Skully yanked his arm away. “Your mind has finally rotted through, Matt, you know that? All that’s upstairs are my quarters and some extra storage space.”
Skully and I looked over the bar at each other for a moment. I knew his silver broadaxe wasn’t far from his reach.
“If that’s true, then you won’t have objection to my taking a look, now will you?” And before Skully could respond, I jumped off my stool and ran-limped as fast as I could toward the iron door located the right of the bar.
Head aside, Skully has a fully fleshed body. A little too fully fleshed, and I thought given my current state, we’d be evenly matched with it came to speed. But even with his bulk, Skully was able to grab his axe from behind the counter and leap over the bar and come after me before I made it halfway to the stairs.
He shouted my name, and I turned in time to see him raise his axe over his head, the silver glinting even in the bar’s dim light. “Don’t make me hurt you, Matt. Please.”
Everyone in the bar watched us play out our little drama, not only to see what would happen next but also to help them decide if they should bother taking cover. But no one observed us more intensely than the pierced warlock.
Where the hell do I know that sonofabitch from? I thought.
“If you really don’t want to hurt me, Skully I have a suggestion: put the axe down.”
“I can’t do that, Matt,” he said sadly.
The irony inherent in the situation was so thick you could cut it with Skully’s axe. It was like a replay of earlier in the day, only instead of a murdering lyke, I now faced a friend. A friend who was about to bring a very large, very sharp weapon down on my head, but a friend nonetheless.
“I can’t let this one go,” I said. “It’s too important.”
“And I can’t let you reach those stairs.”
Stalemate. I had little in the way of surprises left in my pockets, and nothing that would take care of Skully. Hell, I wasn’t even exactly sure what sort of creature he was, and I didn’t have the first clue as to what sort of weaknesses he might possess.
“So what do we do now, Matt?” he asked.
“I figure you can just stand there, and I’ll watch as Devona cracks you over your bony noggin with a chair.”
“Come off it, I’m not going to fall for-” The chair connected with his skull with a sharp crack! and a shower of splintered wood. Skully dropped his axe, which hit the concrete floor with a loud clang, and a second later, Skully himself crashed down beside it.
I quickly examined him. He had a tiny jagged fissure in his skull, and the lights in his socket had been extinguished.
Devona held only a pair of chair legs in her hands now, and she let them clatter to the floor. “Is he unconscious?”
“Who can tell? But he’s not moving right now and that’s good enough. Let’s go.” I continued toward the stairs, this time with Devona at my side.
Skully’s patrons didn’t know what to do at first. They merely sat and stared. Then one particular Einstein among them shouted, “Hey, free drinks!” and a stampede for the bar commenced. I hoped Skully wouldn’t get stepped on too badly, even if he had been prepared to turn me into filet-o-zombie.
The iron door that led to the bar’s upper level was locked and-as Devona had figured it would be-it was protected by some seriously powerful wardspells. But Shrike had managed to borrow some magical lockpicks for us from a thief he knew, and using the knowledge Devona had gained from years serving as guardian of Galm’s Collection, she was able to bypass the wardspells and open the door in surprisingly short order.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “If you decide to stop working for your father, you can always take up a career as a cat burglar-or maybe I should say bat burglar.”
She grinned, and we hurried up the stairs as fast as my bum leg would allow and exited onto the second floor. The short hall had only three wooden doors, all closed. I turned to Devona and touched the side of my nose. She nodded and inhaled.
“That one.” She pointed to door number two.
“That one it is, then.” I took out my 9mm, which was now loaded with purely ordinary bullets, stepped to the door, and was about to try the knob when Devona stopped.
“Let me see if it’s warded.” She waved her hands over the door’s surface, careful not to touch it. “It’s clean. I guess the Dominari figured the wardspells on the door downstairs were enough protection. Idiots.” She tried the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. “At least they weren’t too stupid to lock it.”
“As a macho type, I’d ordinarily kick the door in myself,” I said, “but seeing as how you’re somewhat stronger than I am…”
She smiled, leaned back and executed a swift, powerful kick to the middle of the door, which exploded off its hinges and flew into the room.
Devona stepped back and I moved past her into the room, fighting the urge to shout, “Police!” Instead I said, “Nobody move!” Hardly as satisfying, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. At least it fulfilled my quota of tough-guy talk for the day.
There was no one in the room. I kept my gun out, though, just in case. Inside sat a table filled with chemical apparatus: copper tubing, black rubber hoses, beakers, vials, the whole junior chemistry lab bit. Next to that lay a stone altar upon which rested various flowers and herbs, along with the sliced-up body of a dead lamb and the rune-engraved obsidian knife which had done it in. Science and magic, working together to create a better world, or at least a more profitable one-for the Dominari, that is.
“So Morfran was telling the truth,” I said. Even with the motivation we’d provided him with, I still hadn’t quite believed what he’d told us. You can never trust drug-pushing scum, regardless of species or home dimension.
“And I’ll make damn sure the bug pays for it, too.”
I recognized the voice coming from behind us, and though I was dead, it sent a chill through my roomtemperature blood. We turned to see the voice belonged to the shaven-headed punk warlock from downstairs. His piercings-multiple rings in the outer curves of his ears, across his bottom lip, in both nostrils, along his eyebrows, down both sides of his forearms, and who knew where else beneath his ratty jeans and A is for Anarchy T-shirt-pulsed with a silvery energy that wreathed his body in a shimmering argent aura.
I might have been a zombie, but right then I felt a fury inside me as strong as any emotion I’d ever experienced as a living man. I fought to keep my voice calm as I said, “Hello, Yberio.”
The warlock smiled, displaying metal-encased teeth. “Surprised to see me back from the dead, Richter?”
“Are you kidding? This is Nekropolis. Half the people you meet here are one kind of dead or another. You’ve changed a bit from when we last met.” I looked him up and down. “The new look suits you. What does Talaith think about it?”
Devona’s jaw dropped. “Wait, this warlock is the one who created the Overmind for Talaith, the one who-”
“Killed Richter’s partner,” Yberio finished. “Indeed.”
At that moment, I was painfully aware that I still held my 9mm in my right hand. It was down at my side, and I calculated my chances of raising the weapon and getting a shot off before Yberio could do anything to stop me. My reflexes would’ve been slow even if my undead body had been in its peak condition, but as beat-up and decayed as I was right then, I wasn’t in danger of being crowned fastest gun in the Sprawl anytime soon. Yberio must’ve guessed what I was thinking-or perhaps he literally read my mind-and he evidently thought more of my threat potential than I did, because he made a small gesture with his hand and tendrils of silver energy flowed forth from his aura, snatch the gun out of my hand, and tossed it into the corner of the room with contemptuous ease.
“Not that I couldn’t stop a bullet if I wanted to,” Yberio said, “but I’m more conservative in my use of power these days, seeing as how I don’t wield quite so much as I used to. But then again, what’s the point of possessing power if you don’t enjoy it from time to time?”
The warlock stretched his hands toward us and before we could react, two gouts of silver energy blasted forth, slamming us backward into the table holding the chemical and mystical apparatus used for creating veinburn. Vials and beakers shattered, noxious chemicals spilled, the dead goat went flying, and the table broke from the
