Staked

“I’m ready, Nigel,” she said, though her voice was a faint whisper in the daylight and she looked like someone had gotten too enthusiastic with the transparency slider.

“Excellent. Please don’t trouble yourself about these roads and the strange carriages and clothing people wear. There have been a few changes since you passed. Progress.”

She made no answer, and it was just as well. I had to worry instead about other people troubling themselves about the red apparition floating next to me. Perhaps I would get lucky, I thought, and I’d be the only one who could see her.

That didn’t happen. I was hailed twice on the brisk walk to Massey Hall, once by a pedestrian and once by someone in a car, and asked what was that red smudge next to me.

“What?” I asked. “I don’t see anything.” That got rid of them. They would no doubt make optometrist appointments soon.

Massey Hall was a dirty brick lump of a building on the outside, covered in soot and grime reminiscent of buildings from the Industrial Revolution. Fire-escape stairwells on the front of the building, intended to give people on the balcony a fleeting chance in case of disaster, sloped down to the left and right, bracketing the front doors in an iron triangle. Three double doors with small windows above them were painted candy-apple red to reassure everyone that the building wasn’t derelict and promised all kinds of fun inside. The inside was a beautiful theatre with excellent acoustics, which was why everyone put up with the ugly outside. And like most theatres, it’s spectacularly empty during the day, making it an excellent place for a tête-à-tête in the middle of a huge city. Drasche would appreciate that I’d be cut off from the earth. It would be a fair fight—or appear so to him as he walked into an ambush. And it was fine if he suspected an ambush: Short of demolishing the building with me inside, there would be nothing he could do, and I hoped the half-hour window to act would prevent him from orchestrating something like that.

“The man who ran you down,” I said to Gwendolyn, “is bald and has strange tattoos all over his head. I want to talk to him alone inside this building. If anyone else tries to enter the building—from any door on any side—please keep them out as best you can. Close and lock the doors. Toss them across the street. Whatever it takes. Just get the bald tattooed man in and keep everyone else out.”

“Vvvvery well.”

“Can you lock and unlock these doors?” I asked, pointing to the first pair. Best to make sure.

“Yess.”

“Would you please unlock one for me?” She could do it faster than I could by flipping the tumblers, and I didn’t want to use any of my stored energy if I didn’t have to. Once they clacked, I pulled open the door.

“Thanks, Gwendolyn. You can leave this one open until the bald man comes inside. He shouldn’t be long.”

If he was the punctual sort, anyway. It had taken most of a half hour to walk from the conservatory to the concert hall, and that was a nervous speed-walk.

“Beeee careful, Nigel,” she said.

“Thank you, I will.”

I had to cast night vision once inside and find the light board. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to bring up the house lights, but once I did I returned to the main seating area and shuffled sideways down the twelfth row of seats. In the middle of it I crouched down on the floor, which was a bit cramped but kept my head out of sight. I took off my confining shoes with a sigh of relief.

Drasche burst through the doors in the back of the theatre moments later, shouting my name. “Where are you? Let’s have that talk!”

Casting camouflage and beginning the drain of my bear charm, I peeked above the chair backs to locate him. His suit was a somber slim-cut black for a change, but he’d come through on the ascot, with a glowing shade of teal that qualified as optic assault. Hands clasped behind his back, he scanned the theatre for me, and his eyes flicked up to the low ceiling directly above him, which was the floor of the balcony. He probably wondered if I was up there, and he hesitated before stepping out from under it, not wishing to give me a free shot at him if I was waiting above.

“Talk to me, Druid. What is it you wish to say?”

I whispered a simple binding to see if he’d learned anything from our first meeting on the beach in France and discovered that he had; all his clothing was synthetic fiber now. Nothing natural for me to bind.

“You’re an abomination and a threat to all life,” I called, and his head swiveled in the direction of my voice, trying in vain to spy me. “And since you did nothing positive with your life once I spared it, I need to rethink my mercy.”

I put the sole of my foot on a metal seat back, which was bolted to the floor and under which I knew Ferris, the iron elemental, lurked. I didn’t feel the buzz of him immediately underneath me, but he had to be nearby. He was still waiting for his treat after yesterday’s heist.

//Man with magic in his skin / I sent to him through the metal / It is yours now//

“Here’s my mercy,” Drasche said, and he brought his hands forward with automatic weapons in each hand, little machine guns with huge clips curving down from the handle. He pointed them in my general direction, and his fingers held down the triggers.

Steel-jacketed bullets zinged and popped off the theatre seats and I ducked down, lying flat in the aisle and maintaining my camouflage. Lots of bullets was Drasche’s answer to Druidry, and it was why I hadn’t bothered bringing Fragarach: You don’t bring a sword to a gunfight.

Unfortunately, Drasche didn’t need to see me to hit me. With all the ordnance he was throwing around, it was only a matter of time—seconds, in fact—until one of them ricocheted off the metal seats and nailed me. I felt it plunge into my back and perforate my liver. I grunted involuntarily, dropped my camouflage, and triggered the healing charm instead, hoping a single bullet would be all I had to deal with. But I heard him run out, reload, and start up again, and he must have heard me grunt, because this time he zeroed in on my row and the next one down. One burst got me four times when it hit the chairs behind me. Two in the same area of my back, one ripping low through my guts, another that missed my spleen and got my pancreas instead, and two more that tore through the hamstrings of my right leg. When he ran out of ammunition for the second time and I heard him reload once more, I dug into my pocket for my phone. I was rapidly running out of juice dealing with my wounds and wouldn’t make it without help. It was all I could do to stop the internal bleeding and knit my stomach back up before the acids leaked out and dissolved my intestines. If I died here, cut off from Gaia, there’d be no save from my soulcatcher.

Drasche got off perhaps ten rounds from his fresh clips before Ferris finally emerged from the floor, much later than I would have wished but very hungry. “Was ist das?” he said in German. “Nein!” I had to see this, so I risked levering myself up on my left arm and poking my head out in plain sight, gasping in pain as I did so. Drasche didn’t put a bullet in my head, because he wasn’t looking in my direction anymore. He was staring at his pointy-toed boots and dancing around as a furry black collection of iron shavings crawled up his legs and torso, traveling up to his head. “O’Sullivan!” he shouted, dropping his guns and frantically brushing at the flowing iron, which ignored his efforts and continued upward. “What is this?”