arms.
Father Douglas lifted a megaphone. “That’s far enough,” he said. I could hear him over the heavy wind. “That’s detcord she’s tied up with. Do you know what that is?”
“Yeah.”
He held up his other hand. “This is the detonator. As long as it’s sending a signal, she’s fine. It’s a dead- man switch. If I drop it or let it go, the signal stops and the cord goes off. If the receiver gets damaged and stops receiving the signal, the cord goes off. If you start using magic and destroy one of the devices, it goes off.”
“That’s way better than the electromagnet thing,” I muttered to myself. I raised my voice and bellowed, “So how do you want to do this?”
“Throw them.”
“Disarm the explosives first.”
“No. The girl stays where she is. Once I’m gone, I’ll send the code to disarm the device.”
I considered the distance. It was a good fifteen-foot jump to get from one rooftop to the other—an easy throw.
“Douglas,” I shouted, “think about this for a minute. The swords aren’t just sharp and shiny. They’re symbols. If you take one up for the wrong reasons, you could destroy it. Believe me, I know.”
“The swords are meant for better things than to molder in a dingy basement,” he replied. He held up the detonator. “Surrender them now.”
I stared at him for a long second. Then I tossed the entire bag over. It landed at his feet with a clatter. He bent down to open it.
I steeled myself. This was about to get dicey. I hadn’t counted on the dead-man switch or a fifteen-foot- long jump.
Father Douglas opened the bag. The smoke grenade Michael had rigged inside it in his workshop went off with a heavy thud. White smoke billowed back into his face. I took three quick steps and hurled myself into the air. For an awful portion of a second, twenty stories of open gravity yawned beneath me, and then I hit the edge of the other roof and collided with Father Douglas. We went down together.
I couldn’t think about anything but the detonator, and I clamped down on that with my left hand, crushing his fingers beneath mine so that he couldn’t release it. He jabbed his thumb at my right eye, but I ducked my head and he got nothing but bone. He slammed his head against my nose—
I let him, seizing his arm with both hands now, squeezing, trying to choke off the blood to his hand, to weaken it so I could take the detonator from him. His left fist slammed into my temple, my mouth, and my neck. I bent my head down and bit savagely at his wrist, eliciting a scream of pain from him. I slammed my weight against him, slipping some fingers into his grasp, and got one of them over the pressure trigger. Then I wrenched with my whole body, twisting my shoulders and hips for leverage, and ripped the detonator away from him.
He rolled away from me instantly and seized the bag; then he was up and running for a doorway leading down into the building.
I let him go and rushed over to Alicia. The dark-haired girl was trembling uncontrollably.
Detcord is basically a long rubber tube filled with explosive compound. It’s a little thicker than a pencil, flexible, and generally set off by an electrical charge. Wrap detcord around a concrete column and set it off, and the explosion will cut through it like a piece of dry bamboo. Alicia was tied to the chair with it. If it went off, it would cut her to pieces.
The detonator was a simple setup—a black plastic box hooked to a twelve-volt battery, which was in turn connected to a wire leading to the detcord. A green light on the detonator glowed cheerily. It matched a cheery green light on the dead-man switch transmitter in my hand. If what Douglas had said was accurate and the light went out, things wouldn’t be nearly so cheery.
If I let go of the switch, it would stop the signal to the detonator, which would then complete the circuit, send current to the detcord, and boom. In theory, I should be able to cut the wire leading from the battery and render it harmless—as long as Douglas hadn’t rigged the device to detonate if that happened.
I didn’t have much time. The electronics of the transmitter wouldn’t last long around me, even though I hadn’t used any magic around them. I had to get the girl out now.
I made the call based upon what I knew about Father Douglas. He seemed like he might have good intentions, despite all his shenanigans. So I gambled that he wouldn’t want the girl to die by any means other than a conscious decision from someone—either him letting go of the trigger or me blowing the transmitter by using magic.
I took out my pocketknife, opened it with my teeth, and slashed at the heavy plastic tubing that held her tied down. I cut through the tube once, unwound it from first one arm, then the other, and she was free. She clawed away the blindfold and gag, her fingers still clumsy from being bound.
“Come on!” I said. I grabbed her arm and hauled her out of the chair and away from the explosives. She staggered, leaning against me, and I ran for the stairs.
As we got to the first landing, my ongoing presence apparently became too much for the transmitter. Something sparked and crackled inside the plastic case, the cheery green light went out, and there was a huge and horrible sound from above and behind us. I managed to get between Alicia and the stairwell wall as the pressure wave caught us and threw us into it. It slammed my already-abused head into the wall.
I staggered under the pain for a minute and forced my way through it, like a drowning man clawing for the surface.
“Come on,” I croaked to Alicia. “Come on. We have to go.”
She looked at me with dull, stunned eyes, so I just grabbed her hand and started down the stairs with her, stuffing the heavy transmitter into my duster pocket with the other hand. We had only a few minutes before the place would be swarming with police and firefighters. I didn’t particularly feel like answering their questions about why my fingerprints were on an expensive transmitter and showed trace evidence of explosive residue.
Going down all those stairs was only slightly less taxing than going up had been, and my legs were going to be complaining at me for days. We got to the bottom and I led Alicia out into an alley, then out to Monroe. I looked wildly up and down the street. Michael’s truck was there waiting right where it was supposed to be, out in front of the original building. I put my fingers to my lips and let out a shrill whistle.
Michael’s truck pulled into the street and stopped in front of us. I hurried Alicia forward. The door swung open, and Molly leaned out, taking Alicia’s hand and pulling her in. I went in right behind her, though it made things awfully cozy in the pickup’s cab.
“He’s loose with the swords,” I said. “Did you do it?”
“Did it,” Molly replied, and promptly handed me a dashboard compass with one of her own golden hairs stuck to it with clear tape. The needle pointed firmly to the east, instead of to the north. The grasshopper had set up a basic tracking spell, one of the handier tricks I know.
“He’s probably moving on foot through the park,” I told Michael. “Circle around to Lakeshore, get us in front of him.”
“Are you all right, baby?” Michael asked.
Alicia fumbled for his hand and squeezed it tight. Then she leaned against Molly and started crying.
“Hurry,” I told Michael. “He’s got to know we’ve bugged the swords somehow. If he finds those hairs Molly tied onto the hilts, we’re done.”
“He won’t get away,” Michael said with perfect confidence, and slammed the accelerator down as we approached an intersection sporting a bright red light. Maybe it was divine intervention, or fate, or just good driving, but the truck shot through the intersection, missing two other cars by inches, and sailed on forward.
The needle on the compass pointed steadily toward the park as we went, but then abruptly began to traverse from one side to the other. I looked up ahead of me and saw a dark form sprinting across the road that separated the park from Lake Michigan.
“There!” I shouted, pointing. “There he is!”
Michael pulled over to the side of the road, and I hit the ground before the truck had stopped moving, sprinting after Father Douglas. He was in good shape, covering the ground in long, loping strides. Normally it wouldn’t have been a contest to catch him. I run three or four days a week, to train for situations exactly like this one. Of course, when I practice, I’m not generally concussed, weary, and sporting a recently dislocated shoulder.
