara’s door for several minutes, but the Witch wasn’t there. “Give me SA-9’s location,” Beck said into her Ear.
[SA-9 is in her quarters,] was the reply.
“Shit. Get me a security override for this door!” Beck snapped out her authorization code and waited several seconds that felt like an eternity until the door beeped and swung open.
Beck shoved her way in, ready to beat down any rogue Elf who tried to get in her way, but the sight before her shocked her out of fight-mode.
Sara was tied to a chair, a rag stuffed in her mouth, unconscious. Beck ran to her and pulled the gag out, patting her face lightly. “Sara! Sara!”
The Witch blinked up at Beck, then gasped. “Oh my God. Rowan.”
“Was he here?”
Sara nodded miserably, eyes filling with tears. “He wanted to know where the Gate stone was. I told him I didn’t know. He was…I didn’t even recognize him, Beck. He said…he said he was going to track down the people who killed Jason, and that he could use the Stone in some kind of spell.”
Beck untied her, trying not to be shaken up by her distress, and helped her to her feet. “It’s okay, Sara. There’s a med team coming to check on you, and I’m going to find Rowan.”
Behind her, Beck heard an indrawn breath, and she turned to see Ardeth in the doorway. “What has happened?” he asked, coming to Sara’s side and putting his arms around her. “There is such chaos in the base.”
“Rowan escaped,” Beck informed him. “Keep an eye on her, please. There are medics on their way. I have to go.”
“Of course,” Ardeth replied, offended by the suggestion that he wouldn’t take care of Sara.
Beck left them just as the med team came thundering around the corner, and she tried to think of someplace the Elf would have gone. If he had gotten out before the lockdown, they were fucked, but that would be quite a feat—he’d had perhaps a minute and a half before all hell broke loose. Chances were he was hiding somewhere in the building. He wouldn’t have gone back to his quarters; too obvious, and there would have been armed guards there within minutes to ransack the place. There were a hundred places he could hide…
Her intuition nagged at her, and she thought back to the night he had tricked Sara into doing that ritual.
They’d been found out in the courtyard.
She all but sprinted to the closest outside door, one that opened out beside the labyrinth.
The heat of the summer night hit her like a humid wall of bricks, but she ignored it as her eyes focused on a flicker of light on the far side of the Blessing Tree.
“Rowan!” she yelled, wishing to God she had a gun. “Put your hands up and step away from the fire!”
She was almost there, mere seconds from him, when he looked up into her eyes.
The pain and anger she saw in his gaze was such a mirror of her own, and the emptiness that was slowly consuming her life so clearly claiming his as well, that she froze, unable to take another step toward him. For just a moment, their shared agony was all that mattered, and she knew, she knew, that whatever he was doing, she couldn’t stop him…and didn’t want to.
Kill them. Yes. Kill them all.
He smiled softly at her, and lifted a hand; she felt something grab hold of her body and push her to the ground, and just as she started to pass out, she saw Rowan close his eyes…and vanish into thin air.
*****
Video surveillance clearly showed Rowan entering Sara’s apartment, and leaving several minutes later. Building sensors failed all over the base, and just after the Elf was seen leaving SA-9’s apartment, the cameras went out, but the vault where the stone had been stored was left standing open.
The timeline created by witness testimony from Mellis, Jenny Nations, Sara, and Beck all matched up perfectly. There was no reason to doubt any of their statements. Mellis was so shaken up by what had happened that she asked to return to her Clan immediately, and she was transported back to her home the next morning.
All in all, Sara thought, it was an Oscar-worthy performance.
Part Twenty-Two
Lex wasn’t sure what the commotion was about, but it provided the perfect diversion; with the Agency personnel running around trying to get a handle on the situation, there was no one in the curtained area of the infirmary to wonder why he was there.
He stood over the body of the fallen Agent—Markdale—for a long time, just staring at him. The young man had only been an Agent for about a year, and had been shot in the head; he would never wake up. The paperwork to take him off life support was in process. Even a complete psychic dud would be able to see that there was no one home; it was just an empty body, the soul long fled to whatever destination awaited it.
Markdale had been a handsome young man. Not beautiful like Jason, but still, not bad at all. He was blonde and muscular with a tattoo of a seahorse on his right pectoral muscle for reasons no one would ever know. He had no family, like most Agents, and hadn’t been known to date anyone in particular.
A blank slate.
Was Markdale at peace? He had given his life to stop a sorcerer from sacrificing a five year old girl. If some kind of cosmic balance sheet existed, surely that had to count pretty heavily toward a good afterlife.
And if Jason hadn’t been soul-napped, where would he have gone? Was there a hell? Did gay vampires go there automatically, or would all the lives he had saved, all the good he had done, make up for loving the wrong people? Lex had believed, once, that God was merciful…was He merciful, or just? Could He be both? Lex couldn’t be sure anymore.
And if Lex did what he intended to do…what would that do to his own soul?
He made his way back to the aerie, pensive, not bothering to ask what was going on in the base—no one paid him the slightest bit of attention. Beck was off duty, but she was probably asleep; he didn’t want to bother her, and he didn’t want to give himself the chance to back out of his plan.
He closed and locked the gate, then surveyed the alterations he’d made to the aerie’s living area before he’d gone to the base: all the furniture had been pushed back to the walls, the rugs rolled up, to reveal the concrete floor. He’d drawn the first set of symbols yesterday, to take advantage of the first expansive energies after the New Moon. Taking a cue from the Returning Light people he’d used white spray paint to lay down the Circle, but the rest he’d draw tonight, with colored chalk. Every detail had to be precise.
Neither Astaerath nor Jenai magic used many tools, though the Astaerath were more ceremonial, relying on sacred geometry where the Jenai used a system of Runes. Frog had supplied all the necessary formulas to combine the two, so all Lex had to do was recreate them, then perform the ritual itself, which had familiar components: incense, a small fire, an Astaerath blade, and the blood and hair of the person into which the Astaerath was to be invoked. Ideally that meant having the body itself lying faceup in the center of the Circle, but in this case it was logistically impossible.
Lex took a deep breath. It was now or never.
He went into the bathroom and took a shower, rubbing himself down with the special salts he had made using herbs and spices from Sita’s shop. She hadn’t noticed his theft, which wasn’t exactly a theft as he was sure to leave cash on the counter to pay for it. The salts smelled like church, and it was soothing to breathe in Frankincense and myrrh and sandalwood while he stood under the steaming spray.
He had to be careful not to let his wings drag the floor, or they’d obliterate half his work; he dressed in a pair of loose drawstring pants and padded over to the Circle, kneeling gingerly to draw in the last few Runes around its edge that would signal the ritual’s official opening.
“You’re making a mistake,” he heard, and jumped back.
Sita stood looking down at him, her arms crossed, face set.
“How did you—“ He glanced over at the still-locked door.
She shook her head. “I am Astaerath,” she said tersely. “Do you think a simple lock will keep me out? I go where it pleases me to go.”
He lowered his eyes. “How did you know what I was up to?”
The sound she made was basically a snort, but “snort” was far too crude a word for anything she did. “What else would you be doing with the things you lifted from my store? I owe you eighty cents’ change, by the way.”
Lex sighed. “Keep it.”
She stared at him in silence until he said, “Sita…I have to do this.”
“You realize that what you’re doing is a violation of natural order, and the damage you cause could be catastrophic.”
He nodded. “And you think it’s a mistake.”
Now, Sita sighed. “You’re making a mistake in your placement of the fourth sigil. It should be at a perfect 37 degree angle to the ninth, or the energies of Venus won’t be properly balanced.”
Their eyes met and held for a long minute. Then Lex leaned over and redrew the symbols she had indicated. “Anything else?”
She gestured for the chalk, then walked slowly around the room, pausing twice to bend and correct something or, in a third case, erase it with the side of her hand and redo it entirely.
Finally, she stepped to the center where the altar stood, and scrutinized the Enochian script that was written as clearly as Lex could manage on the parchment there. She nodded, satisfied, and then picked up a small glass vial. “The vessel’s hair?”
“Yes. The blood is in the other one.”
Sita turned to him. “You know it’s very risky, and difficult, to do this the way you have written it. We will have to add extra layers of shielding to the Circle.”
Lex raised an eyebrow. “We?”
She lifted hear eyes heavenward. “I cannot let you fumble through this alone, child. A novice at magic has no business doing this in the first place. You would turn yourself into a newt or some such.”
He straightened, dusting off his knees, and smiled. “Thank you, Sita.”
She nodded. “Let us get this over with. If the Goddess is on our side, your Jason will be back among the living by dawn.”
Lex moved around the room lighting candles as she got the incense burning; he switched off the overhead light, and darkness softened the edges of everything, including Sita’s slightly anxious expression.
He joined her in the Circle. “I’m guessing you have a better grasp of Enochian than I do,” he said. “Would you like to do the first incantation?”
“I had better. We need all the protection we can get.”
Sita didn’t bother with the parchment where he’d written out the ritual text; she simply faced the altar, raised her arms, and began to chant, her voice rising and falling around the jagged unfamiliar words with a native speaker’s ease.
Lex stood beside her, and after a moment he felt the hair on his arms beginning to stand up. Energy began to rise in the room, circling around them like a stalking lion.
Sita finished the initial incantation and looked over at him; it was his turn.
Lex picked up the parchment, found his place on the page, and read.
*****
On this side, the forest; on that side, the temple of the Sibyl. Between them, a matrix of power that held the two planes apart.
The wall between one world and the next trembled like water at his touch.
He lifted both hands to the wall, palms flat against it, and drew the magic of unraveling—death—darkness—dissolution—through his body, slamming it hard into the barrier with the force of a silent earthquake.
The Dreamtime shook.
He reached into it and twisted the lines of force, pulling them apart, unmaking; the wall fractured, and fell, and the pocket of reality that was the forest bled into the Sibyl’s world, rushing, a tsunami of power rocking the very foundations of the tiny world that the Jenai had built for herself.
He smiled, and stepped through.
Reality fled before him. Shadows surrounded him, whispering in swirls at his feet, every step deepening the darkness. The leaves on the trees turned brown and fell; the flowers withered. The air grew cold and still.
What was made is now unmade.
At the edge of the garden the moldy stone walls of the temple quivered, then began to crumble, first at the edges, then little by little until one fell to the ground as a pile of dust. The stone cracked, fragmented, fell. Stone by stone, brick by brick, the outside of the temple broke down into its original form: sand. It was nothing but sand, slipping through time, frozen in a moment of arrogance as the Sibyl decided she was above the world that had given her birth.
No longer.
He felt the Sibyl inside the temple, felt her outrage and her fear as she realized what had been unleashed upon her. The first blast of her defenses thundered from the Well, hitting him in waves, but he simply held up a hand and they dissolved. What was made is now unmade.
Again and again she threw her power at him, and he destroyed it with a thought. The shadows surged forward, encircling her, and she shrieked in rage and banished them, slamming eerie green-white light at the serpentine not-creatures that licked at her feet.
He stood in the widening gap in the walls of her fortress, and watched her fight her doom, saying nothing, waiting.
“You are nothing to me!” she screamed. “I will bleed you again as I bled you before!”
He didn’t speak. She deserved no words.
He raised his hands again, and a single crack appeared in the papery skin of her cheek.
Her palm flew up to her face, and her eyes burned with fury. She came forward, lightning already gathering around her fingertips, and snarled a curse at him.
He smiled again. The last time they had fought like this, he had been so shocked at her betrayal that he had lost. This time he was ready.
He lifted a veil of shadow and deflected her spell easily. Another section of the temple’s wall crumbled to her left, and she started, finally seeming to grasp her predicament. As long as she was here, he could destroy her; and she lacked the power to leave.
She struck at him again, and again he shot her down. Her anger made her rash, and she threw blow after blow, her curses becoming less coherent and devolving into animal snarls.
Once, she had been the embodiment of grace, moving like a bird across the water, even her hair flowing around her in an eternal ballet. Now, she was a ghastly caricature of herself, her face lined with cracks, her hair lank and turning grey from all the stone dust in the air. Her face was a wraithlike mask of violence and hatred. Once, she had been so beautiful.
What was made is now unmade.
He barely saw her move. Her eyes flicked sideways, and so did her arm; he heard a cry of fear, and saw that the Sibyl had her spindly hand in a vise around the arm of an Elven woman. The Sibyl dragged the woman to her side, and though the Elf struggled, the Sibyl’s desperation made her strong.
The woman saw him for the first time, and screamed in horror. She knew what she was seeing.
