L’zar snorted. “You’d lose.” The drow worked around his prison-issue sweatpants to relieve himself. Just another inmate hittin’ the John before hittin’ the sack. The whole time, he was counting down to the perfect moment.
Relaude snorted. “You don’t think I could kick your drow ass back to Ambar’ogúl?”
“Not if we were already in an ‘Ogúl battle pit, greenskin.”
Another low chuckle came from the next cell over. “That how you got popped and dragged into this hellhole? Tried to mind-fuck the CDO into lettin’ you off clean by arguing semantics?”
“You know what ‘semantics’ means?” L’zar flushed the steel toilet and took two steps away from it along the back wall of his cell.
A thump rattled the cement wall, doubtless from Relaude’s thick fist. “Hey, if you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn’t be locked up next to me, would ya?”
“Watch me,” L’zar whispered.
An irritated growl permeated the opposite wall of the orc’s cell. “Shut the hell up, Relaude. Trying to sleep.”
“Aw, come on. You don’t wanna count down to midnight with me, Troj?”
“Listen. If you don’t shut your fat green face, when these doors open in the morning, I’ll count down to your last breath.”
Relaude chuckled, and the cot beneath the massive orc groaned when he flopped back onto the thin mattress. “Y2K. Gotta give it to these human chumps, am I right? Makin’ such a big deal about the end of the world and all. They don’t even know the half of it.”
That might’ve been the only thing out of Relaude’s mouth in weeks L’zar thought incisive, yet saying so to the orc was only an invitation for more attention.
Relaude scratched his hairy green armpit, a blade scraping a whetstone. “Dumb and tiny and weak,” he groused.
“Shut up!” came Troj’s exasperated voice. “I swear by all that’s unholy…”
Positioned less than a foot from the back wall of his cell, L’zar waited for his pesky orc neighbor’s laughter to fade. Alpha block settled into another round of half-enforced silence, and the drow closed his eyes to listen for his next signal.
The door to the guard tower clicked open and shut behind whichever one of them had drawn straws to re-up on their coffee for the night shift. L’zar’s pointed ears twitched at the muffled thump of the other guard’s boots propping up on the console. That was Jones, then, settling in for a night of reading whatever cheap book he’d grabbed off the library cart.
And L’zar stayed beside his toilet, facing the wall like he’d lost his mind.
The drow’s fingers worked an intricate pattern in front of his thigh, undetectable by the swiveling cameras set high on Alpha block’s walls. The air shimmered around him, and his illusion spell formed at the back of the cell. Any guard who checked the cameras or stepped past while on patrol would see the drow’s back as he stood beside the toilet. The real L’zar would be long gone before anyone realized his projected image hadn’t moved in hours.
He placed his other hand on the concrete wall and muttered the words he’d been waiting twenty-five years in this dump to say. Just a whisper, but the spell phased his hand through the wall, and the rest of him followed. No alarms, no flashing lights, nothing.
L’zar had discovered Chateau D’rahl’s budget could not pay for wards on all four walls of every cell.
Relaude was right. Dumb and puny and weak.
L’zar glanced both ways down the abandoned corridor stretching behind Alpha block’s newer cells. No one was there. Not a single guard knew the original bones of this place. Smirking, L’zar closed his eyes and brought up the memory of the prison’s layout. Almost fifty years ago, he had known he’d be making his way through these walls from the inside out instead of the other way around. Before the renovations.
He set off for the sealed staircase. Mundane construction, yet it could stop him as well as any warded wall, not to mention the ten-foot box he’d called home for a quarter-century. For a drow thief, impossible didn’t exist. Not tonight.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, L’zar crouched beneath the grove of bare cherry trees beyond the fence around Chateau D’rahl.
“Barbed wire.” He snorted and shook his head. “Humans have so much to learn.”
His fingers moved in twisting gestures, and a tailored, pinstriped suit took the place of his gray prison pants and white t-shirt. The long white hair pulled in a knot behind his head shortened and darkened, followed by the erasure of the dark gray, nearly purple pigment of his race’s skin. He flexed much shorter fingers on pink-hued hands, his flesh now bright beneath the moonlight. No one would see the pointed ears of his race beneath the light-brown curls he’d adopted.
Destiny tugged at him like a hook through his chest. Beneath the bright lights spilling over so much stone and concrete and iron while dressed as a businessman in a trim suit from the 1920s, L’zar turned from Chateau D’rahl and followed the tingling trail of magic he could no longer ignore.
“Where is she?”
By human standards, the night was chilly, yet the drow thought nothing of the cold. He moved down the frontage road, away from Chateau D’rahl and toward the heart of Washington D.C. Even if he’d driven, it wouldn’t have taken him as quickly as his own two feet through the industrial district hiding the high-security magical prison. He was a blur in the moonlight as he crossed the river into Capitol Hill and encountered the overwhelming New Year’s glimmer of lights and traffic and bars.
He hurried along the sidewalk and fought to keep his eyes open as he followed the trail of magic.
Not her magic, no. Mine. And the
