“Lance?” Donovan said. He turned and followed her gaze up the outside of the huge skyscraper. “Lance Ezzel? Who is he? I mean…”
“You mean,” She replied, “that no apprentice could have engineered all of this. You mean that someone who was still learning the arts wouldn’t have a fortress like this to hide away in, or the knowledge to put together a ritual like the one he’s about to perform. I wish I knew the answer to that. When he came to me, he showed some talent, but he must have dampened it for my benefit. I didn’t check — why would I? Someone with this sort of…”
“He wouldn’t have needed to sneak in,” Donovan finished.
She nodded. “He must have been planning this for a very long time, Donovan. He played me from the start, and he’d met you — through me — and well as others. All the connections he’d need, in fact, if he were a very powerful magician moving into our territory from…somewhere else. We handed it to him and shook his hand as he took it.”
“There isn’t much time,” Donovan said. He shook his head to clear the confusion of thoughts. “Whoever he is, he’s got Vanessa in there, and he’s got everything else he needs too.”
“The bone marrow dust?” she asked. Her voice sharpened. “How?”
“It was a setup,” Donovan replied. “I think the collector, Windham, was in on it, but there’s no time to worry over him now. They got the dust, and they think they got away. In fact, they would have gotten away, except for that damned crow, Asmodeus.”
Questions danced in Amethyst’s eyes, but he waved them away.
“All of that can wait. How do we get into this place?”
“Well, we could hang around out here and wait for an invitation,” she said, “But I’ve always preferred a more direct approach. There’s the front door, but somehow I can’t imagine that the main elevators reach the floor we’re after.”
“Back down the alley,” Donovan said, and started off at a trot. Amethyst followed quickly, and in moments they were back at the chain link gate. Donovan opened the lock the same way he’d opened the padlock at Shady Grove, pressing the small, round pendant to the rear of the lock. It snapped open without protest.
“That was easy,” Amethyst commented, staring down at the lock dubiously.
Donovan shrugged.
“He may not be expecting intrusion from this direction. Maybe he thinks we can’t find him. Who knows?”
Amethyst didn’t look convinced, but she followed him through the gates and up to the door marked Service Entrance Only. Donovan stared at it for a long moment, but he didn’t touch it.
“Won’t that amulet work on a door lock?” she asked him.
“It will,” he said, “but there’s something…wrong…about this door. I can’t explain it, but I have the feeling that opening it is exactly what he hopes we’ll do.”
They stood and stared at the door a moment longer.
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” she said at last. “Step back.”
Donovan started to protest, thought better of it, and flattened himself against the wall on the opposite side of the door from where Amethyst stood. She reached into the front of her blouse, an act that on any other occasion would have gotten an interested stare from Donovan, and pulled out a dark blue crystal that protruded from the center of a gold sphere. Staying against the wall herself, she held the amulet out in front of the door and spoke a single word.
The door exploded from its hinges and flew off down the service drive. It slammed into the fence with a nerve-jarring clang. Smoke rose from the point where it had been ripped from the wall, but otherwise, there as no indication of a threat.
Donovan saw Amethyst push off from the wall, and he moved.
“Not yet!” he cried. Before she could step in front of the door, or peek around the corner, he was moving. He launched himself in a headlong dive, and that single, quick motion saved her life.
Amethyst stepped toward the now open doorway, and Donovan collided with her, wrapping his arms around her legs and dropping her back heavily. As he passed the entrance, a stream of sound and color rushed out, growing wider and brighter and louder with each passing second. It cleared his back by inches, riffling his jacket in passing. Loud, angry cries filled the air. They heard the beat of heavy wings.
Donovan rolled over out of the direct line of fire. Amethyst stared upward for a second, gasped, and then reached for the amulet she’d used on the door. Without pretense at careful aim, she fired a blast into the air over their heads.
Dragons peeled off in either direction with a loud screech. When they’d cleared the door, they couldn’t have been more than a foot tall and a couple long, but they grew with astonishing quickness until they filled the sky. Amethyst’s blast missed the first two, but when they split, it smashed into the pair following and drove them back into the final creature with a crunch of bone and the hot smell of burned flesh and sulfur. Donovan reached to his boots, drew forth two odd, half-moon-shaped blades, and leaped to his feet. He didn’t look up at the dragons as they rolled majestically and plummeted back to the attack.
He drew back his left arm, let the blade fly, whispering a short charm under his breath. It whipped through the air, curved to the right, straightened out, and just as one of the dragons gave a loud roaring cry and dove for his throat, the blade passed cleanly through, like a flashing guillotine. Donovan didn’t stop to check his handiwork. He threw the other blade and dove to the side. He caught the second dragon as cleanly as the first, but it was only a few feet from the ground when it died, and the impact of its collision with the concrete drive shook the foundation of the building.
Amethyst had taken out two with her initial blast and was sighting in on the last.
“Get in there,” she cried. “I’ll take care of his pets. Get in and stop him.”
He didn’t hesitate. He slipped through the door into the passage beyond, hit the ground again and rolled in case something else waited there, but he saw nothing. The corridor he stood in had several doors leading off from it. At the far end of the passage, on his right was the door to an elevator. He ran for it.
When he reached the sliding doors, he saw that they were closed tightly. Two crystals were imbedded in the wall, one on each side of the door. One was dimly lit and glowed rose red in the semi-darkness. The other was clear and unlit. Donovan considered the two for only a moment, then reached out and touched the unlit crystal. It glowed immediately. There was a grinding sound, and then it stopped. The glow dimmed, and the rose-red crystal remained lit.
He considered breaking through the doors and climbing. There were ways he could ease and speed the ascent, but it was too risky. The fact that Ezzel had locked the elevator in place on the top floor seemed to indicate he either knew he had company, or had expected it. If Donovan allowed himself to be found out while in that shaft, it would be a simple matter to lower the elevator and crush him.
He turned and ran back to the door to the alley. Amethyst stood outside the door. She leaned heavily on the wall. There was no sign of the dragons…nothing moved, and the carcasses that had steamed and released their foul order moments before had dissolved into pools of a black, sticky substance Donovan didn’t recognize.
“The elevator is sealed,” he said.
She glanced up, and he followed her gaze. Near the top of the building something glinted, and he frowned. He glanced back into the darkened doorway, then back up the wall.
“Whatever that is,” he said, “is directly above the elevator. Could the car be stuck up there?”
Amethyst reached into her pocket, pulled out a green satin bag. She untied it and shook a small, clear globe into her hand. As Donovan watched, she breathed on the ball, closed it between her palms and closed her eyes. She said something under her breath and opened her hands.
The crystal globe had gone smoky, and as they watched, it slowly cleared. When the last of the mist had disappeared from its depths, an image shimmered into view. At first it wasn’t clear, but Amethyst whispered something, and it came into focus.
They saw the top of the Tefft complex. The moon had dropped nearly off the edge of the skyline. Dawn was approaching fast. They looked closer, and saw that the glint they’d caught before. It was a window of some kind, a single glass pane on the stone face of the building. It was near the top. Amethyst spoke again, and the image shifted closer.
“Damn them,” Donovan said. He saw Vein and the others, staring out defiantly at a sky that would soon fill with sunlight and incinerate them.
