“What did you expect when you gave it to a KoA? It was her job to protect it. And to protect innocents from its use.”
“Aardvark cankles!” the wizard barked angrily. “That artifact is mine. It doesn’t belong to you.”
Shrugging, I bit my lip against the desire to repeat that he’d given it to us. Instead, I asked, “How did you get Alice to bring it out of the vault? I assume it was you who she was meeting, rather than the PTB like she thought?”
His lips quirked upward in a mean smile. “It happens our Alice was contemplating embarking on a very long vacation soon. She has a particular affection for the Caribbean. I was very happy to make those travel arrangements for her. I’m a full service travel agent, you know. With, in Alice’s case, a teensy tiny bonus service she wasn’t expecting thrown in. All it took was a bit of a suggestion hex in her tea…”
Slug snot! Alice had walked right into the monster’s lair and given him a direct line to the artifact. “As much good as it did. You lost it anyway,” I said, my gaze sliding toward the door he’d emerged from, wondering if I could get out that way. Of course, I’d have to get past him first.
“I’d have gotten it back if it wasn’t for the interference of that stupid sprite. She somehow saw through my doppelganger spell and it was all I could do to get out of there alive.”
“The glasses,” I said.
“What?”
“You weren’t wearing Alice’s glasses. She can’t see anything without them. It was a dead giveaway.”
He made an irritated sound. “But the good news is. You’re going to get it back for me.”
“Me?” Okay, that squeak in my voice was embarrassing. “I’m just a trainee. I have no idea…”
“You’d better get an idea fast, sorceress, or you’re going to find out firsthand how Gido died.”
A faint sound eased into the room from beyond the walls. A hopeful sound. At least it was hopeful for me. It was a decidedly less encouraging sound for the wizard. His features sharpened as the meaning of the shrill sirens singing their way toward us sank deep.
I smiled. That was the point I’d look back on as being my fatal mistake.
He didn’t like my smile. He didn’t like it at all.
A shadow fell over the wizard, a charcoal gray miasma that seemed to rise from the carpet beneath his feet and paint his immediate area in an obscuring haze. His form seemed to swell, the humanoid outline taking on an amorphous structure that pulsed with the rhythm of a sluggish heartbeat. From his waist down, the mist tightened into a slender column of oily energy and then seemed to shrink downward, transforming into a shiny puddle of black ooze on the carpet beneath where he’d been standing.
I pressed backward as the puddle grew and ate into the fibers of the thin carpet, sizzling as it spread in my direction.
As the wizard continued to transform into the acidic ooze, his expression turned mutinous. He opened his mouth and a series of guttural commands emerged. The magic shook the walls and sent framed pictures crashing to the floor, the glass fracturing into a million pieces.
The acidic puddle picked up speed, streaming directly toward my feet. I knew with sudden certainty that if it touched me, I was dead.
“Goodbye, Keeper,” the wizard growled as the last of his form turned liquid and melted into the running river of oily black magic.
The magic sludge flowed inexorably in my direction, eating everything in its path.
The wizard’s magic was Death, with its sulfurous stench and promise of agony.
I cast my gaze around me in desperation, seeing no way out. I turned and yanked on the door, screaming as it refused to budge. Acrid smoke filled the room, wafting ahead of the killing ooze. I succumbed to coughing so violent I had trouble breathing through it.
The oily river was mere inches from my shoes, and I had nowhere to go. I glanced toward the window. The sill might be big enough for me to stand on. Its height would buy me a few seconds, though I had no idea if it would be enough.
I shoved the water dispenser onto its side as the puddle began to surround my feet. The carpet burned away around me, the foul stench of its burning fibers choking me until I couldn’t breathe.
The water hit the black discharge, turning to steam too fast. I stepped on top of the dispenser’s base and leaped, praying I would land on the sill before the oily magic reached me. I managed to get one foot on the sill and my hands slammed against the window, cracking but not splintering it. My other foot slipped off, arrowing toward the boiling magic streaming across the floor. For a brief, terrifying moment, I thought for sure I was going to fall. But I somehow managed to grab hold of the window frame, my fingers white with the effort of keeping me upright.
Beyond the glass, the sirens squealed closer.
But not close enough.
The oily ooze had hit the trim along the bottom of the wall and was climbing upward, reaching for me with long, spidery fingers.
In pure desperation, I stomped on the streamers of ooze as they breached the sill. A fiery heat burned instantly through the bottom of my shoe, eating through the rubber and taking a bite out of the bottom of my foot.
The magic carved into my flesh, slicing, biting, burning. Agony was too mild a word for how that acidic magic felt against my skin.
I screamed, the desperate, tormented sound foreign to my ears. My screams drowned out the sound of the police cars screeching to a stop at the curb, lights flashing, and the sound of battering rams pummeling the door until it crashed open.
My throat raw, I croaked a warning to the police, fearing the rabid sludge would take them out as easily as
