6 comments/ 20913 views/ 6 favorites Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 01 By: Stultus Arc Deco 3 - Conceal Me What I Am Copyright© 2010 by Stultus Synopsis: The worst part about being apparently a very minor magician is that no one takes you seriously, until it's once again time to save the world and it's all up to you once again! Sex contents: Almost no Sex Genre: Speculative Alternative Historical Fiction Codes: MF, Magic, Supernatural, Violence Originally Posted at SOL: 2010-10-12 *************** Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 01 Already, my fellow cattle-class passengers were bored with either sitting around their tiny windowless cabins or being stuck all crammed together in a too-small lounge that seemed to be directly copied from some dentist's waiting room. The lounge was cozy, to say the very least. It had about two dozen hard uncomfortable chairs in a long oval all facing each other with stacks of positively ancient magazines on the only coffee table. Some of the magazines were even old enough to date from Kennedy's second term as President. The fashion this year still seemed to be the neo-Victorian style of prim high collars and long hems for dresses that has been en vogue for much of the last decade. Very polite, and absurdly politically correct and proper, making sure hardly an inch of bare wickedly evil and sinful flesh could be discerned. The gentlemen were all sporting their hair long with either long sideburns down to the bottom of their jaws or even full sets of muttonchops to accompany the apparently compulsory mustache. Hats and parasols for both men and women seemed to be virtually mandatory. Needless to say with my short almost military style haircut I obviously looked quite out of place and tempo, and most of the women in the lounge were either trying to avoid looking at me entirely or else were giving me nasty looks. I wouldn't have minded an in-flight romance, or even a single late-night torrid encounter, but I was apparently quite unfashionable enough that even the most rebelliously inclined female didn't think much of my offerings and never passed me a single crumpled note during the trip suggesting a late night rendezvous. Naturally, any thoughts of dalliance with some of the posh dainty bits down in First Class was quite impossible, or nearly enough so that I didn't bother trying. Sometimes, well actually quite often, the Americans can be even more snobby and class-conscious than even their European aristocratic counterparts. The worship wealth up here and if you're not sporting it large in First Class, then you're definitely not worth knowing or their even acknowledging your presence. Bored with reading textbooks, I casually suggested that just like in Canterbury Tales, everyone take turns telling a story to help pass the time, but most of my fellow imprisoned inmates looked at me in dismay as if I were wanted to dispute Keynesian economic theory. On the other hand, I certainly couldn't discuss my job, or magic, even in abstract generalization, as I was traveling sort of undercover and most Americans view magic, and the practice thereof, as both being in exceptionally poor taste and quite vulgar. It's a curse to be ashamed of rather than a pretty cool talent to be proud of. If the Puritans or the Founding Fathers could have burned every single 'witch' with even a hint of magical powers at a stake, they'd have done so... and they didn't fail due to lack of trying, or the result from running out of firewood! Teddy Rex enacted the final definitive law to ensure full citizen rights for magically inclined citizens, but many Yankees still hate and fear anyone with an ounce of adept or wizard power... and god help the poor 'witches' or 'sorceresses', who still get occasionally lynched if caught unaware in a lonely place. Just like in the Great Western Alliance and CSA (or Deseret for that matter), magical sensitives and adepts, and even the occasional wizard are born in the poor backwards US... and since every other country around them has embraced magic as just another weapon of war, and economics. Even the utterly retarded USA finally had to eventually get its collective head out of its ass and admit that magic does exist, and should be used for something useful... because their enemies have magic and the will to use it against them! Unfortunately, socially there is a very large 'but' -- but it can be permitted only as long as it can be completely proven that the Adept or Wizard possessing this power isn't in fact a pawn or agent of the devil, or other legions of darkness. Sure... right... it's marvelously near impossible to prove a negative. Accordingly, unlike my own BMA, the FBMR is not one of the happier federal agencies to belong to if you're a Yankee wizard (still mostly called witches (male or female), or sorceresses or warlocks for wizard grade talent. No one trusts you, and probably a near majority of your fellow citizens want you to die in a bonfire... and that really hurts badly back in Washington at budget approval time. The French ignited Arc Deco revolution eventually helped bring them out of the stone age, but then again the USA has always been jealous and mistrusting of anything French, until recently when they joined together in a political alliance against Great Britain. In theory, if France and England go to war again, this could break the fairly stabilized peace between the USA and the CSA, creating the first true world-wide war. The GWA has strong economic ties and treaties with the German Federation of States but not quite to the level of a mutual defense pact which might keep us free and still neutral, but I wouldn't like to bet good hard coin silver on it. Frankly, we've told each of them through diplomatic channels to 'play nice', or at least have the decency to wait until Deseret is taken care of... permanently. We don't want a war with anyone, but dealing with those demon worshiping cannibals with ultra-high Arc-Tec must come first... duty now, we tell our other American cousins -- settling old scores with each other can wait until later. *********** To avoid upsetting the primitive locals, I didn't wear most of my blatantly obvious magical protection rings or jewelry, and only packed and wore just one of my usual three-piece suits, heavily imbedded with as many protective spells as I could safely layer upon it without it spontaneously combusting. No suitcases, just two hand carry bags. One with a couple of changes of more casual clothes and the other full of magical textbooks... and an alarming amount of Miracle Putty. I wondered now if I should have brought along another suitcase full of cheap glass beads to trade with the rather simple natives, especially since some of my fellow travelers looked particularly inbred and dull-witted. I kept my jacket and long-sleeved shirt on to help cover over my heavily scarred right arm, where an unusual and absurdly powerful ancient Incan magical artifact had more or less grafted itself right into my very skin and made itself quite at home. I guess five thousand degrees of heat, or more, can cause that to happen - but there are always unforeseen dangers when you match powers against an ancient fire god, and I've pretty much decided that it was past time to stop burning down various parts of Austin. It was definitely getting extremely bad for my reputation! This artifact was powerful enough to grant a 'normal' woman without an ounce of magical power the ability to summon a bunch of increasingly nasty critters that I could only just barely handle or banish even as a highly skilled Adept with years of magical experience. Dealing with the rogue Fire God back in Austin, I'd put her long bracer onto my right arm, along with a similar but more modern attempt at a re-creation onto my left and gone into battle, and somehow impossibly lived to tell about it. The modern reproduction bracer puddled into expensive junk but Incan relic bonded itself into my flesh and hung around for the duration. What it was really intended or designed to do, I hadn't the slightest idea, but now as a physical part of me it certainly seemed to boost my powers well beyond Adept range and into Wizard level ability. The fact that an old flame with near godlike powers also had gone into my brain and done a little 'optimizing' before taking off on an eternal tour of the multiverse, probably boosted my powers too, enough so to handle packing off the angry god back to his distant other dimensional home by myself, long after I should have been burned to a crisp. Even now months later after some 'recharge' and recovery time, I still had no idea what my real level of ability was or just how much sheer raw magical power I could handle in another emergency, but I had the willingness to find out. But the next time some rampaging fire or sun god wants to burn down the rest of some city, someone else can handle the job! ********* The stopover in St. Louis wasn't too bad at all. They probably thought they were punishing us by locking us up in a tiny secure terminal waiting room with just one broken toilet for thirteen hours while we waited for some needed maintenance on the airship to be agonizingly slowly completed, but after three hours some of the local staff ruined the scheme by taking pity on us caged second class passengers and let us disembark into the main terminal and mix with our social betters for the next ten hours. Other than breathing space, we were also all getting desperate for some food that hadn't been packaged back when Roosevelt or Kennedy was still President. The terminal restaurant was open twenty-four hours and we all stuffed ourselves silly, and then we each ordered a couple of extra meals to-go, to take with us back on the airship. Oh, the food wasn't that good, but it was just barely fresher and slightly less vile and nasty than the automat offerings. One evil-minded steward started to give me some bullshit about not being allowed to bring food on-board, but I fixed his clock good without casting a single malicious spell -- I just showed him the corned beef sandwich that I'd obtained from the automat and threatened to make him eat it! He rather quickly agreed to our point of view and let us board with all of our ill-gotten food! Some say that Teddy Rex is still alive, being kept in a secret Washington bunker as a mystic arcane oracle via extreme measures of magical preservation immediately after his assassination, but I doubt it. He was the greatest US president ever, and anyone ought to be tired of political power after four and a half terms as President. I hope they let him enjoy his rest, eighteen plus years as the big boss would drive anyone nuts, and no one needs a demented oracle! ************ The trip from St. Louis to Chicago was scheduled to take about two more days, but some strong cross winds blew us nearly as far east as north, nearly as far as Indianapolis before our weak-motored airship could keep us pointed and mostly heading in the right direction north. For this leg of the interminable trip, some faces in our second class cattle pen of a lounge were now new, having just joined our merry little traveling caravan at St. Louis, but I couldn't say that most of them were any friendlier, except for one darker skinned gentleman that seemed to take an instant shine to me. "Zak Zephyr, is that the name? A very unusual one... do you work in the air conditioning business? Ha!" The thin fellow looked heavily tanned and was taking his rusty sense of humor out for a test drive. Allegedly he was from the Yankee side of northern Colorado, but his eyes had that unmistakable dark look that immediately screamed to me 'Deseret'. You just can't miss picking out their terrorist 'missionaries'... oh they talk and sound fairly normal and look just like everyone else, but it's their crazy dark eyes that give them away every time! Too much time spent on their knees praying to their insane dark demonic gods marks them in ways that any minor Adept with even half of a brain couldn't mistake! The fact that I had also had never once given out my last name to any of my traveling mates convinced me that despite anything he said, he was here on a mission... probably to make damn sure that I didn't fulfill mine! You can't reason with the kooks in Deseret, they don't live in the same universe with you and me. Any of them would sacrifice their lives in a heartbeat to do anything that their unholy bishops would even vaguely hint needed to be done, preferably suddenly, violently and with extreme prejudice. To die with joy and a song in their heart in the hope of receiving their just martyr's rewards in their demonic paradise. Fuck them! Frankly, it's the nutjobs in Deseret that give all Adepts and Magicians everywhere a bad name! I'd been a thorn in their side once already and I'm sure that my name had been written into some black book inside their big black basalt rock temple on the Salt Lake, with a notation that I'd been very wicked and naughty and needed to be punished severely, preferably something involving massive bloodletting, dark demonic forces and/or including a very professional carving of the Viking blood eagle across my back. I decided to decline the opportunity. "Aye, lad." My hidden little friend Sean whispered to me inside my head. "You've picked him out right and he'll yet be trouble soon, you'll see!" ************* In the process of closing a massive inter-dimensional rift between a thousand worlds that we'd like to remain as far away from us as possible, I picked up a 'Visitor', an inter-dimensional guest, or should I rather say that he instead picked me! He's an odd one, that's for sure... but he's proven himself to be very useful to me in the past -- like helping me to save my life when confronting that ancient but nearly omnipotent fire god! He prefers to spend most of his time invisible, even to me, which was fortunate for everyone around us because the little bugger is not much of a looker. Short and thin, kind of like a cross between a demented leprechaun gone to seed and an undersized and oversexed goblin with too much nose that's gone into the knee-breaking business. The clumps of hair growing from out of his ears are just too disturbing for words. He can speak out loud, with a bit of fake Celtic accent that he sometimes forgets to use when he gets excited, like now, but usually he just talks to me in my head and then listens hard for my sub-verbal response... he says my mind stutters. At first I thought he was an imp, a scrawny little troublemaker from one of the nether-realms, but they're mostly magical nonentities, more sizzle than steak, and this little guy has more hot juice in his pinky finger than I used to have in my entire body. For lack of a better classification, I've now decided that he's sort of a brownie, albeit one absurdly powerful one from god knows where. Very definitely not one of the weaker home-grown domestic ones here on Earth. In the local Austin BMA library, I tried to do some research on brownies and I found a few domestic correlations... but none that exactly matched my visitor. There are English and Scottish hobs, the Scandinavian tomte, the Slavic domovoi and the German Heinzelmännchen... and then there is my visitor who calls himself Sean, just plain Sean. I did find a few allusions to an odd visitor race known as the Ùruisg, but even that clue got me next to nowhere. One fourteenth century wizard was said to have been befriended by one and wrote a book about the race, but no surviving copies are known to survive. Another obscure mid-19th century Texican history has a footnote about John Lovett and James Joseph Wylde meeting one of these rare and incredibly powerful magical creatures who helped them with an impossible task, but that footnote referred to a rare original document of which no complete modern reproduction has been made... and the original is preserved in the Emperor's own personal library. No chance of my ever seeing that! Sean, despite probably being the most powerful creature within a thousand aeronautical miles of us, is surprisingly quiet and low key, but usually has the attention span of a four-year-old preschooler. Back at home, he concentrated his efforts upon a comprehensive study of human behavior, first starting with television soap operas, then infomercials, until finally he was ready for the profound experience that is the Home Shopping Network. It was something of a relief when he next discovered the dozen or so cable hardcore porn channels, and it was much cheaper too! He has also discovered the twin delights of human accomplishment, aged bourbon and scotch, especially served with fine Dominican cigars, preferably smoked while watching a John Wayne movie. The Duke amuses and awes him greatly and Sean has declared him the greatest human ever born, and a savior to our otherwise shallow and vapid, but otherwise highly amusing race. Sometimes when he's had a couple of bottles in him, he'll laugh that he's just a scout for the invasion force -- here to find the best bars, booze, broads and bacon for the advance troops. Bacon is also apparently our greatest contribution to inter-dimensional cuisine, and a priceless rarity eagerly sought after on most worlds. He keeps asking if we can give up the minor magician for hire bullshit so that we could start earning some real silver by starting a hog farm! I try to avoid getting into these sorts of discussions with Sean... they always make my head hurt and my mouth thirsty for more good Texas whisky than is good for me. I just can't tell if he's kidding me or if he's deadly serious. ************** It wasn't a very good plan, but I decided that my best plan for staying out of the way of the Deseret assassin for the next few days until we reached Chicago was to just lock myself in my microscopically small stateroom and catch up on a decade's worth of reading magical textbooks. For the most part, it worked. I had two days of peace and quiet reading my old school books and eating my stack of take-out dinners. It was time surprisingly well spent -- I was actually learning quite a few things I should have learned years ago and some even better techniques for some things I'd already learned by accident or by trial and error, but being inordinately stubborn, I always had to do things my own way, or rather mostly not do them at all. Now I was slowly making up for lost time, but maybe a new trick or two would help keep me alive up here in the unfriendly north. Sean, going slightly through vid withdrawal and down to just a few remaining inches of scotch in his last liquor bottle, had taken a bar of Miracle Putty and created a pair of Napoleonic armies, complete with cavalry and regimental flags, and had lined the pairs up in a recreation of the Battle of Austerlitz. I ought to have been extremely disturbed, particularly with the sounds of the cannons going off filling the cabin now full of clouds of black powder, but I was used to Sean constantly doing unusually perturbing and disturbingly unnatural things, so I kept reading and pretended not to notice. I was halfway through a rather interesting text on air-weaving techniques when I suddenly noticed that the armies were suddenly gone and the air was immediately clear of cannon smoke. I could now hear loud noises outside my door next to the engine room, as if someone was trying to beat down that door. "Uhhh, oh...." I think Sean beat me to it, but I was certainly already thinking it myself. "Laddie, just how well do ye think ye could fly? Like in another half moment... if this air barge were to blow apart to smithereens -- just a wee bit?" "Don't even joke about that, because the answer is slim and none. If there were a strong Air Ley, I might be able to hover for maybe a minute but flying is right out of the question." That was an understatement. Levitation is supposed to be easy-squeezy, just a matter of applied willpower, but I never had the knack for it. Levitation and flying is pure middle-school level easy magic and often it separates the wizards from most of the Adepts. I was pudgy as a kid and everyone laughed their asses off that the nerdy fat kid could just barely lift his tennis shoes an inch or two above the ground. I think even today I still have some sort of mental block about this, even though I shed (most of) the puppy fat many years ago. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 01 If my life depended upon being able to fly my way out of here, then I was already seriously screwed! This was another damnable reason against flying when I should have been on a nice enjoyable train trip! "Fight or flight time." Sean suggested. "And hurry... I think our Deseret friend is about ready to explode his bomb and go meet his infernal maker!" That was exactly what I was afraid of! From what I could now tell outside my door, just about every member of the airship crew was now trying to force open the door to engineering, where apparently our zealot assassin had locked himself and was quite good and ready to blow everything up sky high. Or at least sky higher than we were already at. They weren't making much progress as the door seemed to be jammed tightly shut, but I knew a trick or two for that. "Guys..." I suggested to the aircrew. "Unless you've got the urge to go skydiving without a parachute, get out of my way and let me deal with him. He's going to blow up the airship, and rather messily... and I'd rather not let him get away with it... your government would probably only put me back onboard another fucking airship! Now give me some room -- or better yet, fix me up a nice table for lunch down in the first class diner, with a pretty companion in a short skirt and with some nice big tits... that's some good chaps!" The door to the engine room wasn't just locked, it was also barred as well. Fortunately, since I had been reminiscing about old school days, I remember an old trick that a classmate had taught me to jinx open any door, usually locked bathroom stalls. It still worked like a charm... and it was also still extremely destructive and tended to not leave much if any door left over. It worked off of an elegantly simple process -- the more the door was jammed or barred, the more force was slowly exerted to open it! In this particular case, the door exerted itself backwards completely off its hinges about forty feet, with a destruction wave pattern in its shattered wake not unlike that of a shotgun shell. The blast, and a three-foot square chunk of metal door, had blown our zealot enthusiast right off of his feet, and knocked him a further ten feet away from the hydrogen airbag. The gas airbag was supposedly magically protected, but it wasn't remotely resistant enough against a very close ranged magically enhanced explosive, of the sort that our nutjob had been holding in his hand and was nearly ready to activate. The explosion of the door, and the impact of the shrapnel had caused him to drop the explosive for a moment, but already the shock of our entrance was beginning to wear off. We matched eyes for a moment and then he drove dove to reclaim his bomb, and now I had an instant decision to make. I've never been good about doing two things at once. Some folks might say I've even had difficulties doing one simple thing at once. Ha-ha! I thought for an instant about just wrapping a shield around the Deseret loon and his device and hope that I could muffle and absorb the explosion, protecting myself, the aircrew and not least, the gas bag. Sean had other ideas. "Quick lad! Just shield the doorway and the air bag. Now!" I didn't have any time to think about it, so I just did it. There was no time at all to be subtle or clever. I just threw up my hands, grunted to exert my force field and tried to think happy thoughts. With my left arm touching the base of the gas bag I could feel my power flow through the coated fabric, increasing its magical protection strength, and with not a moment really to spare. The explosion was loud, bright and blinding, but other than being slammed against the wall by the force, my shield held, as did the gas bag... or rather most of it. The force of the shield flexing had split the gas bag in three places, but the explosive energy -- and its flame, had all channeled mostly away. The outside skin of the airship had been blown wide open, but at least there was no 'Kaboom'... at least not today. I've always been good with shields. They've saved my life several times and I've had enough practice with them that with some preparation time I can do some fairly clever things with them. In this case, if I concentrated hard I could cap them over the exposed open areas of the gas bag that were releasing hydrogen, and reduce the flow of the escaping lift gas a bit... sort of. I did sort of have that sinking feeling that we were quickly losing altitude and I was none too sure about what I could do now, if even anything about our predicament. I thought if I collapsed my shields entirely now, we'd definitely start to fall like a rock, and probably even fast enough to bounce when we smacked into the ground. "Someone, anyone... go take a look outside and see if we're holding enough air to float down, or if we're going to crash down instead. I'd rather know now, rather than discover the hard way! And someone go turn off that damned engine, or better yet put it into full reverse! Yesterday, ladies!" Already I could tell that we were tilting down by the nose, listing a good 30 degrees to forward, as if the airship were gathering speed to slam nose first into the ground... and with the propellers still going at full speed to increase our impact. The stewards wouldn't like the 'ladies' insult, but I had a bad feeling that the normal engineer on duty was probably already dead before he was blown up and pieces scattered to the winds, and now someone needed to do something about our forward descending movement. I certainly was doing already more than my share. As I said, doing two things at once, with magic anyway, was a recipe for disaster. "Aye, and disaster or not, you'll be needing to do a wee bit more, at least if you'll be wanting even a remotely soft landing. Feel behind you, up high and to your left a wee bit... there's a strong high Air Ley. Grasp it -- pretend even you want to anchor yourself to it. Fix yourself firm to it... harder! Try to wrap your thoughts around it like a loop, or even a knot it you can... yes, like that! Now, without letting go of your tie, use your shield to anchor the other end, secure and then use it like a winch, to ratchet the tie tightly. Pull yourself up now towards the Ley, slowly but don't let go at either end!" Like a ship that had dropped its anchor during a storm, I was now doing the equivalent of slowly reeling in that anchor line. How I quite kept the focus line from stretching out until it snapped with weakness, I'm not quite sure. This was definitely wizard level magic, something I could never have hoped to do when I was an Adept. Slowly though, our downward speed decreased until an indeterminate eternity later one of the crew returned to report that our descent had finally stopped. For the moment we were level, more or less, and slowly still under way. Once we had a buoyancy equilibrium, sort of... we were still losing hydrogen slowly but steadily, the mental pressure to hold us in place wasn't too bad. Now that I could stop and actually think a bit, I realized that I could also do a few aeromancy tricks that I'd just read about, and with a little trial and error I found I could use some wind to push up against the bottom and rear of the airship, to help give us a little bit more lift. Not for the first time, I regretted spending most of my school classes thinking about nubile young female breasts and doodling plans for Arc-Tec circuitry. "Aye lad. Better later late than never! And well and crisply done on anchoring on that Air Ley. No flames here today! And of that, ye should be well proud!" Amen to that! ********** Our sturdy but wounded airship, never a swift eagle of the air even to begin with, wallowed its way north... slowly, until I began to develop a major splitting headache. Holding on to that Air Ley for nearly two hours was probably the longest that I'd ever had to concentrate on anything in my entire life. This gave Sean the opportunity to remark that a bit of dedicated concentration was a good learning experience for me. In turn I remarked that I didn't need any more lip from snarky visitors... especially ones that had expensive Home Shopping Network habits. Eventually, as my patience wore out, I sent off a steward off to the bridge with a polite request (firm order) suggesting (demanding) that the pilot get his head out of his ass and start finding a place to bring his wounded airship safely down to the ground... the alternative being that I'd do it for him, albeit rather more quickly and suddenly, and probably involving a lot of gratuitous property damage and an abundance of grievous bodily harm. He got the hint quick, and made an emergency landing at an airfield just outside of Gary, Indiana. I never did get my fancy first class luncheon in the 1st class diner. I did glare menacingly at one of the stewards until he brought me a glass of red wine to sip for a respite, along with about four swift refills. No, I didn't offer the swine one of my silvers for the pleasure. Really, it was the very least they could offer me. I'm still not quite sure if I ever did get a proper, let alone vaguely sincere 'Thank You' from anyone! There was even a rumor later that some executive in some corporate ivory tower actually considered billing me for all of the damages, but fortunately someone with a modicum of common sense talked him out of it. *********** I wasn't quite the first passenger off of the airship, but I sure wasn't the last! I sent a telegraph to the Chicago FBMR office saying that my flight had been grounded and that I'd be on the next train from Gary. I was, but the train then sat on a siding at the rail yard in Calumet City for about sixteen hours without any word, rhyme or reason. I've never learned how to do any Transalteration, even simple stuff like turning grape juice into wine. You either have the knack for it or you don't. I don't -- and it's just as well, otherwise more than a few union rail workers would be now enjoying their new careers as frogs in the nearby local pond! About two days after our airship aborted its journey, my slow train to nowhere finally gasped its last few lurching yards into the protective safety of Chicago Union Station where it could at last happily have its long overdue complete mechanical breakdown in relative peace. I couldn't have cared less. My First Class cabin on the train was probably twice the size of the tiny airship cabin, it was quieter, and the passengers were easier to deal with... not to mention it had a real dining service, although the attendents seemed to be unionized as well, and nearly equally exempt from having to demean themselves by waiting upon hungry customers. Still, I had two fairly decent days of relative peace and quiet where I could sleep, catch up on my reading, and occasionally even get a reheated semi-reconstituted meal that was worlds better than automat chow. I'd made it to Chicago in one piece and with a tiny modicum of decent good humor and I was even more or less ready to be helpful to my new FBMR masters. Things could have been much worse. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 02 In Chicago, I made a point of being the last one off of the train that early morning. My two small bags were all ready to go, as was Sean. How and what he packed, if he packed and where he packed it, I'll never know and probably don't want to know. After my recent adventure in the sky, I wanted to make good and certain that some Deseret B-Team wasn't now lining up to take their turn at a shot at me. Sure, I had significantly inconvenienced them back home, but I just couldn't figure that they'd already have organized up a horde or two of suicidal missionaries just to take me out. The kooks at Deseret were bat shit howling at the moon crazy, make no mistake about it, but they didn't tend to be stupid. Some of my bosses, superiors and acquaintances back home over the years tended to forget this, but then again a lot of them misunderstood me as well. Really, I couldn't be that important to them. One lone bomber hitting a target of opportunity, sure.... gaggles of backup hit men, not so likely -- unless the local Federal Bureau of Magical Regulation had been infiltrated or suborned, which sudden wasn't really such a totally outrageous or preposterous notion to me. Face it, when you think of FBMR, you can't help but think of that old Charlie Chaplin silent short where he's a two-bit street magician being hassled by some useless Keystone Cops. You know the type, fat incompetent buffoons with walrus mustaches all running around blowing their whistles and waving about their truncheons, but never actually getting anything useful done. Incompetent, sure. Always have been, and likely always will. It's no secret they've been in a turf war for power with the FBI for years and they never share information between each other. Someday, especially concerning the terrorist activities of Deseret, that inability to share and play nice is going to hurt them badly. The more that I thought about it, the more I gave myself internal odds that it was already a coin flip that more folks than the local FBMR office would know that I was in town as a consultant, and probably exactly why. Maybe this could work for me... or else it was a certainty that I was already being set-up to fail -- badly, loudly, publically and very politically... probably with a maximum of anti-GWA diplomatic fallout and undoubtedly involving at least one unfortunate conflagration, such as a second Great Chicago Fire. What a cheerful thought! I was sure that my dossier positively screamed out 'Firebug!' and that whomever wanted me to fail would be certain to find something expensive and irreplaceable for me to burn down! I made a mental note to myself to avoid thinking before 9 a.m. in the morning or before at least half a pot of coffee; it had never done me any good before, and Sean always warns me that I'll hurt myself trying to think someday. I could hear the little bastard giggling inside of my head. The other benefit of being the last person off of the train was it was quite clear who my welcoming committee was. A lone woman remained on the platform apparently waiting for me and I decided I shouldn't keep her waiting any longer. I didn't sense any lurking snipers, but then again I had zilch ability as a procog. I did trust my protection and Arc-Tec abilities and I was pretty sure my suit could take a rifle round or two. If the bastard was good enough for a head-shot I'd be screwed, but there is no point in worrying about things that I have zero control over. My receptionist was quite pretty actually, right from the first glance, in sort of a whipped dog sort of way. Her figure was pretty good but most of the effect was ruined by the way she slouched. Her head seemed to look down towards the platform floor more than it did scanning the train. I guessed that there were probably a couple of dozen places that she'd rather have been than standing around waiting for me this chilly morning. As I walked over to greet her, the view somewhat improved, but her mood remained apathetic at best. She was tall and fairly slender, even with the dark heavy coat on to ward against the autumn chills of the Windy City. She wore dark boots with heels that came to a bit over mid-calf, but I guess tell that she wore them for comfort, rather than sexual effect. Her hair was a long dark mousy brown that fell haphazardly halfway down her back, quite straight and a bit silky, secured with a silver clasp behind her neck. Even from the train doorway I could sense a few subtle protection magic's from the clasp, but I doubted even another strong Adept could, but then again protection magic is one of my specialties. As was quite the typical fashion, her heavy dark brown skirt was quite long enough to cover the tops of her boots but they didn't quite come down to her ankles. Her outfit was prim, proper and professional, apparently complete with the typical narrow neo-Victorian corset that emphasized her quite good hourglass figure. She might have been well bundled up but you could still tell that she might be a real looker once all of the layers were removed. With the bit of heel on her boots her ass had a very nice swing to it as she walked to greet me and I wondered what she'd look like in just a micro T-back swim bottom on one of our hot Texas beaches, where nearly every woman went bare chested in season. Up here with the current ultra-conservative styles of fashion, I'd be lucky to ever catch even a hint of her bare lower throat, let alone even a hint of cleavage. Doing so wasn't technically against any law, but naughty women that habitually and wickedly exposed their bare ankles, arms or cleavage had a tendency to be arrested off of the street for suspicion of prostitution. The preachers up here took their moral guideance duties up here pretty darned seriously. If anything even hinted at being 'fun', it was either outlawed or socially frowned upon. Even smiling on a cold cloudy day like today was probably criminally suspicious to most of the kill-joys, who were all perpetually mortified beyond words that somewhere, someone was probably having fun. As I approached closer, I could tell that it was the eyes that really put their mark upon the young lady. They were dark with even darker circles around the eye sockets, the look of perpetual tiredness of someone who got up every morning out of bed nearly as exhausted as when they went to sleep, but did it anyway because they needed to, not because they wanted to. It was definitely the face of a career police officer whose career was going absolutely nowhere... but was still too stubborn or proud to quit or admit defeat. The head and posture belong to a woman beaten and defeated by the world, but her eyes had just a bit of life left in them and showed me that she still had a bit of spark left and the will to fight. That gave me a bit of a smile to my face as I greeted her. I liked her already even before she said a word. I'd seen that face before in my own bathroom mirror in the past from beating my head against the wall fighting idiots in the bureaucracy I knew I could never convince, but I could sometimes instead confound... and often did. "Darlene Belanger." She said by means of introduction. "You must be Zac Zephyr I suppose? I'm your FBMR associate and assistant for your visit." This admission didn't seem to thrill or excite her in any way. At least as far as she was concerned, my appearance was probably an ill-wind indeed. "Spot on. The big Texas windbag has blown into the Windy City! Was it the cowboy boots that gave me away? I know it's over the top, but I couldn't resist... and they are comfortable. I did omit the big cowboy belt buckle so that I wouldn't look like too much of a tourist... or a lout. Should I just call you Darlene, or something simpler?" She glared at me for a moment, but cautiously replied, "Just call me Bel. They call me 'Darling' at the office, or at least my boss does, and I hate it, so don't!" Her eyes glared to show me that she meant it. She must have had a lot of practice with that glare -- it positively radiated 'You will know fear and then you will know pain!' Since I needed at least one friend up here, I was more than willing to meet her more than half way. "Will do -- Bel it is. So, what sort of rat-fuck am I walking into? And, just by the way, did you hear about the fun and games that occurred during my airship trip? I swear by St. Lovett they're never getting me on another fat turkey of a sitting duck blimp ever again!" "Enough of the details for me to want to keep my ass of airships for awhile too. Figures you'd be the lucky one... my boss did hint loudly to everyone that you were the top GWA fuck-up and a trouble magnet! They're calling it a purely mechanical accident in the papers and my boss has been laying it down heavy on any witness or newspaperman that even wants to hint around the words 'Deseret' or 'explosives'." "Ouch! So I take it all of the important heads have remained tightly stuck into the sand for the duration? What are they going to do then if I do manage to track similar Deseret mischief happening up here?" She laughed, but a tone that suggested that she thought the situation wasn't actually very funny at all. "Officially, you're already trouble... more trouble than my boss wants to deal with. I think he'll let you look around and start doing what you came up here to do, but you're going to remain on a short leash and definitely with no touching allowed. Unofficially, I'm supposed to take you around, hold your hand, baffle you with bullshit, and make certain that you don't poke your fingers into any unfriendly dark corners... or accidentally find any evidence that would make our bosses look bad, or worse, utterly and blindly incompetent ." About what I'd already figured. "So, I'll get planted into an inconvenient hotel sufficiently apart from the main office, with no particular plan of action and carefully sanitized intelligence leads, and instead offered a comprehensive tour of scenic locations, museums and frivolous night hotspots? A week or two later some memo will be produced suggesting that I'm a complete waste of consultant funding and I'll be shipped back home pronto with a third class train ticket. Something like that?" "About that... pretty much spot on." She admitted. "Fair enough. How much overt resistance to my presence then by the rank and file? Any chance of getting a real lead or two, or is everyone kissing your bosses ass? Or is the real problem his boss, as well?" "Six of one, half a dozen of the other, I suppose." She thought. "There are few guys with their tongue so far up his ass that they could taste his prostate, and more than a few that just don't give a shit about anything either way and are just hanging in for their retirement. The rest? Who knows. I think I know one or two that might take a risk for you, if the results warranted it... and the blowback from management wasn't too open." She shrugged. Also about what I had figured. "What about plain vanilla corruption, or is it all, as I've heard, just an accepted job benefit?" She glared at me but then shrugged. "It takes connections and money to get promoted to any position that has any sort of meaningful authority. That goes double for the Chicago PD officers. By the time anyone makes Sergeant, let alone Lieutenant or Captain, they're in the pay of a least one street gang and on the payroll of a major bootlegger, rumrunner or narcotic distribution organization. Not to mention getting freebies at that one local knocking-shop." "And probably the smarter ones are in with the local gunrunners too." She knodded. "Fair enough. It's good to know where you stand right from the get-go, so that we have as few misunderstandings as possible. I discovered a major Deseret gun smuggling ring working out of Austin, not even half of a mile from the Republic capitol building. Once the word got out the other BMA and GWA officials found similar rings working most of the other major citys, all of them moving a frightening amount of guns. To Deseret, obviously, but we missed the final links in the chain. Up here I'm sure the same organization is equally hard at work." "But guns are almost totally illegal for civilians to own up here." She stated, as if by rote. "They couldn't possible find many on the black market and the only gun dealers have extremely rigorous paperwork tracking each and every gun." "Put not your trust in Princes, or mountains of administrative paperwork and red tape. The more paper and regulations you push on something, the easier it is to forge and work the system. True, probably most of the guns are coming from across the Canadian border, where the gun laws are virtually non-existent, or smaller amounts from Texas and the rest of the GWA, but I've heard rumors that organized crime up here has gotten into the gun manufacturing business as well. This gives me several angles to investigate. Undoubtedly your boss swears that the local legal gun dealers are clean, so we'll look at them first, but I wouldn't be surprised to find them handling a lot more firearms than they are supposed to be." "He's already put a team on them and they didn't find a dotted 'i' out of place." She insisted. "Of course not, because they weren't supposed to. They probably even politely called first to say that they were coming and the official logs were all neat and tidy waiting for them. It's the other set of books that might have been interesting." "You're a suspicious bastard." She commented, in a fairly approving tone of voice. "Darned tooting! I was given this job by some of your Washington fed boys, but clearly the local office sees things otherwise and wants me either gone or minimized. So let's just go into your office like good obedient troopers, smile and nod our heads a lot and then ignore anything we're ordered to do... or rather not do... and then go turn over some big rocks until something nasty crawls out." "Sounds like a plan to me!" She actually smiled, and I liked that look on her a lot. It was a crooked sort of smile, sort of like those muscles were atrophied and not used a whole lot. Like a dog who had been kicked a bit by an old master that was suddenly now finding itself in a new house and new rules, but not quite yet at all certain of a kinder outcome. ************* She'd been given one of the scarce agency cars, and already I was devising various schemes for racking up some mileage. It was small, almost cramped inside but Bel assured it that it was non-polluting and had exceptional fuel efficiency running on about 90% ethanol. Up here, this car model was a best seller, but the vast majority of Chicago's citizens took the Metro system of streetcars and electric trolleys. You could get pretty much anywhere you needed to within the city on the system, if you were in no hurry whatsoever to get there. Even non-polluting and high efficiency cars were borderline politically incorrect up here, largely being perceived at elitist and wasteful. Still, the elites in government love to have their perks, and cramped as I was, this still beat taking trolleys or walking. With decent Arc-Tec, flyvers were equally non-polluting and environment friendly, as long as one didn't crash into too many birds. Austin, like most big metropolitan cities within the GWA, also had very functional mass transit systems but autos were still far from an uncommon site, even ones burning pure original refined gasoline. If you could pay the heavy taxes for a polluting auto and its fuel, so what. The taxes encouraged and subsidized greener and more efficient technologies, mostly Arc-Tec, reducing government costs for 'greener' drivers. Proper 'conservatism' protects the environment for future generations but allows freedom and choice. Up here someone in power long ago had decided that the concept of individually owned motor vehicles wasn't quite in fitting with their concepts of a socialist utopia, so even with federal government stickers and plates we received a lot of nasty looks from tram and trolley passengers and pedestrians. Funny how 'socialism' always seem to mean bringing everyone to be equal at the bottom, instead of finding creative ways to lift the bottom elements of society up. The Republic of Texas and the rest of the GWA aren't perfect, but we try and stick with the governmental concepts of interfering in our citizens lives as little as possible. No one should be guaranteed happiness, but we try our best to avoid creating misery in society. Quite unlike our dysfunctional northern cousin. With bans on liquor, and stimulating drugs (including caffeinated or sugared soft drinks and tobacco), 'unhealthy foods' (randomly defined as anything that particular judges or inspectors don't like but especially including most red meat or anything with fat), sex outside of marriage (or a locked bedroom), public dance halls (it might lead to fornication), virtually any weapon of self-defense, and so forth, I'd say that it would be difficult in the extreme to create another society with more misery than the USA had done since the days of Teddy Rex. If the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution had not been repealed during the Kennedy administration, I'd have bet some serious silver that most of these other social 'remedies' would never have been enacted... and that by now a lot of very angry and well-armed citizens would have congregated in front of their congress to do something about it! "Just how attached are you to the theoretical prospect of someday actually receiving your pension?" I casually enquired as we drove away from the station. "Not terribly. I'm not going to make Senior here at this office, let alone ever become a Chief. It's strictly old boys club around here despite all of the Equal Rights, Affirmative Action, and 'glass ceiling buster' laws. I don't drink with the top boys, or golf, or drop my panties in the staff lounge... and I definitely don't make their coffee. I've been quietly trying to get a transfer back east, but it's all 'old family friends' instead back there. I figure in another year or so, they'll be packing me off somewhere west, either the borders of Deseret, or the border of the British Columbia Territory, or worse, the separatist states." I cringed with her. Most of the far western border US states west of the Mississippi were hotbeds of secession, and had been for decades. Federal authority there was minimal at best five minutes outside of the Minneapolis city limits. If the westerners had possessed arms in any numbers, this entire region would probably be in active revolt. Certainly Deseret was stirring the pot there, and rather successfully, and every federal officer, wizard or soldier tied down keeping the peace was one less defender along that weak mountainous Colorado, Wyoming and Montana border. In principle, most of the GWA tended to agree with the conservative complaints of the secessionists -- lower taxes, more liberty, less federal interference in strictly local affairs, not to mention legal booze, broads and guns. However, most of the more sensible libertarians could agree that yet another American civil war would only weaken everyone, and make the western pickings just that much easier for Deseret. The CSA had a more aggressive attitude, but then again they didn't have a border with Deseret. Against the GWA, Deseret hadn't gained a foot of territory in over twenty years, but their increasing encroachment against the western American states and the British Colonial Territory of Columbia has been slow, methodical and relentless... and alarmingly effective. For better or worse, the western state situation needed to remained stabilized or they'd wake up some day to find that another hundred miles of borderline or so had suddenly changed into very unfriendly hands. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 02 No one wanted a war right now. Particularly since no one had even certainty regarding who would win. Deseret and the GWA were just a bit too evenly matched and no one counted the US as being an especially helpful or useful military ally. Many even thought that with the USA as a war partner they would proof nearly worthless in battle, leaving the GWA to weaken themselves fatally to defend thousands of extra miles north on the American front, while our allies slowly collapsed. As far as my bosses in the BMA were concerned, the status quo was a lot safer than several other uncertainties. Unfortunately, we couldn't count at all on Deseret to make those same calculations. Creating anarchy in the American west might be sufficient to collapse the weak US government all on its own, allowing perhaps several entire states to be absorbed before the GWA could be enticed into reacting... and with less than favorable odds. What a ratfuck! Bel's boss might not want those weapon smugglers found, but for the security of the GWA it really had to be done! ********** "So," I inquired while she drove, "assuming for amusement value only that if the big boss took a sudden and rather violent dislike for me and my consulting efforts, just what sort of top shelf magical disruption attempts would I be likely to face? If I can put it delicately. I know that's sort of a taboo subject up here. Down south, we're a bit more casual about it, and deciding what I can do, and who is liable to try and stop me, are definitely survival concerns for me." "So I've heard. No, talking about it doesn't bother me. You're technically a very strong Adept, right? Or were? The briefing doc said that you might have had a burn out." This was technically true, or at least on paper. My last official test showed I had a Score of 0.0. Dead normal mundane -- powerless. On the other hand, I hadn't bothered to inform them that after a bit of rest, and internal reorganization and recovery, my magical skills were now significantly greater than they had been before. By a rather large order of magnitude greater. Some of it was undoubtedly due to my new absorbed Incan artifact, but even more might be due to my old flame Henrietta and her sister, merged into some new composite uber-magical ethereal being, poking her fingers around into my brains and adjusting it for her amusement... and self-preservation. Also I had Sean, a very definite wild-card by my side. Did he have a finger fiddling around in my brain too? Now that was a scary thought! In any case I was absolutely Wizard-class ability now, well into the 9+ Score at least I guessed, but the more people that thought I was still a harmless burnout, the safer I'd probably be. "Was. Most definitely. I'm suspended and unrated for the moment, and probably for the better. Still, I don't think I'll be helpless and completely dependent upon your skills, and hopefully my visit will turn out to be useful for everyone... or mostly everyone. Yourself?" "Weak Sorceress First Class, some offense, some defense, and I'm a halfway decent psychometric. By touching things I can tell what they do, or who last did something with it. Nicely useful for figuring out who fired a gun or used a murder weapon that the local police have discovered. In fact I seem to spend most of my time spend on loan to CPD doing forensics for them. Juries don't trust magical forensics though, and half time being called as a Witch for the Prosecution does more harm than good for the case and they'll let the dirtbag walk scott free just to spite me. It's a culture of mistrust and suspicion up here, and even back east I'd still get dirty looks out in the street. The laws and regulations say I have to be in uniform while on duty, except for extremely specific legal exceptions and exemptions. This case theoretically warrants one, and I've got a judicial writ allowing me to work undercover as a mundane civilian. That's at least some small favor if we want to do anything resembling a low-key but intensive investigation. I guess things could be worse." They certainly could! They used to call female Adepts and Wizards in the GWA, witches and sorceresses back home too... and some of the older government folks still do. Most of the gals hate it, but they don't have quite the same sort of glass ceiling back home that they did here. In the GWA, it's theoretically all about talent, a meritocracy, but it does help I admit (sometimes a lot) who you know, and what if any Imperial connections you have. Still a common birth is by no means a deal breaker to climbing the ladder of power. Up here, it often was -- it's all about money, preferably older money. Witch, and not used in a respectful or endearing sort of manner, was pretty much a curse word as well as being a rather discourteous title. Still, things were slowly changing for the better up here. Until the Civil Rights movement of Kennedy's second term, Witches and Wizards had to wear their official robes at all times out in public, very much like the proverbial Scarlet Letter, or the yellow marks of the old medieval Jewish ghettos in Europe, and they were subject to severe governmental monitoring day and night. Change was still occurring, sometimes even for the better... but up here it was glacier slow. It was no wonder that most of the local staff, the ones not bucking for promotion, frankly didn't give much of a shit about anything! Apathy I could deal with or manipulate. "Well that's better than I had hoped." I agreed, and she nodded as well. "Tell me more about the prostate lickers and other talent likely to be on the opposing team?" I reminded her. "Concerning the possible local staff that might have an adverse interest in any positive outcome, I'd say that two of the louder ass-feltching Wizards, Norman and Desmond might jump in any direction the boss hinted at. They're both shoot before talking types with an even bigger history of collateral property damage than even your record indicates. There are a couple of Second Class staffers, you'd call them mid-level Adepts, that are in that camp too, with another three or four staffers on the fence. If they thought they were doing their lawful duty, such as if the boss declared that you'd gone rogue, they'd hop over as well. I don't have much pull with them, or much of anyone for that matter. However, if the local FBI unofficially got word of your inquiries, they'd be disturbingly helpful. Their boss doesn't get on with our boss, and any minor coups or significant confirmations of Deseret activities would float their boat nicely. That would be ok with me, if we could keep it quiet. "Any outsiders with an interest in the current status quo, for or against?" I enquired. "There are also a few crime lords that might know a thing or two about Deseret smuggling activities. Sebestyen Dénes is the top mob boss, both north and south side, at least for now, but he's enough of a patriot to never willingly trade guns, or anything else to Deseret. He served in the Army and also lost his kid brother on the border about fifteen years ago, back when we still had the draft and compulsory military service. Some of his underlings, not so much, but Dénes runs a very tight ship. There's always an upstart or two willing to cut corners and take a shortcut to building up a fortune. Probably just like the local southern muscle you found down south. Ignorant, but willing to take a shady dollar. Dénes would know. He's got ears to the ground, and well above and below ground too. With a careful introduction, I think he'd be helpful. Between you me and the next lamp post, I've taken a dollar or two from him. Hell, everyone up here has... or from one of his competitors. If you don't pick a side, then no one trusts you out on the street. You won't make busts and sooner or later you're bound to have an unfortunate 'accident'." Chicago corruption is a stereotypical feature of fictional detective and political action-adventure novels, and already I could tell that I was going to get a lot of first-hand experience. Unions and organized crime seemed to go hand in hand. No surprise for a country that still had federal prohibition against hard spirits. A late Teddy Rex reform theoretically legalized 'non-intoxicating spirits' such as beer and wine, but both were nearly as tightly regulated as weapons sales. Like any other kind of prohibition however, if Sean or I wanted to find a decent single-malt Scotch or well-aged southern Bourbon, I could probably find an acceptable speak-easy in less than ten minutes. Probably a helpful hotel employee could even provide us with room service for all of the delights of nature, a good medium-rare steak, a nice bottle of red wine and a box of fresh stogies with some sipping whisky or scotch for afterwards. Besides, governmental enforcement of delicious and pleasant social vices took time, tax money and political motivation away from more pressing issues, like Deseret encroachments, or western civil unrest. In fact, once Bel dropped me off at my hotel, I had no problems at all getting my local favorite Tex-Mex dark beer right out of their bar cooler and finding a tolerable hunk of beef right in the hotel's dining room. A hint that a good top-shelf chaser (for Sean) was instantly rewarded, even without a hard silver encouragement (cough) bribe (cough). If he didn't care about enforcement issues, then I certainly didn't. For a quite reasonable price, a Scotch bottle even accompanied us up to our room, mostly for Sean, but I'll admit to having a little nightcap before I dropped off to sleep for the next twelve hours. It was empty by sunset, and mostly not of my doing. How that little bugger can put it away! He needed some respite from his non-existent labors, especially since American cable TV seemed to be a wasteland, without a single porn or home shopping channel to be found! Tomorrow was going to be a rather interesting day! *********** There was really no escaping it, but we had to start our day off at the local Federal Bureau of Magical Regulation, and an extended hour long meeting with all the various pismires, non-entities and blatantly obvious lackwits and fucktards that were going to soon make it their duty in life to piss upon every stage of my, or rather our, investigation. Bel was spot on in her evaluation of the local staff and I could easily pick out the potential troublemakers. Former frat-rats and country club boys with connections, and perhaps a bit of actual magical ability for the irregular times that they actually had to earn their paychecks. I checked over Norman and Desmond extra closely and didn't note a single bit magical protection that I could slice, dice or julienne with half of my brain turned off. The collection of aggressive Adepts aspiring to middle management didn't impress me either, and even the apathetic drones didn't radiate anything that I couldn't handle. Just on principle I gave an extra look-over towards the few 'duty' types that were still heavily in denial that hadn't quite figured out that they were riding an endless merry-go-round to nowhere. From what I could tell, they still genuinely believed that that being a magical shunned leper someone made other folks lives somehow better. A few of these folks might actually have a clue and I hoped that Bel could swing a couple of the remaining true believers to my side, assuming I could find some cold hard evidence to entice them to leave the safety of the reservation. Last there were the slightly greater cohorts of lapsed believers well now into the remorse stage of things, that either couldn't much be bothered by anything other than an actual state of war, or just didn't care, and were now sulking in the corners and biding their time until happy hour or retirement, whichever came first. More or less exactly what I had expected. Her infamous boss, Mason Probert, looked exactly what I had imagined from the sound of his name -- a short, balding, middle-aged civil servant gone physically completely to seed, with an unwholesome interest in generating bureaucratic paperwork and other petty bullshit, and a master political artist at jacking around with the careers of anyone who didn't kiss his divinely holy ass. The sneer on his face as he took my hand spoke volumes. This was a nasty little fuck if I'd ever seen one, and he was very definitely a certifiably dangerous cock-bite that could (and probably would) fuck over every single aspect of this investigation. The glint of bullshit that filled his eyes quite frankly spoke volumes that he just couldn't wait to start making our lives a living hell. I'm darned good at reading people and tell the truth from a bald-faced lie usually at least four times of out five, but this assclown was good. I knew that every word that emerged from the reptiles mouth was pure crap, but he was so good and experienced at spewing it that I couldn't see under his façade to figure out exactly what his angle was. Was this interference personal, political, treasonous or just some sort of internal turf war? Or was he just a conscienceless sociopath completely with scrupples quite willing and able to burn down the entire house before he'd let an outsider touch, let alone set foot inside his domain and play with his toys? My first gut reaction after shaking his hand was that I now felt dirty and needed a bath. Trust your first gut instinct -- always... mine is about a hundred percent faithful for warning me about forthcoming trouble. Now if I only always listened to it, even sometimes, that would be a distinct improvement. "Aye, that one's a right menace, he is. Full of webs like a spider or better a serpent down in a hole scheming, and all for woe. He'll not be your friend, so watch him close, before he can bite... and surely he will when he is ready!" Sean murmured. Spot on as usual. He can read my mind like an open book, but he says he can only skim the top surface thoughts of others... supposedly. Still, his advice has never, ever been wrong. Oh yeah, definitely. As the saying goes, keep your friends close... and your enemies even closer. ************* After our formal introduction and the snake oil sales presentation was over, I was handed a briefing packet that was nearly feather light and its lack of significant contents more than hinted that anything genuinely useful had been omitted, extracted or purged. Alleged the fucktard twins Norman & Desmond had performed a complete and exhaustive investigation... but all six pages of the report suggested loudly otherwise. Even at a glance, the 'suggested' avenue for further enquiries looked like a laundry list of blatant dead-ends, or else indifferently fabricated witness statements. I'd put my odds on mostly the latter. Names of witnesses that couldn't be currently located, incorrect addresses, or else well-paid and prepared professional informants, ready, willing and able to send me on an endless wild-goose chase, like a puppy chasing its own tail. Yep, this screamed misdirection every step of the way. To make matters worse, in order to keep our heads down and keep our obvious watchers nicely bored, we were actually going to have to waste our time on this fabricated nonsense, and with smiles on our faces, at least for the start. Our oral instructions, which fortunately are always very subject to all too human accidental misunderstandings, were equally misleading and rather too indirect. Any new leads we uncovered needed to be immediately reported up the chain of command, clearly so that future suitable misdirection could be constructed to re-steer us back down the track to blissfull happy ignorance. Probert wasn't even particularly subtle about it, he just overplayed the role of the idiot micro-manager boss, who mission was to stunt creativity and ambition at every step. We'd both had experience with this sort of thing before -- the trick is just to snow the asshole deep with bullshit reports that looked meaningless and harmless, then slowly sidle the whole investigation off on an oblique angle, vaguely hinted about buried in the very back of some excessively long update, ready to be used as a get out of deep shit card when the investigation was completed. Clearly, as the records showed, you had kept your ass of a boss completely informed during every stage of the investigation, and his failure to redirect your efforts elsewhere couldn't possibly be your fault. Rinse, wipe and repeat. Hee hee hee. My final last impression of him was that I was certain that he didn't want us to succeed. I guess the discovery of a Deseret spy and smuggling ring operating in Chicago would be bad for his self-preservation, let alone any further promotion. He'd try and take all of the credit in a heartbeat if we found anything, though, and then with his cronies retroactively make it look like it was entirely by his own efforts and the in-house investigation that he had diligently supervised. Technically, it really was his investigation... and they obviously hadn't done shit about it in at least six months, if my flimsy briefing folder was any indication. Unless there was another hidden folder somewhere all prepared with Probert's version of the facts. Now that I thought about it, I was sure that there was a lot that he had to be hiding. Bel agreed with these concerns, as we privately whispered over lunch in a busy restaurant just far enough away from the local office so that accidental interruptions, or eavesdropping, would be extremely unlikely. I had an Arc-Tec gizmo that did a sweet job on any pure techno, non-magical wiretaps, and it ought to be at least 95% effective against magical bugs as well. I usually used it at all of my private client meetings as it also contained a voice recorder good for about six hours. It looked like a fountain pen, and it could even write in a pinch, and with my permission Bel gave it a casual touch and then smiled. "Very nicely made, I've never seen anything like it here. It's better by far than anything I can lay my hands on... your own work? It's probably unnecessary here, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if our fleet car didn't now have a bug or a few tracking devices in it. I'd grabbed the oldest and dirtiest car out of the motor pool, definitely not one of the two the garage boss first tried to offer me, so our ride yesterday was probably pretty safe and clean. Today, they'll have had time to fix that oversight. Probably your hotel room too, I wouldn't be surprised." That didn't worry me too much. Sean seemed to spend 99% of his time invisible hovering somewhere inches away from me and wouldn't be home alone much. Sean wouldn't need any advising to keep his own actions low profile. He always did. My uber-Brownie was more than capable of avoiding any detection, especially if forewarned. Enough said and we nodded quietly in agreement. From now on we'd only hold 'safe' discussions in public places like this and leave the active misdirection for in-car discussions. Anything said in the car was assumed to be lie. Simple and easy. As for my hotel room, I'd already brought along with me any tools I thought I might need for work, either in my vest or jacket pockets. I make most of my own Arc-Tec goodies and I like to keep them small and very concealable. For now I saw absolutely no reason to tell my willing co-conspirator and rather attractive partner that I had another bit of secret help on the side. Sean was an extremely valuable piece of long ranged danger radar and I wouldn't have given a copper penny for my odds on this case without him. Already he was family to me, and quite nearly becoming a true trusty friend I wouldn't want to be without. I felt already that I could trust Bel, but any knowledge about Sean fell into another privacy category entirely. Like my bonded Inca artifact, Sean was going to remain one of my hidden ace cards for as long as possible. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 02 "What's the first step?" She enquired. "Well, I suppose we ought to be good and well behaved for at least the next day or two, so our tails start to lose their interest in us and get a bit more susceptible to some creative misdirection. It's just absolutely amazing what you can do with Miracle Putty and a very twisted and creative mind!" She laughed. "That will be good. I'll need a day or two to pass around a low-key request for us to have a meeting with Boss Dénes. I think I have a secure info-path channel, but it's probably not a very direct one. From what I've seen of the briefing report there isn't shit there. There aren't even any direct interview reports with so much as a single local gun dealer to establish if a weapons smuggling ring might be working locally. They would know, especially the two or three big ones. There aren't many small ones; the way dealer licensing is, they need a hefty fee to even for the basic license to attempt to set up shop, not to mention all of the other regulatory hurdles a customer faces to even be able to buy a hunting rifle or a shotgun, let alone a handgun or anything else more exotic. Dealing in military grade firearms is supposed to be a Class-A felony, a heinous crime worse probably even than murder to most of the east coast civil service bosses, but I'm sure some of the smart dealers are bending that rule as far as it can go without snapping." "That sounds like exactly the folks who we should be taking with." I suggested. "Agreed, but that's also rather firmly in our 'don't do' list, at least according to our verbal instructions... or at least I think so, if you remember them properly." "Ok, save that for Phase Two then. Actually I'd creatively interpret that vague instruction as a hint not to harass them, but a polite conversation ought to suit the spirit of that order just fine! For today, I'll be a good lackey and let's go wear out some boot leather chasing down a few of these wild geese until tomorrow. I think I've got a way to entice a few of our more coached informers and potential witnesses a bit off of their rehearsed scripts. It's probably quite illegal up here, and certainly immoral... but probably not at all fattening, more's the pity. What on earth possessed the Food and Drug administration to ban ice cream anyway? Have they gone completely crazy in their zeal to ban all sources of fat from your nation's diet?" She didn't answer me, but the sour look on her face hinted that this forbidden creamy goodness had formerly been a significant food group in her pre-ban diet. ************* It wasn't a bad plan, and it let us get our feet wet in the kiddy wading pool for a few days before our lifeguards realized we were off cavorting in the deep end of the Olympic sized pool. Beside, my belated rereading of old textbooks had given me some rather devious ideas for some bribe charms on a few silver dollars. If we were lucky, we were going to glean over these well mowed fields and possibly find a gem or two. Bel was already smiling when we located and interrogated our first set of alleged witnesses. I had the very definite idea that she was willing to be quite devious and bend every rule in the book, if it would gain us success -- and a clear promotion path somewhere anywhere else but here. For now, that suited me just dandy and together my new partner in crime and I headed off to check-off the chaff from our list of names, and find that elusive diamond in the rough! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 03 ********** CHAPTER THREE Our first day of interviewing witnesses and a parade of increasingly dubious suspects was quite uneventful, and wholly unproductive. Even with a bit of subtle magical nudging, giving myself a heavy duty 'Trust charm', so that strangers would tend to like and trust me, right from our first meeting, didn't turn up anything particularly interesting or significant. Our gut instincts were spot on, our 'Action List' we'd been handed with names of smalltime stool-pigeons and grade Z street thugs was indeed a bunch of fabricated twaddle designed to keep me running in a circle chasing my own tail for weeks. Even with my unnatural charming personality, our interviewees kept tight to their scripts, enough so that even an idiot could sense the same patterns being repeated ad-nausium. It was quite true that none of these alleged witnesses honestly knew a thing about any weapons violations, let alone smuggling... and it was even more patently obvious that most of them didn't have much of a clue about why they were even involved in our investigation in the first place... but they'd all been impeccably coached and rehearsed in advance to the extent that each said the same nothings in nearly the exact same sort of way. Right off the bat, I also suspected some memory tampering had been used on a few of these alleged witnesses. A few of these very minor street lugs just acted too calm and smug, getting an obvious kick out of jerking us around. They knew that we'd be paying them a visit and now it was like payday! If I'd had to have guessed, a few had probably been used as part-time muscle or security for some previous past operation and had then received very adequate memory erases. That sort of grunt job wasn't unusual even back at home, something along the lines of: "Do this easy and quick security gig, two gees cash for a few hours work, plus they've got a mage who can clean your memory of the job -- no witnesses, loose ends, or loose lips for them, and easy money for everyone, with no need for anyone getting hurt from seeing something they shouldn't have!" Or something like that. Actually probably something a lot like that. Memory spells were tricky, usually only doable by a Wizard level Mentalist. I wouldn't have wanted to try one, it's not something you can learn from a book, you either have the talent or you don't. Done wrong (easy to do) there are literally dozens of things that can go horrifically wrong. I asked Bel to see if any of her local staff were up to that sort of fun and from the immediate reaction on her face I thought she knew right off of the bat the name of an excellent local suspect. One of the staff Senior Adepts, a bitch of a witch named Ingrid, was an unusually talented Mentalist, and also quite close with the boss and the feltching wizard lads. I had not met her at the office and Bel admitted that Ingrid kept odd hours and was often on private missions for the boss. That put her up nicely right at the top of my suspect list; already I was suspecting an inside job. *********** The next day was a bit of an improvement, largely because I was getting a clearer idea about the sort of blank spaces that our smiling gunsels erased memories might be covering. With a little late night tangential thinking, accompanied by a few sips from a bottle of adequate bootleg Canadian whisky, I started coming up with a few ideas for some other questions that one or two of our innocent bully boys just might accidentally answer. Our next likely suspect for further probing revealed himself just after noontime, a weedy sort of low-level gangster wannabe that just looked far too happy to meet us and was just dumb enough to dance and hop like a circus dog when put to the question. We could both tell right away he knew a few things he shouldn't and he was just sharp enough to realize he'd wandered off the safe and narrow interrogation path he should have been on, so he tried his hand at some unplanned free-style lying and prevarication, but he wasn't fooling anyone. When cornered, my final probing question finally made him spill his guts... 'Who do you think I should talk to that might know the answers to these questions?' Simple, direct... and apparently not covered by the memory spell. Even with the Trust spell up, I still needed to pass my hapless victim a charmed silver dollar to slowly pry the rest of the information loose. Now, with my coin clenched tightly in his fist, subtly urging him to trust and help me yet further, and speak the truth without evasion, we now learned the name of an organizational higher-up, a certain local Bureau of Firearms taxation agent who, quote, 'was the fixer we wanted to see if we needed any illegal guns'. Naturally, we couldn't report this back to Bel's boss, but we decided that with a second more innocent and less pointedly revealing interview recorded for evidence early tomorrow morning, we could give ourselves a clear quasi-legal breakthrough in the investigation that Mason Probert couldn't squelch instantly, and probably also provide a suitable introductory welcome gift to take to the FBI. The plan was simple but diabolical. Today, or rather immediately, we would ditch our tails and then rush over to see our new witness, but not report that we intended to interview him later on until our telephone status update first thing tomorrow morning. Then, hidden in watchful surveillance, we could wait to see if anyone rushed to close that loophole, probably permanently and lethally... and exactly whom. Springing our ambush, we would nail ourselves at least a nice mid-level criminal, and not some low level flunky. This would be a job the bosses would want done right. Our new key witness, the local allegedly bent BoF agent lived in a nice part of town that certainly didn't seem compatible with life on a government civil service salary. He, naturally, wasn't at home but his helpful wife gave us his business card, and informed us that he should be in his office all day. That would do. I refreshed my Trust charm and then took the half hour or so that I needed to securely implant a rather strong truth charm upon another of my silver dollars. It was probably even a bit too strong of a spell artifice, especially on a solid silver dollar that the victim, I mean our witness, would be holding. The risk of mental blowback was fairly considerable, leaving a witness, or rather maybe a victim, incapable of lying afterwards for days, weeks or perhaps even permanently. Technically, evidence given under truth-spell was extremely illegal up here. Heck, it was only slightly less illegal back home, except under direct Imperial order. Still, we weren't going to record this interview for official evidence. Already I had a pretty good idea that we wouldn't like what we'd learn. Trapped in his office and trusting me like an innocent child and now pathetically eager to do the right thing, our bent civil servant, David Stout, sang like a canary for the next three hours. His story was so spicy that Bel couldn't resist backing up and recording his testimony under oath, but even she realized that the odds of anyone other than us seeing his confession were about nil. Our crookedly little bureaucrat knew most of the mid and low level players in the gun smuggling game, and the sorts of shadowy high octane political power that protected them. Lots of senior political clout at both the FBMR and the local police, he was certain... but he couldn't name names other than that he was positive that 'very high ranking individuals' would protect the smugglers, and taking the lion's share of the illegal proceeds. Apparently, his motive for involvement was plain vanilla greed, but he had known about alleged Deseret involvement, enough so that I'd unquestionably brand him as a willing traitor to his country. Bel was even less generous and washed her hands of anything regarding his fate. Stout could and did willingly identify the two primary middle men that he directly knew about, namely the pair of major arms dealers primarily involved and also the minor local crime boss that currently handled most of the transportation and security arrangements for the operation, at least within this part of northwest Chicago. The top rotten apples remained hidden up in their trees. Our pigeon was smugly certain that no evidence against them would ever make it to trial, and even the mid-chain links, these names he had provided, were not invulnerable to removal, or just plain unfortunate accidents. Immediately, if not sooner. He was dead positive that the ladder of evidence would be cut off right at his knees and any investigation would die right along with him. Forced to speak only the truth, he was already convinced that he was already a dead man taking his final breaths. I thought, twice even, about adding a few extra compulsions to his charm, but I decided that I'd really rather wait and see who showed up to clean out his clock... and silence his loose wagging tongue. We weren't going to get any prosecutable evidence this way, but Bel admitted she'd also be a dead woman walking as well if anyone got a hold of a copy of her confession interview. For lack of a better idea, we decided that we'd stick with the existing plan, and if necessary just take that jump off of the reservation in order to bring in indisputable evidence the hard way, enough so that disgracing us or otherwise trying to further muddy the investigation probably wouldn't succeed. Any way we sliced the problem, we both agreed that we were going to need the help of the FBI. The more we considered the mess that we were now in, the more we were certain that we were going to need outside help to punch open this case. With the restrictive media laws that pretty much hamstrung (if not eviscerated) the 1st Amendment, at least involving any government related crimes, no editor was going to touch our story without external independent confirmation that would hold up in a federal court of law. That again meant that we needed to make an ally of the FBI, but in order to get them involved, I needed something resembling some strong hard physical evidence, like a crap load of stolen or smuggled guns, or the probably location of a Deseret security squad protecting the operation... preferably both. For the moment we didn't have any of that. Instead, to better portray an attitude of frustration, we nonchalantly made our way to the zoo to spend the rest of the afternoon. Re-locating our tail and letting them trail us again was fairly easy, two low level FBMR drones were handling the car surveillance detail, and then another pair of rather obvious minor league gangland gunsels with yellow striped jackets spent the next three hours shadowing us in the park. Bel thought that yellow was the gang color of the Clinton Street gang, but she wasn't sure. She also didn't have any police friends that worked gang-crime, so she knew no one else to ask, but she thought one of her other gangland contacts might know, but it would take a day or two. No hurry, at least yet. With our audience pegged, it was simple misdirection to send a pre-prepared simulacrum made from a bit of Miracle Putty depicting an illusion of me walking off alone late that afternoon into my hotel. Until I met Sean and discovered his fetish for the magical silly putty, I'd never worked much with illusion spells, but after a bit of practice (and some practical 'how-to' hints from Sean) I was now getting pretty good at them! No one followed my doppelganger inside, a sure sign that our campaign of appearing to follow their misdirection agenda was working smoothly. I silently hid myself in the back seat of the car while she drove to her house and then we repeated the illusion of her walking inside. Certain that we were done for the day, our tails quickly became bored and drove off, and soon so did we, after leaving another of my putty simulacrums that duplicated the departmental car parked out in front of her apartment building. Sean, as usual was right... there is almost nothing you can't do with a handful of Miracle Putty, and I'd brought along quite a lot of the stuff! Bel cast an intricate nullification spell that we hoped would jam, or at least mute down the magical tracker and/or voice recorder that we were pretty sure had been implanted inside of the car, but just to be safe we stayed as quiet as possible during the drive and we parked a full five blocks away from the gun store, next door to a popular nightclub. Hopefully, even if the tracker was still active and someone decided to check up on us, they'd assume we'd gone in for a tot. Bootleg liquor was indeed easily obtainable there, and we decided that we'd stop here after our visit to the crooked arms dealer. ************ It was getting late and almost near dark, but we were just in time to catch the city's top weapons dealer, and the number one culprit that Stout had fingered, right before his shop closed. From what our snitch had strongly intimated, our rogue arms dealer, Jesse Hollaway, did a great deal of subterranean business in the tunnels underground beneath his shop and didn't care a fig where or to whom the goodies went as long as the cash was green, or even better yet, paid in gold or good silver. I'd mentioned that private possession of gold or silver coins or bullion was a Class-B felony up here, far away from civilization and my own land of limited non-intrusive government, but so was selling guns to your national enemies. Jesse just probably didn't care, and keeping your loot in precious metals was always a safe way to plan for an extremely uncertain future, possibly even as an international fugitive. I mentioned to Bel that it was more than likely that he wasn't going to be as easy of a cookie to crumble into obedience, and that we might need to take some risks. We needed to find those hidden guns, or at least a reasonable stash of them, to bring in the FBI to join our private party and that probably meant gunsels or other security, maybe including another wizard or two. Bel thought she was good for that sort of party. The way she smiled to me more than hinted she thought it was long past time that she'd whooped up upon some seriously bad guys while getting a chance to shove her boss's pig snout of a nose into the shit. Just to add to the fun, there was a decent Earth Ley Line almost directly under our perp's gun shop. Of the elements, Earth is really my better fortes (other than Fire) and it makes excellent protective magic, but I rarely ever used it for offense. Still I could metaphorically speaking grab both hands into it to juice my shields up and even keep them going, hopefully for as long as was necessary, but the last thing I wanted to do was bring down the building (and the alleged underground tunnels) with a small earthquake. On the other hand, if things started to get dicey, a solid earthbolt or two shouldn't damage things too much. I felt Bel tap into the ground source as well, and maybe with an even smoother touch than I had done. A quick mental check assured me that her shields were well up to a few random gunshots now and hopefully even a magical bolt or two, if we were very unlucky. Going inside, I felt a couple of high energy magical protective wards covering the shop's entrance. This sort of magical security was not illegal, but it was certainly extremely unusual. Most of the wards were on standby, as the shop was still open during normal business hours. I only glanced over them for a moment as we entered inside, but I was glad we weren't making an after-hours covert inspection. I think I could have canceled most of them out and harmlessly tripped the rest, but the protections were quite good, nearly up to my own level of expertise, and I was glad I wouldn't have to press the issue. There was also very likely some remaining magical tripwire or two, well hidden in the background and designed to be overlooked that could cause some bad things to happen, like a very strong earthquake... at least that's the way I'd program them. The wards looked good enough that I decided not to underestimate the wizard or very talented Adept that had set them. We certainly didn't need our evidence going up in flames! Our rogue arms dealer was rather unfortunately resistant to my Trust charm, in fact quite disturbingly so. I also disliked the man at first sight, probably largely due more to his fashion sense that his squinty beady eyes and oily smile. For a moment I thought we had all disappeared back in time as Jesse, with his severe Neo-Victorian suit and gold buttoned waistcoat, and complete with a rather authentic gunslinger mustache, wouldn't have looked at all out of place in a late nineteenth century frontier gun shop. Well, except for the dandified ruffles on the collar and cuffs of his stiffly starched white shirt, and the earring. Not to mention the white pancake makeup all over his face too! Oh, and the lipstick and the heavy black eyeliner. The current cutting edge of men's fashion this year was the 'rake' look, and to basically look as effeminate as possible. While no respectable American woman would be caught out in public without her corset, bustle, boned bodices, pelerines, fans, gloves, hats, and parasols, this season's gentleman of quality was in turn decked out with enough frills, flounces, lace, braid, fringe, ruche and ribbons to decorate an entire Christmas tree. While roguish earrings weren't uncommon adornment for GWA men, these northern dandies tended towards more feminine styling's, and combined with an unfortunate overlaying of make-up that would even embarrass a circus clown this gave the wearer a distinctively effeminate appearance. Frankly it was currently impossible to tell the heterosexual men from the gay men, and they both tended to fashionably flounce and deliberately lisp equally. I had been amused by some of costumes that I'd seen so far while in Chicago, but our crooked gun dealer was quite at the very peak of current fashion! I suppose the original intent of feminizing men, when the trend started during the civil rights era, was simply more social 'equalization' of the sexes. One GWA social-historian commented in a magazine article I had read recently that part of this was also cultural psychology, due to the fact that the USA had a weak social culture and had been defeated in war, repeatedly, by all of its neighbors... even by Cuba. Other editorialists less kindly also attributed the new growing style as 'Look how manly we are, the more feminine we look and act the more masculine we really are!' Others trace some trends that emerged from the gay and lesbian communities after the passage of the 29th Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed sexual freedom (for just about everyone except for the oppressive heterosexual majority). Since the homosexual community was largely immune from the avalanche of sex restriction laws passed in the last two decades, including the insanely misguided one that makes it a federal crime (albeit a misdemeanor) for a man and a woman to engage in premarital sex, or any other sort of 'deviate' sex not intended for procreation, gays seem to now enjoy more rights and privileges that their straight counterparts. This relatively free lifestyle is perhaps being emulated... and now even socially encouraged. I guess it's quite understandable actually. If a teen kid or unmarried adult wants to get their rocks off, legally, they can either masturbate or indulge in a 'legally protected' same sex relationship. With the recent political majorities espousing increasingly extreme environmentalism legal and judicial activism, same sex relationships are now being overtly depicted as socially preferable to school children, rather than 'traditional relationships and the reprehensible over-breeding and excessive exhaustion of Mother Maia's precious irreplaceable earth resources'. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 03 Yeah, you get the idea. The heterosexual male is apparently a very endangered species. For some reason, American women do seem to approve of all of this, at least that's what the government polls say. It's no secret that men will do pretty much whatever a woman wants in order to have a prayer at getting laid... even if it's pretty likely that his wife would wear the strap-on dildo in the family. As for wearing the pants in the family, let alone shorts, no decent respectable American woman would ever be caught in public wearing them. The shape of the feminine thigh is wicked and must be concealed at all times! I don't even want to discuss children's fashions... I'm sorry; there is just something terribly unnatural about dressing boys in pinafore dresses! Being a 'breeder' is becoming so increasing politically and socially incorrect every day it seems that now even the children are now being punished for the crime of being born, accused and already convicted of the crime of ruining the earth by their very presence. No wonder the younger generation seems more than a bit warped! There are plenty of gays, lesbians, transgenders, bi's, etc., in the GWA and no one much cares. They have the same rights as everyone else (but not more) and the government doesn't care a lick about legislating what consenting adults do behind closed doors. Unlike up here, where sex is just another progressive social policy to be mandated by government. The age-old war between the sexes has gone to DefCon-1 and I doubt that in the end anyone will 'win'. Perhaps the cynics in the CSA are right... when we settle the final score with Deseret it might be time to then turn the tanks east and not stop until we reach the Potomac River. For their own good... so that their own special and very over-ripe forms of insanity don't come and infect us! *********** The treasonous arms dealer quickly saw through our rather shallow interest in buying any of the minimally legal firearms available in the store since we didn't even have any of our preliminary BoF paperwork, tax stamps, or the federal 'intent to buy' notice, let alone a BoF green card signifying that we'd passed our extensive background check, psych evaluation, anal probes, and paid our final exorbitant application tax fees that could almost buy a car back home. Did I mention that it's outrageously expensive to buy even a shotgun for bird hunting? All of these documents were necessary long before you even get permission to set foot into an evil emporium of un-liberal infernal devices like this one! This pegged us quick as 'know-nothings', lookers that were just wasting his time. His assistant, whom I could swear was at least a minor level Adept, had one of his mental fingers tapped and ready on that Earth Ley as well, waiting to hit us with something nasty if we so much as blinked sideways. When the boss, obviously Jesse, announced that he was closing shop for the night, Bel and I shrugged. Ok, we'd thought this contingency out too, as something of a last resort, but the tightening of her mouth suggested that she was none too happy about this. I lifted up a hand to tell her to hold up for just a second, while I tried a quick Plan 'Y', better, I hoped, than our Plan Z. I smiled and flipped Jesse my charmed silver dollars which he caught in mid-air and proceeded to examine it with pleasure as I stepped over towards him. "Good Texas silver as you can see! And we have quite a lot more. What's the chance of getting an expedited purchase plan? I'm sure it can't be that exhaustive doing all of the Bureau of Firearms paperwork... maybe you'd know a friend in the BoF that could help cut off some of the red tape?" I was 99.9% certain that our information from Stout was accurate, but to confirm it I ideally wanted Jesse to directly point me right straight back to the bent BoF official. Jesse's brightly red painted lips smiled, but mostly at the sight of my bright newly minted silver dollar now in his palm. Moving up close, so we could whisper in confidence, I noted that his minor protective gizmos were no match at all for my artificed charmed coin. Particularly I noted that he had a personal anti-charm artifice mounted on a gold pendant around his neck, which strictly looked like weak-ass over the counter crap, and it shut itself down tight without a peep when my charm spelled coin overloaded its defenses, and soon our wicked nasty girly-boy traitor was babbling with me like I was an old army friend or suck buddy. Oh, he had the goodies alright. The mundane crap that I could see in the shop here upstairs was simply for show, as we suspected, and he purred that the much better stuff was stored down below. His stock was a bit low right now, he admitted as he described a few of the more lethal military grade toys that he could readily obtain on fairly short notice... assuming of course we'd pay his crooked BoF friend, our old acquaintance David Stout for greasing the paperwork. Otherwise, for a disturbingly large amount of sweet Texas silver, we could be fixed up with the illegally obtained murder weapon of our hearts' delight, right here and now. He still wouldn't name his other buyer, but he as much as gleefully announced that he'd delivered an entire truckload of weapons to his biggest regular customer last month, and soon he'd have enough for another big shipment. With a bit more pressure, he remembered that the delivery was handled by the usual joes, the Clinton Street gang (yes, they did wear yellow striped jackets), and the name of their small time criminal boss, Daniel Ramirez, now appeared. This gave us some information coin in trade to deliver to the big crime boss, Sebestyen Dénes, assuming that Bel heard back from her contacts. The only other useful piece of info, gleamed after a bit of frankly excessively hard pushing, was the off-hand comment that the gun smugglers and their huge monthly shipment were soon heading out of town to somewhere near Rockford. Names and locations otherwise unknown, and he liked it that way. He laughed that he didn't want to be on the receiving end of a mindwipe. While this information might have made us all nice and tingly inside, his assistant, the minor mage, decided that he'd heard far too many beans casually spilled, and he rushed over to take charge. Unfortunately for us, he had more than enough practical experience to detect our massive personality charms that were affecting his boss and he loaded up his magical juice to give us a blast. Bel beat him to it, sending a rather impressive earth-force shockwave towards him. Oh, I definitely could have more than matched its power, but she'd crafted it textbook perfect and the busybody flew across the rest of the showroom to loudly crash against a wall showcase, shattering the glass and knocking him quite for a loop. It was surgically precise and didn't crater the floor or knock down the walls or ceiling, a very real danger with using earth energy offensively. I considered adding a sleep spell, but I never could do those worth a shit... more Mentalist magic that I had absolutely no aptitude for. For now, the minor Adept was in a daze and more or less out of our hair and I decided not to try and layer anything else on him. "Laddie, you'll never know until ye try!" Sean helpfully suggested. "Aye, ye'd be as subtle as subtle as a moose in a nail salon, but your will would be as strong as any's if put to the test. Think grand!" I thought about it, and for once Sean didn't giggle any jokes about my lack of razor sharp wits, and how I'd sprain something and hurt myself trying to think. Bel had a simpler and much more direct solution and gave our dazed opponent a sharp heavy rap upon the top of his head with the butt-end of the grip of a revolver, knocking him out cold. Now we could fix our attention back upon the boss, who was still stuck in a charm-fog staring at us. "I've put a jinx upon their surveillance cameras and a back-room recorder, so they'll a notta' record your faces. Now give the bad man a wee bit of corrective suggestion and perhaps your visit here might not go totally awry. Get-a-going!" Sean whispered as he gave the back of my head a little bit of a wee kick to prod me. That's the trouble with inter/intra-dimensional 'visitors', they just don't know their place! He did have a point. I don't like making helpful 'suggestions' to overly heavily charmed individuals, and in fact the textbook I'd recently read warned specifically against doing this. And did I also mention that it's very much illegal, not to mention horrifically immoral? A hint tends to turn into a compulsion, and often dangerously so. Oh, I so hoped so! This guy wasn't ever going to enjoy a long happy life and die of old age in bed while being fucked to death by his barely teenage girl or boyfriend if I had anything to say about it! "Jesse," I whispered as I held his hand holding the coin, and forcing my will once more into the coin and into him. "You will love this coin as your greatest treasure and keep it forever hidden and your personal secret, but you will only vaguely remember the man who gave this to you and forget our conversation and my companion as both being unimportant, except that I will return very soon to buy guns and I can be implicitly trusted, even with your life. You will remember me, but if questioned even under truth-spell, you will remember and describe me as a fairly small and thin man, definitely local, probably a low street ganger looking for a gun so that he build up his street cred. Be instead much more worried about your assistant - he tried to cheat you, wanting to send all of your guns instead to another gangland buyer and not your biggest customer. His masters in Deseret want him to arrange another street war between the gangs, so he's using you... while laughing at you behind your back and telling you lies. Oh, he pretends loyalty, but he had a charm on you, bending you to his will, but your discovery of his treason, his backstabbing has freed you. You caught him in the act and you fought and knocked him out, with our help. Your life is now in terrible danger from him and you'll need to make him disappear, now and without a trace. Your big buyer and their masters in Deseret will get nervous because their disloyal agent, your treacherous witch, will have disappeared and they will want to mindwipe you, but we can trick them when I return tomorrow, and then you'll be safe and secure -- for now. Now let's go downstairs and you can show me all of the weapons that you have stored for your buyer so we can find a way to keep you safe, my old friend!" This was overkill and even a hint of this sort of outrage would have caused my own mind to be wiped clean back home, as a public safety measure that I could even consider doing this sort of action, let alone willingly performing this kind of mind-rape. On the other hand, short of a covert late-night expedition (not my forte), there was no other way our wicked arms dealer was going to pop open his secret staircase and give us the complete four-star tour of the hidden underground weapons storage rooms and the maze of dark tunnels that went onwards in at least three different directions under the city. Even Bel was stunned by the vast arsenal, untold crates of military and hunting rifles and a vast assortment of handguns from innumerable sources and tried to film as many details as possible with her video recorder. Some of the weapons were smuggled into Chicago from either the GWA or Canada, but apparently entire underground armaments factories existed secretly under the city, manufacturing brand new and apparently quite respectable quality versions of several classic military grade firearms... and in industrial quantities! The FBI was going to cream their collective frock coats when they clasped eyes upon this place! ************* Bel just looked at me hard as we made our escape. "I'd like to go find a dark bar somewhere to drink heavily and forget this encounter ever occurred. You are very scary man, Zak Zephyr, and if I had any sense at all I'd be running away screaming just as fast as I could. What you just did was... appalling." "Quite. What I did was profoundly and wickedly evil, and entirely beyond the pale... and absolutely necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if our secret smuggling leaders don't mind-wipe our insecure friend tomorrow as well, as a security measure once they know that Mr. Stout has been compromised. I wouldn't be surprised if our other gun dealer isn't also taken care of even before we get a chance to speak with him tomorrow, after our stakeout of Stout's house tomorrow morning. If not, it's likely we'll have to do that exact same thing to him as well." She didn't disagree. *********** We weren't in the mood for the big speakeasy nightclub just down the street so she drove me off to her favorite neighborhood dive bar in dead silence. While there over a great number of drinks we wrote out a status update containing a barrel full of lies with just enough subtle truth to barely cover our asses for the major investigations that were sure to follow. Namely, that we'd kept to the official Action List and we had stayed quite safely on the reservation, except for a casual reference to a BoF official... which was probably trivial and unrelated to the case, but that we intended to follow up on this lead later, in a day or two, after all other previously documented leads had been exhausted. Included was a hint that perhaps we'd take some time for some sight-seeing, since this case was obviously heading nowhere. Nice and misleading, but mostly true information that Probert would be happy to read. With luck, our surveillance team might even take the day off tomorrow as watching us was clearly wasted time and effort. The battle plan for tomorrow was pretty simple. In the morning, we were going to pay Mr. Stout a very early visit at home, and obtain a carefully orchestrated recorded confession. Then we'd phone in our morning progress report to the FBMR office and reference our fuller written report which Bel would have buried in the middle of her boss's inbox. Now with our prey subtly alerted, like mighty hunters on safari, we'd sit back with some cameras to see who showed up to put out the fire, and silence the loose lips. With an arrest (hopefully) in hand, we'd then dash off to the FBI to obtain a strike team to take out Jesse's gun shop and subterranean weapons depots. The shit would hit the FBMR fans afterwards, but Bel and I should end up smelling like roses. The plan sounded ok, and after four or five good drinks I couldn't find any potential flaws with it. If the drinks were good, then the companionship was even better. By the time she dropped me off at my hotel she had quite forgiven me for blatantly consigning at least two individuals to a violent and messy death, albeit by other more malevolent hands. She almost leaned forward for a kiss, but we'd both had a half-snootful and I wanted her to cross that bridge dead cold sober. Besides, starting a romantic attachment with a partner was always bad news and trouble, and worse up here where the word 'sex-crime' wasn't just a fictional concept from George Orwell. Even a rumor of an inappropriate sexual relationship placed into her federal personnel folder would kill any slim hopes she would ever have for promotion, and excessive dalliance with a known troublemaking magician from Texas wouldn't help her career in the slightest. I was going to return that kiss... but well after I'd put this case to bed! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 04 If I had known that the day would turn straight into crap almost right from the very beginning, I'd have just sent a simulacrum and gone back to bed. Bel picked me up from my hotel just minutes after sunrise and already it was going to be a wild race against time and luck, and both now seemed to be quite set against us. Bel, as planned, had dropped off our progress report on her boss's desk early this morning, just before picking me up, and we had assumed that it would remain unnoticed until after our phone call later on this morning. Unfortunately, one of Probert's butt-boys, Desmond, had made an uncharacteristic early arrival into the office as well and had noticed Bel burying her report into the middle of the in-box files. Curious, he at once retrieved it and was already reading it as she made a hasty exit. Desmond was just nominally a higher grade agent than she was and didn't really have the right to review her reports, but unfortunately he was one of the favored sons in the department and a known tattler with a direct pipeline to the boss. The smarmy sycophantic wizard was quite bright enough to read between the lines and run off bleating to their boss, and/or anyone else involved in the protection of the gun smuggling operation. Immediately, if not sooner. Our first major lead was about to be prematurely exposed and now it was going to be a race to see who got to him first. We barreled across town as fast as we could but when we saw the smoke rising from the city ahead of us we knew that we were going to be too late and had arrived second, and dead last in the race. Stout's house, along with himself and his family, were already engulfed in a bonfire that had also consumed another pair of houses on each side of his, along with those innocent people's lives as well. Ingrid, the witch we had hoped to catch in the act of mind-wiping Stout was nowhere in the area, nor was any other FBMR agent or official Bel recognized. To compound matters, our surveillance team was already there waiting for us to show up, so now we couldn't even claim we'd never been there. Damn it! Bel got out to coordinate with CPD and CFD and after awhile I got bored myself just sitting and got out of the car to join her, but with less enthusiasm. The fire had been magically set, no doubt about it I could feel and taste it in the air, and it wouldn't take long at all for some eyes and fingers to start looking and pointing towards me. Very cute... now this was a frame-up that I hadn't expected at all. You burn down half of one small suburban subdivision and a famous historic movie theater and then everyone thinks you're a deranged arsonist! I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut and tried to watch Bel's back while she helped with the arson investigation. There was no helping it, Bel had to admit that David Stout had been a person of interest in a federal investigation but that we had not yet taken a witness statement from him. Technically true, but that fudged the truth a bit more than she was comfortable with. Bel appeared to be an unfortunately truthful sort of woman. The fire was still burning too hotly for any direct investigation of the wreckage but Bel seemed to be able to gather some magical forensic evidence from the perimeter. This was the sort of thing that she really excelled at and even the CFD arson investigation unit deferred to her as they began to slowly get the blaze under control. The sole bright point to this fiasco was that an introduction to the local FBI field office did present itself a couple of hours later. The investigation of the murder of a federal employee and his family fell safely within FBI jurisdiction, no matter how much FBMR might wrangle for oversight, due to the alleged magical nature of the fire. The agent now in charge, Janice Simms, came to take over the crime scene but allowed Bel to continue to work gathering evidence with the city fire department arson unit. The two women casually nodded at each other in recognition but didn't otherwise much coordinate with each other. Just as well, our watchers were still there about half a block away watching us, and as far as I knew the FBI and FBMR were pretty much vowed hated rivals and I didn't want to give away anything of our game plan , busted and shattered as it already was. It wasn't until after lunch before Agent Simms even took even the slightest notice of me and wandered over to give me a rather thorough visual inspection. I probably confused her greatly as I didn't look anything like an effeminate dandy. Or maybe the cowboy boots made me look especially 'butch'. In any case, she raised a perky cute eyebrow in vaguely amused bewilderment and sidled up to make a more personal acquaintance. She was a beauty, a tall slender drink of fine perfectly aged wine and the most glorious example of the Gibson Girl ideal of ephemeral beauty I had ever seen in photo, let alone in real life. Her neck was thin and delicate with a dark blue velvet choker with a cameo decorating her sallow white throat, and her long soft amber colored hair was exquisitely piled high upon her head in the contemporary bouffant with a delicate overflow of few selected waterfall of curls across her ears. Her tall, narrow-waisted figure exuded feminine perfection with a classic 'S-curve wasp waist torso shape achieved by wearing a swan-bill corset in exquisite torment for a great many long years, since perhaps she was a young girl. She was perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever encountered and since a good deal of my blood flow had left my brain to descend into my pants, I was hardly at my best now that I had the chance to speak with her. I might have also been drooling vapidly for the first minute or two of our discussion. "I see by your outfit that you are a Texas cowboy?" She smirked, but not unpleasantly. "Nonsense... vile slander and pernicious lies!" I retorted. "Why does every lonely under-appreciated woman think that just because a Texan is wearing boots he intends to brand, mount and give a good vigorous riding to every filly that he meets? My Aunt Millie, it is quite true, left me her horse with her small ranch just outside of Austin but I sold it off to a happier home years ago. I, in turn, can see by your outfit that you are a lady of exact propriety! Your French style blue afternoon dress matches your eyes flawlessly and is exquisitely cut with every frill, flounce, fringe or ruche tastefully and perfectly set. On the other hand, your corset does seems to be too tight, and your posterior probably doesn't require quite as much bustle as you presently have under your otherwise tight dress, and I'd suggest a bit more heel in those boots if you really want to get that bustle wiggling and waggling. The hat with the half-veil is also a darling touch, and it looks very authoritative the way you point out instructions with your folded silk painted fan. Absolutely ducky!" "Ah, a dedicated follower of fashion, I see!" She giggled. "Oh, Madame! Your jibes sting! If I were to accost you and find you quite worthy of rustling away to my secret corral and wicked stable of debauchery, it would not be for your soft petticoats I would have most unwholesome thoughts for, unlike most of my rather effeminate American rivals who would know naught of how to properly minister to your more furtive secret longings and repressed desires." "From a Texan? Certainly not! They're all mouth, but alas they all put their tongues to ill improper uses indeed, and scarcely where a woman, even of good breeding, would desire it placed for her enjoyment. You would woo a mirror and crow of your conquests until tedium, e're you'd ever back a brag of bravado with a single direct passionate deed. Even without rouge, powder or gloss, your face sir, is much too bold for your actions, for the dish you would present appears to be served with a rather weak sauce indeed!" "Crushed! Besmirched my character has been! What is a Texan without his pride and honor? I would tussle with you further, in words at least if the rest of your bounty shall never be bestowed upon me, for we do need to have at some length words of substance, and in private, thus this pleasant piffle must be postponed for pleasanter hours. We've got some unfriendly eyes on us and it would be unseemly for your pure and inviolate reputation to be seen so boldly bantering with me in such a winsome and wanton manner." "Oh, Sir! You bear every mark of being a scoundrel!" She giggled and then whispered, "Molly O'Grady's, nine o'clock tonight. Darlene knows the place; try to arrive without your lurking friends tagging along." "Some women, even well-bred ones... especially well-bred ones, are often extremely partial to the intimate company of scoundrels!" I retorted to the back of her perfectly coiffed head, and then settled down to wait on some cement steeps at a house across the street for Bel to finish her investigations, which took several more rather tedious hours. *********** "Arson. Definitely, and it was caused by magic. Out of curiosity you wouldn't happen to have an alibi for early this morning?" Ha-ha, she smirked, but jovially. I didn't think it was quite as funny. "The fire destroyed most of the doorway and nearly all of the psychometric traces were burned away. I had a sense of something or someone familiar, Norman I'd guess, since it would be unlikely that Desmond could have beaten us here after reading our report, and with at least a half hour to spare. Under oath, I couldn't say who had lit that fire. Seriously though, someone at FBMR is going to suggest that you did it. Since I picked you up at your hotel at about the exact time the fire started, you're obviously in the clear... but some asshole will hint you did it anyway, just to muddy up the evidence some more." I didn't disagree. On the way to the car we conferred briefly to revise our plan for the rest of the afternoon, deciding to pay a second visit back to Jesse Hollaway, just on principle. I didn't have a plan for getting us any good court-viable evidence but I did have a few more new questions that I'd thought of to ask him. We deftly ditched our tails but I needn't have bothered wasting the brain juice, because when we arrived at the gun store it was closed and locked up tight, permanently. Looking through the windows I could see that every legal hunting gun that had been displayed in the showcases was now gone. The place was empty, stripped to the walls except for the barren showcases. Yep, our streak of bad luck today was continuing unabated and our final witness had now also disappeared. Maybe Jesse had decided to make a run for it, but my gut told me otherwise. The shop owners next door hadn't noticed anything particular other than the gun store had never opened for business today. A slightly more observant clerk at the cleaners across the street had noticed quite a number of individuals inside of the place, moving things, but no one had gone in or out of the front door all day. The evidence would all be gone now, both above and below, moved out via the warren of tunnels under the city streets, and I didn't have much of any hope at tracking any of the weapons to their new secret location. Perhaps I should have marked a few of the guns in the basement armory with a tag, so that I could trace them. Just exactly the same way I had found the gun thieves operating out of the gun show in Austin. Just because I was a much more powerful magician now didn't mean that some of the old simple tricks wouldn't still work! Now I wished I'd remembered to do it. Bel didn't have much else to offer for clever suggestions either. She was game for a bit of breaking and entering to see if anything had been left behind downstairs, but a closer and exactingly careful examination of the shop's magical wards showed that all of the old ones were still present... along with a few brand new ones. Nasty new ones. I thought I could disarm most of them, but if I fucked up the entire shop, along with several of its neighbors were going to blow up sky high. I wouldn't have any alibi for that magical fire... and reluctantly we decided to leave the place alone for a day or two. We had never paid a visit to the other name on our suspect list, the other crooked arms dealer, one Harold Bates, esquire. While a slightly less prominent legal arms dealer, Bates' family had money, a nose well into upper society, and an uncle who was a Ward boss and senior Alderman. None of these things apparently helped him. Like Jesse Hollaway, this bird had also flown the coop, leaving behind locked doors and empty showroom display cases. Again, according to local shopkeepers, the store had never opened for business that day and vague shadowy figures had been seen inside, but no one had entered or exited the main doors. Perhaps, as at Hollaway's, a van or truck had been used at the rear service door, away from unfriendly eyes, but I was pretty certain that everything had moved underground here as well. Another careful inspection of the doors here showed near identical levels of magical protection, almost certainly performed by the same wizard, but with the faint touches of another wizard assisting with the fire spells. Honestly, I couldn't have done a better job myself. This meant that there were at least three magicians potentially arrayed against us. Ingrid, the superb mentalist; a very superior protection magician like myself; and a rather powerful fire wizard. All working together and able to react nearly immediately to any threat. Back in the old days, before I nearly single-handedly tackled and banished an ancient fire god, I might have been impressed, or even gravely concerned. But not tonight. That still didn't leave us with a single clue worth following up. Our smuggling villains had known exactly what links their crooked BoF agent could betray and swiftly, and probably ruthlessly, silenced each and every one. Now we were stuck, and without a real proper lead to work with. Just for fun, we made a back-track to try and talk to the charmed street thug who'd told us about Stout in the first place, but he was gone... disappeared. He'd gone off with some mates in a bit of a hurry in the morning and hadn't returned... and never would. He was probably now part of some new underwater reef off-shore in Lake Michigan. Every single link in the chain of evidence we'd found so far had now disappeared and we had nothing, absolutely nothing, left to lead our investigation onwards. *********** Bel and I dithered over a long dinner and tried very carefully writing a report that didn't betray our investigation other than the point that David Stout's name had been casually mentioned by a witness (also now 'missing') and we had learned of the fire. Just exactly how we discovered the death of our purported witness we left rather vague. For now, we need to convince Bel's boss that we were still good well-behaved agents and that bright and early tomorrow we'd be cheerfully right back on the phony-baloney list of bogus mem-wiped non-suspects, from which we'd learn nothing now. She was already more than ready to hop the tracks and leave the reservation and go rogue, but we didn't have a single worthy direction to zerge off towards. To hell with patience... we both were now seriously pissed and wanted to blast something or someone and put a seriously malevolent world of acute hurt upon our smugglers! We'd been behind playing catch-up every step of the way so far, and somehow we needed to find a way to find where the weapons had gone, and where the big buyer was going to take them. Somewhere in Rockford, we'd heard... and soon, but none of that helped us right now. Maybe our meeting with Janice Simms would reveal a clue or two, but from the way Bel primped herself up after diner, you would have thought that we were going out on a date, rather than a covert meeting between agents of two governmental agencies that mutually hated and despised each other. After a repeat performance of staging simulacrum illusions of ourselves quitting work for the evening, we drove about half of the way to Molly O'Grady's in silence and then parked the car near a trolley terminal transit center. We rode back and forth up and down the route a couple of times until we were certain that we had not been tailed. Then we ducked into a local neighborhood speakeasy and pulled the simulacrum illusion trick once again with us apparently walking out the front door while we scampered out the back. It was about a ten block walk to reach O'Grady's, a dump of a building that appeared to be abandoned that had no lighted signage and the only entrance was through a dark alleyway. You either knew where O'Grady's was or you weren't meant to know. Like a classic speakeasy, there was a grated sliding metal panel for the doorman, or rather woman, to look us over before allowing entrance. No password was given, but the bouncer appeared to recognize either Bel or Janice and grunted approval before unbarring the extremely sturdy metal door to admit us. Admittedly, the bouncer didn't much like the look of my cheerful mug and Janice had to interpose herself and say, "He's with us" before she grudgingly admitted me. Why this was necessary, I wasn't sure, until the another inner steel door was opened admitting us to the main downstairs lounge area, where everything suddenly became quite clear to me. At once I noticed that I was the only man there, and the other thirty or so women present looked up at us and took a near immediate disapproval of me. Apparently, my being there was going to seriously cramp their style, since it was obvious now that O'Grady's was a very private, member's only, lesbian club! ********** Pretty much right away, Bel and Janice went into conference with a rather burly and substantially built woman who appeared to have at least twice the innate raw masculinity of any fellow I'd met in Chicago so far. They huddled in discussion for a moment and I thought I heard Bel tell the proprietress that I 'liked to watch'. The beefy matron shrugged and promptly handed over a bottle of wine and a room key to Janice and they promptly beckoned me to follow them upstairs. Too bad actually, I was sort of enjoying the view in the lounge. No frumpy Neo-Victorian fashions on display down here! The uniform of the evening was soft, slinky silk, displaying bare arms, shoulders and long soft thighs and legs, and also very visible protruding nipples. The ladies weren't shy either about displaying their affections, dancing closely together to soft recorded music, or kissing or even boldly necking, stroking each others' faces and breasts. A few soft round breasts were openly displayed for the admiration of their lovers, completely with suckling mouths and tongues and naughty fingers stroking or penetrating other more intimate areas. Now following the ladies up the stairs, we passed the second floor of rooms which seemed to contain the dressing area complete with lockers for the ladies to change into their more comfortable, and intimate attire, complete with an exercise room, sauna and a small hot bathing tub. Another shut larger room appeared to [be] a large meeting or play room. Upstairs, the third floor was divided into about ten individual private rooms and a much larger central bathing area with a larger hot tub. Janice unlocked one of the doors to reveal a rather sumptuously furnished room of which the large oversized bed was very definitely the featured highlight. I now had the rather firm impression that this was not the first time the ladies had been in one of these guest rooms, and almost immediately the moment the door closed behind us the sexual tension in the room dialed up to an extremely uncomfortable level. It didn't help the tightness in my pants a bit when Bel and Janice hesitantly looked at each other and then hugged... which turned into a very unchaste sort of kiss a few moments later. Oh yes, it soon involved tongue! It was with considerable embarrassment they eventually remembered that I was present and stopped their passionate greeting. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 04 "You really don't need to stop on my account! Like you told the woman downstairs, I do like to watch... but I'd have to admit that participating would be much nicer still!" Bel just glared at me and readjusted her dress, smoothing out any wrinkles her tight kiss with Janice might have caused. Janice just laughed and winked at me. "Not tonight, cowboy, so keep your pony in its stable." Janice laughed. "Appearances otherwise, this meeting really is all about business... or at least business first." The wistful look of longing that Janice gave Bel was absolutely incendiary. She blushed noticeably and loosened the top buttons of her blouse, displaying for the first time a hint of her own pale but deliciously tender neck. It's amazing what parts of the body become erogenous once they're covered up and declared 'naughty' to behold! "Look, let's get the juicy naughty bits out of the way so your brain can start thinking about more important things other than the two of us thrashing about together naked." Bel scolded, as she sat down upon one of the four arm chairs in the sitting area of the room. "Yes, Janice and I are members here, and we've been friends, and more, for many years since we met and were together for several governmental inter-agency training classes back in Washington. We need the extreme privacy that this club offers, as any public knowledge of our relationship, even as just friends, could destroy both of our professional careers. Here, in business terms alone, we can talk without fear of disclosure, privately relaying information that each other needs to do our jobs, but cannot openly obtain. Outside these walls, for the security of our careers alone, we must act as strangers and public adversaries, despite our personal inclinations otherwise. Outside this club from this moment on, we must trust that you will never make mention or even hint of our personal arrangement, and upon your honor, allegedly so important to a Texan, we need to hold you to this oath at all costs. Can you swear this to us?" I could, and did. Oath magic is simple to cast, but extremely effective and binding. Breaking this oath wouldn't kill me, literally, but the pain and other drawbacks would be enough so that I might wish I were dead. There were ways to break a magical oath, if one were really smart or desperate, but I'd not readily take those risks. After another pair of pensive melancholy glances between the two lovelies, we soon got down to business and slowly the sexual tension started to drain from the room, and the pressure in the crotch of my pants began to decrease. I started off at the beginning, telling Janice about the discovery of the gun smuggling ring back home, and how some well-meaning Washington level bureaucrats thought that I could help discover a similar sort of operation up here, tackling the constant but unproven rumors of a similar major weapons smuggling operation based out of Chicago. I let Bel relate the rest of what we had discovered and she even played the recordings she'd taken of our unofficial interview with David Stout and the images of the underground armory full of illegal and mostly locally manufactured weapons. Janice was in turn intrigued and then appalled at the scope and depth of our discoveries. She also agreed that we didn't have anything physical or useful enough to take to her own bosses. The FBI had heard rumors that a relatively small local gang, perhaps the Clinton Street Gang we'd heard about, was involved in some major smuggling operations, but like us, their agents found their own sources of information either vaguely useless or oddly vacant of important details, again memory wiped after each operation. We agreed that we now thought we knew what was going on... but didn't have any hint of a way to find another new lead that would break the case open for us again. Without such a lead, Bel and I were going to be on our own. We all agreed that an extra effort to get in contact with some of the bigger crime bosses, especially Sebestyen Dénes, might give us a possible break in the case. Otherwise, we were going to be at the un-tender mercies of that fickle bitch Luck, and ours today had been disastrous. ******************* We kicked around a bunch of increasingly flawed ideas for another hour or two, but nothing worthwhile stuck. We finished the bottle of red wine and the ladies eyes started to become filled once more with longing for each other once again. After about the third round of wistful looks, I knew that I was just an unnecessary inconvenience now and with a loud sigh I loudly admitted that I was getting fairly tired and that I could find my own way home, alone. My companions didn't complain or suggest otherwise. Just before I shut the door behind me after saying goodnight, I glanced back briefly to see the ladies once more in a rather passionate embrace, and each with hurried fingers yearning to unbutton and reveal the soft treasures hidden beneath the other's clothes. If I'd lingered just another moment, I'd have undoubted seen quite a bit more soft pale flesh on display, but Texans are supposed to be gentlemen, or at least act as one accordingly, and I very reluctantly shut the door fast behind me. The other ladies downstairs weren't at all unhappy to see me leave the lounge and the club either. The matron informed me that by pressing a buzzer, she could signal for a nearby waiting taxi to pick me up outside in darkened privacy, if I did not wish for my presence to be noted in the area, and I accepted her offer. The gals here took their privacy extremely seriously, and with the mess that I was in, I didn't need anything else going wrong. An extra precaution to keep my secrecy oath was worth the rather expensive cab fare to my hotel and the extra rather generous tip. ********** I had zero sleep that night as my brain played and replayed Bel and Janice's passionate embrace. It wasn't just passionate lesbian sex, I'd seen plenty of that back home on cable TV; their looks revealed an actual profound love for each other. This ought to have put paid to my private lusts for the pair of them, together or separately, knowing that I really didn't stand a prayer of bedding either of them - stupid US fornication laws be damned! Being an eternal optimist and possessing a less than adequate reservoir of common sense, I was still lusting for the both them and delighted to see Bel's cheerful face the next morning. She looked tired, but her face held a smile that even two awful cups of office coffee couldn't wipe entirely away. Her boss had left us a message for another private meeting this morning where our asses would get reamed out, but neither of us cared an iota. We were going to solve this case regardless of what we were verbally ordered, and let the chips (and the villains) fall where they may! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 05 **************** CHAPTER FIVE As ass reamings went, I'd grade this one only a C+, but then again I'd been called onto the carpet and screamed at by real professionals before back home. Numerous times. My old bosses at the Austin BMA could give these USA wankers some real management lessons in the art of attitude adjustment, but perhaps with me they'd just enjoyed a lot of prior practice. Back home I had the reputation of being a 'fuck-up' and was treated accordingly; here, I was sort of a visiting VIP, so the velvet gloves stayed on. It didn't hurt that we had more or less covered our ass on paper with our written report... it. I might have been the smartest thing that we'd done so far. Just so that it was quite crystal clear that we were on the bosses' shit-list, Probert made us sit and wait in his office for him for nearly an hour, just so we'd know that we weren't quite important enough for him to make a priority of his time for. We stayed quiet, as we were fairly sure there was a recorder active in the room, so we kept our remarks to each other vague; we remarked on the weather and discussed whether the Chicago History Museum or the Field Museum would be the most interesting to visit on Saturday tomorrow. The time was also useful for semi-overtly searching over the topmost contents of his desk, and I can read upside down with the best of them, no magic was even remotely necessary. Unfortunately, I didn't see anything the slightest bit juicy or even relevant. Probert was the sort of boss that liked his worker drones to generate lots of useless paperwork to keep them busy, and then he'd take his dear sweet time even reviewing, let alone later filing their reports. He had a junky Magi-Dupe brand copier on a credenza next to his desk that had to be at least thirty years old, even by US standards. I killed twenty minutes of waiting time trying to get the damned machine to make a single clean readable copy of one of our witness statements but eventually I gave up. I was almost finally bored enough to get up and try this time to photocopy my ass when Mason Probert finally arrived. He bitched at us for nearly a full hour, but most of it was old material, given as if by rote, rather than any actual genuine enthusiasm. We got the intended point rather quickly; he was 'disappointed' in us. When Bel eventually managed to pipe in her two cents, she assured him that we had stayed working on his holy and incarnate Action List like good boys and girls... and would continue to do so. Well, I did notice that her fingers were crossed. Eventually he believed her and we were admonished to go forth once again and sin no more. Since we didn't have a single worthwhile lead left, it was going to be hard to be naughty... but we were determined to give it a try! ************* For lack of any better ideas, we spent the rest of the morning back humping the non-suspects on the old boy's Action List, hoping for lightning to strike twice and find another lead we could exploit, but it wasn't looking promising. Each of the minor thugs could hardly refrain from smirking, as each had been expecting our visit, but still it was apparent to me that they didn't seem quite as happy to see us as their friends had been previously. This made us sure that another round of fresh warnings had been given to each and every one of them. Even charm spells weren't cutting through the very prevalent miasma of fear. The word had gone out -- telling us the 'truth' would mean far worse things than just another mindwipe. Frankly, my mood was in the pits. My investigation was now going nowhere and every time I looked into Bel's face my mind instead recalled the memory of her and Janice passionately embracing and kissing. Try as I might, I just couldn't get my brain kicked properly into gear today! For lack of any better ideas, and with more than a hint of desperation, Bel took me for a late lunch to a noted south central Italian restaurant that she admitted was her usual underworld connection spot. The food I had to admit was good, but today our timing couldn't have been any better. After a brief private discussion with one of the staff, Bel returned back to our table with a smile. Sebestyen Dénes, probably the top Chicago mob boss, was expected a bit later this afternoon and he, or one of his lieutenants could probably spare a minute for us. Her message requesting a meeting had been received! I still found the entire idea of 'organized crime' fairly laughable. Sure, Texas and the GWA had professional criminals, what place didn't? The part that I found amusing was the idea that here it was all nearly out in the open and utterly and boldly commonplace. Crime here had gone so professional it was almost legitimate. The laws up here made doing nearly any sort of business impractical and rather immoral, so nearly everyone had to work in the shadows with unsavory people upon occasion just to get anything done. Need some completely legitimate merchandise shipped interstate? You could pay a unionized trucker and wait at least a month or two and enjoy nearly 50% pilferage of the goods, or pay extra to a well organized gang that would get the job done swiftly and securely. Most would prefer and choose the gang. As for the police and other law enforcement, they were only a minimal concern. Since nearly everything was technically illegal, the police had to be relatively selective over what laws were going to be actively enforced... and nearly everyone at some point needed to pick a side. Even Bel readily admitted that to even hope to do her job, to get the local information she sometimes needed, she had been rather forced to commit herself to picking a side amongst the various Chicago mob elements. Everyone in government service had, more or less. In Chicago there was little room for neutrals or folks who just wanted to go their own way. It wasn't hard to kill the next two and half hours while waiting in the restaurant. We ordered endless baskets of warm bread, a couple of bottles of wine, and an apparently endless selection of goodies from the deserts cart. Sean, invisibly present as always, quite outdid himself. He wasn't much for red wine, and apparently he was keeping himself quite amused sampling the harder stuff kept behind the bar, for which he had a nearly unlimited gullet, but I discovered to my amusement and eventual dismay that he also had discovered a fondness for cheesecake. Bel and I ordered some, and enjoyed ours, but new fresh plates kept arriving... and arriving... and mysteriously disappearing. Worse, after an untold amount of pilfered Limoncello, I could start to hear increasingly audible giggling and 'om nom' sounds as entire rounds of cheesecake began to disappear. 'That wouldn't be your stomach giggling, would it?" Bel inquired, giving me a rather sharp concentrated look. She was a smart woman and Sean's antics were becoming obviously apparent. "I'd prefer to admit to it, but I'm not at all sure I could be convincing. Perhaps they've got a resident gremlin?" If you can't convince, then confound. I wasn't ready to fess up to having Sean yet, so my best hope was to shift off the blame elsewhere. Besides, when Sean gets a snootful, he can be just about impossible to control or remotely contain. At this thought, Sean just belched right into my ear and I could swear out of the corner of my eye I could see the little maniacal bugger take a piss right across the length of the dining table and directly his flow right straight into the rose vase by the window. Bel's eyes went fully wide; some things are just too blatantly unspeakable to be ignored or dismissed as fantasifull illusion. I sighed. "Sean. Chill out now! You're making a scene and freaking the mundanes." I muttered, hopefully mostly under my breath. Already Bel was probing for a distant upper level Air Ley, and visibly pondering the application of a general area affect banishment spell. Sean belched again, and rather more loudly, and now right before our eyes in the very center of our table a fresh bottle of Lemoncello appeared as a floating apparition. With further loud giggling, the top of the bottle was blasted open and its contents drained upside down, seemingly flowing into an apparently invisible mouth which was making loud clearly audible 'glub-glub' sounds. This phantasmal apparition was more than enough to clear out most of the other patrons of the restaurant, many of which left running and screaming out in the street in mortal fear for their lives. In magic-phobic America, the sight of an invisible monster guzzling down booze and cheesecake in near equal numbers was more than enough to cause most folks to remember other much more urgent appointments elsewhere. Even the wait staff was horrified by this and most of them disappeared in a panic to the kitchen area of the restaurant, and for the duration, leaving Bel and myself more or less alone. "Now Bel, don't be too hasty!" I muttered, while trying to grab the nearly empty floating liqueur bottle away from Sean. It remained just out of my outstretched arms until the last drops were gone and another new fresh bottle appeared to take its place. This was more than enough for Bel. Leaping to her feet, charged full of magical power, she drew a circle of major banishing in the air and sounded off ever increasingly powerful and heavy duty commands of magical expulsion. I had to admire her efforts, futile as they were. Banishment is perhaps my strongest specialty, but I was suitably impressed by Bel's knowledge of the basics, and I let her have her fun for a good full ten minutes or so until she slid back into her chair exhausted and extremely annoyed, and grudgingly admitting defeat. There was nothing wrong with her willpower either, but she just didn't know any arcane rites strong enough to affect Sean. Even with all of my own superior expertise, I'm not sure I could have done much better either, if push came to shove. As visitors went, Sean was very much in a class of his own. Sean giggled, and took another extremely long and quite visible piss into the next nearest rose vase, filling it to overflowing. He then gave a passing thought to giving Bel a good soak down as well, but I nipped that one in the bud. "Damn it Sean, stop!" I mentally bellowed, and wonder of wonders he did stop, and then he disappeared in a snit. I can usually feel when he's about, hovering around invisibly, but for now he was gone. Still, I wasn't the least sure about how to explain this all to Bel. Since Sean was gone for the moment, I decided to cover my ass by trying a banishment spell that Bel didn't know. I made it look firm and impressive, but I'm not sure my audience was fooled. "It giggled in my ear!" She muttered, after downing another full glass of red wine rather hastily. "I was sure it was about to take a piss down my neck too! What was it? And is this some sort of acquaintance of yours?" The look she gave was rather pointed and telling. This was a rather direct accusation, and my answer needed to be a good one. I could tell that she was good and ready to walk, and wash her hands of me and our investigation in a heartbeat if she didn't like the answers. Choices. There are always choices in life, but for me they're usually always bad ones. My first instinct was to lie and keep lying... and make her prove otherwise, but my gut instinct was nagging at me to stick a bit closer to the truth. Bel seemed to have an innate talent at detecting lies and I wanted, and really needed, to stay on her good side. She was the only friend I had up here and I needed to keep her trust, as much as could and still keep Sean's secrets... not that I knew many. Plus, I was awful at lying and I've never gotten away with a fib in my entire life! "I've sworn to keep your oath, now in turn you need to keep mine as well." I stated and stared her straight into her eyes. "Can you do so, and hold it to, even upon knowing the truth of the matter, for either weal or woe?" She raised a pretty eyebrow, her anger turned at once to curiosity and interest. I deliberately was using the elder and more arcane preamble to the Oath ritual, to invite an even more secure binding of the magical pledge than was customary, and intrigued, she accepted with alacrity. "I so swear, affirm and bind myself to my Oath." She calmly asserted, while firmly poking a finger with her small ritual belt knife and taking my hand in hers, making her pledge a blood-oath, one of the most terrible and binding. Completely unnecessary and bit old-fashioned overkill, but the depth of her sincerity was reassuring. "My invisible friend is named Sean, and I think he is one of the legendary Ùruisg, but I wouldn't swear to it. He finds me amusing and usually just likes to watch and observe, but he has been extremely helpful to me in the past. In truth, he's probably saved my life at least twice, although he's never overtly cast a single spell in my presence. I'm not sure the greatest word of Banishing that I know would even tickle him. Why he's here and why he's picked me to follow about, I couldn't venture a guess. In apology, he does find alcohol highly stimulating, but usually he keeps his thirst under somewhat better control. He's gone off in a snit right now, but he'll be back and I'll try and make him apologize to you. Actually, knowing him, I'd bet he's not quite as tipsy as he appears; I've seen him empty an entire case of whisky before without any apparent affect, so he's either found a weakness for lemon liqueur or he just needed a distraction to do something else while we're here... my bets on the latter." "That's the whole of the secret?" She asked, with her blood drops gently still running into my hand. "As far as I know, yes. No one other than you knows of Sean, as he remains hidden and silent to all eyes other than mine. Why he has chosen me for his guest-host, I cannot say, other than I appear to amuse him and he thinks that among humans I am special, but how I couldn't say. He pretends to be utterly frivolous, but he's up to something, I'm sure of it... but I have no idea what." "Since we are speaking frankly and in secure truth-oath, might I also enquire about your magical ability? Your file said that you'd burned yourself out, and were possibly powerless, but I know that this is not so. I've seen your charm spells and the way you grab Ley's. You lack subtlety, and then some, but you have power well beyond that of a minor magician, or an Adept. You grab magic and wield it firmer than any wizard I have yet met, greater even my own ability to channel power. With patience, training and more forethought, you could be one of the greatest wizard masters of our time, yet you hide this power. Have you not always had it?" "Like Sean, my augmented magical gifts seem to be also a recent acquisition, and you're right... I have little knowledge of how to best apply them. When I was a weaker Adept, I was good at what I knew, Banishments and Protections, and I could craft skilled artificements to help cover my many weaknesses. Now, I can do much that I couldn't before, but I do seem to rely upon improvisation rather than technical skill. By sharing our oaths together we have gained trust, and perhaps we can help each other where we are weak, for your talents are different than mine, and your technical training seems to be considerably sharper than mine. I never was one for classrooms and textbooks, and even now I'm a slow learner sometimes." "Help you I shall!" With a last squeeze of our hands the oath-binding was done and we drank another pair of glasses of red wine in relative silence until suddenly Bel's face went completely beet red in color and she downed another glass of wine nearly in one gulp. "The miserable sneaking bastard!" She wheezed, half choking on her wine. "He stayed and was watching us last night! Janice and I!" I sighed. Sean had always enjoyed watching the local porn channels back home and he certainly didn't get much detailed real-life practical observation by watching my love life, or near total absence of it. The nastier it was, the more he seemed to like it. I could tell if a porn flick was particularly hot or interesting if the living room became filled with the smell of conjured popcorn. 'Sick Degrees of Penetration', an 'everything goes' boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl, plus trannies and dwarfs added for good measure, orgy flick seemed to be his favorite film and he chain played it once non-stop for over a week. "Well, I frankly don't blame him." I commented. "It was indeed quite rude, especially since the three of you had not been properly introduced, but I wouldn't have minded being an invisible fly on the wall myself, but then again my manners are acknowledged to be quite attrocious." "You and your friend seem to excel at finding ways to violate privacy." She muttered, but not quite in actual genuine annoyance. He face suddenly turned beet red once again, but this time I could hear what Sean had whispered, this time into my own ears as I could hear him giggling, indeed he was quite nearly sober now, seemingly hardly affected at all by the immense amount that he had imbibed. "Aye, the ladies are indeed quite a nasty pair of rutting minxes and they like their sport more than a wee bit rough and wet and wild!" He giggled. "They also both admitted that they found you to be 'cute', in a burly non-effeminate sort of way, and the topic of a possible future threesome did come up for vague discussion, in a definite sort of 'maybe' kind of way. While reminding her of this moment, I did happen to casually mention that your reproductive equipment was in my estimation quite a bit on the larger end of scale of comparisons and I suggested that you were quite up to the task of breeding the pair of them like a stud bull, given the proper inducement." Oh, wonderful! My sex life was already problematic enough without Sean pandering for me! Since Sean sometimes implanted visual images into my mind, I was more than certain that the sadistic little bugger had just give Bel a rather intimate visualization of my rather neglected nether regions, probably also augmented to heroic proportions! Still, as she drunk her next glass of wine, I could feel her 'looking me over' once again, measuring me apparently to some internal and probably impossible standard. Besides, I wasn't at all sure Darlene Belanger or Janice actually liked men all that much, in the romantic sense. I'd seen that look of real genuine love in their eyes as they embraced. "They've seen and felt a banger or two in their lives and not been the sadder for the experience, lad. In the right mood, yee'd be a suitable mount for them. The thought is already there, the seed planted, but let the lasses wait to make their move. The time isn't best for love-play anyway, so be sharp... instead it's nigh for your meeting with crime boss downstairs in the wine cellar. He has a young witch of his own hidden to watch, but she'll be no menace to you. Your peekers are still outside watching and awaiting and growing impatient, so you'd be needing an illusion left in-place at the table here, so be quick about it lad!" He must has whispered something similar to Bel, because she suddenly jerked to alertness and quietly whispered 'okay', right as a waiter rather unhappily wandered over to escort us out of the dining area and through the kitchen to our meeting. With the illusion set, we disappeared down the stone steps to the wine cellar and our watchers remained fooled that we were still lingering at the table. I thought I could keep this spell active for at least an hour, but a shorter meeting would be better. I was getting better with practice at illusions, but they just didn't come naturally to me and I would need to keep a constant focus to maintain the spell. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 05 *********** Most of the lights in the cellar were off, with just one small central desk lamp upon one of a pair of small tables in the middle of private dining or wine tasting area next to three nice and comfortable looking leather club chairs perfect for sipping the in-vogue rare vintage of the season and burning some decent Jamaican cigars. Bel took the chair offered to her, next to the middle-aged and rather portly looking gentleman in an old-fashioned suit with the jacket unbuttoned to display his rather splendid, and rather constrained, waistcoat. Not at all a bad outfit, and probably from a custom tailor. Dear old Aunt Millie didn't leave me with near enough of a fortune to afford any sort of tailor, and I bought my suits off of the rack (and on sale), but otherwise, Sebestyen Dénes gave me much the forewarning of just about what I would exactly look like in another twenty years, if I get gorging on cheesecake and ignored exercise. I declined the offer of the remaining empty chair and more or less remained behind Bel's, as if I were her bodyguard. The chair looked soft and comfy, but I wanted to keep my wits and not drink any more wine and I also tend to think better when on my feet. Well, slightly better anyway. Examining him rather more closely I was none too sure what to think about Bel's reluctant crime lord. His round earnest face reminded me of a grocer back home in Austin and he dressed like a chartered accountant. Frankly couldn't picture him running amok with a tommy gun or gleefully kneecapping business rivals with a baseball bat. Upon further reflection, that was probably precisely why he had more or less succeeded and become one of the biggest boss around. Crime, especially organized crime, is a business and really needs to be run like one. There are fiendishly amoral lieutenants to handle all of the nasty violent and disreputable things, but the man up at the top needs to know how to run a big enterprise; sort of a CEO at least, if not quite a proper Napoleon of crime. Other than a single obviously visible bodyguard and the hidden mage, we were now quite alone and could speak entirely in private. While Bel made her exceedingly polite and respectful introductions and minor grovelings, I politely nodded my head and began a detailed examination of the wine cellar. I know just two things about wine; it comes in white and red and shades in-between, and the dustier the bottle the more expensive it is. If I had a small fortune that I wasn't doing anything important with I'd love to train myself to become a wine-snob. You know, one of those insufferable people that can swizzle just a taste and tell you the vineyard, the vintage, and probably what side of the hill that the grapes grew on. For some reason, both the 'cultured' and the obscenely rich fawn all over a good wine snob and you tend to get invited to the best sort of parties. Definitely not the sort of affairs or do's where I'd often been in my life, but I was willing to be educated. My minute examination just revealed lots of very dusty bottles, but I was willing to wager that this was the lair of some really, really good stuff. As for magic, there were no obvious protections set, no magical traps and nothing that made any of my magical senses tingle. Well, there was this one other magician lurking hidden in a corner behind some racks, out of sight and remaining rather passive. She had a bit of an aversion spell running but nothing I couldn't easily sense through. Strictly minor adept level grade talent I thought, but it wasn't likely that even big crime bosses had much access to top-shelf wizardly talent. A little rumble of magical force told me that she knew that I knew that she was there, but I kept my energies all to myself and just pretended that I was just there for the ride as well, which was more or less the case since I'd planned on letting Bel do 99% of the talking anyway. Keeping the illusion spell going upstairs, out of sight and through some rather thick earth and stone, was straining my talents. It wasn't an issue of magical strength, but of 'touch' and if I were to lose focus the spell would fade quickly. Bel finished her introduction of me and more or less stuck to the facts. We had very strong indications that several deep underground manufacturing plants were making weapons for delivery to agents of Deseret, being smuggled in convoys, probably by members of the Clinton Street gang, working in conjunction with unknown high level political support, possibly including governmental agencies. At the very first mention of Deseret, our crime lord turned around in his overstuffed leather club chair and whispered something to the gunsel bodyguard behind him, who promptly scurried off into the darkness and probably down some tunnel as if his short and curlies were on fire. "I was afraid it would be something like this." Sebestyen Dénes said, while waving me over towards the vacant chair. "I'd prefer not to shout to your companion from Texas. Sit please... with our eyes all, please, at an even level, so we can discuss matters quickly and earnestly, and with no unnecessary confusion or complications. This matter you've described offers enough opportunity for uncertainty and perplexity as it is. Now please seat yourself!" I shrugged and did so. The gang boss obviously had important things to say and didn't want to raise his voice a bit more than was necessary. Heck, I didn't blame him. "Now..." he continued, "To my precise knowledge there are at least six underground weapons manufacturing facilities in or near Chicago. In fact, I do own and control two of them. While I admit it is not possible to completely control where every single gun ends up at, I can tentatively say for almost certain that my guns are most certainly not ending up into the hands of Deseret. I say 'almost certain' because after my meeting with you I will be taking a good many of my men to both facilities where everything will be secured and locked down tight, along with everyone working there, until an extremely exacting audit has been performed. None, I repeat none, of my guns should ever end up in Deseret. You have my oath and pledge on this! As for the other weapons plants, I cannot say precisely now where any of them are, or where their firearms end up, but by this evening I shall make it my business to know and then a course of action shall be decided upon." "You have rather strong feelings about this, I see." Bel stated. "Already your attitude quite amazes me, as you've taken my concerns rather more deeply and personally that I would have anticipated, or even hoped for. Patriotism? A desire for better governmental relations, or does this particular agenda fit into your own long term plans?" "Each and all of the above." He stated, and started to pour the contents of an extremely dusty wine bottle into three empty crystal wineglasses. "First, let's get the patriotism out of the way. Let us be clear, I have little love for the government this nation currently enjoys, and the increasingly misguided and unconstitutional way in which it has governed during my lifetime, but I have not the slightest misconception that life on our knees as slaves to Deseret would offer even the most meager improvement to anyone. In fact, I have a much more personal motivation to see Deseret's ambitions foiled, as my only son died about ten years as a young officer fighting with the army in Eastern Colorado. As for governmental relations, I'd prefer to see the stolid ranchers and farmers of the west armed, to defend their homes against the foreign aggression of Deseret, not to mention the tyranny of our own government. It is to this destination and cause that my own guns flow. As for personal gain, why not? If the Clinton Street gang is manufacturing guns specifically to be smuggled into Deseret, I very much want to know. If this turns out to indeed be so, then every soldier and asset at my disposal will be engaged to put them out of business... or rather, put their entire operation under new and more enlightened management." "This then gives you the reasonable excuse to take out an important competitor then and maybe then perhaps become the top boss for the entire city?" Bel smiled with a bit of a giggle. "Perhaps, the timing wouldn't be particularly inconvenient at the moment. Not ideal certainly, but then again there would always be uncertainty about a new gangland war at any time. Certainly there are several ways that my organization should benefit, but our gains would not be at little cost either and for the immediate short term might only equal the rewards gained. I also now have two rather uncertain allies that I cannot be sure of how they might best contribute to this rather uncertain enterprise. Miss Belanger, we have never met before now, nor have I ever called upon your professional services. Perhaps while we wait for further more detailed news, it might be instructive if I now called upon your service, if you are willing? Call it perhaps a small demonstration of loyalty." Bel nodded and then looked at me and I shrugged and commented. "Is this perhaps a small matter that your rather young lady magician hidden in the corner could further enlighten us on? I assume the matter involves magical issues, otherwise I'm fairly certain that for other more mundane matters your lieutenants and officers would hardly need or require our meager help." He smiled and shouted out, "Miranda, come join us." Miranda, the young adept I had sensed earlier, came out from out of the shadows and I at once offered her my chair with a very genteel Texan flourish. She'd probably never met a real man before, let alone a Texan, so I wanted to make a good first impression. She give me a hard glare and enough of second look and then a third bewildered one that it could probably be accurately classified as a stare, but I guess she hadn't met many men not wearing white pancake makeup or lisping. Her father poured her a glass of wine which I was happy to offer her, but I wasn't entirely sure if she was of quite yet of legal drinking age back home. She didn't appear to be eighteen yet, but since booze was illegal up here anyway, I guess it really didn't matter anyway. At much closer range, I could get a much sharper gauge of her talents such as they were and I wasn't particularly impressed. "Did you have any formal magical schooling Miranda?" I enquired. "None. Father has kept me hidden and mostly underground since my talents emerged a few years ago. I can help him a little with truth-reading but anything else is tricky for me to do. I'm usually good at appearing invisible to strangers and I'm rather put out that you saw through my spell so easily! Technically, I'm a 'renegade', an unlicensed witch without any government papers." She seemed almost proud of this fact and gave me a sort of 'so what -- do something about it!' sneer. Looks of derision and distain is never becoming to young ladies, especially pretty ones that weren't decked to the nines with pseudo-Victorialn Revival laces and frills, or a bustle or petticoat even. I disregarded the urge to put the surly teen into her place a bit... it's also never good to piss off the boss's daughter. "That's a shame, you really do need a mentor, because even with textbooks you only just learn the technique but not the feel of how things should be done. Magic is as much of an art as a science, and often equally unreliable. Without training you can get the magic 98% right and still screw it all up. In the GWA you'd be an Adept, a rather weak one I think, but still capable of doing rather exceptional and useful things for yourself and your father... and without being called a witch or being micromanaged by an uncaring and fearful government. If you've any inclination towards traveling south to visit Texas sometime, if your father can wrangle the transit papers, I could perhaps help to arrange an apprenticeship. Hopefully, if my own mission up here works out acceptably, it could also be done without any inconvenient political strings from my own government." In a nutshell and not particularly subtly put, this gave her father the clear message, scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. If you could find the weapons factory (or factories) producing arms for Deseret, and we could shut them down, this would probably gain me a fairly serious IOU back home. This might be enough to get my Adept's license reinstated, certainly, but in any case I should have little trouble finding a sponsor to mentor Miranda. Since nearly all magicians are identified and sent to special schools for training from the time they were young children, mostly, it is quite uncommon for a 'late bloomer' to appear rather too late for conventional schooling. Still, it is not unheard of for the families of some young wizardlings to somehow evade the virtually mandatory testing and keep the child hidden away at home. Even in the enlightened GWA, there are always some prejudiced or superstitious folks in remote rural corners that still feel that magic is nothing other than the work of the devil, or something even worse. When eventually identified, and if they're too old for traditional schooling, an old-style traditional apprenticeship is then usually arranged. Usually this works out acceptably to all parties, giving a young (or not so) magician a chance to develop their talents better and providing them a place within the BMA structure. Sometimes though this just makes a bad situation worse and then there can be some real trouble, but I wasn't going to mention any of that to Miranda! She blinked a bit at this offer and looked over towards her father with obviously transparent yearning, but his face and eyes revealed nothing. I wouldn't have wanted to have played poker against him! Instead, he just with an idle toss of hand beckoned to his daughter to explain the situation, and how she thought we might be able to help. The problem was indeed a bit of a brain-churner. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 06 "Madame Witch Belanger," Miranda began, slowly and very formally to Bel, "I have tried to solve an important problem for my father, but I have been quite unable to do so. The matter is either too complicated or beyond the means of my powers, or perhaps both. In short, children have been disappearing lately and no one quite knows why or how." "Just called me 'Bel'." She replied. "Disappearances in Chicago, or any other city are not uncommon... especially for children. What makes these cases so unusually particular?" "Yes, children do disappear, but rarely in such singular circumstances where the child will just suddenly vanish right from plain sight in front of several witnesses while out in an open public place. In the most recent disappearance, the five year old daughter of an important family member just blinked completely out of sight while playing with other children in a public park. Her mother and three other parents were within ten yards of her when she disappeared and no one saw or heard a thing. She was there and then she was gone. This happened four days ago." "There have been other cases like this? Is Chicago PD investigating?" Bel inquired. "At least a dozen other cases that we've heard about," Sebestyen confirmed, "but this has been the only case involving a family member from my organization. In the earlier cases, the police were called in to investigate but I've been told that the FBI or some other government agency is now in charge of the investigation, and since then all of my usual sources have gone silent on the matter. That alone is extremely unusual and insinuates that they either cannot or will not resolve the problem." "Do you have any items or articles of clothing that the girl had worn that day, or shortly before?" Bel enquired and Miranda nodded her head. This was very useful indeed, as Bel was quite a talented psychometric who might well be able to follow the trail just like a bloodhound might follow a scent. "I have the girl's jacket and a knitted cap that she had just taken off before she started to play that morning. We had the thought of using a tracking dog to follow the scent as well but the animal quickly became confused and then frightened and refused to follow the trail even a step outside of the playground. I had hoped that perhaps either of you two wizards might be able to try your talents instead. The family of the missing girl has served my father for many years and in positions of great responsibility and unquestioned loyalty, and it would be most regrettable indeed if that faithfulness could not now be rewarded." She murmured, not entirely optimistic of the chances. "We will do what we can," I replied, "but you have to know that after a disappearance of four days, the odds become unsettlingly slender that the girl could still be found alive. We certainly both have skills that might allow us to find where she was taken to, and by whom, but we cannot promise you or her parents a happy recovery, but we will both do what we can. If we are already too late but have the chance to discover the culprit, would this be acceptable?" They both agreed, but not with any particular eagerness. Still, they both knew the odds and realized that our late efforts were just a last ditch sort of forlorn hope. Still, as Mr. Dénes had suggested, this was indeed a way of us building some trust with him. Since we figured that it would be early evening at the soonest before we'd have word of the exact location of the rogue weapons factories, and/or the headquarters of operations for the Clinton Street gang, this gave us a few hours at minimum to examine the peculiarities of the disappearances. Miranda agreed to come along with us to point out the exact location of where the child had vanished, but I wanted to make a quick phone call along the way to our only FBI contact, Janice Simms. She probably didn't want us directly contacting her, but we didn't have time to do any of the other usual sneakiness that Bel and Janice relied upon to leave messages to each other. From what I understood, the FBI had jurisdiction over missing children and possible kidnapping cases, but yet they didn't seem to be involved, and I was curious why. First, though, I had to get rid of our snoops on the street upstairs. I was feeling good and ready to ride hell bent for leather off of the reservation, but I needed to ensure that we had some privacy for this brand new bit of investigation. We needed to preserve Miranda's anonymity and reduce, if not eliminate, any obvious public association with us and Mr. Dénes and his organization. This problem definitely called for another pair of handfuls of Wonder Putty. Miranda was fascinated by the way Bel and I moulded the two crude putty images of ourselves along with a strand of each of our hairs as we channeled the energies for the illusion spell. "So that's how it's done!" She cooed with genuine amazement. "I tried to do something like this a few months ago when I thought a government witchfinder was on my trail. I'd had to hoof it the hard way and he almost trapped me with a stun spell before I reached a place where I could access the tunnels underground. The next time, I think I'll be able to do this!" I didn't disbelieve her. Truth-telling, the mentalist ability to detect whether a speaker is lying or not, is a tricky skill to do with even close to 100% accuracy. Like most mentalist powers, this was something I wasn't particularly good at and had hardly even ever tried before. Having a knack for the truth sometimes also means that a magician might also be equally good with illusions. Odd how in magic, opposites tend to work together. More weird magical theory that I'd mostly dozed through when back in school. That was definitely something that you couldn't really learn from a book! I had only recently learned this simple illusion, and only after quite a bit of help from Sean while learning. Miranda was going to need a proper instructor if she was ever going to make the most of her promising but nascent talents! Sending our images walking down the street and turning the next corner down the block, our watchers dutifully drove on after us, and right away the three of us scampered into Bel's car and headed off in the opposite direction. Out of sight and now more than a block away, I knew that our illusions wouldn't last or fool them for long, giving us a minute of freedom at most before they would realized they'd been duped and would be hot again once more on our trail. Bel tried to give the tracker in the car another good hex to disable it, but this wasn't really her forte. I didn't think I could do much better, and it would have to wait until we reached the park. Hopefully, this would give us at least a half hour or so of privacy before the cavalry started to arrive. Reaching the park, I let Miranda take Bel over to the last place the girl, little five-year old Anne-Marie had been seen, so that along with the jacket and cap she could best use her psychometric talents to pick up the trail. This was her forte and strongest talent, something that I couldn't do if my life depended upon it. Frankly, if Bel come up stumped, I wasn't too sure at all what else I could contribute that would help. For now, I just wanted more information and calling Janice at the local FBI office seemed to be the best, if not the most discrete, way to get it fast. There was a payphone at the corner of the park and I thought using this reduced at least some of the risk. She was in the office that Friday afternoon, wonder of wonders, and the switchboard connected us in just a few moments. I was pretty sure that government phones were not secure, especially in the local FBI field office, so I had to be a tad creative. "Agent Simms? This is Officer Zachary with the Chicago PD. We talked last night with my partner, Officer Darling, about a possible arson investigation, do you remember?" She did indeed. She didn't quite laugh or snicker, but I was sure that there was a smile on her face on the other end of the phone. "Well today I've got a different sort of problem, and we're wondering if the FBI has any formal involvement. There have been some rather odd public disappearances of children -- as if by magic. The last case was of a girl in Lincoln Park. I've just spoken with a concerned family member and they're a bit concerned that some government agency has already taken over the investigation and my superiors don't want us street boys getting any further involved. Can you assure me that it is your office that has this investigation in hand?" Janice paused, then thought for a long moment and then hastily put me on hold. I stayed in the booth feeding dimes as necessary and waited for Janice to return to the phone. While cooling my heels and ears, I watched Bel trying to do her thing, tracing the psychic traces of the child from her clothes and her last footprints off into the unknown, but without much if any visible signs of success. Finally Janice returned. "Officer Zachary? Sorry for the delay. No, the FBI has no formal involvement in this investigation of the missing children, including the most recent Lincoln Park disappearance. I would however be available to meet you at the park so that I could file a report of inquiry to send to my field office supervisor. Can I meet you there in about fifteen minutes?" That was cutting our safety time a little close, especially since the last thing we wanted was for our spies to catch Bel and Janice together in public once again, but it was apparent from the tone in her voice that Janice knew something we didn't, and she couldn't say anything more over the phone. I agreed I'd be there and we hung up immediately afterwards. From the looks of Bel's face, she wasn't finding anything sort of the kind of success that she had expected. "I don't understand it!" She panted and with her jaws set tightly, as if in physical pain. "I can feel the traces of the girl strongly in her clothes, and I can even find her last footprints before she disappears, but if I concentrate on where she went next I get dizzy with pain until I almost blackout . The world just spins on me. That's never happened to me before!" Still, she wasn't ready yet to admit defeat. She placed her right hand once again upon the last tiny footprint and closed her eyes tight with concentration until the world again spun around in her head and she quite fell over to the ground, dazed and with a head full of stabbing pain. "Damn it!" She whispered, as Miranda and I helped her to a sitting position. "I can almost feel where she went next, but it hurts too much to follow. She wasn't teleported ourt, she didn't fly, and she wasn't carried either. Someone or something takes her hand and they walk away, but I cannot follow them. It's like they're here... but they're not quite. Like they've taken a half-step outside of this world to one where I'm blind!" Someone or something - and living in but just a fraction outside of our world... that suggested 'visitor'. It actually screamed, not just hinted, inter or intra-dimensional trouble. Well, that's the sort of shit that tends to pay my bills back home in Austin. Still I needed to think for a moment, so I joined Bel sitting on the grass and I shut my eyes for a moment to think. I had half of an idea that I thought might work, but I wanted to consult with Sean for a moment. "Aye, lad... you've got the jist of it just right, and with just enough Wonder Putty left to work the shaping. There be at least three of the child's hairs still in her cap, and with those in the simulacrum it can follow the trail without feeling the pain of the other's presence. This be a bad one, this is... but make ready swiftly for Janice is crossing the grass to join you, and your other company will not be far behind her!" Sean was right as usual and by the time I made my feet and grabbed my last handful of Wonder Putty, Janice had quite nearly reached us, and her mood was none too cheerful. "Zak, do you have even half of a clue about what sort of shit-storm you've stirred up now? Ok, you did a decent job of playing a stupid CPD officer just fishing for information, but how did you know that this whole investigation isn't even in FBI jurisdiction anymore. Investigating missing and kidnapped children is a FBI obligation, but some other government agency, MDIA, MSA, NSA or something like them, came in a few weeks ago flashing their badges and took all of our files and told us to mind our own business! They even took a piss all over the FMBA too, and told them to stay out as well. You of all people know what that means!" "Unfortunately, yes. Visitors... and probably not nice or friendly ones." I replied, finding the three loose hairs of the child that remained stuck inside of the knitted cap. "This has major clusterfuck written all over it, with some big government lads in black protecting some of their nasty illegal very alien friends in return for unwholesome and probably unspeakable rewards. I know that this is a majorly fucked up government, but they signed the Visitation Treaty along with every other magically responsible government on the planet. To officially support and protect a group of visitors is against international law... and all of the rules of common sense, let alone self-preservation. Even the 'likeable' visitors have agendas of their own and should never be assisting governmental policy on a formal basis. That's what the treaty says, and as far as I know the GWA has always followed it to the letter. If the USA isn't, this could seriously set back relations with everyone, and even give the CSA a major causes-belli. Please tell me I'm wrong, or at least overreacting?" "No, you probably aren't." Janice replied, who gave Bel a brief hug that she tried to disguise by helping her girlfriend up from the grass. "If you find those agents responsible, and you can prove they're hiding or protecting in an official capacity the persons or things responsible for these kidnappings, you have my carte blanche... and that of my boss the station chief, to start the next great Chicago fire roasting the bastards responsible. With any luck, just pray this is just a group of basement dwelling bureaucrats protecting some gang of child-snatching pervs, assisted perhaps by a rogue wizard." The tone of her voice suggested otherwise. This sort of magic was just not normal, and this wasn't the way most gangs of kiddie-pervs operated. I also wondered what sort of government agency had the clout to order the FBI around in its own jurisdiction, but I quickly decided that I probably didn't want to know the answer. When I had the child's hairs worked into the small putty doll I set it upon the ground on the last footprint that Bel had located and I quickly explained what needed to be done next. We were nearly completely out of time and could feel Sean's impatient breathing down my neck and more than a sense of vital urgency. "Bel, I need you to hold the jacket and cap and focus upon them hard and connect this link to the simulacrum. I need you to become that lost little girl and give the simulacrum her focus and life, to follow and go where your mind could not. Miranda, I need you take my hand to help me concentrate on keeping the simulacrum 'alive' and focused in this world, because it is going to try and 'jump' out of phase with our world, and if it does we'll never find and get it back. It's going to be hard and it will take both of our wills linked together and if the doll loses its anchor to both the present and the past path that the girl took, I don't think we'll get a second chance!" Both women nodded and with a bit of magical flourish I focused as much earth energy as I could into the putty doll, living live and our focus to the putty crafted simulacrum. At first I thought we hadn't succeeded, but with everyone exerting their will eventually a shadowy figure of the young girl began to appear, dressed exactly as she had been on the park playground a few days ago. The illusion wasn't real of course, but I thought I saw the little girl smile at us as she took one step forward away from the last known track and then another, and then a few more. I thought Bel was having another dizzy spell as she focused upon her linkage with the child's clothes, and the connection it gave her, but as the pace began to increase the discomfort began to minimize a little, but I could tell it never quite went entirely away. Soon even the effort to keep her eyes open became too much for her and Janice had to lead her as if she was blind so that she could maintain her focus. Miranda and I were having a slightly easier go of it, but we too needed to keep our focus on the more material parts of the doll. It felt 'slippery' to us, as if we let up on our focus it might slip out of our mental hands entirely and disappear, following that different and unseen path instead. A year ago, I could never have held my focus this long and already after just a few minutes I was grateful for Miranda's assistance. The young lady was untrained and inexperienced, but she did have will and she could indeed focus it! By the time we reached our probable destination nearly two miles away, Miranda was too mentally exhausted to do more than stumble her feet, but her will never quite collapsed. We had done it. My own eyes were awash with pain and it hurt to look around us, but the doll had reached some sort of final destination, stopped at the edge of a sidewalk leading to an old but rather splendid multi-story house that was nearly a mansion. "Shit... just what I was afraid of." I heard Janice mumble, and when Bel managed to get her own eyes open and focused, her spirits became equally deflated and she sunk to the ground in agony to rest, but didn't quite entirely lose her focus on the girl's spirit. "Ok, where are we and just how bad are we fucked? This isn't the Mayor's house?" I enquired. "Worse... this street is Consular row, and all of the houses on this block belong to the various embassies or consulates. There's no flagpole here, but not even the FBI can go here and no judge would ever give us a warrant." "There is evil here." Bel whispered, her words stuttering with the pain of her concentration. "The girl disappears from here, across the barrier... inside -- and with something... something very bad. I can feel it almost even here, outside." With that, Bel exerted herself and leaned forward across the sidewalk to place her hand upon the walkway leading up to the rather forlorn looking house. And then she screamed. I've heard screams of terror before. On the frontier border with Deseret in my youth while in military service, and while protecting victims from a horrific summoned creature, such as when hundreds of possessed bodies were burned to the most minute ashes in that movie theater in Austin. Sometimes, once or twice, I've screamed myself. I'll admit it; the world is indeed full of ghastly and unspeakably terrible things. I don't know what Bel sensed for she suddenly quite lost her contact with the simulacrum and she fell into a trembling stupor on the pavement, shaking uncontrolably. To make things somewhat worse, her scream had attracted a good deal of local attention, including pointing out our presence to two different car loads of unfriendly looking folks that now seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in us. This particularly included one large vehicle full of yellow jacketed (and probably jack-booted) thugs that were already smiling at the thought of making our acquaintance in a unfriendly sort of physical way. One way or another, the jig was pretty well up. Since Bel had lost her connection with the simulacrum, further concentration was no pointless and I told Miranda to let go of her focus as well. Both women were quite done in, and exhausted beyond the point of being able to concentrate their wills. The doll had led us as far as it could go. Now, after catching a few deep breaths, I decided to take a closer look at the protections around this house. While I didn't actually touch the pavement itself, I could get a pretty good idea of what was on the other side, and I didn't like it much at all. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 06 "Sean, I've never felt protections like this ever before in my life. There is a big major aversion field that surrounds the whole house. Not even a mailman could ever set foot on the pavement or the grass... and what's lurking in the grass is too nasty to even contemplate further. This is major visitation... something wicked and nasty that should never be here at all. I'm not sure I can handle this! Back home I'd scurry off with my tail between my legs and call in the BMA, and the Marines, and find the local burghermeister to have him arm everyone else in the village with torches and pitchforks." "Aye, this is bad. Nearly as bad as it comes, but trust me lad you're going to see worse... so gather your strength and we'll see them off right soon enough!" I liked the sound of that word "we". Sean never had involved himself directly in human affairs before, no matter the personal danger to myself, but I had just the inkling that direct confrontation with other entities was quite permissible within his code of conduct. I took Bel's hand and helped Janice in soothing her, enough so that she could concentrate again enough so that I could ask them both a single important question. "Bel, Janice... we're all seriously fucked now either way, but the moment we step foot onto these grounds we'll be going rogue, with every government hand against us. You both can leave now, making whatever report you need to give to your bosses to keep your jobs, but I have to go inside to deal with what is in there, regardless of the cost. If you want your pensions, or don't want every government wizard hereafter looking for your head, then go... and please take Miranda away with you to safety." Miranda, bless her young teenaged heart, just squeezed my hand tighter and shook her head vigorously. Hell or high water, she was determined to come with me. Like Bel, she was nearly too exhausted to even stand, but she still wanted to fight and press on. Bel and Janice also smiled, as the determined FBI agent assisted my partner in magic to her feet and they together squared their shoulders together in determination. "Fuck my pension, fuck the FMBA, fuck my boss, and fuck anyone that tried to get into our way!" Bel grunted with more sincerity than she had body strength and will, but her eyes were fixed and determined. Janice just muttered 'Me too!', and took out her sidearm from its jacket holster. The yellow jackets gunsels, about six of them, were all out of their vehicle and approaching us from about half a block away, blatantly toting rifles and other guns. My companion's bravado was comforting but the time for words was over. I gathered up my will and started to focus my strength to unravel the rather potent and unearthly weave that formed the massive barrier of aversion. Already I could tell that other wards and protections were arming themselves behind this field and that a host of magical alarms were now going off. Now for the first time I felt Sean's own magical powers join with mine, more slender and delicate but with at least the strength of will of my own. His force was much more nimble, lighter and more subtle and it danced, glided and flowed from him in an oblique angle and manner that I couldn't even remotely understand and never hope to replicate, but it complimented my own forces. I gathered all of the power that I dared to draw upon, and it was in fact quite the magical feast here with Leys of all five magical forces right here nearby, easily within my grasp. My force became the bulwark, or rather the frame, of the siege tower itself, allowing Sean a salient within and his castings were both too swift and too intricate for me to follow, but irresistible just the same to the defenses. The aversion field suddenly collapsed, and so did the next obvious barriers along the walkway. We, the invaders were at the very gates of the citadel and even those defenses couldn't hold for but a few moments more, and with a great kick of my cowboy boots the doorway was penetrated, and in the very nick of time. The internal defenders were on their way, I could feel them approaching, cold and unearthly, and the Clinton gangsters were now arrayed for battle, already exchanging rifle and pistol fire with Janice, while Bel shielded her lover with her feeble, badly weakening strength. To add to the confusion, another car was now arriving, featuring well dressed men in very dark but prim suits, undoubtedly the mysterious and powerful government representatives that were protecting and sheltering these unspeakable visitors. This left us with an unprotected flank that young Miranda couldn't hardly hope to cope with. We were now outnumbered and outgunned. Facing, significant and potent magical and military forces now beyond our ability to probably resist for long, but for some reason this thought cheered me up. They had us surrounded now, and that was just where I wanted them! Poor bastards! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 07 I'm used to being outnumbered and outgunned. It's an occupational hazard when you're a practicing private Adept working on your own in hazardous situations, especially when you're facing some gawd-awful creatures from some unfashionable region of the multi-verse. What just makes everything twice as bad is when you discover that the poor misguided folks that have been aiding and abetting your nasty alien visitor like things this way, and take a rather unhelpful attitude towards your kindly humanitarian assistance. Today was a perfect example... and as usual my timing and luck was pretty shitty. We were surrounded now and about to be under attack from three sides at once. Inside the doorway of the consular house, I could sense just with the rising hairs on the back of my neck that a host of rather unpleasant entities was about to come and see what the fuss was about, and probably take an unfortunately dim view to my interruption of their unsavory activities. Behind me to one side, Bel and Janice were already dealing with a car load of a half dozen Clinton Street Gang thugs loaded up to their eye teeth with pistols, rifles and at least one automatic weapon. Now, as if this wasn't quite enough trouble to deal with at one time, a new car load of misguided governmental busybodies in dark suits had just shown up, almost certainly with the preposterous notion that we leave their precious and highly malevolent visitors alone. Let them all come! The only real problem was that I really didn't think I could hold off all three sets of assailants at once. Two sets, maybe. Bel and Miranda were doing their best to help, but both were exhausted already and pretty much out of willpower, due to the long trek we'd made tracking the simulacrum of the missing young child. Bel was keeping a shield up in front of us, bouncing (mostly) the hail of bullets from the gangsters, but she was so tired already that she could just barely stand, let alone hold up the protection for more than maybe a few seconds more. Miranda, being a scarcely trained very minor teenaged magician, was already way out of her comfort zone and far past her level of competence and was now in the early stages of a very immense 'freak-out'. I didn't blame her, if I'd been in her shoes and thrown headfirst into this ratfuck, I'd be wanting to run for the hills screaming too! "Miranda!" I sharply barked while giving the panicking girl a quick rough shake. "You're going to have to help Bel fast, her powers are just about exhausted and if her shield weakens any further things are going to get very ugly and painful fast! Grab the Earth Ley just under your feet and channel it into Bel the best you can. Hold her and hug her if you need to, but help get that force into her somehow! She's too tired now to do anything other than draw on her own internal resources, and knowing her, she'll burn herself out or drain every drop of her entire life-force protecting us, so do it, now!" The teen girl's eyes began to sharpen and focus and then close hard in concentration and I felt her connect to the underground magical energy field, then with tears in her eyes from her own exertions, she clung on to Bel's back and hugged her hard, forcing her own tired and ill-trained will to flow into and join Bel's shield. The result was minimal at first, but as Bel was starting to expend her final internal reserves she sensed and latched on to this flow of new power, much like a drowning person would a life-raft. Her strength stabilized and now with her energies reinforced, the protective shield began to strengthen and slowly even began to increase in size and strength around us, now forming at last a full circular field. It was ragged and a really powerful magician could have overwhelmed it easily, but for now it would do! "Sean," I muttered, after taking a quick breath for gathering a bit of strength myself, "Bel has the shield firmed up for now, but can you do something fairly overt to slow down the imminent arrival of our visitor friends? I just can't deal with them yet until we get our rear flanking attackers settled with. I think those new government wizards are going to be real trouble!" I'd rarely spoken truer words! Sean gave me a mental grunt and with an intense and hyper-rapid channeling of massive but untraceable force, a new shimmering shield now barred the doorway in front of us, but this time the protection was to keep them in, rather than them keeping us out. This gave me the minute I'd need to deal with the three dark suited government agents, each of whom was now channeling an alarming amount of magic power directed right at us! They weren't even interested in talking to us, and suddenly with almost no warning three bolts of magical power were now blasted straight towards us, and I just barely had a moment to interpose myself just outside of Bel's shield, so that I could focus my own defenses to parry these energies first. There was no way that Bel's protections could have even slowed these massive energies for even a moment and the Clinton Street thugs were still banging away at us with their guns. I've been in a magical duel or three over the many years, but I'd nearly always in the past won due to superior cleverness or just sheer dumb luck. My most recent shoot-out outside of the Austin convention center was such an example. Today, facing three extremely powerful wizard-class magicians all at once convinced me once and for all that I was certainly no mundane Adept level magician anymore! I stopped the first three bolts, and then the next three... and then I stopped holding my breath and started to think about making a counter-attack. Since I wanted to leave Miranda and Bel with unimpeded access to the Earth Ley for their shield, I settled upon my old faithful and usual standby, the Fire Ley, from even deeper into the ground to use for my own. As my flame shield grew in power my confidence began to grow. I was able to restrain their following attacks with relative ease, and now I could also get a better measure of my dark trio of opponents. Their powers were certainly wizard class, perhaps even 'Great Wizard' (or 'Magician 1st Class, Primus', as they call them up here in the USA. Definitely at least 9 Score, each, to the best of my calculation. In theory, I shouldn't have stood a chance against one of them, let alone all three, but I was certainly somehow able to hold my own. Nice... I'd worry about the potential ramifications of this odd magical bounty later! My first thought was to stick to what I did best, maniacally burn down entire neighborhoods with excessive and unnecessary force... just joking. I did try a few nice sharp fire-bolts, but their shields were up to the task of deflecting them, for the moment. Putting my opponents on the defensive now was also useful for another reason, I wanted to try a focused Spirit jab or two to get some more information about my foes. Now that they were probably drawing near max normal power, I could feel a dark thread or weave to their castings, a similar sort of feel that I had noticed earlier when scanning the protections of this house. With a loud grunt, I focused a probably excessive bundle of raw fire energy and hurled it right at the wizards, and as expected they stopped it, or rather they slowed it down rather considerably. They didn't quite go up into smoke, like the car behind them, or the houses across the street, but it served its purpose. I'd lead with the jab to conceal the punch that was launched a fraction of a second behind it. This blow of spirit power should have knocked any normal human senseless, or at least scrambled their brain long enough to disconnect their powers... but it didn't. In fact, the sense of darkness about them instead just grew some more with intensity, until the figures just appeared to be ones of shadowy darkness and not actually human anymore. Now that was both interesting and really creepy at the same time! These visitors had apparently taken over the mortal husks of these once human governmental agents and even though their stolen physical bodies had now been consumed by the power of the battle, the malevolent spirits within still lived, if that's even remotely the right word. Since I now had a better feel for their powers and the sort of energy that they thrived upon, and since fire didn't seem to be especially effective, I decided that it was time to try something different – it was time to let the winds of the Zephyr blow! Replacing the Fire Ley with the closer and even more powerful Air one, I began to focus my efforts on grabbing first an upper level warm air mass from the south, and then a slightly lower and much colder mass of air from further northeast, right over Lake Michigan. It was going to take a few minutes to bring these two opposing fronts of air together in a collision right over our heads but we didn't seem to be in hurry at the moment. Bel's shields were holding fairly stable and secure for the moment, and Sean's barrier across the doorway was certainly still shimmering and glowing quite nicely. The Clinton Street gunsels were regrouping behind their car for the moment and probably also calling for reinforcements, heavier weapons and probably another carload more of ammunition. They had most likely already fired nearly every round of ammo they'd brought with them, and they'd been busy with their 'Chicago typewriter' so far, but it hadn't done much if any good. Now it was my turn at bat! The tornado of lightning that I'd coaxed down from the super-cell of violent weather I had now created was absolutely and very definitely an example of extreme overkill, and an absolute illustration of 'what not to do' in crowded urban area, especially when it's nearly dropped down right on our heads, landing dead center on the lawn in front of us! Someday, my autobiography is going to be mandatory reading in school rooms everywhere to teach young magicians to think more carefully and to just use the minimum amount of magic necessary to solve each and every one of your problems. I realized pretty quickly that I'd seriously overdone it - again... and hurled myself upon Bel, Janice and Miranda, to knock them to the ground and then I added my own strength to Bel's earth-shield (also rather overdoing it a tad excessively in my panic) as the tip of the massive electrical tornado touched down right where I'd directed it, on the front lawn of the consular house. I then felt, rather than saw, the energy fields of the three visitor wizards crackle and then finally fail from the electrical disruptions of the massive storm, disintegrating into non-animate energy to be utterly dispersed by the storm. This quite permanently took care of the three hostile wizards... and the six mobsters too, who were never seen again and quite probably blown into Lake Michigan, if not Canada... along with a three block stretch of every house along Consular Row before I could concentrate enough to force the twister to return back up into the clouds. It wasn't quite the storm of the century for Chicago, but it would rain non-stop for the next three days and create smaller tornadoes that did rather remarkable amount of city property damage. The big one I had summoned would later be graded a very strong Scale 4, the second strongest possible. Mercifully it was never quite traced back to me! There were no deaths (other than the alien wizards and gunsels) – thank goodness! I'd have never quite forgiven myself if anyone else had been killed due to my miscalculation! The Zephyr had indeed extended his storm wings and triumphed, but I didn't need to see the unhappy glares on both Bel's and Janice's faces to know that I'd once again done something unpardonably reckless. Only Miranda thought I had just done something really neat and cool and I didn't have the heart to tell her that she was just an ignorant un-magically educated kid and that what I had just done was indeed insanely reckless and (almost) unforgiveable. I just couldn't keep making a habit of this! **************** Actually, the view of the devastation around us was quite remarkable in at least one way. The visitors' lair, now once again opened up for our entry, was completely undamaged by the tornado. In fact it looked unscratched, with not a single roof tile or window out of place! Now that I had a moment to think about it, this miraculous feat wasn't particularly surprising. Our particular malevolent race of visitors seemed to exist just slightly out of phase or time with our own dimension, as we noted when the girl's tracks could no longer be followed once her abductor had taken over her body. The entire house, behind its layer of protections, was much the same... right here and now in front of us, but yet slightly 'elsewhere' at the same time. With Sean's ward now removed, I gathered up our exhausted and wobbly crew for the final push, indoors, right into the very heart of darkness (or so it seemed). With Janice and Miranda's help, I was just about able to get Bel standing upright and vertical again. I say 'just', because if anyone had then let go of her she'd have then collapsed right straight back onto the pavement. A quick feel of Miranda's energy suggested she was near equally done in. "Whatever masculinely clever idea you've plotted for your encore," Bel weakly murmured, "you're going to have to do it without my help. I couldn't light a candle now, but after the carnage you've just caused, I don't dare let you go in alone out of my sight!" The beady-eyed look on her face said it all. "Fine! It's me against the entire fucking universe once again... and that's just the way I like it!" Ouch... this was a cruel statement to make to poor Bel, who'd done every little bit that she could have done, and far beyond what I could have done back when I was a mere Adept, or perhaps even mortal. No, something in me had changed... and perhaps not entirely for the better. "Sorry Bel, that was extremely uncalled for and rude. I'm tired and I'm scared more than a bit at what I've just done... to save us all, and I'm frightened more than a little that I'll just screw up or 'slightly miscalculate' again, and probably soon - to save us all over again yet once more. I don't like what I feel about what's inside this house and I've got to stop it, and yes, all alone... I'm now the only one who can, but I need to know that you're still on my side. To offer practical advice, and just hold my hand when I get scared completely out of my wits, if nothing else." She didn't quite smile, as I had done quite a bit these last five minutes that she wasn't going to forgive me for anytime at all soon. But still she took my hand to steady herself and then she quietly leaned her head against my shoulder. It was going to take all of us to keep her standing, but she was there – ready now to fight and if necessary die at our side. ************** I'd been in some miserable unhappy places in my short life, but the psychic taint of the occupants just exuded from this house, even touching the floor with my boots made my mind cringe. I'd known that whatever lived here wasn't remotely human, but I had never considered that any such entities could ever be so utterly inhuman. What poor Bel, who had superb psychometric talents, must have thought, I didn't even dare consider. Even for me, a lug of a bloke with minimal mentalist talents, the aura of the house was excruciating. Miranda, who seemed to have minor mentalist talents, was positively bug-eyed and was biting her tongue hard to keep from screaming. "For the love of God..." I whispered to Janice and Miranda, "don't let Bel touch a thing in his unspeakably malevolent house! Follow me close and shut your eyes if you have to and think very happy thoughts if you can. I can feel the main cancer of this place, just below us, maybe downstairs and that's where we're going. We've got to destroy it all, everything, everyone and every-it here." And it wasn't going to be easy. For starters, I needed to keep some sort of protective, aversion field around us. The last thing I needed for some shadow-assed piece of shit to walk through a wall and grab one of the women, pulling them forever into their half-dimension where they seemed to normally live. I could feel them now all around me, now; poking and prodding my shields to find a way to reach us, to devour us... and not our bodies either. They needed our living essence to feed off of, so that they could become more real here, able to exist and feed more easily among us. That's probably why they chose the children – they were attracted to their younger and stronger life force, their vitality of the years stolen from them that they'd never get to live. Air magic, particularly the lightning effects of the storm, could seriously disrupted them, but now that I could feel them, dozens of them, perhaps even a hundred or more of the foul creatures existing just a fraction outside of our normal reality, I guessed that Spirit, a scarcer and much trickier magical energy to focus and wield, might instead be my strongest weapon here. The beings were so darkly evil, so full of negative energy and matter that our clean good earth was quite nearly a poison to them. It attracted them, yes; they yearned to drink it, free and unrestrained, and in its utter entirety. They hungered to devour our world, or rather all that lived great or small within it. Naturally I wasn't about to let them. "Love." I muttered collectively to all of my enfeebled companions. "The monsters can't begin to understand it. They live to feed and they want and desperately desire our life essences, but let's give them a belly-ache instead! Think of living things, growing plants, cute puppies and kittens, or anything bright and cheerful. Happy thoughts folks... they're going to try to stop us from getting to their portal, their gateway downstairs to their own vile nasty world, but they're not going to prevent us!" I'm not sure what happy cheerful thoughts the women were considering, but it certainly helped the aura of my spirit shield. Probably they were all were considering the cheerful thought of battering me to a paste with heavy blunt objects. As for myself, I remembered happy thoughts of Aunt Millie, particularly her riding about her small ranch on her horse when I was home on school holidays. I don't remember my mother well enough to have much of any thoughts about her, and my father and I are extremely, to use the term, estranged. The old bastard was living in Florida, in the CSA, the last I'd heard, allegedly working as minor magical talent for a gang of smugglers operating out of the Keys. Minor talent was an understatement; probably even Miranda has more talent than my father did! Spirit energy is weird and peculiar stuff and most magicians can't handle working with it. I almost never did myself, but I thought I knew just enough about it to make me dangerous. While spirit does exist in Leys, they're rarer and much harder to deal with and at least some of the energy has to come from within inside yourself, so it's nastily exhausting to even perform minor spirit magic. I've also never had the knack for it, but needs must when the visitors drive! With my glowing green and yellow sparkling field of Spirit magic, the shadows were keeping indeed as far into the dark as they could manage. Nothing that I'd met and bypassed so far had enough stolen life energy yet to make a physical appearance to stop me, but that happy coincidence was over once we made it to the stairs heading down into the basement. The one blocking the top of the stairs was just material enough that I couldn't quite see through or past it, and it was quite as disturbed by my spirit shield as I would have hoped. Well... when in doubt, do something bold and impetuous – it's been the story of my entire professional career! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 07 Here, almost downstairs, my grasp upon the Leys of the outside world was fading rapidly, as if the strength of the negative world downstairs, where the portal was, was growing. I didn't have time to waste. Rather than try anything remotely subtle, I just blasted the damned thing with a spirit-bolt. You're taught in school expressly and specifically to never do this sort of thing. Spirit is for creative and constructive manipulation uses only and the backlash of using it for destructive violence can be overwhelming. It's probably one of the very top five "Don't do this moron!" lessons magicians are taught, and the ones with any sense at all never will... and I made a note to myself to never try it again, even here! The magical result was more like the effect of a small bomb going off, with us very much right at the point of impact. Everyone and everything went flying, and the very stairs below us completely disintegrated, adding the insult of a fifteen foot fall to our other minor injuries. As the spirit bomb had quite knocked down my own shield too, the fall wasn't a pleasant one, but we all mostly landed upon our feet, or each other. Granted, if I had landed upon something harder, like my head, it might have hurt a lot less. In any case, the mental feeling I had when all of the creatures upstairs were abruptly and rather rudely destroyed was utterly gratifying. Now, dealing with the maelstrom of their portal to their unspeakable world was going to be a rather different matter. There was just no way in hell that I was going to use anything with spirit against this! Mostly due to the fact that now that we were downstairs, we were all now as much in the aura of their world, as ours. I couldn't even feel the real world outside, let alone the Leys, no matter how strong they were near here. Like our visitors, now we were all in shadow; out of phase and out of the time or reality of our comforting world. This meant banishment. One serious assed application of brute force against force, my will against theirs, to pinch off this portal to their existence and seal it (hopefully forever) from ours. Oh man... was this going to really suck! "Aye lad, and get to it!" Sean whispered in my ear, as he was at the moment seated upon my left shoulder, quite visible. The 'reality' of this unearthly part of the multi-verse, was apparently affecting his own powers... or else he decided that he had no reason not to become visible. This was certainly a shock for Janice and Miranda, who were both too exhausted and nerve-wracked for any more bizarre surprises. "Tis simple for you, you've done this before... and it will be just like last time!" He added. "The last time, about five hundred people ended up getting burned to a cinder by an ancient Fire God. Now granted, they'd all been possessed, but I'd rather not repeat that experience!" I replied, with perhaps a bit more alarm than I would have preferred. No, it wasn't a whine... but perhaps calling it a whimper wouldn't have been entirely inaccurate. Before, in the movie theater in Austin, I'd had access to some decent Ley's and I was positively flush with recklessly eager enthusiasm. I'd also had help, from an old girlfriend and her twin sister that together when they merged their spirits had more power than was at all healthy to control. I'd also cooked into a melted puddle an artifact that I'd spent an inordinate amount of time and effort crafting that had significantly boosted my powers. This time I'd have to do all by myself, with my own innate powers only. This time, I just wasn't sure that I could handle the job. "Aye lad, you can... so get along to it! Company is coming from the other side, a great deal of them and they're none too happy!" I wasn't sure which was more demeaning, the fact that I had very little confidence in myself to do the right thing, or that my so-call magical familiar Sean had just slapped me hard on the side of my head, as if I were a petulant schoolboy. Well, I had been vaguely curious about how much innate magical talent I had after my accident, and now I was about to find out. First, just to help with the concentration and give us a smidgeon of protection, I decided to first set up a Major Circle of Protection. I had the small sack of salt and the bags of various herbs and substances in the inside of my leather duster coat all ready to be grasped and utilized in but a moment. Sure, using raw magic is fun, but it's inefficient and dangerous. Starting first to constrain the portal with a circle would give me future leverage, like a jack lifting up a car to change a tire. I could build one in my sleep, which helped because I was already beyond just pretty tired already, but I could still make it well and more importantly - fast. Even Bel raised up an eye-brow at my working and faintly nodded her approval. No, it wasn't quite 'textbook'... but knew an added trick or two that would make it better and probably even stronger. Keeping the portal blocked was not going to be enough however. This one used really nasty negative energy fields that I didn't pretend to understand, so I wasn't quite certain about how to go about weakening it, to reduce its projected power to something that I thought I could manage. Already I could see several shadowy figures starting to emerge and due to the extreme otherness of my foes, I was none too sure that they couldn't use their own powers or other magic against us, even if they were trapped behind the circle. "Focus lad, just focus upon the edges of the horizons of the portal and peel its own energies back in against itself." Sean helpfully advised, and loudly enough that I could tell the wondrously magical creature was himself rather frightened. "Push it back in against itself, and hard! Do it Zak, for there is no time at all to waste!" Now I knew he was scared badly, because his faux Celtic accent quite disappeared and his speech now sounded 'normal'. I wasn't quite sure how I'd manage it, but it was the only idea any of us had, so I gave it my all. I wouldn't say that it was easy. In fact, I'm not sure if imploding that inter-dimensional portal wasn't harder than closing the rogue magic portal inside of the theater, or banishing that Fire God. I ended up on the floor with my eyes closed chanting and exerting every ounce of power that I had left in my body. I had no Leys and no other source for external energies... it all had to come from within. Bel said later it was the single greatest application of magic she had ever seen done, and far beyond anything within her own powers. I'm still not entirely sure where I found the strength to briefly and weakly shield and anchor ourselves from that last great final blast of raw magical force just as the portal had imploded inward against itself and its last faint marker was removed from our world. With luck, they'd never find another way back to us! ***************** The blast didn't take out too much more of the stone basement, but it shredded to toothpicks all of the upper stories of the house above. This fresh destruction made everything here now blend in quite nicely with the rest of the tornado damage to the other surrounding houses. With luck we could climb ourselves up upon the vast amount of timber wreckage and wander off before anyone took any notice of us, or could remember our descriptions. It was pretty much a case of the wounded all stumbling together with each of us hanging on to each other just to stay upright. The idea of walking the two miles back to the park where our cars were was quite laughable. After staggering for just two blocks, we found a neighborhood speakeasy and we all planted ourselves inside. We asked the bartender to call us a cab and bring drinks for all and to keep them coming, including an extra bottle and glass tumbler for Sean, who once the portal was destroyed was back to being his own usual invisible and snarky self. We kept the cabbie waiting another ten minutes, but I gave him a Texan silver dollar as a bribe to keep waiting for us while we had another few quick rounds. We were all quite dead sober, but the drinks helped to take a little bit of the edge of weariness off of us. After our ride back to the park, I gave the hack another silver dollar, with a very mild charm upon it so that he would forget us entirely, but Janice gave him another good tip in real US greenbacks that would make his day quite profitable, even if he didn't quite remember all of it. ****************** Picking up our cars once more from Lincoln Park, we all returned this time back to the restaurant, and hopefully an update from Sebestyen Dénes. Unfortunately, he still had nothing yet to report, so we all trooped back upstairs for an early dinner, which merged itself into an additional supper later on. Drained to exhaustion, I ate enough for three and Sean was slightly better behaved this time around. The crime lord was more than delighted to discover that the perpetrators of the kidnappings had been indeed punished, and that no other children would suffer this fate. We supposed that somewhere inside the wreckage of the house, the decaying bodies and clothes of all of the victims would be found, and that if his organization really wanted to tweak some governmental noses, he could contact some of his normal police sources, telling them that at the wreckage of a certain former diplomatic residence (but now unoccupied), they might find the bodies and some interesting evidence of the crimes. At least this way the families would all have some closure, and the life-drained bodies could be given a proper burial. Finally, when it was decided that it would still be some hours yet before all of our anticipated information would be received, the lot of us decided to get some shut eye. Downstairs, past the wine cellar down one of the tunnels, we were directed to a room with some comfortable cots and pillows, and quite possibly I was already soundly asleep even before I could kick off my boots. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 08 *************** CHAPTER EIGHT I should have been a bit alarmed that we all had quite slept for nearly twelve hours straight, without anyone waking us once the needed information had been gathered, but it was quite accurate that we had all been quite dead on our feet last evening. Now, fairly well recovered from her ordeal, Bel had a bit more life in herself this late Saturday morning, and just to confirm to herself that she hadn't quite burned herself out, she quickly and easily magically lit a few of the candles back upstairs in the restaurant. "First we eat, then we talk, then we go do!" Sebestyen Dénes stated, and that plan of action wasn't at all disagreeable to anyone. After three long and very rich meals here in a row, my waistline was rapidly now straining against the edges of my suit pants. The evidence that his organization had gathered was quite thorough and painstakingly meticulous, and best of all it had been gathered by stealth so that there should be no warning of our interest. "There are in fact seven weapons manufacturing locations underground," the crime boss revealed to us once we were all safely back downstairs in the wine cellar, "but only two locations appear to be of interest to us today. As I mentioned yesterday, another two of the arms plants belong to me and their production is indeed secure, with virtually every weapon able to be accounted for and tracked to its proper destination... to the hands of the farmers and ranchers of the west, or to members of my own organization. This leaves three other manufactories left, one each of which belong to various minor competitors, but none of which at this time I feel are overtly assisting to arm Deseret, although some minor wastage and loss might indirectly reach them by indirect channels. For the moment, these three are not of any particular of importance to us. Instead, I can confirm that there are two separate places whose weapons and ammunition production does not seem to reach the usual domestic uses here, and indeed one of these two facilities is controlled by the Clinton Street Gang. The other slightly larger works, and this is quite of significant personal interest to myself, is controlled by the Harrison Group, an important and dangerous rival organization much at odds with my own. More interesting for your particular concerns is that one of the three Harrison brothers was seen last night by one of my agents in a meeting with several important Clinton Street members. For the suitability of our dual but complimentary purposes, my organization shall conduct large scale raids against both premises, shutting them both down so that we might gather further evidence of where the weapons are being shipped. I recalled your mentioning of Rockford, but this meant nothing to any of my associates and they know of nothing of interest happening in that city." "When will we start the raid?" Janice enquired in excitement. "And, if I might ask, will my agency be allowed to officially take over the premises of the Clinton Street operation, at the very least? I would assume you have future private plans for the Harrison facility and if we are in agreement, my reports shall not mention that facility." "Indeed I do. As the two locations in question are both rather separated geographically, the Clinton works down here in the south of the city and the Harrison one much further north, I see no problems allowing the FBI a minor coup, and one that would undoubtedly greatly benefit your career!" Janice certainly had no arguments about that. "I assume then," Bel enquired slowly, as if still quite lost in thought, "that our group in particular will be involved with the Clinton assault then, with the able assistance of your men, of course. I assume though that the majority of your forces otherwise will need to be concerned with the Harrisons, your more dangerous rival?" "Indeed quite so." He replied. "You'll receive about a full third of my soldiers for the assault, but the majority of my more trusted and best armed units will attend with me up north. The Clintons are dangerous, yes, but they are mostly thugs, content to rule their streets only with little vision to the future. Indeed, I would not be surprised if the Harrison's are just using them for allied street fodder for their operations. Working together, as we assume they are, if they were well armed and conducting a surprise attack upon my organization, the odds might in fact favor them. Perhaps we only had a matter of weeks more before all of their plans were completed. It is quite well and good that we have discovered their armories first! For just this knowledge of our apparent close call, we are all already quite indebted to you!" "And me too!" Miranda added. "I'll be coming with you! In fact, I'm not leaving you at all, so where you go, I'm following!" The teen girl was quite giggly at this, but I didn't blame her. In one afternoon she'd seen more magic done than in her entire previous life. Most of it was serious 'Great Wizard' (or 'Sorcerer Supreme', US title) level stuff too, if not yet even greater. "Still," I pondered out loud, as much to myself and my companions, "it would have been better still if I could have traced either of the two missing gun shop owners. Maybe they were killed, silenced perhaps, or yet they might still be arranging their affairs underground. If I could find either of them... and prove, to just my own satisfaction of course, that they were indeed directly involved with either the Clinton's or the Harrison's, I'd feel a lot happier about igniting this new Chicago gangland war! I've already disturbed things quite enough up here on my visit." "What about the coin you gave Jesse Hollaway?" Bel asked. "I know you didn't put a tracer upon it, but what about using the Law of Similarity to go searching for it? He'd have prized that coin, and at worst it will be found hidden under his old shop, but perhaps his killer would have taken it? Or, better yet if he's still alive, it will be with him now, almost assuredly." In magic, the Law of Similarity means that 'alike things' can be used to find or follow other virtually identical things. Miners hunting for precious metals like gold or silver often buy an artificed prospector's fork, with a bit of charmed metal at the tip matching what the seeker is looking for. Bel in particular could follow a criminal or a missing child from just a trace of torn dress or bit of shirt. In this case I had plenty of silver dollars from the same mint roll, stamped in rapid succession from the very same batch of molten ore moments apart. Even better, all had been in my possession for some time, since I'd left Texas. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the more certain that I was that some strong affinity would and should still exist. There couldn't be many bright and sharp, freshly minted uncirculated Texas silver dollars circulating in Chicago. Ok, I'd passed a few out already, for charming the various minor criminals that the FMBR had sent us to annoy, rather than finding any genuine suspects to question, but we could rule each of these bearers out, when detected. It was well worth a try. "Bel, are you strong enough to do the working? I vaguely remember the basics, but I haven't cast this spell since I was in school, and even then I usually screwed it up." "I can do it." She readily confirmed. "For local police cases I often use this to track bits of evidence. Sometimes, I've cast the spell several times a day even. I'm a bit tired still, but this will be a lot easier on me mentally than channeling that simulacrum, like we did yesterday. I don't ever want to try anything like that ever again, but a simple Similarity working is a piece of cake to maintain." "Well, let's not waste time then. Let's coordinate where to meet later this afternoon for the Clinton assault and we'll meet you there. With any luck, we'll also find our gun shop owner is there too!" *************** I'd like to say that Bel, the expert on tracing and finding items, located our rogue missing gun dealer on the first try, but actually we found nearly everyone else I'd handed a coin to first, including our cabbie from yesterday. The spell was clearly working as intended, but I found eight of my ten other given silver dollars first. The tricky part was once Bel was sure that we were near our real quarry, the location of the coin seemed to be somewhere underground. Miranda didn't know this part of town, as it was well within the self-proclaimed boundaries of the Clinton Street Gang, in fact we seemed to see one of their yellow jacketed youths on nearly every street corner. In fact, it was quite a wonder, as suspiciously as we were now acting, that they didn't particularly seem to notice us driving back and forth, constantly stopping every block or two so Bel, the driver, could check her magical traces and pinpoint the next direction we needed go towards. Actually, the more I thought about it, the happier I was with the idea that my missing gun dealer was now pretty much right where I wanted him. Probably right there underground, in or near the subterranean weapons factory that we were going to be raiding in just a few hours time! In fact, once we quit our street level searching, and met with our assembling force of armed muscle for our attack in just an hour or so, the traces seemed to be still growing stronger and pointing right in the direction that we were now heading towards. *************** Our leader for our strike force of benevolent mobsters was a senior officer by the name of Jerome Standish, and he struck quite the figure of a Victorian hero with his handlebar mustache and green garters on both arms of his bright green and white striped shirt as he cradled his well-worn but beloved Thompson machine gun, the infamous Chicago typewritter. He'd skipped the bowler hat, and it was just as well, as there was none too much ceiling space in this part of the tunnel system. In a pack across his back he had attached grenades and numerous extra 200-round circular magazines of ammo for his tommygun. He'd been to war before and he was well prepared. Jerome had been well briefed and he seemed to have a tight grasp over his men, about forty in total. Everyone was armed to the eye-teeth and quite looking forward to firing off their weapons as if this was the Fourth of July. I warned our ground force not to be too indiscriminate with their weapons fire as we had a person of interest that we wanted to take alive, if at all possible. Naturally, they would all forget this instruction the moment that things started to get interesting, but perhaps a few of them might remember that taking a few prisoners alive, would indeed make their bosses happy. To reach the main manufacturing area, we would have to pass through two checkpoints, the first having a heavy reinforced steel door with numerous guards and the other only a minor formality of an open check-station. In-between these two areas was sort of a workers dormitory and living area that we would need to remain relatively quiet while passing through, but there was not much anticipation that we would meet much if any trouble. With our attack planned for the early evening hours of a Saturday night, it was hoped that most of the day workers would be gone, off upstairs spending their week's pay and we'd only find a skeleton crew operating the machinery or guarding the facility. Well, we were about half right anyway. At the first secure checkpoint I just walked up alone to the solid steel door and knocked loudly on it. When the guard opened the metal window to look out at me I just smiled at him and looking past him down the corridor past the other guards I quickly set up a thick air shield behind them, then used some excessive earth force to blast the steel door off its hinges, sending it flying down the hallway until it reached the air wall, which stopped it... and most of the noise. A couple of the guards still had most of their various body parts and were quite unconscious from the concussion, with bleeding noses and ears and would now not inconvenience us in the least. The unluckier ones that had been in the way... well, they were rather less fortunate, and let's just leave it at that. The fact that our entry had taken out the guards without setting off the alarm or making much if any noise probably saved us all. The dormitory areas ought to have been mostly empty, and actually the folks who lived and worked there normally were indeed for the most part gone, off somewhere drinking up their wages. The problem was when we walked through a large almost open area room where the workers usually took their meals, we found instead another group of rather unfriendly folks who were taking the opportunity for a detailed strategy meeting of their own, and took a rather violent exception to our sudden uninvited presence. The big dance had some of everything and everyone. The top Clinton Street gang leaders all looked spiffy in their official leather jackets and each of them carried at least one sidearm. A couple of the over-achievers either carried two, or had a small machine pistol instead. I thought I recognized two of the legendary Harrison brothers from the descriptions the crime boss had given us by their matching outfits and near identical looks, both being big mean and very crazy looking. Next there was an assortment of local government clowns, none of which I knew or recognized, but from the shock of their expressions, between Bel and Janice they could identify nearly the entire lot of them. More to my interest was the pair of official looking FBMR wizards in their government robes, the infamous Norman and Desmond that Bel and I had already suspected of being in cahoots with the crimes, so to speak. I didn't see their famed mentalist Ingrid, or her skunk of a boss, but like a bad coin they were sure to turn up at an unfriendly moment. It was actually this loveable pair of wizardly ass-kissers that started off the fireworks first, instantly recognizing both Bel and myself and then without a moment of hesitation and they instantaneously leaped into action. I could suppose that the other twenty or thirty odd well-armed gunsels leaning against the various walls of the room might have been worth a brief mention, but with the firepower that was now suddenly enveloping the entire room and both hallways, their primary function at this particular stage of the rat-fuck was to provide loud screaming, both before and during their rapid and unexpected deaths. Truthfully, I would have to admit that vast majority of these violent demises were due to friendly fire, specifically the FBMR wizards weren't wasting any time at all in filling the meeting room with flame, clearing house so they could make their own escapes. Out in the very front, I was quite entirely caught by complete surprise when two, not just one, huge fire-bolts came crashing upon me, with no shields or protections yet up. Bel had a fairly weak shield already going that adequately covered herself and Janice from the splash effect behind me as I suddenly was utterly and completely inundated and apparently consumed with searing magical flame! *************** Under most normal circumstances, though very little of my life seems to qualify as anything remotely resembling normal, getting blasted by magical flame is bad... very, very bad. From even just one cast by a minor magician, the victim is usually killed outright, and often burned to cinders, often to their proverbial smoking boots. It's officially listed in the self-defense training manuals as a 99% sure kill, assuming you nail the target directly at close range and he or she is helpless without shields, both of which certainly occurred, textbook perfect. In my case, two rather large flame-bolts from highly trained and rather powerful wizards ought to have consumed me in a heartbeat, and probably continued onwards to engulf to their doom another couple of victims right behind me. The thought that I would still be standing there unharmed, but rather annoyed a few moments later as the flames cleared, ought to have been utterly unthinkable. In fact the wizards were already choosing other targets, clearing themselves a clear escape path with their excessive use of magical flame. Been there, done that, have the t-shirt. As for the effect upon Sean, well, that was laughable that anything mortal could affect him! Already I could hear him giggling next to my ear. I guess while thinking about the entire situation later on, I realized that my unpleasant encounter with an ancient Fire God had definitely changed me in more ways than one. Don't get me wrong, the flame was hot and it burned a little to the touch, but not much more than a slight sunburn would hurt. For a plugged Mexican centavo, I would and could have toasted up the entire room to the temperature of roaring crematorium furnace, but I did really want some live prisoners leftover to question. Very, very grudgingly I decided not to educate these two felching ass-clowns about what real magical fire was like. Sensing that something was now terribly wrong with the universe, the two wizards gave me a hesitant look of frank disbelief. Heck, I didn't blame them; I was feeling kind of weird about the situation too. The bastards repaid my own delay by toasting me again with another even stronger pair of fireballs that would have cooked nicely everyone in our strike force behind me if I hadn't casually parried both blasts up into the ceiling harmlessly. My crew was now shooting at anyone in the room that wasn't already on fire and not taking much if any return fire back. Some more follow up blasts missed me entirely and did a pretty decent job of cooking everyone else left in their room that wasn't already a smoking corpe. I didn't even bother to shield myself that time. I wanted them both to be afraid enough of me to piss their own robes. They didn't, but they might have made it safely to the far doorway and gone if I hadn't next blasted the two with an airbolt, which flung the both of them hard... rather too hard, against the far stone wall of the room. I rather didn't like the crooked look of Desmond's neck as his now dead body lay still and unmoving on the floor, but his fuck-buddy Norman was slightly healthier and soon slowly writhing in pain on the floor. He thought about standing up for round two of the bout, but I waggled my index finger at him, warning him not to even think about it. He did consider for a moment gathering some Air Ley for himself, to make a last attempt to fight his way out to safety but when he felt just how much magical energy I was channeling, he submitted to Bel like a whipped dog, who came over to bind him. The rest of his pals weren't so lucky. One of the Harrison brothers was a smoking partial torso and the other had incurred about half a dozen bullet wounds, most of which looked to have been mortal shots. He was still breathing for the moment, but he was way beyond interrogation, and I didn't know a thing about necromancy, let alone the art of speaking to the departed spirit of a corpse. The remainder of the assorted gunsels were in various stages of disrepair also bleeding or burning their lives away on the stone floor. A couple of the Clinton boys and a double handful of assorted thugs looked to be salvageable, but the odds of them knowing much was fairly slight. Knowing our crime lord and his loathing of waste, I wouldn't be surprised if most of these wounded soldiers didn't suddenly decide in the next day or two to join the winning team, especially as their top bosses looked to be toast. Yeah, running amok with fire often gets a lot of other hands burned, and Norman and Desmond had indeed been rather indiscriminate. The prep school boys might have known the correct magical techniques taught in advanced wizardry classes, but nothing prepares you for a sudden unexpected combat. The instinct is to over-react... lord knows that's what I've done more times now than I can count, and there is no other substitute for experience. The wonder twins had been too busy playing kissy-kissy with the boss's ass to spend much time on the front lines doing the real hard work, like Bel and I had done in our careers. This magical laziness just cost nearly four dozen 'normal' people their lives. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 08 *************** With the magical duels now resolved, the rest of the assault upon the factory was rather more straight forward and conventionally fought, but not much less costly in casualties. We lost a handful, and they lost quite a few more, with nearly everyone that was left fighting quite to the death. There just weren't many prisoners to take, and not many of them were particularly worth the effort involved. For the creamy frosting on the cake, I found my missing arms dealer, Jesse Hollaway in a corner near one of the storage areas with two randomly fired bullets in him. The one in his shoulder didn't look too bad, but unfortunately the one lodged in his temple was nearly instantly fatal. Of course, he did in fact have his lucky silver dollar on him, which I left to be buried with him. This was not quite what I had planned for our next encounter. With the mopping up accomplished and the facility secured, Bel, Janice and I started our rather exhaustive search of all of the bodies and anything that resembled files or paperwork that might lead us to the secret location of the Rockport warehouse. Our exuberant teenaged witch was somewhat more subdued and I found her later sitting in chair in a nearby room with her arms quite wrapped around her body, as if to comfort herself, and for now I just let her be. She was getting an unusually rough magical education and this was probably the first time that she had ever seen the negative aspects of our craft. She just wasn't going to easily understand as we say down in Texas, that sometimes 'folks just need killing'. Maybe Bel could think of something comforting to say later, but I knew I'd just say the wrong thing, so I left her alone for the next few hours until she felt herself mentally gathered enough to rejoin us. *********** It was in the pants pocket of the half-charred figure of one of the Harrison brothers that I found our only real clue. On the face of it, the singed but largely complete folded photocopied document looked just like any other badly duplicated bit of paper, and the heavily smudged information printed on it didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. Fearing our investigation, the leaders of the smuggling organization had decided to advance the next pick-up of the produced weapons at both facilities the previous Friday night. We'd found a few old leftover cases of guns and ammo, but the large storage rooms were both emptied, and we still had no clue where they'd moved their contents to! Still, this nearly illegible photocopy hinted at something, but I just couldn't put my mental finger on it until I gave it to Bel for her to examine. At once she caught the significance! "This paper came from my boss's office!" She exclaimed with delight, and I immediately realized why she'd known. That morning a few days ago when we had been waiting in Mason Probert's office, I had fussed a bit with his nearly broken-down copier. In fact I hadn't been able to get a copy even this legible! The smudge marks were telling and quite identifiable, even from just my flaky memory. Bel's was certainly better, and she could positively identify the paper as having come from his copier. The devices were still expensive and scarce in US government service and shoddy or not, he possessed one of the only copiers in the entire federal building. Finally, this was solid evidence that the FBI could use! Now that our investigation was complete, Janice was ready to call into her office for backup, and for the rest of us it was time to hand over at least this part of the investigation to the FBI. Jerome Standish departed with his troops and took all of the wounded prisoners and of course their own dead, back with them. As far as Janice was concerned, she was going to tell her bosses that she learned of the gang conflict involving illegal weapons manufacturing, and that the vast majority of the carnage had been done before we had arrived, with unfortunately no survivors. As there was no one left there living, other than us, we didn't have to worry much about her story being contradicted. The notion of two FBMR wizards working for criminals would not at all be an outrageous one to most members of the FBI. They were going to count some serious coup as the result of this raid, and Janice was going to become very much the fair-haired girl back in Washington. Bel was going to corroborate her lover's story, and recite her own account of the suspicions she had about the local FBMR office. Of reports of misconduct that had been repeatedly ignored and how her office might have a few bad apples still left in it. We still hadn't found our missing link of evidence to lead us to the right place in Rockford, if indeed Rockford was quite the proper place to go, but at least two weapons plants would no longer be supplying Deseret with smuggled arms and ammunition, and that was my real purpose for being up here in the first place. Come Monday morning we'd catch Probert in his office and I'd make the miserable bastard squeal out every secret in his pointy little head! The FBI could then take point in raiding the warehouse and by Friday the paperwork could be finished and I might be on my way back home to civilization! ************** The FBI kept us busy the rest of Saturday night and well into Sunday afternoon and I was interviewed by at least a dozen different agents and increasingly higher ranking federal officials, even more of which were on their way from Washington. I signed just about everything put in front of me (after reading it of course) but they were buying our story, eating it up and wanting seconds. Some of the more excitable officials were all for conducting an immediate raid against the FBMR office, rounding everyone up including the cleaning staff, and pretty much in general all in favor of throwing out the baby with the bath water, but good old politics as usual soon put an end to that. Bel and I were more than certain that a host of senior Washington FBMR officials and wizards were on their way here, too... probably to make damned certain that the rot that might be found would absolutely end with Mason Probert. Hardly likely, but that was definitely what they'd seek to establish. ************* When the FBI finally released us for the time being, I made my excuses to everyone and trotted back as quickly as I could to my hardly used hotel bed to catch up on yet more lost sleep. I'd burned up more magical energy in the last few days than I'd used in the last few months, and trust me it takes a toll out of you. I was feeling thin and squeezed out like an orange that been shoved into a press and repeatedly mashed until nothing was left but the pith. Bel and Janice casually mentioned to me that they were going to spend the night at O'Grady's... but since they weren't inviting me to join in the fun, I didn't have much of a care. Neither of them had quite forgiven me yet for dropping a near maximum category tornado directly on top of their heads, not to mention several of my other slight magical excesses of the last few days. I'd even come to the conclusion that I had quite scared them with my improbably displays of raw, near unrestricted and only minimally regulated power. Now that I'd had a little time to think about it, I'd also done a pretty good job of scaring myself. Very definitely any hints towards a possible flowering romance had quite died on the vine, with the feeble plant dumped under a few tons of concrete for good measure. On the other hand, there was still one person who looked towards me with unrestrained admiration, the young and far too impressionable Miranda. I found her sitting in front of my hotel room, wanting to hear the latest news from the FBI, so I let her in and poured her a soda and we picked each other's brains for most of the next hour. Her father's raid of the Harrison Group manufacturing facility up in north Chicago went off nearly flawlessly, in fact it went nearly too well. The place was nearly empty of guards as nearly all of the weapons and ammo had also been transported elsewhere. The final remaining Harrison brother was not present, nor was any of his best trained and elite soldiers, his so-called 'Highland Park Guard'. This still gave Sebestyen Dénes a minor tactical victory, but now he was left with a rather messy street war that would determine the outcome of this war. So far, the guardsmen had not made any appearance in the fighting, and her father feared a rather heavy counterstrike would soon occur. A note from her father rather clarified things some more. Now that Miranda was with me, he felt certain that he could 'feel assured of her continued safety in this extremely uncertain time'. Unquote. Now granted, this temporary responsibility for her care and security was not just mine, but also encompassed Bel, and perhaps even Janice. There was a bit of the plural insinuated in his royal use of 'you', but for now at least, the kid needed to stay under my watchful eye. Unfortunately, I really needed some shut eye instead. Mercifully, Sean charged in to the rescue, and with lumps of Miracle Putty in hand the pair of them were soon sprawled out on the small sitting room floor to reenact some old Civil War battles in startling (and noisy) 3-D. As tired as I was, they could have reproduced the entire English and French moon rocket rivalry of 1899-1902 and I'd have never heard it. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 09 ***************** CHAPTER NINE When I awoke fairly early on Monday morning the hotel rooms were quiet but I was not alone in bed. Sometime during the night Miranda had crept in and joined me and was now more or less awake herself, with her left arm wrapped around me and her head lying upon my chest. The fact that she was still clothed didn't really help to mitigate the situation much. Sensing that I was now awake as well, she snuggled up to me even tighter, if possible. "Hold on there, Princess Tiger!" I muttered. I'm never at my best in the morning and it takes me forever to really wake up. "You realize if anyone barged in and saw us snuggling together, they'd haul me off in handcuffs and throw me down every set of stairs along the way to the federal pen, and I'd piss blood for at least the next month." "Oh, don't get so excited!" She giggled. "We're both perfectly respectable and of course nothing happened, yet... but if the moment is right for you, I might be willing!" My young little temptress was indeed quite in the mood, and her hand started to slide under my covers to softly probe at what was hidden underneath. There was quite a lot to find actually, since I invariably sleep in the all-together unless it is unusually cold. "Miranda! Now stop that, and let me get up and get dressed. We need to get to Bel's office early this morning... and without distractions. Besides, you're still a child, legally up here anyways, and I don't think I'd like at all what your father would do to me if I returned you home not entirely in the same condition in which you arrived." "Silly goose! I'm not a virgin, and besides I'll be eighteen this summer. Isn't the age of consent just sixteen in Texas anyway? They say wherever a Texan's boots step, they mark it to become a part of Texas, so just pretend you're back at home! Besides, I think daddy really likes you. He's already decided that I'm going to return home with you, to be apprenticed and learn real magic, just like you offered!" Actually, I hadn't offered myself to be her master for apprenticeship training, but it didn't help my feeble early morning thinking one little bit when her probing hand evaded mine and she reached down just far enough to quickly grab my semi-hard cock and give it a tight squeeze. Yes, she was really cute, but more than anything I needed to take a wicked piss. I think she liked what she'd found there because she coo'ed into my ear and snuggled up even closer and tighter, and now prepared to start kissing me. Faced with this formidable assault, I chose rapid retreat. I leaped up out of bed and grabbed my clothes hung up on a nearby arm chair and skedaddled to the bathroom to dress. This gave her a pretty good view of all of my particulars, front and back, but it couldn't be helped. "Oh, you're no fun at all!" She pouted and kicked her bare feet a bit on the bedcovers with frustration. "Tell you what." I compromised, mumbling through the closed door while I relieved my achingly full bladder. "If you are convinced on your eighteenth birthday that I am not a deranged pyromaniac and an insanely reckless wizard unsuitable even to be trusted with so much as a burned out match, we can have this conversation again. Later. Besides, it's considered extremely bad form for a master to take unsuitable advantage of his apprentice." "But I'd be eighteen then, and able to make my own choices then!" She persisted. "You would and could then... but I'd really advise you to set your sights a bit higher. Back home I'm neither rich nor famous, or even held in any particularly good esteem. They sent my ass up here to this land of barbarians because I was extremely expendable and no one would miss me while I was gone. Your eyes are a bit clouded as to my virtues, I fear." "Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but a young woman is allowed to maintain her fantasies and fixations. You win... I'll grant you a six month reprieve from my affections, but trust me, you're going to kick yourself later for waiting!" She giggled and I heard her hop off the bed and dance off into the sitting room and loudly ask Sean what had become of her shoes. She must have found them, because when I emerged from the bathroom more or less ready to face the day, she was all ready to leave with her large oversized purse hung over her shoulder and waiting impatiently for me to also be ready to leave. She then made a moderately humorous remark about women always having to wait on their men to get ready to go, but I ignored it. We snatched a quick breakfast downstairs in the hotel restaurant, but even eggs and a few paltry slices of bootleg bacon (outrageously expensive) couldn't quite bring my spirits up into a particularly happy place. I hoped that after this morning, once Bel's boss Mason Probert was subjected to some suitable menaces, that he'd be ready to spill his guts to the FBI, and my job up here would be done. I didn't much like Chicago and cared even less for the insane and draconian laws up here. I wanted to be able to eat a big Texas steak, half a dozen eggs and an entire side of bacon if I wanted to without pissing off some malevolent governmental 'Big Sister' that feels it is their right to make me eat gruel instead, in the interests of public health. I was also still getting my head around the improbable notion that I was at all a suitable person for instructing a young and very impressionable young lady. Back home, my bosses and acquaintances at the BMA would laugh themselves silly at even the suggestion of this. Maybe with this minor success things there might be different, but I didn't think so. An old Army sergeant told me once while I was doing my obligatory military service right after school, that it only takes one "Oh Shit!' to wipe out a dozen 'attaboys', and I didn't have many of those... and far too many of the previous. "Be not afeared lad!" Sean murmured inside of my head. At the moment he was invisibly pillaging the breakfast trays of some of the other diners and quite rather pleased with himself at the moment. "She does much look up to you and she'll mind what you tell her. Her mind is a good one and her talents are not quite so hidden as they were when you came along. She'll prove to be worthy, of that you'll see." "That's not really the problem." I mentally replied back. "She's never cracked a book and has only learned what she does know from either accident or trial and error. She's what we'd call back home a 'maverick', a walking piece of wild magic without a bit of the proper training necessary to let loose amongst society." "Just like your own 'proper training' prepared you?" Sean laughed. Well he did have a point. There weren't many magical laws or rules that I hadn't bent or actually broken, and a great many people believed I was already a walking menace to society. "Aye lad. She might even teach you a bit about responsibility, caution, preparation, planning or even forethought!" Ouch. Now that was really just rubbing it in! *************** With our early start, we made it to the FBMR office in the federal building a bit before eight. This was nice and early as the rest of the staff wasn't expected for at least another half hour. The boss, Probert, would probably be along sometime later. He usually was. Maybe sometime after nine in the morning he'd arrive at the office, but we couldn't rule out an earlier appearance for some reason. Bel and Janice were already waiting for us downstairs and their faces looked happy but tired. Undoubtedly due to a long night of passionate wrestling under the covers. I ought not to have felt that sudden stab of jealousy that briefly passed through me, after all it was true that I'd had a romantic offer of my own this morning, but had rejected it. They certainly didn't feel anything towards me that was even close to what they felt for each other. About some things, especially emotional ones, I just seem to be an extremely slow learner. Janice already had in readiness a team of FBI agents, with more than a few senior ones 'supervising' from the rear, but the actual takedown of Probert had been left entirely to our own hands. There was nothing like a FBI team assaulting an entire room full of rival governmental employees, especially magicians, to spark some serious immediate carnage, and make an already bad bureaucratic war at least ten times worse afterwards. Bel and I assured anyone who would listen that we could safely handle it, and we were going to leave Janice and Miranda in the client waiting area, to pretend that they were waiting for a scheduled appointment. If Bel and I couldn't handle Probert, then we were suddenly in a lot more trouble than we could ever hope to cope with. As we waited for the next hour, the rank and file employees began drifting into work after their weekend. Most of the staff, which I had largely met earlier, was composed of Adepts, or 'Magician 3rd Class' as they called them in the FBMR. There were a few odd magicians other than Bel, but with Desmond dead, and Norman probably already a concrete shoed fixture at the bottom of Lake Michigan, the rest of the top shelf talent didn't pose much of a significant threat. As employees all arrived, Bel and I latched a hold onto them and directed them into a nearby sufficiently large conference room for them to cool their heals until we were ready to deal with them. We wanted to explain the situation carefully and present the facts of the matter, but we really only wanted to do this once. So we politely but rather firmly kept directing everyone to sit, shut-up and wait. At about a quarter till nine, Bel figured that she'd gathered just about everyone, and we braced up our courage to face the rather annoyed mob. They weren't all that much happier once we'd finished our report either. For the most part, everyone accepted our conclusions that Probert and several of the most senior wizards had been heavily involved in organized crime, but the shock that this organization had been supplying armaments to Deseret was considerable, and few of the more astonished magicians kept us busy with questions of proof for some time until Bel and I were nearly out of patience. No one was happy that the FBI would even be setting foot onto their premises, but the official designation that this was going to be a joint FMBR and FBI operation, faintly soothed some of their objections. At the end, we solicited volunteers to assist us with our enquiries and about half of the staff did raise their hands to cooperate, albeit some of them didn't seem particularly enthused. There remained a slight but vocal party of opposition, led by Probert's executive secretary, a Ms. Holcomb, which was hardly any surprise to either Bel or myself. The one quality that all executive assistants possess is abundance is excessive loyalty to their boss, with the concerns of the company falling to a far distant second place in their hearts, assuming they have any. The fact that her boss was an evil, felonious traitor to her own nation was entirely secondary of importance. Malevolent criminal bosses tend to be excellent strong administrators anyway, very much a plus in their opinion. Also still missing from the proceedings was the mentalist adept, Ingrid. We had been certain that she had been the one conducting all of the mind-wipes for the organization, and Norman had quite confirmed this to us when we questioned him, but we still wanted some additional proof and we really needed to lay our hands on her. Bel did say that Ingrid kept odd hours and was often absent from the office even under normal circumstances. Now with a major gang war engulfing the city, of which the outcome was far from certain, it seemed likely to us that she'd be involved with that mess somehow, although Bel thought that her actual combat skills were rather slight. So we waited and waited and waited. By about ten o'clock we were all fairly certain that Probert and Ingrid were both going to be no-shows, and we gave up and summoned in the FBI to dismantle Probert's entire office and everything in it. Bel and I hadn't found any clues to anything, other than we easily confirmed that it was his personal photocopier that produced the smudged message we'd found earlier. The intrusion of the FBI into her private domain certainly did not improve the mood of Ms. Holcomb, who was now charging about like an enraged bull, fighting to prevent the government agents to remove so much as a scrap of paper from her boss's desk. Naturally, she soon lost that war and retreated to the sanctum sanctorum of her large workstation in front of his corner office and visibly fumed at everyone. As she didn't possess even a lick of magical talent, her curses could be very safely ignored, but I had to admit that they were quite explicit and colorful. Sean was giggling up a storm and I could tell that he was taking mental notes of a few of the choicer oaths to recycle in the future. For the lack of anything meaningful to do, I sat myself into a corner of the office and kept a watchful but oblique eye upon her imperial majesty, Ms. Holcomb. If she even possessed a first name, no one knew it... or certainly no one would have ever been permitted to utter it. In my vast experience dealing with dysfunctional bureaucracies in both military, government and civilian service, I've learned this fact as a gospel truth: 'There is nothing that the boss's secretary doesn't know'. Naturally, she wasn't about to tell any of us lesser unworthy mortals a thing, but actions always speak louder than words and for the next quarter hour I watched the middle-aged surly bitch like a hawk. At a quiet moment when she was sure that no was directly around her or watching, I saw her carefully slide something from out of a desk drawer and into her open purse in her lap. Then she got up and started to sidle with haste towards the ladies restroom. Like a falcon nabbing a fat pigeon, I was on my prey. She beat me there, but not by much. She'd just entered the ladies room and was in the process of starting to dump something into a toilet when I tackled her and then wrestled away a large paper object from her fingers. The object was a thick rolodex of business cards and other important written information, and I'd rescued it from destruction by barely a moment. Ms. Holcomb was still battling me for my prize when Bel then arrived to assist, and I tossed her my trophy. The timing was fortuitous, because the old battleaxe was really more than a handful and she really fought dirty! "Bel!" I shouted, as the furious secretary tried her best to claw out my eyes. "The stupid bitch tried to make off with this and was starting to destroy it. I saw her grab it from her desk before she sidled off. Oh, and check her purse too, for other goodies!" With the large rolodex now safe secure, we dragged our kicking and screaming captive back out into the open office area and started to look over the seized goodies. Bel dumped the entire contents of her purse out onto a nearby desk so that we could peruse everything in some sort of context. Meanwhile, with two FBI agents mostly keeping the thrashing secretary restrained, I forceibly managed to pry open the clenched fingers of her right hand and discovered two wonderfully lovely little gems of evidence that had been but a moment from being flushed down the toilet. With a telling jerk of her head, Bel signaled the pair of helpful FBI agents that the faithful and devotedly loyal Ms. Holcomb could be taken into custody as a material witness and charged with obstruction of justice and the attempted destruction of evidence. I won't admit that I had needed rescuing, but she'd scratched me up with her talon-like nails very nicely and was even at the very end trying to bite my entire arm off while I tried to retrieve her concealed evidence. The two crumpled rolodex cards I'd rescued had made the entire operation worthwhile and a complete success. Not only did Mason Probert have a weekend farm just outside of Rockford, but he also owned a rather interesting property, Probert Warehouse and Storage right on the outskirts of the same town. This was much too much of a coincidence! "Bel, how do you feel about a nice drive out to the country to take some fresh fair?" I asked. "What, and leave the luscious smell of burning cars and torched buildings? I don't think the city has seen this much fire since the big one, not to mention the lovely smell and sounds of gunfire in the morning!" She laughingly replied, but in a few minutes she'd gathered up our corps of semi-faithful co-workers, who were now in a much more civic minded mood after watching Ms. Holcomb being hauled off in chains literally kicking and screaming. But still they weren't at all happy about taking orders, especially from me! Even the most pissed of the magicians was now starting to see the way the wind was now blowing, and in the interest of making this a truly joint FBI/FBMR operation, everyone was now more or less willing to cooperate. The hint was none too subtle that anyone that wanted to stay and home and pretend things were business as usual might instead spend a lot of quality time under FBI arrest as material witnesses... and also very likely suspects themselves. Given the alternative of being under federal custody or joining my posse, they unanimously all agreed to come to Rockford with us... and I'm sure every single one of them later regretted the decision! "Look folks!" I shouted as Bel and Janice corralled our meek and surly lot of not particularly voluntary volunteer magicians. "This is war... war with Deseret, whether it's official or an act of congress or not, those bastards want to kill us all... and using your own guns to do it! Alright, so I'm from Texas! Yep, I got the boots, the big belt buckle and duster coat. So what... get over it! This just means that I'm the one that needs to stand up tall and fight for what is right, and when things are at their worst! As someone reminded me earlier today, wherever a Texan plants his boot, that ground then becomes a part of Texas and should be defended as such. Now my boots are marching over to Rockford to seriously kick some Deseret ass, and I would be much obliged if I could count on more than just your company, but also your willing and able cooperation. If it would soothe your consciences, I'll swear you all in right now as honorary Texas Rangers, if it will make your heads stand taller on your shoulders with your chins held high instead of the shameful bunch of defeatists I see now before me. Ok, your boss was a crook -- deal with it! Shit happens, now dust yourselves off and let's show those FBI folks that you can do what needs to be done and not just ride along playing the weak sister! Now, will you ride with me?" Now this speech had them cheering and even Bel and Janice exchanged a pair of amused looks and then positively smiled at me, and for the first time in quite awhile. I couldn't resist to carry forward with the spirit of the moment and really bind them wholly now to our cause. "Good! Now repeat after me and swear..." I shouting, and began to repeat the Oath of the Lovett Rangers, with a few minor creative alterations. No, I've never been one, but I'd met more than few out near the sharp end of things in my military days and respected the hell out of each and every one of them. I wasn't sure a normal Texas citizen, let alone an Adept with a suspended license could swear up a real posse, legal-wise anyway, but for some reason it really seemed like a swell idea at the time! "I Swear that I will bear true allegiance to the Republic of Texas, and that I will serve her honestly and faithfully against all her enemies, and observe & obey the orders of the stupid bastard appointed over me, for he just might accidentally know what he's doing. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 09 I believe that all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world -- but some worthless pieces of shit do sometimes need killing, but in those instances God will put down the firewood for us to take, but that every man must gather and light it for himself. I also hold that men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number of its common people and not the urges of the high and mighty, but to instead protect the weak and the innocent, for sooner or later... somewhere... somehow... we must settle our final account with the world and make payment for what we have taken and done, for all things change, but the truth, and the truth alone lives on forever. Now with the help of God, when trails are steep and passes high, I swear I shall ride them straight the whole way through, until into the falling dusk I get that final call, to ride with my friends into glory, and we shall ride one and all!" And swear they did, and it was better than a Hallelujah after a sermon. I'd won them all over and they would willingly ride with me into the pit of hell. Well, most of them anyway. The pit of hell was pretty appropriate, from what I'd seen of the forces of Deseret over the years. ************** With the overflow of recent events, the FBI was quite nearly out of additional manpower. More FBI agents were already on the way to Chicago, especially high ranking ones, but with the seizure of the secret underground munitions factory and the red-hot gang war enveloping the city streets, their current available manpower was depleted. Every agent not already with Janice was already out in the streets trying to stop the gangwar, and being outnumbered probably by a hundred to one, their chances were laughable. At best, they could protect a few places that they'd rather not get burned down or shot full of bullet holes, but I figured once the bosses were all out of sight they'd hasten off to protect their own families first. Certainly the CPD and CFD already had that thought. The boys in blue were mostly home for the duration until the shooting was over and the fire department was letting most of the fires burn and only fighting the really major blazes. After a lot of extremely lengthy wrangling that lasted further into the afternoon that I would have preferred, Janice announced that despite the extreme importance of arresting Mason Probert, her field office could now only spare her two junior agents to assist her. With the remaining four minor wizards and the dozen adepts that Bel had corralled into service, I hoped this would be enough manpower to raid both the farm and storage facility in Rockford, but Miranda had other ideas. With a quick phone call to her father, she obtained the grudging release of six of his own personal bodyguards, to be accompanied by his faithful lieutenant, the most fashionable and formidable Jerome Standish, who arrived in his usual sartorial splendor complete with a large Tommy gun complete with numerous one hundred round drums of ammunition, which made it quite the Chicago typewriter and street sweeper of legend indeed. When at last we were all assembled and ready, we formed up a caravan of official government cars with a large heavy van (allegedly armored) containing Standish and his mob 'volunteers' in the rear, we finally pointed our noses west, out state highway 90 the seventy or so miles to Rockford, which we hoped we could do in two hours, but a flat tire and a busted radiator hose delayed our convoy another pair of hours until we faced the setting sun in our faces just as we drove into the outskirts of the small city. I admit, despite the fact that we were already far behind schedule, the real need for swiftness had already probably passed us. I had wanted to assault both properties during the day but obviously now we were going to be too late, and the majority of our already tired strike-force wanted a bite of dinner first. As I'd only had an early breakfast myself, I grudgingly went along with the majority vote. Their reasoning now for waiting until full darkness was that a covert assault under the cover of darkness might be safer for everyone concerned. I was still worried about the bastard Probert getting away unseen in the dark, but truthfully I now considered myself responsible for my own team and I was half expecting to find a Deseret support team at one or both places as well. For any important foreign operation, Deseret had zealots always assigned to handle the security, such as the Eyes of the Prophet, the masters of espionage, who in turn commanded Hands of the Prophet that did most of the actual dirty work. Both the Eyes and the Hands were composed of magicians usually of adept level power, but highly skilled in the arts of battle magic. Then, for a more conventional threat, there were the Missionaries, the very expendable warriors that invariably fought to the death and killed with the pure lust of the slaughter of battle. I'd fought against a few of these before and I hadn't enjoyed the experience much. If I was very unlucky or Probert's operation was of extreme significance to Deseret, there could even be some 'Anointed Ones', the wizard level magicians who oversee the Shepherds of the Faithful, Deseret's feared secret police. They'd forgotten more dark magic than I could ever learn in a lifetime, and they weren't even the top magical acts of their wickedly evil circus. These magicians within the hierarchy of Deseret were still relatively small fish, members of their minor nobility of the Fourth to Sixth Circle. These guys were trouble enough... I'd never faced one of their top wizards, ones from their First to Third Circles, but even the mention of them was enough to give my associates in the Army and back home in the BMA a queasy stomach. They were legendary, and obscenely nasty to face in battle, and I hoped I'd never have to. *********** With our assault crew fed and watered at the trough of a pretty decent roadside diner, we assembled ourselves in strike formation and we charged forth, hell bent for leather towards the apparently quite remote grounds of Probert 's Warehouse and storage, which was a good ways apart from any other nearby building. If I had needed to hide a whole lot of important and rather treasonous items, this place would be near the top of my list. It was a big singular barn-shaped metal structure with a determinedly solid external appearance, and a distinct scarcity of lower windows suitable for a sneak and peak. It looked more like a military storage bunker than a commercial warehouse and something about it just didn't look right even from my first glimpse of it. The place wasn't quite deserted, as there was a pair of armed guards standing just in front of pair of heavy metal iron doors and some additional discrete observation revealed another pair of roaming guards that constantly circled the entire property line, just inside the tall chain link and barbed wire fence. This was rather quite a bit too much obvious security for any normal warehouse or moving and storage sort of operation. The guards were all rather too overly heavily armed as well, each with military grade rifle that should have been impossible for any civilian to possess. It was less than a surprise when our senior gangleader Jerome, identified the patrolling goons at once as Harrison Group thugs. Apparently the bowler style hat complete with an attached yellow feather that they all wore was their trademark. This was a bit of a relief, and I had wondered how we could safely and quietly take out all of the guards without unnecessary bloodshed. Now, it didn't matter... they were very expendable. Jerome and his six lads were quite eager for some rather gratuitous violence and with a shrug, Bel and I tossed up our hands and let the gangland boys have their fun. Jerome quickly assigned his men and gave a few quick whispered orders, and with each man assigned to take a specific guard, with two of his soldiers still in reserve, the signal to take out all four men was given and nearly instantly accomplished. With all four of the guards down, Bel unfastened the lock on the swinging gates of the perimeter fence with just a touch and a bit of light concentration. That was a really neat trick and I made a note to myself to ask her later just how she did it. Miranda, just right behind me as always, perked up at this brief demonstration and had a similar look of interest. After making sure that the guards had been disposed of to a remote corner of the yard, Jerome had a pair of his men put on the identifying bowler hats and remain out in front, just in case anyone suddenly arrived to check up on things. After a quick perimeter search, the grounds were declared secured and then Bel and Janice, along with her pair of additional FBI agents, moved over to inspect the lock at the main doors of the warehouse. I had wanted to be right there with them, but was delayed significantly by getting my posse of magicians sorted out into two strike groups, one to come up and join Bel and Janice and the other to remain near the gate to stay on defense. Unfortunately, this took more micromanagement than I had expected, and by the time I was read to head up to the big steel doors of the warehouse proper, I was already tail-end Charlie. I think Janice had been itching to take a big crowbar to the door and make a pronounced forced entry, but with another touch of her finger and a slight burst of magic Bel beat her to the punch with her opening charm and the great doors swung right open. At once all hell broke loose and the entire entry group disappeared into an massive explosion of magical flame! *************** Being a bit behind most of the advance crew of federal agents I was playing rear guard with Miranda and really hadn't gotten quite close enough yet to the doors to sense the massive firewall of magical protections that secured it until it was nearly too late. Still I had just enough forethought to blanket Bel, Janice and the other two FBI agents as they became shrouded by the rushing humongous wall of searing flame. This was a serious firetrap, designed probably to both eradicate any intruders and any stored evidence inside. Even shielded, the sheer force of the explosion threw the agents back at least about ten feet onto their backs, and none too gently. Bel's own shields were now down, but mine had held. Not bad for a split second effort, as hers could never have held against the severity of the explosion. The rest of us were now eating concrete as well, since nearly at once boxes of ammunition began to cook off and explode from the extreme searing heat inside. Anything paper was going to be instantly toast from the heat of this inferno, as was the ammunition, but I had vague hopes that any stored rifles and guns might survive another minute or two before becoming slag, assuming I could think of anything clever to do first! The security wards across the door had been too carefully concealed to notice until it was too late. Like the wards at the two Chicago gunshops, there were obvious protections that had been meant to be seen and disarmed, which in turn triggered more cleverly hidden wards. This was absolutely wizard-class magic, and done by someone at least as competent at protections as I was! This was not at all the easy-squeasy slam-dunk operation that we had planned for. Bel was now decidedly in an extremely foul mood once she managed to regain her feet, just as I was about to reach her side to better shield the fallen but mostly unhurt agents. Then to make things worse she found herself faced with a pair of the largest and most powerful fire elementals she'd ever even read about, let alone before witnessed. She tried a quick powerful word of banishing, but the pair of Greater Elemental Lords just laughed at her and enveloped her and Janice in another searing column of magical flame. The two other FBI agents, having seen what was coming, turned and run like hell itself was on their tail. Knowing at once she was completely overpowered, Bel clutched on to her lover and tried to get her own shield back up again, to support mine and they began to retreat the last dozen or so steps towards me while I kept them shielded. It's hard to shield others at a distance, especially with the kind of power that these two top-shelf Elemental Lords could exert, which was way above normal mundane human Wizard level power. I didn't know either of them by name, their magical secret names, which unfortunately was almost the only means of banishing any elemental from the seriously upper nobility. These two weren't just spear carriers back at their home, the Elemental Plane of Fire, but were serious major players of the court and I wondered just how Probert had managed to obtain their limited contingency service, to be summonable at his calling. Still, I'd played with the big boys before and fought one of their masters, a God even, the Zoroastrian deity of primal fire - Yazata Adar... and I'd kicked his divine ass and sent him crying home. And I could do it all over again, if necessary. I let Bel and Janice flee past me and gave a completely unnecessary warning to Miranda to get her cute young ass behind some cover, way, way back behind me, along with everyone else, because it was time for the top cats to play! My world became one of fire and for just a moment I thought I was once again back at the old El Marvelo, that doomed and once famous theater as I turned it into cinders and burned a crater around it deep into the bedrock. Their fire, hot as it was perhaps nearly to the surface temperature of the sun, could bear me no harm I now realized and with a dramatic flourish I dropped my personal shield entirely. Smiling the nastiest and most wicked shit-eating grin I could manage, I advanced towards them while reaching underground for a weak Water Ley that coexisted quietly inside of an underground aquifer about four hundred yards below me in the ground. With this in hand, I began carefully bringing this reservoir up to the surface but I'd still need another minute or two. Playing with water can be just as dangerous as dealing with fire, and quite as destructive. Done crudely, I could dry up every farmer's well and stock pond for miles and miles, and I thought for just once, I'd like to solve a problem with some marginal amount of subtlety. The Fire Lords burned their displeasure and the concrete around my feet became molten as if it were molten lava, but still I came. This was going to ruin my boots, shielding or not and I wanted to teach these two eminences a quick lesson or two. Despite being quite entirely inhuman, the greatest of any of the true elementals, the true lords of air, earth, fire and water, tend to assume human form, and have adopted at least some of the minor peculiarities and traits of our race. The more powerful, the more humanist their traits tended to be. Being of an indeterminate physical nature, over the millennia they've tended to assume at least some of the bearing and attitude of the wizards they have served. In this case, despite their otherwise inscrutable elemental nature, I could now strongly sense their growing fear. Never before had a mortal been immune to the power of their flame, even when shielded, and the fact that I bore them no fear whatsoever as I stared them down, being apparently quite defenseless but yet invulnerable, was enough to quite totally unnerve them. "Enough of this." I rather calmly stated. "This is become irksome and most annoying. You know of course who I am." This was not really a question, but a not quite so subtle hint that they should know... and be very, very concerned. "We are here as of a proper summoning, from which sacrifice has already been made and promised further in addition. We shall leave your realm without further disturbance, but upon the completion of our duty. Those that broke the barrier must burn for it and their souls taken in payment back to our realm." Ah, this meant that they didn't have a clue who I was, but they were just barely concerned enough about the situation that they were going to hold tightly to the exact terms of their contract, and without any extra clever embellishment. Still, they didn't quite understand yet the situation they were in and it was time to start correcting their ignorance. "This is unfortunate... for you anyway. It is most unseemly for one of the Dux-Ignus to be driven home in defeat, with your physical form destroyed. That would mean an exile from our world for a full thousand years, and not just the usual hundred years and a day, if I were to just merely just be inclined to banish you both home. Both embarrassing to your betters and those beneath you, but that will be little of my concern should you continue to flout my powers and continue to be irksome to me, for I am the Zephyr, he who summoned and banished with but a whim your divinity, Yazata Adar, whose will is nothing to my own, and now if you persist in vexing me further my winds shall surely blow you to either misfortune or non-corporeal irrelevance." Now, with a great deal of ready water waiting to be wielded at my command, I slowly forced enough water to the surface of the bubbling lava pit around me to cool the molten concrete and even provide me with a small shooting fountain of water from which I took a carefully staged drink. Water power now flowed obviously around my fingers and if two Fire Lords could have pissed themselves, they indeed would have. "We bow to the might of the Zephyr! And we would seek your benign indifference to our immediate and complete departure, harming none as we leave." They both declared, each making entirely acceptable bows to my august personage. "Be it so, good Lords, for your words are pleasant to mine ears and I bear you no ill-will. I give you thanks and my leave to make your farewell, but first I would have you kindly inform me, but as a courtesy, the name or names of your summoners, for I would much like to have their acquaintance." "Great Zephyr, the pact was made by the wizard known as Mason Probert, but he had the able assistance of two great wizards of Deseret, Jamil Great-Lord Wizard of the Second Circle, and Xolhua, Lady Sorceress of the Third Circle. Their acquaintance can be readily made, as both can still be found at Wizard Probert's residence, which is of no significant distance from here. Now with your permission, we shall abjure ourselves willingly and without prejudice from this realm." I nodded my head slightly, as a superior would give farewell to an inferior, and they at once were gone, returned to their own plane. The fires inside the warehouse still raged, but now with an abundance of water at my hands, they were quite quickly extinguished, leaving indeed just enough useable evidence that the FBI could trace the origination of some of the weapons to the underground factory they had secured (from us) in Chicago. ************** Since our element of surprise, no pun intended, had been quite blown... and roasted to a temperature of about 28,000 degrees, or near the heat of lightning for about five minutes, our anger was quite cooked to perfection. We decided hastily to leave the pairs of FBI agents and our two faux-guards to keep the facility secured while the rest of us dashed off to Mason's farmhouse, which was only about five minutes away. The local fire departnement had noticed the fire, hard not to with a column of flame hotter than the surface of the sun that reached nearly a thousand yards into the sky, and were now on their way. The local police or sheriff would be arriving soon as well and the FBI could use them to help keep the crime scene under control. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 09 Reluctantly, I let Miranda come along with me, after all I'd promised to keep her in my sight. We weren't expecting to catch Bel's old boss napping, or the two Deseret wizards that were alleged to still be with him to be taken unawares either. The alarm had been sounded and they were probably getting good and ready now for a shooting war, but so were we, so if they wanted a real fight then we wouldn't disappoint them! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 10 *********** CHAPTER TEN When an honest wizard like me sets out to capture or smite an evil magician at a remote farm or ranch, you can be assured that the very first level of defenses will included enchanted scarecrows. It happens every time, trust me. It seems to be written in some wicked magician 'how-to' book in the chapter about preparing external defenses for your citadel of evil. Fair enough... the corresponding pages in the governmental do-gooder's manual says to give the suckers a nice heaping dose of magical flame and turn the constructs into animated torches! Mason Probert, damn his squirrelly ass, had read that manual too and was prepared for us. Much more prepared for us than we were for him! I guess it was my own damn fault. I'd been clever enough to warn my frightened posse to expect a first wave defensive assault of malevolently animated scarecrows, but the quantity and quality of his advance preparation frankly unnerved me also. They came charging us just a few moments after we set foot on his driveway, right after we parked just outside of the farm road gate. Fortunately, everyone was all still bunched together when they swarmed us or we'd have lost at least half of our assault force right off of the bat. If my posse had already split up into the two flanking groups as planned, the silver-clawed animated defenders would have ripped them to shreds. Our magical flame might have lit up the night sky, but it didn't do shit to burn down the animatrons. They'd each been possessed by minor spirits of fire and their pumpkin heads glowed with daemonic flame. The fire that they breathed upon my cadre of magicians was fairly potent, but it was the long silver claws for fingers that cut like daggers right through the shields of the more minor adept-class magicians as if their protection was not even there at all. Nasty, nasty, nasty! If I hadn't been right at the front and able to build a strong earth shield in front of us, they'd have carved right through our ranks with only minor difficulty. Jerome and his six gunsels were also finding that even automatic Tommy gun fire was not causing a lot of damage to the constructs' physical forms either. Right from the start we were on the defensive and with six of our number already down and wounded. My posse was frankly panicking and even Bel had a wild-eyed look that hinted that she was in a situation far beyond her previous experience. As for me, I was much too pissed to bother getting angry. Since earth seemed to affect them quite nicely, I upped the ante a bit and created an even larger earth force in front of us, creating now in effect a big plow of moving earth in front. This served two purposes extremely nicely; first the dozen or so scarecrows facing us were soon plowed under and buried under at least four feet of solid earth, and second this gave us some cover against the growing amount of mundane automatic weapons fire now coming directly towards us. The scarecrows would be able to eventually dig themselves out, but this would give us a few minutes to deal with the next level of defenders, the two dozen or so elite members of the Harrison Group that had been out of town for the recent fun in Chicago. Nasty boys to be sure, and we hadn't planned on finding them here! Normally, gunsels didn't bother me too much, even normal adept level shields are adequate against lead... even lots of it, but these fucktards were of a better quality and had also been provided with silver bullets for ammunition. And from the looks of it, they had lots of it and were willing to use it all! As they started to flank us, a couple of my posse started to engage them and moved out from the tight protection of my shielding and promptly got themselves shot for their troubles. Silver, as I've commented before, has a natural affinity to magic that even magicophysicists can't really explain. It flows with magic... and it in turn resists magic. Like the medieval crossbow in the hands of a peasant, silver bullets can and do kill magicians. Even prepared ones. It goes beyond saying that silver bullets are extremely illegal, not to mention difficult and expensive to make, but I doubted our villains cared much. I stood up a bit too much to get a better look at the situation and a sudden hail of a couple of dozen silver bullets smacked into me, with a couple penetrating hard enough to strike me. Shields or not, three of them got through, but with enough reduced energy to only pierce my duster but be stopped by the protections imbedded in my suit. They didn't pierce to my skin, but the impact was enough that my ribs now hurt like hell and they kept hurting whenever I took a deep breath. Cracked maybe... but that was enough for me to decide to keep my head down under the plowed up bern of soil in front of us. A couple of other yelps from other lightly injured folks, including Janice who had a slight upper arm wound, indicated that we were getting rather the worst of this exchange and soon everyone was huddled into the dirt as close to me as they could get. "Alright Zak, you've got my permission to do something appalling and excessively violent, and please do it soon!" Bel muttered. She had pushed Janice right up against me so that she could quickly bandage up the in-and-out wound. Miranda was whimpering as tightly into my back as she could manage, but fear had not frozen up her young and rather agile mind. "Behind us, the scarecrows are now digging themselves out of the ground but the fire has left their eyes. Does that mean that being buried underground has smothered the minor fire spirits? If so, why don't you take them over instead with some earth energy and have them go do a little clobbering and slicing and dicing for us for a change?" You know... that idea was just crazy enough to work! With my hands already wrapped around all of the local minor Earth Ley that I could grasp, it was easy to make eye contact with each and every emerging scarecrow in turn to assume mastery over them and send them forth again on the offensive, but this time against Harrison's all too efficient gang of murderous gangsters. Off the straw-bound silver-claws menaces ran, and in just moments the odds were now rather much more to our liking. The silver bullets the Harrison thugs fired were admittedly much more effective against the magical constructs than our lead bullets had been, but the charmed creatures had virtually no vital regions and it took sustained and accurate automatic weapons fire to disable or dismember one of the straw-filled attackers. Our new defenders did their job to the last and before the final cloud of stick and straw fell to the ground, nearly all of the gunsels had taken mortal or debilitating wounds of their own. Now able to make a counter-offensive of his own, Jerome led his soldiers to clean out the final pocket of five remaining defenders that was to our right flank near a barn, and they were soon adequately themselves shielded by a flanking cadre of half of my magician posse. The other half was itching to go as well and reluctantly I allowed them to go scout around to our right. I was going to take the center by myself, leaving Bel, Miranda and the slightly wounded Janice back in reserve at our earthen protective trench, but they gamely trotted right along behind me. Miranda had slapped on a minor healing spell onto Janice that seemed to have at least sealed up both the wound entrance and exit holes and she was looking far too entirely pleased with herself. Bel didn't have any talent at all for healing magic and my abilities in that sphere were absolutely minimal. Maybe I could have sealed the wound, but perhaps also just might have made it worse instead. This thought caused Sean to giggle once more. I know... stop bitching about trying new things until I've actually tried them! But really this wasn't the time to be too experimental. ************* From the sights and sounds of magical flame going off in all directions, it was apparent now that the first line of defense had now decided to show up and I didn't need the surprise of a solid blast of dark magical electrical energy slamming into my shields to warn me that the expected Deseret support team was now making its appearance in every direction. Our flanking team members quickly ran into problems that none of them felt up to facing and a quick look around indicated that the forces of goodness and law and order were once again in full retreat, unfortunately leaving dead and wounded behind them. A general retreat seemed to be in order so we all hightailed it back to our earthen defense line and once again hunkered down under the cover of a bit of solid earthen shelter between us and some seriously nasty black magical fire and lightning. At least one of the Deseret wizards seem to have some serious affinity with air and was assembling above us the makings of a magic thunderstorm out of very meager raw materials. Very nice work, I had to admit... but that was energy that I could use too. I decided I'd let this top-notch weather wizard do all of the hard work for me and then slide in at the last moment and preempt his private party. On the other hand, the rest of the Deseret fiends now approaching from the sides were quite competent enough to be major trouble all by themselves. My FMBR associates had already proven themselves to be quite second-rate in comparison, and already Bel had lost just over half of her former co-workers. Now huddling for shelter my posse was down to just one wizard and five remaining adepts, probably the ones with the strongest personal shields that lived long enough to be able to run at all. Then of course, things just got worse! The Hell-Boars arrived, an especially nasty creature from the nether planes, and their three foot long razor sharp tusks had been augmented with silver! They ripped into our flanking lines and the bodies of our posse and our mob helpers went nearly instantly flying into the air, with a rather unfortunate amount of arterial body splatter as well. In just a moment of battle, my rather incompetent and untrained collection of FBMR minor wizards was carved to less than half their original numbers, and now in a terrible state of panic and the sharp silver tusks carved away their minimal defenses and ripped quickly into their flesh. Jerome's gang was in slightly better shape. He had four effective soldiers left and a couple of them had been clever enough to capture a couple of drum magazines of silver bullets, which worked just as effectively now against both our porcine and moral enemies as they had against us earlier. Two gang members retained their conventional lead bullets and with short but controlled bursts they broke up a charge of over twenty Deseret suicide troops, probably Missionaries who attacked to the very last man, but only slightly wounded one of our gang members in return. A little restrained suppressive fire with silver ammunition took down a few of their weaker wizards, wounded others and drove the rest down to an intimate acquaintance with mother earth. Being fairly undisciplined hunters of only margin intelligence, the Hell-Boars tended to stop and feed upon their kills rather than first concentrating at eliminating their remaining foes. They also burned well with concentrated magical fire, and once gunmen were no longer shooting silver bullets at me I could now concentrate on this secondary assault and soon had all of the creatures dead or disabled. If the three attacks could have been better coordinated, I have no doubt but what we'd have been totally overrun and forced to either retreat or be annihilated. Usurping control over the scarecows and eliminating the Hell-Boars pretty much leveled the battlefield back to a comfortable stalemate, and this gave their A-team of minor and advanced wizards a few minutes decide how they were going to handle us, namely by next trying to blast us out of our cover. That was a workable plan, because that was exactly what I was planning to do now to them! Their mighty air wizard had finished gathering his storm, and it was quite a nice one, but when I reached up to take control of it I got my mental fingers burned rather nicely. Not content to just blast dark lightning down at us, the maelstrom above us was also now filled with dark fire and the nastiest sort of malignant spirit energy I'd ever sensed before in my life. Touching it was like being in an immense cesspool that had somehow also set itself on fire. Burned, I quite reflexively released my touch away from it. I needed to make a mental note to myself to make a report that the current GWA magical curriculum really didn't cover real world magical conflicts. "Aye, that black spirit they've woven into the casting is going to burn you, but it will soon burn them even more. They've locked their wills into that vortex but can but barely control it and for some, they'll notta be able to release themselves, to their peril. Take it lad, and let the winds of dark fire blow!" I was sure that this was one of the worst ideas Sean had ever had and I just about screamed with pain when I grasped the vortex of swirling dark energies and seized mastery of it away from the Deseret wizards. Of the dozen or so other minds I felt weaving their energies, I was quite able to trap most of them and prevent their wills from returning to their bodies, but the three most powerful wizards were able to quickly and safely withdraw once they sensed to their consternation that my will was quite the strongest. Now with my captives mentally bound to my pleasure, I decided it was time to let loose with the maelstrom. After all, it had been a day or two since I'd done any excessive property damage! "Bel," I grunted, "make the biggest and strongest earth shield you can and cover everyone and get even deeper into the trench here if possible because I think I'm about to have another major miscalculation of excessive force! And everyone else with flicker of power left, go help her, or you won't like the results!" The remnants of my posse were scared, but even a glimpse at the amount of power that I was channeling was enough to shock them into obeying without arguing. By the time I dropped the maelstrom nearly right upon us, my friends and associates were well shielded, and probably adequately... despite the fact that their close proximity to this vortex of evil was enough to make nearly everyone vomit and scream with agony. I felt sorry about that, but the Deseret clowns weren't going to like this any better! Rising up from behind the wall of earth I began to conduct my own private orchestra of destruction and in just moments I could feel the souls of the minor wizard's I'd trapped scream and vanish as their mortal bodies disappeared in my dancing column of dark fire. Oh, it burned my mind too just to hold it as closely as I needed to, but its malignant fire burned everyone and everything in its path. Yep, paybacks are hell! "Teach a man to build a fire and he will be warm for the rest of the day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life." I giggled to take my mind off of my own searing pain. Ha-ha! The three greater wizards decided to cede this round of the battle to me and scampered off into the darkness, probably to their final line of defense inside Probert's farmhouse, which undoubtedly had more than a few magical protections of its own. Just for fun, I bounced my black tornado of dark spirit-bound fire off of the house and nearby outbuildings a few times and noticed that they now burned really nicely and this flame gave us a good bit of light to work with now in the darkness. With my job now done and with only minimal and quite acceptable collateral damage, I flung my ill-formed storm back up into the clouds and with Sean's minor assistance, worked to unweave the dark spirit binding the fire to the storm. Once released the storm became quite violent, but it was an all-together a natural tempest now. Everyone was covered in dirt and rather unhappy, but mostly still possessing all of their original body parts. The wounded weren't any better off for their ordeal, but fortunately I hadn't made anything worse. The main farmhouse was still on fire, but not quite so much so, indicating that at least someone inside didn't feel like becoming cooked just like a TV dinner. Seeing the women were all fine and the remains of my posse were shaking off the dirt and getting their heads readjusted, I boldly stomped up to the farmhouse and let the villains know the futility of facing me in a three-against-one duel. I had oodles of loose 'free-range' magical energy to use, with the storm still above us in the air, and channeling the wind to my calling, I started a fairly impressive home improvement project by blasting in all of the first floor windows and then I started to dismantle the house, starting with the roof with rather expertly bolts of wind, if I don't saw so myself! With the roof soon gone, I was having a great deal of fun randomly dropping lightning bolts inside the house when I heard a rather sinister and unknown voice coming from behind me. In fact, I was feeling rather optimistic about a swift and effective resolution to this entire situation when the long absent mentalist witch Ingrid had finally made her belated and unwelcome appearance and was now doing what she did best, taking complete mental control over a helpless Bel. She'd snuck in behind us under the cover of darkness and grabbed on to Bel's mind with absolutely no forewarning at all. Janice, mentally also mentally stunned was also holding Bel's hand, her eyes too frightened to even blink. "Drop the storm and back away from us or the bitch and her friend both die. You even look at me funny and the bitches die. If I die this bitch still dies, understand Texas boy?" Ingrid snarled at me. She had her right hand upon the back of Bel's head and I didn't have the slightest doubt that she had the ability to do everything that she threatened. Jerome had his sidearm drawn and admittedly had a pretty good and clear shot and he was visually begging me to nod so that he could take it. I shook my head emphatically, no. A really good mentalist could easily do the curse of death, binding her victim or even the killer to join her in death, and according to Bel, Irene was one of the best. "No, she's not bluffing." Sean unnecessarily added. "As bad as they come, that one is... all cobwebs and shadows, like a queen spider she is. She has the girls now snared, so give her some rope for a wee bit..." Frankly, Sean didn't sound his usual overly confident self, but I had to agree with him for the moment. "Let her go!" I grumbled and made sure that I kept about a ten foot distance away from her as she slowly led her captives towards the farmhouse steps. The upstairs of the house was nicely ablaze but so far there seemed to be mostly just smoke downstairs, but if the villains wanted to fight to the death in their final retreat they were certain to get smoked out pretty darned soon. Reaching the doorway in safety we were all a bit startled when the door suddenly opened and there was a slight change of personnel. Bel and Janice were then grabbed by mostly unseen hands and yanked inside while still mentally stunned, leaving Irene trapped outside on the porch along with another female Deseret sorceress who was half-pushed to accompany her. This new arrival was a bit underdressed for the late winter weather and wearing not much more than a ceremonial loincloth and a lot of fetish beads and stuff. Her face was grim and from the way Irene was banging on the locked outer door it was now obvious that the two of them had been 'volunteered' to play the role of final defense and 'hold them off for just a minute or two', so that their bosses could make some sort of escape. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 10 Damn it! The high priestess of doom was not much for bewailing her fate, unlike the increasingly unhappy Irene, and was quite determined in the appropriate Deseret manner to die face first against her enemies and go out in a blaze of zealot glory. Again my posse, she'd likely have cleaned house. She'd definitely have rung Bel's bell, so to speak and given the old 'normal' Adept Zak far more than he could have hoped to have handled. I had her pegged nearly at once as one of their better talents, a high noble-woman sorceress of the Third Circle or a really talented flunky of the still powerful Fourth Circle. Folks usually too powerful and important for most out-of-town business trips. This was absolutely one of their more important operations, perhaps even their main distribution place for all stolen and smuggled weapons from the entire US. This was a much bigger operation than the one I'd helped shut down back home and this made me wonder if we'd just missed the big fish there... maybe even some senior bent BMA folks, just like here. It's shit like this that keeps me awake at night! Right here in the now, I let the enraged Deseret sorceress do her worst for probably much too long. I needed to get into that house right away but yet I really wanted to semi-scientifically digest the talent that this apparently 'expendable' wizardess was capable of, and what I discovered disturbed me. Her skill in battle magic, really subtle but powerful and direct stuff, was above anything that I thought we taught to our own wizards back home. Necromancy and dark-spirit stuff and lots of it. I had my shields turned up to eleven on the power knob and some of her sneakier stuff almost found a way through! Given enough rope, that bitch would find a way to hang me, so I reluctantly hit her with non-stop lightning until her shield failed and her corpse quite totally smoked. I gave her another blast or two to make sure that she wasn't faking. If I'd had to have handled her other two bosses also at the same time, I don't what I would have done... probably something extremely excessive like refocusing that storm once again! Now that Irene was all on her own and she recognized that she was just another speed bump, her more than adequate sense of self-preservation began to kick-in. She called out that she'd surrender and held her hands up high while she walked over to me but I wasn't fooled. Bel had warned me before that she was a poisonous cockatrice. She made an all-or-nothing mental lunge to seize control of my will once she'd almost come within arm's length, but I was more than ready for her. The battle of wills, if you want to call it that, was over in about a tenth of a second. Irene was one of the most talented Mentalists I'd ever met, but her raw power level was strictly mid-level Adept. Catching another more powerful magician by surprise, she was skilled at the sneak attack, like the spider pouncing on a trapped fly, but I was ready for her tricks. The real trouble now was, I just couldn't at all trust her as a captive. She could mind-snatch any of Jerome's gunsels easily, even with a blindfold on and she'd be certain to do it. Still, I just couldn't bring myself to torch the bitch right on the spot, although she undoubtedly deserved it. While tying her up, Irene tried just this, pouncing upon the mind of the nearest of our mob soldiers but I put the kibosh on that fast. I gave her a fast mindjab, about the only bit of offensive spirit magic that I was comfortable using and then for good measure physically punched her, just about knocked her senseless. "No, you can't leave that little snake loose behind your back." Sean whispered. "It's time I think you put of the fear of god into her, so that she'll never be a nuisance again." I wasn't quite sure what Sean had in mind, but it did involve me taking her head into both of my hands and grasping her mind. As I've mentioned, I've really got no talent for mentalist magic and my main objective was to just doing something in my usual manner, and brute force her brain into some sort of shutdown. The brute force, I was certainly capable of mustering, but once I was inside the tangled dark cobwebs of her thoughts were way beyond my understanding, but fortunately not Sean's. No, he didn't actually do any of the work, but I felt him prodding me along into her maze of memories, and while I didn't have a clue where I was going or why, he seemed to, so I just concentrated and went along for the ride. The memory Sean had chosen for me to loop was a suitably appropriate one, namely being the captured memories from Irene's childhood of a time when she had been significantly abused. Nasty vicious stuff, and just the sort of thing would have used to torture a captive victim, which Sean later assured me she had done. With a hint of will, Irene was now reliving her own terrible and sordid past... endlessly apparently. She was going to now scream her life away in some sanitarium and the world was already a much nicer and safer place without her. **************** Now only the two great wizards were left to deal with, but I'd given them nearly five full minutes to make their escape plan and they'd taken full advantage of it. The ground floor of the burning house was now entirely empty, with no signs of the bastards... or Bel and Janice! *************** My posse was beyond livid, and mostly at me. They knew that I'd done my best and fought two significant battles that the lot of them could never have handled on her own, but there was a touch of the 'we should have done something! ', meaning 'I' should have done something faster and sooner. Yeah, something like bring down another tornado when Bel and Janice were both helpless and unable to protect themselves! Even I knew better than that! In order to make a closer search for our escaped foes we really needed to put out the big bonfire first and that ate up another fifteen minutes of time. Most of my remaining companions were half hysterical and waving about their hands or guns, a menace to both friend and foe... if we could find any more foes. The scarecrows hadn't left many walking wounded but Jerome's gunsels had the surviving elite Harrison boys under guard. The wounded Deseret zealots, soldiers and minor magicians both, all suicided when they realized they'd been captured. Some sort of nasty built-in necromancy that I'd never seen before and couldn't figure out how to disarm. No Deseret wizard had ever been taken captive... and their streak still stood unblemished. Their secrets died with them of course. I put what was left of my posse to work clearing out scorched and fallen debris from the farmhouse so we could make a more effective search, but most of them were beyond being either helpful or particularly useful. The entire lot of them were quite ready sit back on their heels and wait for the reinforcements to arrive. Not so Miranda. She clung to my shadow like glue and in fact it was her keen eyes that spotted the faint outlines of the trapdoor right in the main hallway. This being the Midwest, nearly every home has a combination root cellar/tornado shelter, but admittedly very few of them are trapped to the eye-teeth with nasty magical protection spells. With luck, our nasty boys were cringing downstairs, fearing my very footsteps and eager to release their captives. Who was I fooling? The remaining greater Deseret wizard would fight to the death... the fuckers always did, and probably kill the girls first in some excessively nasty magic ritual designed to help them either get the hell out of dodge or give them a possible edge against me a firefight. My bet was on the latter. Since I was in absolutely no mood for anything resembling subtly, I decided that my usual bull in the china shop approach to problem solving would be the best (and by far the fastest) means to penetrating the intricate layer of overlapping USDA Grade-A protection spells covering the cellar door. I ordered everyone out of the house and to get as far away as possible and I have no doubt that a few of the more timid minor magicians stayed running until they met up with the slowly arriving police and federal reinforcements. I cranked up my shield to eleven and yanked open the storm cellar door. It was a nice medley of protection spells, I did have to admit, that quite covered all of the usual basics and few extra maliciousnesses just to make sure. One particularly severe shock wave blast from a ruptured protection spell sent Miranda and I flying through the air for a good fifty yards and gave my brain cells a good shaking that they didn't really need. Then, returning to the house, or the debris field that was left of it, it was once again time to face another pair of summoned Fire Lords. This time, they had my number. "Fuck! It's the god-damned Zyphyr! We're gone!" And with that, they were. This wasn't the exact same pair of major league Plane of Fire nobility, but they'd gotten the advisory memo. Oh the fun that having a reputation can give you! **************** Back again at the now open and defenseless doorway down into the darkened abyss, I could immediately sense that we were not alone. The ever astute teen grasped the situation quickly as well. "I feel something really, really awful down there and I don't want to see it, feel it or face it... but I'm coming with you!" She wasn't just whistling Dixie; it did feel bad down there, something absolutely terrible and menacing, like some proverbial monstrous evil that never slept... and she was right. If anything it was even worse, if possible. Somehow, the magnificent gawdamned bastards had summoned a dragon! ***************** It goes beyond saying that there are no dragons on our world... anymore. Several millennia of magii and great wizards made it their lives' work to roust out the last of them and either slay or banish the lot from our world. The malignant beasts suck up magic like air and they're so innately magical themselves that it's virtually impossible to fight them one-on-one (or even a hundred against one) using just magic. Dragons are apparently native to at least half a dozen unpleasant to visit worlds in the multi-verse and conventional wisdom is that there are no 'good' dragons. Even the benignly uninterested ones are mighty enough to rule whatever little bit of the universe they want to occupy at any given time. My teachers spent a full week covering dragons and their kin fairly exhaustively, and it went without saying that anyone caught summoning one could (and would) receive the nastiest punishment that BMA could devise. As for banishing dragons, the technique was advanced and highly theoretical and probably involved gathering at least a hundred of the most powerful wizards available to gently encourage the creature to return home and pray that force wouldn't be necessary in case it was feeling contrary. Dragons come in all sizes and colors, like snakes... and like most lethal reptiles the smaller they are, the nastier they seem to be. This one was small.... not much larger than size of a big dog. That meant either good news, the creature being a relative benign member of the dragon-kin family or more trouble than the entire Austin BMA could have ever handled, on their best day, and with a very long and extremely magical pointed stick. Since you're all familiar with how my luck runs, you can guess which of the options it was. The creature turned its terrible golden-green eyes on me and wave of unspeakable terror flowed over us. Miranda quite pissed herself as the legendary dragon-fear overwhelmed her, but even whimpering now on her knees in terror she clung on to me. Whatever on earth she thought that I could do now to save either of us was quite beyond me. When Sean clearly cringed upon my shoulder and muttered "Oh Saints preserve us!" I knew that this was a serious major ratfuck that I was going to be unable to fight my way out of. Seeing that this aura of fear would not be quite enough to send us packing, and that I was clearly a mortal of less than any usual common sense, it gently sighed and opened its unspeakably awful mouth and breathed its flame upon us. No, not all dragons do breathe fire, but it's sort of traditional for the nastier sorts to do so. Not just magical fire, but legendary dragon's-breath; quite at least as hot as the sun itself. It ripped though my shield as if it wasn't even there and covered me, but fortunately I was covering Miranda or else something of our shields together combined in desperation saved her. Or else I was his only target, and it's flame was unusually surgically precise. By this time, the novelty of discovering that I was quite entirely fireproof now was slowly ceasing to be a major novelty item. I blinked, let out my held breath and put out the last sparks from my singed eyebrows and hair. My dustercoat was pretty much a bonfire now but a fast extinguishing charm did put the flames out. My suit, already previously ruined with three bullet holes was quite past any hope of mending. Fact #1 -- I was not going to win any magical battle here, even with Sean's help, and at the moment, the way he was cringing behind me, I wasn't sure the little bugger could help. This had 'magically irresistible force' meeting 'magically immoveable object' written all over it. Fact #2 -- when the little terror realized that I couldn't hurt it, it would eventually get bored enough to come over and bite my head off. Fact #3 -- It had relatively small wings, true, but I had no doubt that if it wanted to it could fly. If we took off screaming and tried running away, there was a better than average chance that it could catch us... quickly, easily and extremely violently. Those claws weren't just for show either! Fact #4 -- Aunt Millie's favorite (and only) nephew was in serious deep shit! Oh well, if you can't convince -- then confound! I was the god-damned Zyphyr, and even if I couldn't do jack shit about it, I could at least pretend. Maybe the horrific little fucker didn't play poker. Just to show it that I wasn't afraid (much), I took two steps closer to it. The dragon stood in front of an open portalway, blocking my access to it. Obviously it had been summoned to guard it... and I would have given any number of month's pay to discover how the evil geniuses had done it! "I am the Zyphyr, master of all fire and imperator of the Dux-Ignus, who quail at my might. You have not yet earned my displeasure and I give you my freedom to depart, to leave this realm in peace and without malice." Not in the least impressed with my speech the little bastard breathed on me once, to the final destruction of my leather duster coat. I tried to look unimpressed and I must have succeeded because the scaly little bugger actually brought up a forepaw to scratch its chin in wonderment. This gave me a moment to sift through the smoldering wreckage of my coat to gather up my magical reagents and other useful goodies before it decided that I was worthy of addressing." "I have been properly summoned and am under a geas at the peril of my true name, under which my service was unwillingly impressed. While I bear no consideration for my master, my geas is a significant one and I much feel compelled to obey, err my imprisonment shall become yet more dire." Granted he did sound apologetic, but his butt wasn't going to move! "I can assume your master has just recently departed via this portal which you appear to be guarding? You should be aware that he is of a particular evil bent, and his wickedness and dishonor here has been discovered and he shall never return." "Nevertheless, by my oath, I shall abide." "I would assume if I decided to leave you in peace for the moment that you would feel compelled to complete your instructions, to smite all that shall appear save by his word, and chase after us?" "In exactness! You understand my charge well. Indeed I would welcome the relief of a break from this solitary place for it is long since I have been well fed. It has been at least a month since I was last given an animal, a sheep the wizard said, for my hunger, and should you flee I would be quite within my instructions to hunt for additional sustenance, once your flesh has served my needs." "Optimistic, aren't you? Indeed, it is yet quite uncertain whether I shall punish you soon for your admitted ill-will towards our arrival, for our presence concerns one of the greatest honors, being the noble rescue of the two noble captured women at vastly superior odds to ourselves. A worthy, principled undertaking of honor, should you decide to ignore the indignities done to you and seek some appropriate justice yourself." That was laying it on a little thick, but my old teacher had told me that (most) dragons tended to have a perverse sense of honor and justice themselves, and now I was hoping to appeal to this code of honor. "Under other circumstances, perhaps. You interest and amuse me. However, until my duty is done, I am defeated or my master is slain, or slightly less than a hundred of your years have passed, my geas binds me to this chamber, and perhaps a less than honorable duty, but the upholding of one's duty, even under unpleasant circumstances is nevertheless worthy and itself honorable." Ok, the honor game wasn't going to work then. Time then for my final ace in the hole! "Well, we cannot avoid our duties, for I must go to attend to the smiting of your ignoble master and shall indeed do so with considerable relish and delight. Still, I am impressed with your devolution to duty and feel that I should offer your some slight respite, as you are a most worthy opponent whose sense of duty and obligation I must respect. I have naught but a slight morsel to offer you, but it is freely and willingly given, without expectation of repayment or obligation, if you would accept it." "Free of any obligation other than mutual respect, I shall accept!" The dragon stated and as I harmlessly tossed the food item towards it, it was snatched by its jaws in mid air and swallowed whole without a single bite. No, it wasn't a hand grenade! That would have been extremely dishonorable indeed... and probably pointless! In the remains of my coat, I had found the remaining majority of that infamous corned beef sandwich that I had unwittingly almost eaten weeks ago on board the airship. It was just as fresh as ever, without a hint of mold or staleness. In other words, it was as vile as it had even been and was utterly still just as toxic today, to the extent that even bacteria or mold couldn't consume it! The poor bastard had no sooner eaten the nasty thing but then its own digestive tract went into sudden and immediate revolt. The next bolt of fire it launched at us was pretty half-assed and didn't even singe me and the next two bolts weren't much more than violent burps. A moment later fire erupted from both ends of the creature, and if the looks on the dragon's face were to be believed it hurt just as much as it looked, like the revenge on a toilet the next day after a hot chili eating contest. The next intestinal eruption was much more piteous and even Miranda had to look away in dismay and slight disgust. I'm not sure where the dragon normally did its bodily waste removal functions, but I didn't think it was usually right there in the middle of the cellar floor. A second louder and more liquid eruption filled the cellar with a ghastly smell that almost made the aura of dragon-fear amusing in comparison. Miranda lost her recent diner and I almost added my own contribution to the growing mess on the floor. The next blast was purely aromatic in effect only, but it still cost me my sense of smell for the next two weeks. The once fierce dragon now crouched in a pitiful heap onto the floor and more clearly audible stomach rumblings hinted that more acute intestinal distress was on the way. I've heard that dragon's blood and even scales are extremely useful and valuable to magicians, but I had never heard any rumors about dragon shit. At the moment I could corner the entire market for it... if it wasn't so insanely corrosive that it wasn't already eating its way through the concrete floor. Perhaps specially magically treated Pyrex beakers would work? Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 10 I had a guess that my opponent was ready to concede and staying just out jaws' reach I casually asked the miserable creature if it had had enough. "Enough? I am defeated -- I concede -- I surrender, I give up, I wish I'd never ever laid eyes on you. I am humbled and defeated... a pitiful wretch of a being. I shall not dispute your passage within the portal! Take it! Go! Please... I can't tell you how embarrassing this is! Oh, by the Great Flame, here it comes again!" I didn't wait. The way its shit already glowed and burned into the floor, I really just didn't want to know what a really big eruption was going to be like... and if our noses could even withstand it. I grabbed Miranda and dragging her behind me at a ran into the portal and we were gone! With luck, we would be only thirty minutes or so behind the escaping wizards and our beloved captives! *************** Portals are generally pretty quick to instantaneous, having an observable transit time usually of only a second or two, depending just slightly upon distance. This trip seemed to take about five indicating a trip of at least a thousand miles. Very, very long distance for portal travel. The magic required to maintain a portal is rather enormous, even with Arc-Tec and I doubt anytime soon if it's going to ever be remotely commercially viable for transportation. When I came out of the other end of the portal with Miranda's hand still clutched in mine, I discovered how the Deseret folks were keeping this end powered. We were standing now at the top of a rather tall Aztec style pyramid, at least a thousand feet above everything, now starting at a pair of feather bedecked but otherwise naked priests holding down a naked female sacrificial victim while the equally startled high priest hesitated the downward thrust of his big black bloody obsidian dagger chock full of nasty magics and he gaped with surprise at our arrival. "Zak! Help!" The captive cried, and at once I got a better look at her face. It was Janice! And like the Lovett Rangers, I'd arrived in the very nick of time! Maybe... if I could stop that dagger from now suddenly heading rapidly to her naked heart! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 11 It's not every day that you step out of a portal to find yourself something like a thousand miles away from where you were a few moments ago, and then catch some half-naked religious weirdo in the act of trying to stick something six inches long, hard and throbbing into a close female acquaintance of yours! Yes, the damned blood covered obsidian dagger was throbbing. It stole life-force from sacrificial victims and used the energy to keep open a permanent portal between Rockford, Illinois and somewhere here deep in the heart of batshit crazy land, i.e. Deseret. If anyone was asking me, it sounded darned complicated to have to haul endless boxes of guns and ammo down the steep steps of the modern Aztec style pyramid, but maybe that's the way the priests needed to do things, endless human sacrifices at the top of thousand foot altars just to keep that damned portal open and to fuel their other magic. We don't do human sacrifices back home... so I guess these assclowns know how to get the most bang from their victims. Being fashionably late as usual, I still arrived just in the nick of time to defer Janice's own sudden introduction to the afterlife. Being in a hurry and in a bit of a blind panic, I didn't have time to think (no jokes please) and as usual quite did the entirely wrong thing. As the sacrificial knife started its rapid decent towards Janice's naked chest my first thought was to quickly pop a protective shield around her. Not a bad reaction normally, but upon further review I had the unhappy thought that the massively magical knife probably had enough octane to cut its way through. Naturally, I liked Janice's chest exactly the way it was, heart intact, but when I felt the blade begin to break through my barrier, and rather easily, I didn't react nearly quickly enough. Fortunately, I had close at hand a rather undertrained and highly over stimulated young apprentice that had a frightening talent for mimicking anything that she'd seen another wizard do. In this case, she wisely stuck to simplicity, and grabbing a big handful of the loose magical energy that permeated the entire area around the sacrificial altar that fueled the portal, she just blasted the high priest, dagger and all, off the edge and down the side of the pyramid. Yes, he bounced the whole way down and I don't think he was either conscious or still living even by the half-way point. Just to show the kid that her alleged master knew a trick or two as well, I did much the same thing to the remaining two junior priests that were holding Janice down... except with rather a bit more force than was necessary. They quite flew off of the pyramid for a couple of hundred yards off into the night and probably only had to bounce just once when they hit the hard rock pavement about a thousand feet below us. Janice was more or less alright and unharmed, physically anyway. She was butt naked and had been drugged to keep her quiet and complaisant by some junior priests down at the bottom of the pyramid within a few minutes of her arrival, so mentally she was quite out of it and it took both Miranda and myself to get her almost standing on her own feet. Getting down a thousand vertical feet of steep pyramid steps was going to be mildly entertaining to say the least. To make things slightly more complicated, there was rather a long line tonight waiting for their turn at the altar. It was apparently about midnight or so, and a couple of dozen more potential victims, along with their guards were now wondering what the delay was. I stuck my head down and stared at them in the gloom, and they stared back at me until one overly ambitious guard decided that I wasn't part of the normal sacrificial party and decided to put his ceremonial spear up my ass. Now thoroughly annoyed, I cleared house, sending the dozen or so guards on a short air flight with more rather sudden and extreme landings down at the bottom that they probably wouldn't walk away from. Try as I might, I couldn't remember the trick Bel had done to easily undo locks (without massive collateral damage) so to my chagrin, my lowly untrained apprentice puzzled out the trick in less than a minute setting the entire string of slaves free to run like holy hell anywhere but here. Maybe a few of them would make it... maybe... but with Janice quite out of her head with happy drugs, even getting her (as us) safely down the pyramid was going to be tricky and none of the former captives had the patience to wait for us even as far as the first ten steps, and there were a lot more to follow. "Sean... please be here with us!" I half whispered and half prayed. The dragon had seriously spooked my resident Ùruisg, one of the most innately magical creatures in the entire known multi-verse and he'd been of absolutely no help at all during the brief conflict... probably because he'd been none too certain about who would win. If Sean was afraid of a dragon, then I ought to have been gibbering insane with fear, but my smart-ass mouth (and a little luck) had amazingly gotten me out of trouble. This time! "Don't shout!" He murmured. "My nerves aren't at all up to it. I need a drink... any chance these Deseret barbarians enjoy any sort of civilized mature beverage suitable for enjoying irresponsibly, and have some large quantities of it sitting around?" "Slim and none. I think it's illegal here, but in more of a 'we'll kill you up upon a high altar if we catch you', rather than the silly pseudo- speakeasy stuff back in the US..." "Quite understandable... I'm about ready to kill myself for a stiff drink and I pity the poor bastard that gets into our way until I find one!" He tersely snarled. Yep, he was scared and angry that he'd been caught dead scared, just like the rest of us. Tough shit... we were now in a serious pickle and probably hundreds of miles away from anything resembling help. We were going to need to kick some serious ass to get our own fannies safely out here, not to mention finding Bel, and I was going to need help! "Look, this would be a really convenient time to do something useful." I snarled, and rather loudly. "For starters, can you purge the happy juice from out of Janice? We're walking at a crawl down the sides of a nearly pitch black freaking pyramid when we need to be getting our asses running, very fast and very far away! Even the dimmest priest or guard down there has now figured out that tonight's sacrifice has been terminated with extreme prejudice, and they're now gathering up all of their friends and butt boys with sharp objects to get the curtain back up on their show!" "Can't do that... that's purely medicinal, and nothing regarding magic. I can stimulate her nerves a bit to wake her up a bit, but it would be dangerous to do more." With a quick mental nudge, Sean woke up our sleeping beauty, mostly anyway, which really just made her an almost wide-awake and alert drunk. If anything, now that she was more under her own power, she was much more likely to stagger and fall down the remaining half the length of the pyramid... while giggling non-spot. Actually, now that I think about it... this was worse. Before it took the two of us to drag her down each and every step, but now our laughing merry lunatic was doing to best to dance down the steps in a gleeful frolic, and it was all Miranda and I could do to no keep her from trying fly off into thin air. The progress we were making was just too slow. In the dim moonlight, I could see cars full of reinforcements arriving. Soldiers with guns and probably a handful of semi-adequate magicians, too. The heavier stuff would be shortly behind these folks. Already a few of the better shots with hunting rifles were taking potshots at us, but the flying lead was just that – lead, and with minimal shields up we were so far pretty safe, for another minute or two but we had to get off this damned deathtrap of a staircase fast! "I don't suppose this would be a good time to try a basic lesson in levitation or flying, would it?" I muttered to anyone around me who might care. No one said anything otherwise, so I took a deep breath and reached up for some air currents to use to give us a lift. A month ago, if anyone had told me that I could hold a decent sized half-wrecked airship up in the air for over a half hour, I could have suggested that they were clinically insane. Having done it, once, I decided that giving three people a lift could not be that much more difficult, but even the basic levitation trick that about half of any decent crop of Adepts could manage, was an awful tricky and slippery thing. I sort of almost figured it out, at least enough to blast us rather out of direct controlled flight onto the roof of a stone one story building a bit away from the immediate excitement, and by landing I mean a rather sudden uncontrolled crash from the height of about fifteen feet. Still, any landing that you can walk away from... **************** The pain of crashing did make Janice a little more alert for a minute or two, enough so that I could get something of a story out of her. "Janice, do you have any idea where you are? And where did they take Bel?" As a magician, I figured Bel was a little too valuable to be wasted (yet) on a normal sacrificial altar and I was hoping that Janice knew when they had been separated, and perhaps she was just alert enough now to tell me. She was... barely. "The wizards took her! Bel's old boss and a big and mean looking Deseret grand Pooh-Bah. They didn't need me and left me up there! I think they said something about the Fort, something 'green' but they didn't stay and they flew off with Bel! They were going to kill me!" She wailed, loud enough for everyone within a hundred yards to now figure out our hiding location. That was fine. Bel didn't seem to be anywhere near here and this place had gotten onto my last nerve! I got the ladies down off of the roof safely and we found a bit of a space of clear open ground and I told them to lie flat down and stay there because things were going to get a bit bouncy. I didn't think my usual wind or fire storm was going to bring down that big-assed pyramid, but I wanted it shut down... permanently. From the brief looks of the minimal landscape in the gloomy moonlight around us, this was just some minor religious function and cargo warehousing area. Its purpose was strictly to bring in the guns and ammo, and feed the magic necessary to keep the gears going. This was something that I could definitely put a stop to. With a rather nice fat Earth Ley not too deep below me, I didn't have the slightest doubt that I could summon a suitably sized earthquake quite capable of bringing that high altar of evil crashing right down. In fact I rather enjoyed the experience! It was only when Miranda came up me to gently remind me to stop, that I actually let go of the rather massive forces that I'd unleashed for the last ten minutes. Everything, and I mean everything, was just a heap of rubble... and very likely to remain that way. I figured the two nearest warehouses would contain all of the most recently smuggled arms and ammo that Probert and the Harrison brothers, with the help of the Clinton Street Gang, had channeled out on Friday and indeed it looked like I'd finally hit the jackpot. It really didn't take a lot of creatively applied fire to get this arsenal nicely exploding, especially since they'd mixed crates of ammo together with the firearms. Everything blew up 'real good' and I think I genuinely smiled for the first time since I'd arrived at Probert's farm. Mark this entire smuggling ring, along with a large depot of smuggled goodies, toast! Assuming I made it home alive, a few folks might actually be happy with me! On the other hand, I was a good thousand miles or so away from Chicago, somewhere in Western Montana if my guess was even half accurate, and there would be a lot of very angry Deseret wizards and soldiers hunting my ass down. Not to mention that I had to find Bel! ***************** With everything within five square miles a heap of rubble, I had slightly more trouble than I anticipated finding live prisoners to question. Even the survivors looked seriously scratched and dented up and not particularly in good enough shape to talk. The priests were all absolutely useless; their magical compulsions forcing them to suicide the moment my bright and shiny face peered into theirs. The soldiers weren't hardly any better, mostly zealots the lot of them. Mind-treated to resist to the very end, and pretty much to a man they did. I ended up setting a lot of barely walking wounded on fire the next hour or so and Miranda commented later that I was the walking personification of the angel of death. I was in goddamned Deseret - the bastards just couldn't run away... no, they all had to go banzai and attack me or the women! No, I wasn't taking prisoners! It just wasn't safe to. Eventually I found some poor pitiful maintenance worker who wasn't much higher up the social ladder than the slaves, but he knew what I was asking about and seemed reasonable to deal with. The wall that had collapsed nearly completely on top of him was already more fatal than the dangers of speaking with me. "Where are the great wizards, and where would they take a captive woman wizard?" I asked the poor mangled fellow who was already breathing blood from his nose and mouth much too copiously to be remotely healthy. "To the Fort at Green River, west down the road from here." He replied with no particular resentment or apparent anger towards me. The wars of his betters didn't seem to concern him much and he was too unimportant to be worth the time to mind-condition. "The Great One, Jamil, Great-Lord Wizard of the Second Circle commands the testing grounds there and his word is death or benevolence to all. More of the former than the later, I'll admit. I saw him leave some time ago, before the great earthquake, with an Otagu, a foreigner who serves but does not accept the Prophet and shall never become one of us. They had a woman with them. Clothed, so not to be a sacrifice but yet well-bound and hooded, for it is anathema that any woman should meet the eyes of a man as an equal, let alone a great lord. I think she is for the breeding pit there, to be given to either the Great One or his guests, dark creatures that are not men. That is where captured female magicians are always taken, to be bred for the future glory of the Prophet and our race, or so I've heard whispered. I saw one just once and prayed that the servants of the Prophet would select me at once for their next sacrifices, but I never was. But now I am not unhappy, for I shall rejoin my wife in the next world and my soul and blood will never darken any altar. I am content." That was the last word he spoke and his eyes shut and he quietly passed beyond any pains of this world and for once I was glad that I didn't have to speed along someone's passage to death. I already seen as much death and destruction in the last few hours as could manage, but I knew that this was just a start... and this dark night wasn't over yet! *************** From the looks of the first road sign we passed, the shattered pyramid and storage area was near the outskirts of a town call Rock Springs and there was a marker for the town of Green River about ten miles away heading west down the road. I assumed the Fort, being a rather secret testing area, would be a few miles somewhere out of that town, and I figured we'd have no trouble finding it. Since it was still rather early in the morning, just barely after midnight still, I figured that it was a whole lot safer for us to follow the edges of the road in the moonlight and approach the Fort under cover of darkness. Mayhem could wait until I could get a look at the layout of the place and find where they were keeping Bel. The idea of a breeding pit didn't at all sound comforting. Now that Janice was more or less coherent, it was hard to keep her mouth quiet during our hike. She was still a bit 'bouncy' and also barking mad at me for getting her (indirectly) into this mess in the first place and soon absolutely livid about finding herself in a backwards corner of Deseret with umpteen thousand fanatic soldiers and wizards between us and freedom... and her lover! Our portal trip was now permanently a one-way one, and that was a price I was quite happy to pay for the destruction I'd wreaked in return. Now that I could mentally run some accounting figures, I cheerfully determined that the good-guys were slightly ahead on points already, and a tough trip home wouldn't balance the scale much back their way. I couldn't blame Janice for being rather angry and annoyed. It didn't help that she was nearly freezing in the cold night air with just a single blanket we'd found in the wreckage to cover her body and the only pair of shoes we could find that fit her from off a dead body was now pinching and rubbing her feet raw. Neither Miranda nor I had much in the way of extra clothes to offer her, and she refused any of the blood-soaked salvaged items we'd offered her. In the chill of the late winter/early spring air, it was much too cold for her to rest, let alone sit down for any length of time, so we kept pressing on. Worse, Janice bitched constantly that she felt naked without her gun, so Miranda grudgingly handed over the Thompson machinegun she'd cleverly grabbed before we headed into the cellar with the dragon. It was still loaded up with a full hundred-round magazine of silver ammo hell, and she was now itching to give some Deseret wizards some stitches. If we'd been clever, we'd have grabbed some of the weapons from the fallen guards, but we hadn't. Janice had still been loopy and needed all of Miranda's and mine attention to deal with and we'd tried to leave the pyramid area as fast as possible. Any thought of actually taking the roadway was crazy. Nearly as soon as we started down the side of the road west to Green River, it seemed like every five minutes or so another vehicle or truck loaded with soldiers passed us heading toward the disaster area at Rock Springs. They'd soon suspect that a grade-A wizard, or someone like me, had gotten through their defenses and had attacked the religious center and the warehouses. The magic signature from my earthquake would make it obvious that this wasn't any natural event. They'd search around there for us first, but eventually somebody clever (and too high ranking to be ignored) would figure out that we were heading towards the Fort. Hopefully long after something structurally debilitating had happened to it. Our first plan that we discussed while trotting along as fast as Janice's sore feet would let her, was for a quiet surgical extraction, but this optimism wasn't fooling anybody. Maybe we could get in quietly, but finding Bel, let alone getting her out alive was probably going to take some serious magic... and the usual helping of excessive destruction. Once I had Bel safe in my arms, or rather probably in Janice's arms, it was going to be time for some gratuitous random redecoration of the local landscape. I'd used up a lot of magical energy the last week or so, and the last couple of big firefights hadn't helped. You can party down on Ley power as much as you'd like but some of the energy has to come from within yourself. My internal reserves felt low, and walking all night without much recent sleep certainly didn't help matters. If Miranda and Janice weren't inclined to complain, then I could also keep my own private bitches silent as well. Walking in the growing dark as the moon started to think about setting, we lucked out a couple of miles out of town when we saw a pair of car headlights way ahead of us, and quite off of this roadway. As usual we hunkered down to let them pass us by but not before we noticed that these military vehicles had definitely not come from the town just ahead of us. Tracing their path on the road ahead of us we soon found the small dirt road leading north that they had come from, and we figured this must lead us toward the Fort, and in about another weary hour of walking it did. The region was pretty rough and it wasn't too hard to keep to the edges of the roadway and hide when other vehicles passed. Apparently they weren't wasting any time on beauty sleep either and they were trucking out squads of soldiers to look for us just as fast as trucks could be found and loaded, and reloaded for second and third trips in the direction of Green River. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 11 In an unwarranted bout of optimism, I hoped this would mean that most of the soldiers would be now gone from the fort, searching for us in the morning darkness at a place where we weren't. On the other hand, this alert also meant that the existing guards would be very alert, and perhaps even the usual number of usual soldiers patrolling the grounds would be now doubled. There sure seemed like there were an awful lot of them at the main security gate, and more annoyed soldier boys also patrolling inside and outside the wire. As for seeing the layout of the Fort inside, the way the hills were inside of the guardhouse on both sides of the road, I really couldn't make out a thing past them. "Decision time." I whispered to my shivering ladies fair. "I can do something loud and violent to the guardhouse and probably set all of the local brush on fire too, or we can try another night flight into the unknown. Or does anyone else have a clever idea that won't get us all killed, or at least not right away before we can take an awful lot of them along with us." No one did. Miranda shrugged and just suggested that I fly much more carefully this time. Yeah, right. This time however, I wasn't in as much of a hurry and I didn't want to create a sudden curious gust of wind blowing things like guard towers and big trees over so I took it cool, calm and casual. We took a short and very elliptical flight up high out of sight and no one was more surprised than I was when we reached the top of the leftmost and tallest hill, my exact objective, which I hoped would provide a decent nighttime view of our objective, and with some cover and darkness, we could now reconnoiter adequately enough to make some final planning for our rescue plan. ****************** We supposed that the quarter of the base that was in darkness might be barracks, or perhaps low importance facilities like administration. Other areas with decent lighting and some nominal personnel activity I thought might be supply or maintenance facilities. Two other locations were lit up nearly as bright as day and both were rather actively patrolled areas that seemed to be of considerable importance. I didn't dare pull the night flight trick again. The last trip had worked so smoothly that I was sure that something would go badly wrong the next time to help even the statistical odds. Instead, I decided that it was safer to pull the old scouting trick of just sneaking around in the shadows and praying very quietly that no one would see me. From back in my military service days, I vaguely remembered using (successfully) some sort of an aversion spell that didn't quite cloud men's minds or make the caster invisible, but it did sort of vaguely hint that the semi-hidden person more or less belonged there and that there was nothing of any particular interest to see there, so move along! I hadn't used it in years, and also I'd needed some help to get the complicated spell active, but it had saved my life once or twice when I was lurking around dangerous and extremely unhealthy places in the New Mexico and Nevada desert... and much too close to active battlefields with lurking enemy snipers. No problem, I thought. It would be just like riding a bike all over again! Not quite... I just couldn't seem to duplicate the effect! Now, I realized that I'd had more help casting this spell back then than I had remembered. Damned Mentalist magic that I was worthless at, once again! "Whatever you're doing, it clearly isn't working. If anything, you're even easier to see than you were before... you've got a nice blue glow all around you that screams 'shoot me!'" Janice eventually muttered with her teeth chattering as she sat all wrapped up in her blanket, shivering with cold. Unfortunately, Miranda agreed with her. "If anything," the teen added with a smirk, "the bright halo around you makes it impossible to miss you, let alone ignore you!" "Damn it Zak!" Janice fumed. "Bel is counting on us and this is our only chance! Didn't you ever learn anything back in school except how to cause wholesale mayhem and pointless destruction?" I thought this remark was a bit unnecessary but I knew she was tired and extremely unhappy about the mess we were in, so I bit my tongue shut and I sat down next to Janice to stew about the problem. In another hour or so it would be dawn and we'd lose our cover of darkness. I needed to go now, to find where they'd stashed Bel, or far too soon it would probably get far too dangerous to even attempt a rescue. The more I thought about, the more I decided that a magical personal aversion field, let alone trickier things like cloaks of shadow, etc, definitely had to be pure mentalist related abilities. More stuff that I didn't have a clue about doing properly, and really never had any sort of knack for. Maybe Bel could have done the spell, as she was smarter about that sort of thing, but obviously we were out here on our own. Well, when in doubt, try something drastic... "Miranda, you've been watching me try this. Do you think you have any sort of feel for the way I was trying to meld the spell around me? Give it a try and think hard about 'not' being seen." "Like this?" She giggled and then she quite disappeared from right in front of us then reappeared with a smile and a whispered "Ta-da!" and gave us a showgirl flourish. Smart assed teenagers! Going off scouting with two us huddled together was going to be risky enough and Janice was far from delighted to hear that she'd be left behind on the hill to stay hidden and remain quiet while we were gone. Even shielding two of us was going to be tricky and covering all three was quite out of the question for Miranda's still limited power abilities. The look she gave us when Miranda borrowed back the Tommy gun was positively malignant! Frankly it was safer with us, because if Janice ever needed to use it while we were gone, she'd be pretty much screwed, and between the two of us, Miranda and I needed to remind her at least four times to stay down low in the brush and don't budge. Even if we ran into serious trouble that was going to require malicious and excessive application of terminal magic forces, up here on the hill was pretty much the safest place to be for awhile. "Lay down, shut up, and go roll up in your blanket and take a nap!" Miranda snapped from the shadows the moment she suspected that Janice was about to follow us anyway down the hill. She muttered a few vile oaths at our backs but did give up and hunkered down. Our FBI beauty certainly could get cranky when she was cold, hungry, tired and footsore from walking half the night without any sleep. *************** Now that I was certain that Miranda could hold the aversion field around us, the other thing the spell needed for duration was ground pepper, and I was glad I'd rescued my small bag of the spice powder from my ruined duster coat, along with a few other useful goodies. Reagents are not always necessary with spells or magic working, but in certain clever applications and combinations, they can be an extreme boost, doing some of the work for you so you didn't need to exert as much internal will. The aversion field worked best, I remembered, with just a tiny bit of the pepper constantly rubbed between the caster's fingers, so I handed Miranda the bag and with my arms wrapped as tightly around her waist as I could manage, we started to slowly shuffle in tandem down the hill towards the base. With the help of the pepper, Miranda didn't have to concentrate as hard but she didn't have much in the way of internal reserve internal power left to start with. Here in the heart of our enemies, it was far too dangerous to risk using any Ley energy fields, as this could allow any local wizards to sense us. Instead, I tried to flow my own energies slowly and weakly into Miranda which she then could fairly easily channel into her aversion field. The pepper seemed to add nicely to the effect, just as I had recalled, and we had enough for at least an hour or two of covert exploration. By the time we reached the base of the hill and started to wander into the occupied portions of the base, our act was pretty well coordinated and we thought well enough that our protection would hold against anyone other than a decently powered wizard, and we hoped to avoid them for now. I wouldn't say that we skulked around the whole base utterly invisible to mortal eyes, but none of the local guards or wandering soldiers within visual range ever gave us a second glance. We tried to stick to the shadows and move silently but it looked like the aversion spell was doing everything exactly the way it was supposed to. **************** The first heavily lit and active area we checked out turned out to be a mustering area. Squad by squad, groups of soldiers were being roused from sleep to either go out on local patrol or else load up into a waiting truck for transport. This was certainly nothing that I wanted to interrupt. The more that were gone, and the sooner - the better. The next place that I wanted to take a look into was an extremely over- guarded warehouse. Knowing the Deseret clowns, they didn't believe in hiding anything in plain sight, instead they stacked on the guards and then added some more guards to guard the guards, and so forth. The main warehouse door was closed and heavily guarded, but lights inside and lot of talking voices convinced me that this place was hiding something worth knowing about, so we slunk to the shadows and mentally broadcasted, "There's no one here" as loudly as Miranda could manage. In full slink mode, we sidled and shuffled over around to a side door that only had one guard on post. I wouldn't call the two-striper on duty quite exactly bored, but tired and 'extremely disinterested" would quite likely fit the bill. A couple of obvious maintenance drones in drab zippered coveralls were carrying a few last wooden crates inside from a parked truck and no one particularly noticed when we slithered in behind them. It was a stupid risk I really shouldn't have taken, but I'm sometimes an impulsive little prat, and Miranda was already too scared to be afraid... if that makes any sense! This once, we got away with it. Already Miranda's nerves had been stretched quite a bit further than she would have preferred, but she trusted me that we were doing the right thing and she would follow wherever I lead her. The interior of the warehouse, which was quite open and brightly lit in the center area, revealed some sort of mag-lift vehicle, nearly the size of a truck and much more obviously armored with three visible mounts for weapons, not to mention a nasty looking pair of large rocket tube barrels mounted right at the front. The crew of supply drones shuffled over towards this vehicle with the last of their cargo, and a couple of younger but official looking types in uniform nearby visibly sighed with relief. I had them pegged for junior officers given a shitty job that potentially had ratfuck written all over it, and they were delighted that there was one less thing now that could go wrong. "By the Prophet, I cannot tell you how glad I am that this is over. Now that the last of the ammo has arrived, we just need to stow it onboard, mount the guns and run a quick alignment test. There are going to be entirely too many Great Lords and other high wizards blessing us with their presence tomorrow for the final demonstration testing. Are you sure your team has prepared enough of the master power cell modules?" "Too many..." his partner complained. "The Colonel grabbed every single ArcCell that our department had made over the last six months. The range of the BattleCar is still much too limited, enough only for less than an hour on a roadway and much less over heavy terrain like the testing grounds. And with the plasma guns firing on the testing range, the power cells will drain out even faster! Half an hour of simulated combat time, at most. The twelve storage bays are stocked, plus the installed module of course. Enough for the complete battle simulation test of six to eight hours of constant operation. Enough to spearhead the main assault for the planned spring offensive." "Is the Great One going to be able to replace the cells when the car runs out power during the evaluation?" "No Great One is likely to get their nails marred doing servant's work." The young research and development officer laughed, albeit quietly. "My Colonel knows the procedure and it's simple and can be done in less than a minute, even by an officer! Still, since your boss will be likely be manning one of the three plasma guns as well, I can show you how it's done so you can then privately instruct him, in case his assistance is necessary." "That would be prudent, but let's get the last of the crates stowed. They want to demonstrate the vehicle filled with a full projected combat load, the crew of four and full normal load-outs of power cells and silver matrix balls. A fortune in silver my friend is going to be wasted tomorrow, blowing up simulated buildings and old rusty targets out on the testing range!" The gunnery officer laughed. The two of them spent the next twenty minutes completing the battle load-out and then reviewed and rechecked everything carefully once again. Fuck-ups in the junior officer rank didn't apparently survive very long. Once everything was stowed and triple-checked for accuracy, the gunnery officer bent over and grunted a moment, lifting and then mounting an extremely large multiple barreled gun unto one of the sturdy fixed side frame mounts, of which the vehicle had three, one on each side of the vehicle except for the rear. The weapon was extremely heavy and possessed six revolving barrels that seemed to be composed of some nearly clear glass crystalline or ceramic material. He then mounted a pair of large and extremely thick electrical cables to the underside of the weapon and carefully showed his curious partner how the cables were attached and secured for combat. As each cable seem to have color coded mounting brackets, this task seemed to be easy to perform. Loading the ammo feed tube was slightly trickier, but he demonstrated this task twice before permanently disconnecting it and then carefully inspecting the gun's feed mechanism to ensure that the weapon was unloaded. "By all of the Saints, it wouldn't be good at all to have left even a single silver ball inside the feed hopper! Even one shot turned to magical plasma would take out most of the wall!" The gunnery officer chortled to his fellow. "Indeed! I've heard but not yet seen what this wondrous new chaingun can do, turning 1cm round balls of silver into magical ionized plasma at the rate of over 1000 rounds per minute. Each plasma bolt capable of burning through the front armor of an Alliance or US main battle tank at over 1000 meters, or also destroying aircraft or helicopters within line of sight. If my division can construct even a few dozen of these invincible BattleCars, and enough means to power them all, then our forces shall advance without stopping until we reach at least the Mississippi!" "Powering them all... that's the bitch! You said that your top boss, Count-Warlock Heumac, had a plan for that, but I don't see how. From what I've heard whispered, nearly every wizard of the lower circles is already engaged with other projects at the command of the First Circle." "No, even with every Great One already engaged in constructing the ArcCells, it would never be enough. Like the existing procurement of weapons, the Hands of the Prophet have been busy elsewhere, helping our enemies give us the tools we will need to defeat them! There is a new Confederate Arc-Tec plant in Florida that is nearly ready to supply our need. Its chief administrative wizard has been possessed by one of the dark ones and now serves us. The power cells will soon flow to us in abundance... and if the Prophet wills it, in plenty of time to complete the capture of the entire American midwest." "May it be so!" They both muttered together, palming their hands together and bowing in a moment of prayer. Unlike the slaves and pismires, you could always count on the officers being suitably indoctrinated. The conventional wisdom about Deseret military officers was that they were tactically knowledgeable and brave to a fault, usually leading from the very front. Their weakness was that everything in Deseret society, particularly the military, was heavily regimented with a very vertical chain of command that didn't encourage individual initiative or creativity. Following orders was beyond second nature for these guys, but if you could knock them off of their game plan they'd often become confused and dither, waiting to receive further orders from their superiors. Improvisation and 'maverick' leadership were not encouraged. The pair of officers test powered and dry-spun the six-barreled Gatling type weapon with its multiple rotating barrels for about a minute or so each, spinning the chain gun around upon its mount, up and down and in all directions, watching the bright red target point of the laser aiming guidance system. Certain that everything, except the disconnected pneumatic feeding tube of silver ball ammo, had been tested thoroughly, the duo then carefully dismounted the gun and proceeded to close down the warehouse for the remainder of the night, dismissing the remaining enlisted maintenance crew to go and get some early breakfast chow before returning at dawn. One of the officers left with the crew, to probably to go eat as well, and the other one wandered off to a desk quite a bit off, next to a side wall and sat and reviewed some paperwork. From there he didn't have direct line of sight to the BattleCar prototype and I was pretty certain that I could risk a peek inside. It was really something pretty unique, even for Deseret. My own GWA had used flyvers and some much smaller Arc-Tec powered mag-lift jeeps for light transport, but nothing this blatantly military. Sure, we could have built one ourselves, I guess, but some bureaucrats in accounting probably convinced the Generals that this sort of battlefield beast would be too horrifically expensive to build and operate, and they'd be probably be right. A quick glance inside one of the spare boxes of ArcCells revealed a rather creative but probably underpowered module chockfull of linked Minor Arcana stones wired up in jury-rigged sequence for power storage. Not at all the way I'd have designed it... if money and materials were on my own dime, but I assumed that obtaining enough Majors was impossible or impractical for them at this time. In theory, Minors were much easier to recharge and maintain, so maybe reliability was another important issue for using these weaker Arcana stones. If the ArcCell power modules were interesting, then the stored ammo boxes of 1cm diameter round silver balls were even more so. With a quick glance at the chain gun's ammo pneumatic feeder tube it was easy enough to figure out that once hooked up to an ammo box, a strong air pressure within would feed the silver balls quickly and easily up the tube and into the gun's ammo hopper, transformed by extreme magical energies as matrix material to be turned into lethal bolts of superheated magical plasma. One crate seemed to contain one thousand balls, or one full minute of a gun at its maximum possible rate. Even with those special glass or ceramic barrels, I was pretty sure that these guns couldn't stay locked on full auto for long before this material would overheat, melt or just explode. A quick look at the gunner control settings indicated that the default setting was a burst of six rounds. Enough to blast a single round from every barrel of the weapon in less than a third of a second. Yeah, that was probably enough to melt a tank, armored personnel carrier or a few helicopters and would be way overkill if used upon infantry. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 11 I couldn't resist grabbing a big handful of silver ammo rounds and stuffing them into my pants pocket. Hey, free silver is free silver and the stuff is just so darned useful! ************* Our lurking here now done, I took a chance and played 'the wind blew the door open trick'. I thought for a moment that the side door sentinel had detected us as we sidled out past him, but he just looked around a bit startled and then went right back to being bored after giving the door a kick shut. Deliriously happy with our discovery, Miranda and I now sidled toward the only other extremely high security area, a large mostly windowless bunker of a structure on a small hill surrounded by three full circles of barbed wire with multiple checkpoints. It also seemed to be the main power source for the entire camp, with several big electrical lines emerging from within the hill. Even a hundred yards away I had no trouble at all detecting magic contained within. Enormous amounts of it even, and with a nasty dark alien taint that I'd felt once before in that diplomatic row house back in Chicago. "Fuck." I just whispered to Miranda, without bothering to explain why. She was moderately happy with herself at the moment, pleased as punch that she was doing serious magic and being useful, and I just didn't have the heart to ruin her mood. The glow in the eastern sky said that dawn was imminent, so we needed to find a way inside fast! This looked like the heart of this military research and development installation and since we were looking for a 'pit', this also seemed to be the only underground location. "What are the odds that we can keep the aversion field up doing right straight into that lion's den?" She asked when we'd crept up to the ten foot fence heavily strung with barbwire fence near the first checkpoint gate. "Slim and none. The staff with access to this big top all seem to have ID bracelets with some identification charm. See how that soldier is putting his right arm into scanning box? If we don't do that, we don't get through that big turnstile. Also, sneak a quick feel around the area. There's at least one military grade protection circle just inside this fence and it bet it goes all the way around. Without the right pass or even the right mental password to think while crossing it, things would seriously go boom! We've got two choices; either we start making a whole lot of noise or we do a really fast up and down and fly up around to the other side of the hill. Bel would have been brought here by the big cheese himself, his high and mightiness Jamil, Great-Lord Wizard of the Second Circle in his fancy staff car along with Probert, who won't... probably, anyway... have the right sort of entrance passes. There's a gate for vehicles to enter the compound somewhere over there, and mighty wizards and top military brass usually get to bypass all of the petty security procedures anyway." "Given my druthers, I'd vote for another few minutes of sneak and peek. It's going to be second Great War probably fighting our way out, so let's save the pretty fireworks for some assholes that deserve it!" She laughed. Sounded good to me! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 12 *************** CHAPTER TWELVE Doing another up and over worked out more or less according to plan and the aversion field didn't trigger anything nasty (at least audibly) as we floated down to the main delivery area and the VIP parking lot. When in doubt, follow the big shots. Two guards were vaguely awake in the area patrolling the loading dock, but the ramp that led up to a large security door with a window was guarded by just a lone sentinel. To make it more appealing, the gun toting apes down at the loading dock did not have clear line of sight to this lone guard manning the VIP entrance. If that wasn't enough encouragement for me to think naughty thoughts, I noted that the decorative hedges on both sides of the pedestrian ramp were nicely overgrown and dense, marvelously suited for the pleasant task of hiding an entire squad of dead or incapacitated bodies. Slightly chortling, I whispered for Miranda for us to trot on up just a bit closer and I'd take care of the guard, quickly and almost soundlessly. I had just the spell in mind! Military service is useful for teaching a young impressionable man like myself, dozens to possibly hundreds of ways to do wickedly nasty things to your enemies, and the three month long military wizardry school I attended at the start of my service taught me one or two perverse tricks that I've used irregularly ever since. In the past, I'd largely relied upon translocation, the art of magically grabbing an object from point A and sending it to point B, and vice versa. Really clever and insidious wizards can innocuously steal all of the bullets from an enemy's gun and send them harmlessly in an instant to their hand, but that level of delicacy was beyond me... not that I'd tried it recently. My best trick was just to take the entire gun and skip being unnecessarily clever. But I now remembered a very old trick that I'd never once used while being at the sharp end of things in magical combat. Instead I'd learned this magic the hard way, mostly on the receiving end in the playground or after school at the hands of my magical betters. The old burst the melon ploy! It's easy to do, fast and (mostly) silent and isn't usually lethal... unless the caster is in a really bad mood. I was, but decorating the whole side of the building with fresh blood wasn't remotely subtle. Besides, Miranda was still a young and (mostly) innocent girl and in my new role of providing appropriate instruction to the young and impressionable, I didn't want to cause any more mayhem than was appropriate. Odds were that in just another minute or two just about everything would go to shit anyway and then I could resort to the final expediency of an accused sociopathic pyromaniac, and start to do what I did best.... namely blow some shit up! The 'Melon Charm' (yep, that's its official name) worked beautifully and I could swear that I briefly heard Sean cringe inside of my head. Done exactly properly, as I had done, the magician quickly forms a solid sphere of air completely around the head of the victim and then you suddenly implode it inward with a sharp sudden bang, just like popping a big soap bubble! Since I was in a bad mood, I wasn't particularly gentle. This had the very immediate effect of causing an instant brain concussion and immediate unconsciousness for hours, or until serious medical treatment is performed to release the internal cranial pressure. This poor bastard had about a 50/50 chance of dying from brain edema, or brain swelling from the bleeding caused by innumerable ruptured blood vessels inside the victim's skull, but - casualties usually do occur in wartime. The more Deseret bastards I killed, the fewer someone else would have to deal with on a battlefield. Now if the spell had been performed perhaps a tad more excessively, the little prick's skull would have been crushed at minimum, or made to completely explode in a glorious spray of Technicolor grey matter and crimson over a pretty wide area. Just like if you'd dropped a ripe melon from a roof onto hard pavement. Splat! That's why it's called the Melon Charm. Perfect for that specialized instance when you really want to deliver a message to the survivors! The VIP door into the facility was unlocked and a brief check revealed nothing more potent than a minor aversion charm on the door handle, probably to remind the rank and file dumbfucks that this entrance was reserved strictly for the use of their betters. Inside, was a long well lit hallway entirely unsuitable for either lurking or skulking, and I grabbed the first door that we passed on the right, which had the good fortune to be the security ready room. Inside, this room was fairly large and had more than a few goodies worth investigating, once its sole inhabitant was dealt with. I bounced the inside contents of his skull with a bit too with more air pressure than was even remotely healthy, and from the instantaneous bleeding from his eyes, ears, mouth and nose, I was pretty sure that just about every blood vessel inside his skull had ruptured. He didn't have any long term plans left for his life anyway other than enjoying his coma next to his fellow guard covered up outside in the bushes. Now, all alone in our private little military arsenal, I started to rummage through lockers and storage chests to assemble a few odd items that suddenly seemed fairly useful. We'd about exhausted our luck sneaking around unseen and it wouldn't work inside here anyway. Aversion spells really don't work well in brightly lit and narrow areas like highly classified government installations... otherwise, there wouldn't be a secret left anywhere and professional spies would have it way too easy. Inside a well guarded facility like this, it would be easy to set up a protection spell that would cancel out major stealth or invisibility charms, let alone simple aversion spells like ours. It was time to turn to Plan B, relying now upon boldness rather than stealth. In my experience of being in places where I really wasn't at all supposed to be on several occasions, I had learned that audacity has its own tactical quality and usefulness in a dangerous situation. I was inside a high security top level military R&D lab, past numerous levels of magical and physical security and now if I could look and act like I belonged there, calm, cool and collected... just another pitiful pismire doing his shitty thankless job, then no one would think twice about me. The 'us' part was going to be just a tad trickier, but this was no place to leave a girl alone right in the heart of trouble. "Miranda, I've got the ID badge and the bracelet from the second guard and he's more or less a vague physical match for me and I've found a fresh clean uniform that should fit. Not perfect but I bet hardly anyone looks closely at these things once they're inside, but to be safe I'll plant a Verity charm upon the ID, so watch close because this is a really useful spell that isn't really too tricky to learn. Most young magicians back home learn this spell early, so they can make a fake ID good enough to get served inside nightclubs and bars, but it does have other useful purposes sometimes... like now!" It wasn't tricky at all for her, and my young apprentice nodded that she'd picked up the basics right away. This spell was vaguely similar to the Friendship Charm I'd cast upon those silver dollars back in Chicago in that anyone inspecting the identification would see exactly what they would expect to see. The gnarly photo of the un-photogenic military security policeman would now appear to look just like me, and best of all, since this ID badge was mundane plastic, it would only betray a very light minimal magical aura, probably too weak to be noticed by a minor magician making only a casual visual examination of the card. Now equipped with a spotless pressed uniform and a sidearm I hoped I'd never have to use, I now needed to convince Miranda that putting a mask over her head, a leather collar with a leash, and then handcuffing her to make her look like a newly arriving prisoner, was a sane and practical plan. I didn't convince her, but the brave hearted girl had a lot of trust in me anyway. Someday her new hero was going to seriously disappoint her and her shining white knight was going to take a nasty fall from his charger right into the doo-doo. Unhappily, I thought it was safest to leave her Tommy gun stowed away in one of the storage lockers out of sight. Even in insane Deseret, they don't let the prisoners run around armed and I was scared that I was already hauling around way too much silver, with the balls and various coins in my pockets. Really powerful mages can sense the stuff like the smell of freshly baked bread, plus I hadn't seen any of the internal research station guards toting about anything other than small sidearms. I needed to stay 'normal' and unremarkable for as long as possible. *********** Boldly sauntering into the heart of your enemy's stronghold certainly beats skulking, every day of the week. My uniform (and charmed ID) showed me to be a corporal, the perfect natural coloration inside any military installation. It was perfect military camouflage, I was just high ranking enough as a junior NCO to be realistically authorized to go anywhere where any actual real work was performed and too low of any importance for anyone else to bother or even notice them particularly. Roaming the wide brightly lit halls as boldly as brass wasn't too disconcerting and I tried to stick to the main passages but slightly inclining towards the direction where I thought the internal loading dock facility was located inside, probably somewhere off to our right. Miranda played her role well as my meek little prisoner and trotted along blindly behind me being led by her leash, all the while probably plotting some horrific revenge against me. "Sean." I half whispered under my breath with my teeth firmly clinched. "I can't find any damned department or office signs anywhere! The doors only have number markings, that's all. I guess the riff-raff doesn't need to know much about what everyone else outside their own office or lab is doing, but I need a clue!" "We need to go down, far down to the bottom level where that great magical energy is being created and channeled into power. Go straight ahead for now, there are wizards just ahead up there... a checkpoint, probably for the elevator and that's where we'll want to go!" "Into the Valley of Death rode the two heroic wizards!" I muttered and without missing a beat the scheming and nearly all-powerful Ùruisg replied: "Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them Volley'd and thunder'd; Storm'd at with shot and shell, While horse & hero fell, They that had fought so well Came thro' the jaws of Death, Back from the mouth of Hell, All that was left of them, Left of six hundred." "Fuck you very much!" I muttered as the checkpoint up ahead now came closer into view. It figured my insatiably curious visitor had read Tennyson. "Have you not any words of faux-Celtic comfort for us? A nice prayer perhaps... even in Lithuanian would be just fine!" "Bugger it, Lad! Your plan will work or you'll create a nice crater here in the middle of the facility and we can just float right down into the smoking abyss and down into the pit. Unless of course you'd like to pay for the official guided grand tour and give the nice man in robes up ahead one of your shiny Texas silver dollars for the admission fare?" "Sod off, you damned little bastard! Someday you're going to tread on my last nerve and I'll banish your miserable scrawny hairy brown ass back home or else I'll donate you to the Imperial Zoo in San Francisco, as a megalomaniac example of a common domestic brownie with extreme delusions of grandeur... and alcoholic tendencies!" "Bring friends!" He giggled, being now entirely too smug for himself. Someday that smarmy little shit was going to get me killed! I was sure of it... but it wasn't going to be dull when it happened! Sometimes the most useful thing a wizard can ever do is to die in such an appalling and regrettable manner that the story of his death is taught in schools as an object lesson and practical warning to others. More than one teacher had hinted that would be my own probable fate someday, but I was in no hurry to be immortalized in magical history just yet. I gave a vague smile and waved my ID casually at the direction of the wizard seated at one of the two desks in front of me, which together blocked direct access to the elevator heading down. This was a strong talented wizard I noted, and if he actually touched or carefully examined my ID my cover would be blown, but I didn't dare reach out for any external magical sources while he casually looked me over. There was a pair of extremely strong Earth and Fire Leys right under this hill and research facility, and they were probably the reason this location was selected. Air and Water Leys weren't too far distant either and these could be channeled, eventually, with proper preparation time. I hoped I wouldn't need them. I was slowly gaining a better mastery of air magic and enjoying the thought of being a terrifically powerful air wizard someday, but winds and tornados weren't going to do me much good down here! "Newly arrived prisoner, Great One." I declared with a decent bow and more than hint of genuine sincerity. "The officer stated that she was to be delivered down to The Pit, to join the other one who arrived earlier last night." Nice and meek, I thought. Chockfull of 'Don't get mad at me, I'm only following orders!' The Deseret wizard pondered this notion for a moment and this gave me a moment to indirectly examine my possible foe without at all appearing to take my eyes off of my shoes, like a good obedient piece of enlisted dog-turd. The wizard wore a rather formal black wizard's robe with silver piping around the collars and sleeves. If my 'Know your enemy!' lectures were correct, this identified him as member of the minor Deseret magical aristocracy. A member of the ruling class but nothing really special. The silver five-pointed stars on the lapels of his collar marked him as a wizard of the Fifth Circle. Chump change, probably a medium to strong Adept level magician. Meah... I could handle him in my sleep if my cover was blown, even if he got the jump on me. His assistant at the desk next to him looked to be a mundane Army captain and the poor sod was definitely much lower down the political totem-pole than the wizard. From what I understood, any magician ranked higher in the Deseret hierarchy than even most generals. He kept his face firmly glued to some bit of paperwork and never even raised his eyes to me once while I stood there. Eventually, after what seemed an eternity, the magician just shrugged and activated the elevator doors, opening them for me and then he briefly stepped inside and cast another very minor charm, which seemed to unlock the controlled and very restricted access to the highly classified bottom floor Pit stop. I gave him another bow, as I assumed I had his leave to depart. "Bottom floor, of course. You know the way?" He commented, with no particular interest in my answer either way, but I felt obliged to reply. "No, Great One, I have never had that honor... and I would not wish to delay my duty." "Take the left turn and leave her with the Commander of the Pit, or whoever is Guard-Captain at the moment at the entryway. Don't dawdle! If you take the right turn, your duty will be quite instantly and permanently delayed so restrain your curiosity, should you be unfortunate enough to have any." I bowed again on general principle, but the Great One had no further interest at all in me and didn't even bother to watch as Miranda and I entered the elevator and took it down. There were at least ten normal levels below us containing various research labs all handily labeled S1 through S10, and then there was a nice and shiny red button below that labeled 'Pit'. How convenient! I didn't dare check for any magical protections around that button with the magician still close at hand, so I just trusted to fate and pressed that button and nothing awful happened to me, other than eventually, about two minutes later we arrived in someone's clever recreation of hell. Really, the only thing that dark and sinister carved stone hallway was missing was the proverbial 'Abandon All Hope' sign. The growing sense of enormous, and virtually inexhaustible magic filled me as we grew closer, descending down into the bowels of the earth, and as I could more easily sense its power, I also could sense the awful wrongness of it. The exact same sort of malignancy that I'd sensed in that vile house in Chicago. Second verse, same as the first... but bigger, badder and bolder. **************** When the doors opened I risked taking a look down the right hallway and saw about twenty yards downrange a seriously large and heavy steel door that glowed by malevolent protections and guarded in front by two veteran looking magicians who were already giving me the beady-eye glare of doom. I gave them a brief bow and gave Miranda's leash a sharp tug hard to the left. The bastards were watching me like a hawk just begging for any pretext at all to fry me to a pair of smoking boots. They were positively bursting with fire energy and itching for an excuse to create another pile of soot. Of course they couldn't burn me... but I wasn't ready yet to let them know about that little fact. Speaking of boots... I just now realized that my cunning military disguise was a tad fatally flawed since I was still wearing my Texas cowboy boots! I'd changed my clothes but not the footwear! My boots were an anachronistic item that most corporals in this army would be extremely likely to possess, let alone wear on duty! Fortunately they were black and only the tips really showed clearly. Perhaps they were a decent match for dress black military shoes, but this was a flaw in my plan that I'd not recognized earlier. The left hallway was only about twenty yards long as well and ended up at a rather similar door. I guess they were cheaper to buy and install in bulk. In front was a pair of military guards, a fairly senior NCO whose chevroned rank I couldn't quite decipher and a fairly normal looking three-striper. I approached to about six feet away or so, stopped and then snapped my heels together and announced my presence. "Corporal Dardan reporting as ordered with the prisoner, Sergeants!" This seemed to fit the normal routine and they couldn't have cared much less about examining my out-of-place boots. They almost yawned while relaxing their assault rifles back to a rest position, and I'm sure they were back to thinking once again about how badly they'd like to fuck up that duo of wizards down at the other end of the hall. From the twitch of the senior Sergeant's face, I could tell he hated magicians probably more than he hated officers. Just out of principle. He left the buck Sergeant to stay on guard and protect the hallway and make sure no dastardly wizard could steal it, or the gloomy reddish tinged light bulbs in the medieval looking fixtures on the ceilings. He then ordered the door to be opened and he escorted me and my prisoner personally inside to the Watch Room, where the Gate-Captain in command of this little slice of heaven kept his office, and to whom my prisoner would be relinquished to, to soon enjoy the pleasures of the breeding pit! After this point I was all out of extremely clever ideas for how to get any nearer to Bel, but she had to be close now! Audacity had done its part... now it was time for a bit of restrained and vaguely subtle ass-kicking! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 12 Ahead down the main hallway just beyond the door to the office and the other watch rooms was another slightly smaller locked steel door but I assumed that the Gate-Captain would have the key, and I made a note not to burn his ass down into ashes. At worst, once I'd cleaned shop here, I'd then quickly release Miranda and get her to tweak the lock quietly open. It was somewhat mildly irritating that she could already do several things much better than I could! Entering his augustness's office, I leapt again to full attention and fired off a rather snappy salute to the short but sneering specimen of officerdom that awaited me, seated primly and erect behind his duty desk. The Gate-Captain gave me a nasty glare and mentally added my name to his shit list. "You know, corporal, that salutes within the building are not required. In fact, within this facility itself the usual military courtesies are quite forbidden." The senior sergeant acidly commented, noting his boss's extreme annoyance. "I've been told that Sir," I said as I directly faced the Captain, "but in matters of protocol, I've usually found that most officers prefer to be shown that respect... and it beats the alternative of having the Guard-Captain suspect me of any disrespect to his personage. Sir!" I did refrain from saluting this time, and both men decided that I wasn't worth the trouble of shooting. "Sergeant, let the dumb PFC deliver his package and get his newly demoted ass back upstairs... and then go find his lieutenant and squad sergeant and give them a polite reminder of facility rules and regulations and attend to their punishment personally. A couple of dozen whip strokes should do the trick... and then let them give him a few dozen extra stripes of their own upon him to go along with his demotion. Now, now get this piece of shit out of my face!" Alright, that was my final cue! It was now or never! ************* First, just because the rat-bastard had pissed me off, I meloned the surly Captain's head... a tad over-excessively. Those walls - and the ceiling too, were going to need some heavy coats of paint as his brains were now completely decorating everything in the room, including me! Note to self -- stand back a little further the next time I want to explode someone's head! The senior NCO was caught rather off-guard but amazingly his first gut reaction was to instinctively try and gut me with his large military belt knife. If I hadn't instantly raised my shields his entirely normal (but sharp) steel knife would succeeded. This made me wonder just how nasty things really were on the other side of that last door, and if that was a rabbit hole I'd forever regret diving into, all hell bent for leather! I didn't want to give this wily and skilled warrior a second poke at me so I next gave him in turn a slightly gentler brain squashing. He was still alive, probably, when he hit the floor face first, but he also was bleeding freely out of every orifice in his skull and probably would remain in a brain coma for far longer than this entire building was likely to remain standing. Fortunes of war, buddy... your wizard friends have done this (and far worse) to pals of mine, and one of them, Bel, ought to be on the other side of that last sealed doorway! Down the office hallway past the late Captain's duty desk, I ran into rather more soldiers than I wouldn't have preferred to have dealt with, or at least I'd have preferred to deal with them one at a time. Sorry, melon charming works great on a one-to-one basis, but sucks as an area effect spell. In times of great trouble, when nearly a dozen people are drawing sidearms or reaching for assault rifles, it is best to stick with what you know and do what you do best. In this instance, and nearly without any particular conscious thought, I raised up a nicely large storm of fire and in a matter of moments made sure that every little bit of organic life in the next three rooms had been sterilized with sheets of magical flame. Mold, mildew and roaches wouldn't bother anyone down here for a very long time, that was for certain! With this limited military threat now removed, it was time to get that last steel security door out of my way and I was now much too annoyed and worked up to let Miranda deal with it. I didn't even bother to unlock her cuffs with the key, I just directed a pinprick of flame to enter the locks and they immediately melted her hands free. I did much more gently remove the hood and collar, freeing the girl so that she could now take her first looks around her and size up the situation while I gave her some quick orders. "Shield yourself 100% and stick to my shadow and help me look out for Bel once I blow that last door off of its hinges. If I say 'Oh Shit!' you run... right back to here if you can manage it and then start putting your devious feminine mind to a means of teleporting yourself up out of about half a mile of solid rock. If the worst happens, listen to Sean and obey him without question... unless he's whimpering 'Oh Shit!' too. In that case, I would make urgent contingency plans to ensure that they won't take you alive after they're done with me! Unless you want a long personal tour of the breeding pit as well." The look on my face convinced her that I wasn't joking. I had a very, very bad feeling about what might be secured behind this door leading to the breeding pit. The worst part was that due to my expertise in banishment rituals, I had a pretty good idea about the sort of really nasty visitors that were capable of, and had the inclination... to biologically mate with human females. Sure, some of their females get their own sort of fun on occasion too, like the Succubus I'd burned down part of Austin to get rid of once, but they're a distinct minority. Or so I hope! Mars, and some other really dark nasty corners of the multi-verse, does wants women... and it was time to bring this little breeding program to an end! *************** I slightly miscalculated my initial fire blast and instead of blowing the door off of its hinges I just carved a nice round smoking and glowing hole in metal that I could easily step right through. Adequate, but not as intimidating as I had hoped. Inside here somewhere, there were wizards and I was ready to punish them for being extremely naughty and they didn't disappoint me by running away for help. That's one of the few good things about Deseret zealots, they're not usually the sort to hide and malinger for while thinking up some nasty clever plan to foil your assault or plot revenge, five minutes or five years from now. Instead, instead they're pretty predictable - pure 'scream and leap' as one military mage described their behavior to me once. There were four of them, two decent Adept-level magicians and two extremely competent wizards who were highly skilled in all of the dark arts of arcane battle magic. They immediately charged right towards me casting their own spells of black unholy fire and for a moment gave my shields all of the exercise they could handle. While they were the masters of dark flame, they could not hope to withstand more than a moment of mine. It was purer in substance, and much, much more powerful than their shields. The weak burned into cinder nearly immediately and the strong fought a brief delaying battle against my raging inferno until they in turn were consumed by the magical embodiment of my implacable wrath. Miranda, once the smoke began to clear, shouted out that she could see Bel, locked inside some clear glass or crystal holding cell, naked and alone, but apparently unharmed. I looked over towards where Miranda was pointing and could see that she in turn had now seen us, and she was jumping and shouting with joy... and some extreme annoyance of her own. Around her I could see numerous other holding cells containing maybe half a dozen or so other naked captives, equally now hopeful for rescue, but clearly a bit worse off for wear. I didn't need to hear Sean's loud voice now shouting 'Oh Shit!" to recognize serious trouble when I saw it. If anything the fear that I felt now was at least as terrible as the wave of dragon-fear we had faced in that Rockford, Illinois cellar basement. I didn't have a clue just what that hulking creature was, but it was pure evil personified... all nine or ten feet tall of it! Miranda didn't need to be told twice to run like hell back to the other guard rooms and I'm entirely quite positive that Sean skedaddled right along after her, leaving me now alone! Other than being gargantuanly huge, the creature possessed a skin so dark and rather reflective of the flames around us that it seemed at first to be made of obsidian, but it had flesh and thus it was probably mortal... and it had a massively huge swinging cock that would probably frighten a whale. Allegedly, women prefer well-endowed male partners, but this was ridiculous... and probably medically hazardous to take internally! This I take it, was the resident bad-ass visitor and primary designated sperm donor. No wonder most of the other captive women didn't look too happy, or very healthy either! That massive member was frankly rather excessive for the assigned duties, and possibly even life (and internal organ) threatening. Well, I was going to give that big prick some major crotch burn! Fire, and lots of it, did two just things.... jack and shit. The monster even had the nerve to laugh at me. I laughed back when his own inferno of daemonic fire did blast right through my shields as if they weren't even there, but except for more irreparable suit damage, I more or less survived that one... and the next, but I had some serious doubts about facing a third... or a thirtieth one! The mundane fire I could resist, but the taint of negative energy that accompanied it was wrecking havoc on my best defenses. It possessed just as much magical power as I and it had me in magnitude of volume and size! Next I tried creating a massive earth wall to wrap up the sucker tight, but he bashed through it like it was wet cardboard. Sinking him down in a bottomless crater to the very center of the earth didn't work either. I created the hole but it filled itself in just as fast as I dug. The creature in fact handled earth magic better and smoother... and more powerfully than I did! Finding and retrieving the distant Air and Water Leys would take too long, minutes I didn't have. This giant was taking everything I could throw at him without even blinking. Laughing boy, Chuckles, as I now decided to call him, was already ahead on points and about to demonstrate who the real magician was down here in this abyss of hell! I brought my shields up just in time to be nearly splattered by the strongest negative energy bolt of dark spirit my excessive imagination could even contemplate. It hurt worse than both any physical blow or mental nightmare I'd ever had, and I trusted to my feet rather than my shield when he immediate launched another similar blast at me that I just barely dodged. The next blast pulverized my former hiding place, but just for a moment the fiend had lost track of me, which gave me time to slightly clear my head out of its panic current mode and begin to plan an organized counter-attack. Obviously a battle of ranged attacks was not going to work. That left either running like hell too or getting up-close and personal with it. It was naked, and with a pair of basketball sized testicles that ought to be a vulnerable area if forcefully attacked. Air ordinarily would do the trick, but I couldn't get my hands upon it fast enough to use it. Chuckles could just move as fast as he was tall and he was now heading my way! The beast was immune to fire and had at least comparable skills as I did with earth... but at a distance. But, if I could harness an unhealthy amount of earth force into a directly pinpoint focused physical strike. That might work! I had taken elementary martial arts self-defense classes long ago and knew how to do a 'roll into a flying kick', and after taking a quick moment of concentration I channeled all of the earth power that I could muster into my hands, and with a scream and leap of my own, I launched a physical attack aimed at the center of giant's right testicle. Since I was badly out of practice, the leap stumbled its way into becoming an awkward standing thrust and I socked the holy bejesus out of his left gonad instead. Not perfect, but a decent start. The only problem was the blow hurt my fist more than his family jewels! Then, to add serious injury to insult, his rapid physical counter-attack would have bludgeoned my bones into flour if my weak half-powered shield hadn't at least slowed the first blow down. The second blow didn't nail me quite directly or as solidly, but it still had enough raw force to send flying across the room and I slammed shieldless against the far stone wall only just slightly more gently than the crushing air blow I'd delivered to the treasonous FMBR wizards Desmond and Norman back at the Chicago gun factory. The rib or two I'd already cracked earlier from silver bullet gunfire at the pyramid, probably now shattered with the impact, along with a few of their closest bone friends and relatives. I hurt bad; worse than anything I could previously remember in any of younger misadventures... even that Shadow Stalker, an inhuman killing machine, hadn't damaged me either so badly and extensively. The damned bastard just stood there and laughed at me. Now I had Chuckles right where I wanted him --nice and over-confident! The problem was that I'd about had it and just about all of the fight had been knocked out of me. Even standing up was going to be a miraculous achievement of willpower, and a physical battle (or running) was now quite out of the question. Worse, I couldn't get a shield up to save my life... literally. There was no time for any protection wards either, not even a basic circle drawn with my own blood. That was another problem; I now seemed to be leaking from just about everywhere! In desperation, I threw my bag of salt at him and he laughed that off too. I guess his body wasn't much like a slug or snail anyway and he wasn't innately magic enough anymore to be vulnerable to that substance. Standing over me the gleeful bastard had the nerve to taunt me and laugh yet some more. At least he wasn't going to add me to his harem for his sexual amusement... I really don't think I'd have enjoyed that at all! Instead he just chuckled some more and slowly meandered over towards me to finish the job. In just a moment he was going squash me with a foot or punch my skull a quarter mile through the stone floor... and there wasn't a single thing I could do about it! I couldn't even sense, let alone use any of the ample power around me, not that a weak shield or another feeble earth force strike or firebolt would accomplish a damn thing, other than as a last final act of defiance. This time my goose was cooked and I didn't have to wait long for the final blow to come! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13 **************** CHAPTER THIRTEEN They say that in the nanosecond or so before death, your entire life flashes before your eyes, probably so that you can panic and be seriously concerned right from the start of your journey into the afterlife that you've fucked up royally from start to finish and shouldn't be trusted with another rebirth into life, let alone be granted white robes, a halo and harp for the rest of eternity. Well it didn't happen to me... probably because I was so already so brain dizzy with all of my internal emergency alarm circuits blinking red that it couldn't spare the time to dissect thirty years of screw ups into a one or two second summary. I thought for sure that the ten foot creature was going to just merely squash me with a foot, or maybe just jump up and down on top of me for awhile, but Chuckles was still in fine humor and now her thought he was probably letting me off much too easy by killing me right away. In our less than five minute duel I hadn't shown that I couldn't even momentarily inconvenience it, let alone actually hurt it! If this had been a professional boxing match, the referee would have rung the bell on me long ago. The bastard seemed to be completely immune to anything I could cast at it and my desperation physical attack on its sort-of rubbery skin had pretty much ignored that magically enhanced force too. His own physical assault had in return left me rather mangled and had knocked my my eyes quite out of focus. Even the notion of trying to crawl away was well beyond my my currently capabilities. Under the circumstances, I was willing to declare the bout a tie. Now the giant walking turd was standing over me laughing. No, he wasn't going to finish me off quickly. He was enjoying himself far too much, and he was going to make Aunt Millie's favorite (and only) nephew plead for death long before it would ever finally come. I might be a righteous asshole sometimes, but I just fight to win and never draw out a fight for my personal amusement or any sadistic notion of prolonging my opponent's agony, but then again I do have some principles. This nasty huge dark skinned visitor apparently didn't... but then again, almost none of them did. That's why the wizards of virtually all of the civilized worlds don't like any visitors much, and really stomp down upon renegade bastards that summon these assholes. Deseret has never given a shit about playing by the rules anyway, and if breeding pits like this one turned out to be common-place around here, some GWA wizards back home were going to go postal upon reading my report... assuming I lived long enough to write it. Chuckles was just winding down his laughing exercise for the day, and was now pondering what to do to me next when Sean finally decided to make a reappearance. The best I could tell, the little traitor had taken off with Miranda when my jolly huge playmate first appeared. Frankly, it was a bit late for advice now -- I really would have preferred having his help earlier. At the moment I was pretty much out for the count and I didn't think I could even find even a thimbleful of magic now, let alone channel even a drop of it. I'd already hit this guy with my best stuff and it didn't even singe his crotch hair. "Aye, lad. This is one of their masters, a dark lord of darkness he is from that terrible realm that you sealed the other portal to earlier. This body is not his own but a hybrid construct made of matter from both his world and yet ours. No, your powers were not great enough or of the right sort to defeat him, but now you've still got one last chance... but only for a moment! Hurry! Reach for the silver ammo balls in your pocket and focus upon them; be swift, lad!" But I couldn't. For the moment I could only feely the power around me smirking, and dancing like a butterfly just out of my reach, evading my feeble attempts to channel and use it. "No, not that way, feel inside yourself... focus on your arm. Upon the bracer that melded to your arm during the fire in the theater. Yes, there! Let that power flow of its own now around your fingers and the silver and manipulate it -- let it flow through them and melt, not molten or hot but soft and cool, flowing like quicksilver, lad... let them flow!" Manipulation. It's a tricky skill that not a lot of magicians have much aptitude for, but I had just enough of a knack for it that I mention it upon my business card. Yeah... that's me showing off again. It's flashy, but a really functionally limited sort of magic that's better for parlor tricks than 'save-your-ass' techniques. I only learned it because it nicely complimented Arc-Tec fabrication, to more easily mold or sculpt the design of an artifice -- helping to turn form into a more aesthetically pleasing design... and thus improved function. In a nutshell, this is the art of manipulating or subtly altering a non-organic material's form or appearance. A wizard with a genius for manipulation can turn a rock into a coffee cup (the manipulated item must always retain an equal mass) but no one can do the same trick with organics, such as to turn a prince into a frog. As far as I know it can't be done. In this case I think I understood what Sean wanted me to do... and like an idiot, I should have thought of it earlier. Note to self, I was going to make myself one heck of a set of silver brass knuckles the next time I had a quiet week or two! I should have figured this out earlier! The skin of this hybrid creature was largely immune to the magic of this world but silver, being the innately magical substance it was, should be able to penetrate it. Probably the Thompson gun loaded with silver bullets wouldn't have hurt it much either, but it might have been distracting and I might have gotten lucky with a well coordinated attack. With the silver now beginning to coat my hand like a cooly flexible glove I could now almost feel the golden bracer below the skin of my right arm 'click' and connect to it and I could feel its internal power flow now up into the metal. Weird... very tingly and peculiar, but it would do. The bracer, an unknown, unidentified piece of pre-Columbia Inca magical art had melted into my arm, or rather it had grafted itself onto me internally in the great searing heat of my battle against the fire god. It was stuck on for good, fused underneath the skin of my arm. I'd pretty much ignored the thing, really assuming that it was just a big stupid hunk of 'Hamburger Helper', or Artifact-level magic that helped to boost your own inate abilities, and nothing more. Now I wasn't quite so sure. Even looking at the bare skin it was hard to tell that the bigger looking freckles were really just sub-dermal traces of the Greater Arcana Stones that powered it, or other parts of the Arc-Tec circuitry. I'd traded a lot of labor time for just a couple of the stones and these were definitely factory seconds, right out of the scratch and dent surplus pile. Buying a single 'good' one would have cost me more than I could make in a year, and then I'd have to stand in line to find anyone to sell me one. Somehow, this 'flawed' device had now merged with me and probably contributed to my augmented powers. I wondered now if Sean had tweaked or helped to arrange this accident in some way, but that was a question for later. "That's the way!" Sean whispered inside my head. "Now wait to strike... he'll want to hold you close, to watch your eyes at the moment when he kills you slowly, to savor it. You'll only have one chance to strike first, so you must wait to take it. Keep your hand in your pocket until then, to hide it and focus every ounce of magic you can muster to flow into the silver when you strike." Actually, I had no trouble restraining my attack for another moment or two. When Chuckles grabbed the mangled front of my suit to pick me up, my body suddenly wanted to report a rather long listing of broken and shattered bones, twisted and torn muscles and more back problems than a convention hall full of chiropractors could have handled. I nearly blacked out with the pain as he used two hands to pick me up off of the floor and hold me up for a final bit of taunting. Once the double and triple vision cleared, the pain dulled again for a moment and my focus became a bit sharper and I thought I could channel magic once again. Not a lot at the moment, but some... and for what I needed to do next, some would probably be enough. Another moment later, some started to turn into a bit, and right as Chuckles decided he pull me towards him so that he could bite off my head like a chicken, the internal power faucet began to turn itself more wide open and by the time I heard Sean yelling at me to strike, I had an adequate bunch of power stored up in my hand. Glowing bright, my hand quite burned its way out of my pocket and it didn't have far to reach, to thrust right into the center of the creature's chest. "Hard!" Sean yelled, and rather audibly. "Deep! Deeper! Keep the palm flat and thrust hard straight into its heart!" I supposed I shouldn't have been surprised at all when my liquid silver covered fingers and hand quite penetrated and burst through the creature's tough rubbery skin. The silver alone nearly did the trick but the extra magical force helped immeasurably. Inside, the creature' flesh was quite soft and almost more like a gelatinous soft mass rather than solid meat and bone. My silver hand glowed strong as it continued to enter, turning the soft gelatinous flesh black, destroying it to smoke and ash powder as I touched it. He thrashed for a moment trying to claw me off of him, but the agony made his arms randomly spasm and his long powerful claws could no longer grasp or hold me. But when my fingers touched its pulsing and burning heart, I knew I'd won. Chuckles had been caught quite by surprise by my silver handed desperate assault and howled with insurmountable agony the moment my fingers pierced through his rubbery outer skin. He'd never known this sort of pain before and seemed helpless to resist me. The second my index finger touched his heart he collapsed to the floor quite boneless, alive but inanimate, no longer in control of his hybrid body or able to resist me at all. Now it would be his eyes that powerlessly watched mine in terror! With my hands upon the prize, I grabbed the black pulsing heart and in triumph I ripped it out from his chest. What I did next would probably disturb my dreams for the rest of my life. Slowly, as if in a trance, my silver brightly glowing hand lifted that black smoking daemonic heart up to my mouth and I bit into it. "Yes..." Sean gleefully chirped with intense excitement. "Do it! Bite into it! Now! Hurry, while it still has the full power of the hybrid inside it! Eat it all... all of it! You must... especially if you want to have the strength to stand, let alone find the strength to fight the rest of the wizards and close that portal! You have to! That is our task!" Our task? Suddenly I had a very terrible feeling that nothing that had happened to me lately had been at all random. When I could stand and walk again... my little buddy and I were going to have a rather long important conversation! Actually, from the moment my teeth bit into that huge grapefruit sized black heart, I began to fill with power... and lots of it! After I took few bites I suddenly realized that I was standing up without a bit of physical pain as my body burned, inside and out. The burning pain was like the worst flu sickness I'd ever had, with my limbs all crackling and shaking, but I was healing too! Broken and shattered bones were now merging back together and my torn muscles were knitted themselves and tingled with strength that they'd never known! I'd never been athletic, sucking in most school sports back in the day, but now I felt ready to rip out the limbs from every Deseret soldier or magician I faced and bludgeon them to death with their own arms and legs... and then go run a marathon! The worst part about absorbing a demi-god level of the dark magical energy that had been filtered into Chuckle's semi-mortal body, and now into to mine... is that you feel like somehow someone has managed to pour a full keg of beer into a one-pint glass without spilling it. I was now hyper-alert and surging with an adrenaline or hyper-caffeinated buzz and wanted to go kill some Deseret folks. No, not just kill... I wanted... needed, to make them all pay. They needed to burn! And the Zyphyr was coming to give it to them! I was going to be their burninator and punish them all for everything that they had done to me, to Janice and of course to Bel! I wasn't 'me' anymore, or rather 'Zac the pyromaniac screwup' had escaped from the internal prison I had been trying to confine him into and now he seemed to be the one back in charge of my hyper-stimulated body once again. I surged with aggressive malevolent power and wanted everyone and everything around to pay for the anger and rage that I now felt. This was the 'old Zac', who acted before thinking... and now he was back, angry, and filled with the stolen powers of one of the mightiest aliens I could even imagine! The smallest remaining bit of the new smarter and wiser Zak was helplessly screaming inside of my head, watching helplessly as my immortally powered body turned and momentarily considered the nearby figure of Miranda, and then unable to distinguish friend from foe in its madness, began to summon fire to obliterate her! *************** I'll never know how much of the last part of that battle that Miranda saw. I'd assumed she'd run in terror back to the front guard area, but when I finally looked up in my utter initial madness I saw her standing there with a blank face next to me. Her eyes were steady and focused and she wasn't looking at me in horror and screaming her lungs out. In fact she was way calmer than I would have been under the exact same circumstance. I was more than crazy enough at that moment to burn her up too, until she smiled and took my non-glowing left hand. I wouldn't say I became completely sane again... but I now remembered that the people I loved and cared about were around me and my anger became a little better focused from that moment on. Not much granted, but just enough so that my mind once again had a bit of regulatory oversight over my body again. "Bel needs us now! We need to rescue the other women too, and fast, I think company is already starting to beat on the main door." She quietly and calmly stated. Too calmly for all the horrors she must have witnessed. Perhaps Sean was mentally holding her hand as well... no teen girl was capable of keeping their emotions under that much control after seeing what had occurred in the breeding pit. She squeezed my left hand again tighter and I tried to relax and let out a long exhale, and with it I purged another fractional bit of my irrational rage and anger. I needed to be able to think, to plan... to handle the next battle that I knew would be coming soon and then get the women out of this hell pit and to safety. ****************** Bel, other than being naked, scared half out of her mind and utterly powerless from some potent cocktail of drugs she'd been given, looked to be alright and was ecstatic that we'd found her and come to rescue her. She'd seen most of the battle with Chuckles from a distance and had been quite positive that I'd been killed, so despite seeing me again alive and healthy (far too healthy actually), her nerves were quite a wreck. Miranda found her a blanket but otherwise there were no other clothes to be found. The other five women rescued from their transparent cells weren't quite in as good mental shape but they were all relatively herd-able and mobile, if done firmly and slowly. Bel started to have her long overdue mental collapse, now that she'd been rescued, but Miranda, once again unusually emotionally anchored, was having none of it. She slapped her adult friend and mentor twice, and fairly hard, and then looked her hard into the eyes. "Look! It's been a rough night for everyone... but get over it, as Zak would say!" The girl sharply announced to Bel and to the small collection of blanket wrapped rescuees. We got down here safely enough but we're all going to have to now fight our way out against a lot of very angry people. There is no time to complain or go 'Boo-hoo', so please postpone your nervous breakdowns until we're all out of here, alive and safe. Bel, they may have drained your powers but not your brains... stay with me and help get the others upstairs to safety. Zak has things that he needs to do now and he needs to know that we're out of the way and safe. Can you do this for us?" Bel nodded with a few tears in her eyes and Miranda gave her a quick comforting hug. We weren't out of the woods by a long shot yet, but I had two of my best helpers by my side and ready to rally round me any way that they could. For now, I needed them safe and out of semi-insane 'burnination' range, in case I lost mental control once again. I think I started to try and explain what I'd need to do next but Sean beat me to it. Both women suddenly nodded their heads and said 'Ok' and then they immediately began to herd everyone off to the furthest-most prisoner cell in the room. Those crystalline clear cell walls and ceilings seemed to be extremely magic resistant and my power level 11 fireballs hadn't even singed them earlier. Now, my power knob went up to at least twelve, if not twenty-two, and taking out the generator down at the other end of the pit was going to cause an awful lot of collateral damage. Since Sean seemed to be choreographing this particular part of the enterprise, I waited a few moments for the girls to give him the notice that they were as safe and secure as was possible for the moment and then let him give me the starting bell for this next round of the mayhem. I could hear loud sounds and indication of magicians on the other side of the big steel security door leading here to the pit, but I didn't feel particularly creative at the moment. Five, ten or even twenty mid-level wizards were outside now trying to force their way in, and I was glad the paranoid dweebs who built this place had protected their dungeons against exactly that sort of thing, but sooner or later they'd break their way in. Instead, I thought it would be a lot more fun I just blew my way out. Sure I could have opened it easily from this end, but I hadn't destroyed anything in several minutes now and I was still steaming mad that Chuckles had kicked my ass. The magical overload from eating that atomic-heart snack chockfull of a dozen blends of native, alien and just plain weird magic also was making me a little over-excited and trigger happy. When dark alien magic turns you into a near god-sized hammer, every little problem in the world just becomes another nail, and it was definitely hammer time now! *************** From my angle of view, the huge magically protected steel door didn't so much go flying off of the hinges as just completely disintegrate into a couple of thousand red-hot bits of metal and super-heated magical plasma and this burning cloud just evaporated most of the Deseret magicians and soldiers that were trying to force their way into find me. I never even managed to catch a glimpse of them so I don't know if the vaporized door toasted ten or twenty of them in total. A few smoking and twitching corpses towards the back about thirty to forty feet further behind the doorway hinted that the front ranks might have been a bit crowded. This was just the emergency response team. The big boys would be along soon but I was not particularly inclined to have a seat and wait for them. If they were late for the big dance that wasn't my problem! Besides, smashing up a few more things and shutting down that dark energy generation portal would help me take some more of the edge off my anger for a bit, while I waited for them. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13 The doorway down the forbidden right hand corridor that lead to their magical power generation facility was now unguarded. I guess I'd smoked those two clowns here, down by the door to the Pit. Like the other door, this one was well shielded and protected against unfriendly magical entry, but I was pretty much too angry to care. I stepped up to about ten feet away from it, double-checked that my shields were still powered up to eleven, and then I gathered up a metric crapload of raw power and chucked it at the door. For a moment I thought that it would resist my efforts, but slowly as the door burned with magical flame it began to just puddle down onto the stone hallway floor with little if any backsplash or forward penetration. I didn't care... they'd grabbed Bel and put her into a breeding colony with a monster who had a cock about the size and thickness of my arm. Now I was going to show them some real penetration! Behind the molten wreckage in the hallway were about a dozen or so wizards and probably pretty competent ones. Close to top shelf talent who spent their time controlling the various magical portals, energy fields and converters. Engineering types who probably never had had a decent fuck in their lives. Karmic justice that they were right next door to the prison area full of naked babes... all look and no touch for them! Since I wasn't in any sort of chivalrous mood, I just roasted them and didn't bother teasing them by showing them how badly outclassed they were. My fire (and balls) were bigger, and they weren't going to live long enough to tell any flattering stories about me anyway. A few more latecomers attempted to vaguely inconvenience my bold advance into their private magical playground, but this was piffle... sending boys to do a man's job. Before they could even blink they were scorched toast, leaving nothing but smoking boots and sets of warm silver insignia rank stars to clatter and cool upon the stone. I was accumulating a collection of these, tokens of dead Deseret wizards, their noble ruling class. Each and every one an essential cog of their perverted religion and ruling bureaucracy. I'd add this nice collection of insignia, battle stars of my minor victories, I'd decided, to my growing collection... the BMA folks back home just wouldn't believe my story already without a bit of hard evidence and these silver rank tokens were as hard as magical evidence gets. No one had ever taken a Deseret magician prisoner... it magically couldn't be done, but I'd bet that the GWA had a huge Imperial reward for the creative guy or gal that could arrange that miracle! Unfortunately, it would be today. One last robed figure now stood in my way once I reached the main portal room. Arc-Tec equipment was everywhere but the really big show was a huge crystalline sphere where about two dozen dramatically different sorts of portals of various light and dark energy fields merged and twisted themselves into a rather excessively powerful electrical generator. This would blow up real good, I decided... but first the Great-Lord Jamil, Wizard of the Second Circle wanted a few moments of my attention. He began the obligatory insults and taunting by giving me a little hissed speech in the Deseret priestly tongue, which borrows a lot from classical Aztec. But since I didn't understand a word of it, I frankly didn't care and just gave him a big shit eating smile. I'd gotten the jist of the message by the way he smiled at me, showing all of his well-sharpened teeth that had each been filed to a point. A mark of the highest Deseret nobility. He was just giving the usual warning that most bad guys give: 'You will know pain, then you will know fear, and then you will die!' More or less. Additional comments about one's mother were optional. I had better material than that! I'd kicked his assistant' ass back at the farmhouse, a very capable sorceress of the Third Circle, and I thought mentioning this right of the bat would get the taunting portion of the magician's Code Duelo off to a nice start. Not that the Deseret assholes ever played by the rules, unless it gave them an advantage. "Your stupid bitch back at Probert's farmhouse got her half-naked scrawny ass smoked fast. I hope you won't miss her too much... but I doubt if she could fuck any better than she could fight!" He blinked at that... score one point for the Zyphyr! "Her skills in that sphere were not exceptional either, I must admit, but she did have her uses... and just like your particular friend, she did have a fondness for big black cock." Nice try, but at least it was in understandable English. My rescue had been just in time and Bel hadn't had a ride on Chuckle's big black stallion yet. Zero points awarded. "Your big friend just got done taking it in the ass before I finished with him and I think he preferred it to the imported fluff you've been feeding him lately. Your so-called breeding program was going to create a race of wimpy fat sissy-boys and whiny oversized bitches with more aptitude for pounding down pizza than pricks... sorry to say, but all on their very own the US population has already beat you to this feat. I frankly wouldn't have bothered... unless you rather liked having his prick splitting your ass, or did his naughty smoky seed in your mouth make your tummy go all tingly?" Nicely done! Three+ points for me, and game and match! Inter-species sex is always a ripe topic for the creative insult monger, and I was pretty sure this would jerk his chain, and it did. The Great Lord got his frilly panties in a bunch and instantly and with great smoothness chucked off a nasty dark spirit bolt that bent and almost broke my shield. Granted, I didn't have all of my will embued into it for the moment, but it was a nasty unexpected shock. I grit my teeth and released a bit more of my anger and fury. It just isn't fair! The 'good-guys' just can't use spirit that way! Unless you want to rip your soul into shreds with the backlash, we can only use it for fluffy-bunny purposes like healing and working with nature -- and very definitely not act against it! Alright, so this poptart probably didn't have a soul... I'm sure he was required to turn it in to teacher on the first day of magician kindergarten, but it still must have been causing him internal agony to pervert spirit that way! Now it was my turn and just on principle I gave him a force-12 firebolt. I still needed to burn off (literally) a little more rage before I felt like getting even remotely subtle. His shields held as well, but his cute pointy shoes with the darling little curl right at the top were starting to smoke with fire. He tried to pretend I hadn't given him the good-ole hot foot and followed by with another massive dark-spirit bolt, but this time I was expecting it and I held out my still silver coated hand to block it, and that worked fabulously. For my second offensive spell I decided to give him a change-up, and I tried my well-rehearsed Melon Charm on him. It didn't work, but it confused him. I guessed he hadn't seen that spell since middle-school, but he knew of it also, because he turned right around and tried to slap it on me! Sloppy and rusty and easily dispelled, but I gave him points for cleverness. My turn again. I was pretty sure that he was looking for the heater once more, so I tried a different change-up with some earth magic this time. The floor was too naturally shielded, from having to support the magical pressure of all of the high grade Arc-Tec that was channeling the portal energy to either break up much or dig the bastard a nice hole to bury him into. Still the hailstorm of small rocks was denting his shield pretty decently and some smaller stuff pinged him just enough to rattle him a bit more. A distracted magician is often soon a dead magician! Annoyed, and more than a bit concerned, he gave me his strike-out pitch... his best 'this fucker has got to die now!' spell, and it was a pretty good one. Dark spirit (of course) but with a sharp horizontal spinning rotation just like an electrical power drill. Hitting a shield the rotating flows of the magic weave would probably burrow right through most shields with hardly a pause, but I stepped up again and blocked it with my silvered palm and we now played the old schoolyard game of will against will. My silver hand just glowed brighter and his dark energy couldn't penetrate it and soon I was forcing his own powers against him, further weakening his shields and clearly demonstrating my will was superior. His best punch blocked, my foe was taking his own advice now. He was in pain and he now knew fear! Time for him to shut up, go away and just die. For this feat I decided to reply upon the old boxer's trick for when a foe is cornered on the ropes and already defeated inside his own head. The old jab-jab-knockout punch routine. First, fire. With my right hand still holding off his weakening dark spirit flow, I used my left to now deliver a tightly focused bolt of fire, to make him concentrate and tighten his weakening shield. Next, with the same hand, I concentrated upon another more general battering with rocks. The floor was a bit more weakened now and I'd dug out a bit of a pit in-between us for loose stuff to throw at him. This made him have to suddenly spread out his shields widely again and this effort was going to soon exhaust him. Now, if I'd had any bit of Air Ley at all to work with, or even some water, I'd have gone for the quick rapid and clean kill, probably with a needle thin blade of air penetrating to his vitals, but I couldn't get my hands on either of these quickly enough here. Instead, I began to focus upon manipulating some of my liquid silver to return to its former shape, the 1cm round silver slugs, and then using spirit (air would have been much better) I suddenly repulsed the reformed handful of #0000 'quad-ought' sized shot from my hand towards my battered opponent, and nearly at the speed that a shotgun would have fired them... but the result was just about the same. It wasn't a perfect clean kill, but it was close enough. The silver passed effortless through his weakened protections as if they weren't there at all and about a third of the silver projectiles struck home, albeit in mostly in non-lethal locations. That's the drawback of a scattergun sort of spell... but more than potent enough to do the job. I made a note to practice this spell some more... a lot more, at the local target range once I got my ass safely back home! Asshole tried to mutter a necromantic death-curse against me but I torched him into ashes before he was even half finished. Hopefully. At least I didn't feel anything stick. Necromancy is a nasty and vicious sphere of magic; it's powerful, no mistake about it... but it's tricky to use and it nearly always takes more time than you've got in a crisis situation. Preparing a trap = it's deadly; nailing a foe when your pumper is already squirting blood everywhere = not so deadly. His large two-star pips on his robe collar didn't fry with the rest of him and I picked them up as another souvenir. I doubted another mage in the entire GWA had an identical set won in battle. There are only eight mages in all of Deseret (allegedly) more powerful than this bastard. These are the members of the First Circle (rumored to be the seven most powerful and amoral wizards) and the big Cheeto himself, The Prophet. I could settle very nicely for never meeting any more of those ass-clowns for the rest of my life! ************** Shutting down this rather interesting constructed bit of Arc-Tec was actually a lot easier than the effort had been to implode the portal in the basement of the diplomatic residence. Really, the way this monstrous bit of electrical engineering had been constructed, the trick had been to not let the merged matrixes of various and sometimes contradictory magic get overpowered, resulting in a complete magical meltdown. Block just one of the positive energy fields, like one of the 'normal' domestic earth ones and its corresponding alien negative energy would soon knock everything else out of balance and alignment. It was brilliant work, creating a vast energy source probably bigger anything around other than Hoover Dam, and a heck of a lot smaller... and a whole lot more explosive if a chain-reaction meltdown was to occur! I easily shut down two of the domestic power sources and Sean assured me that the resulting implosion of the remaining portals and the massive Arc-Tec generator would be massive and would annihilate easily the foreign negative energy ones, causing a nice little bit of destructive blowback up the line to their homes. The feeling on one of these portals was identical in feel to the one I'd destroyed in Chicago. One portal could be just random visitor trouble, but two identical portals indicated a major problem. Invasion? Extensive deliberate cooperation with Deseret? Maybe, or even probably. This was above my pay-grade! "Not quite, lad." Sean giggled. "Now you know the game... and we're going to be busy for awhile until the very last hive is destroyed! It's more important than you know!" There he went again with the 'we' bit! I really didn't at all like the way he said this. Someday soon, when our asses were safely home, me and my little scheming secretive buddy and I were going to have a little chat... and I was going to look up the most extreme and potent banishment spell in the books just in case I didn't like his answers! Suddenly, the idea of a quiet pig farm to ranch bacon for the alien gourmets in the multi-verse didn't sound quite so bad after all! "Aye, we'll have that wee little chat latter, but now the fields are already out of alignment and an overload and meltdown is in progress and can't be stopped. If were you, I'd have the lasses well gone safe and sound, and by at least twenty miles in the next hour! So get running!" He didn't have to tell me twice! I'd burned off just enough stolen hybrid-magical energy to take the insane edge off of my madness and I soon found Bel and Miranda, along with the other five rescued women, waiting for me at the elevator. I pushed the button to summon it, and it arrived just a few moments later already full of soldiers. They burned nicely and their smoldering ashes didn't disturb or appall any of the ladies one little bit. I kicked out the worst of the smoldering bits of the fuckwads from the elevator and we took it straight up to the main level. A couple of times we stopped on intermediate floors and various wizards, officers, soldiers and researchers helped me to productively channel out a bit more frustration, often leaving entire subterranean floors now entirely on fire as we resumed our trip back up to the main facility. Nicely done, but the whole place was going to go sky-high in less than an hour anyway so my extra contributions weren't really all that necessary. Sadly there was only one person at receptionist duty when we at last arrived back stairs, the poor military officer who had ignored me earlier on the way down. This time I completely had his attention. He was conditioned of course to fight to the death so I off-handedly set him and his desk on fire. He was never going to be cold ever again... and I was going to start dreaming about burning people in my sleep. I let Miranda ghelp me with the return directions as she wasn't confused at all with the path we'd taken in, despite the fact that I'd had a hood over her eyes. She'd shout, "Thirty paces then left!" and I'd look quickly to the right to fill all of our pursuit paths with flame to keep the hallways clear. I had a lot of frightened women behind me that needed protection and couldn't afford to allow the retreating bastards to get in a lucky gunshot. Miranda took a ten second break when we arrived back at the guard room to reacquire her silver loaded Tommy gun, full to bursting with a round magazine of exactly a hundred rounds and pointedly ignored the hints Bel gave her to pony over the machine gun to a grownup. I even let her use it! I needed two minutes to retrieve and don my old clothes and right when I was almost dressed a due of patrol magicians came down our the hallway in hot pursuit. They got their shields up but Miranda gunned them right down with two smooth bursts. Out in the parking lot another trio of minor magicians immediately spotted us and fired off various spells that I could have safely ignored if I wasn't hauling alone a troop of civilians that was currently straggling a bit too far behind me to be safe. I kept my shield up in front of us to let them catch up and let Miranda play a bit with her Chicago typewriter. She nailed one, winged another one, and the third lackwit ran off to find reinforcements. Ordinarily, at this point I'd have looked over the fine array of Deseret military vehicles and picked a nice VIP one styled for comfort and was hopefully bullet-proof, but I had a nastier chariot already in mind. Still, in the interest of public safety (ours) I didn't want any of these vehicles ever going anywhere, ever again. It was only sauce for the goose that one of these nice cars already featured Bel's old treasonous boss trying to charm open one of the locked doors. Clearly Bel had not taught him that unlocking trick. "Bel, do you really need that fucktard alive? I suppose you can take him with us if we absolutely need him for a live party-favor?" I groaned, but in a loud stage voice sort of whine, meant to carry. Mason Probert already looked bug-eyed, and like a rat was trying to find a way out of this sinking ship. "Unfortunately, that would be really helpful. No one is going to believe even half of our written or oral reports, even given under truth-charm. Just a little corroborative evidence might come handy." She admitted, and I had to at least partially agree. A bit too much of this whole entire operation had been seen by our eyes only, and our word against theirs. So be it. The fat prick tried to run but I melon'd him... and gently. Sure his ears were bleeding but he'd live to stand trial and sing like a songbird. He was going to hang, no doubts about it... and if he didn't want a short rope he'd give up any incidental higher-ups who knew about the smuggling operations... and overt magical aid to Deseret. Oh, I hoped so! I couldn't wait to get back home to Texas! ************** Naturally the vehicle I wanted for this fine bright and early morning was the prototype of the BattleCar. I wanted to travel in style and let a few of my ladies release a bit of their own pent-up frustration in the process! But to get back there I needed to blast through three barbed wire fences and deal with about a company sized force of soldiers that were now guarding the wide-open pavement area outside the security zone. About a dozen of the remaining wizards had joined and together they hoped to put up a wall of burning fire and flying silver to stop our escape. Fat chance! They knew that we were coming, but I could see them before they could see me and that made all of the difference in the world. I couldn't afford another major earthquake, at least just yet, but a sky full of burning raining fire would do nicely! They (and half of the fort) burned real nicely! Bubbled up in a full protective sphere with everyone bunched up tight against me, I decided to ignore mostly random and inaccurate gun fire of the surviving soldiers. Most of them had only had lead bullets anyway, which didn't have a prayer of penetrating. Two lone officers armed with tools appropriate for the task didn't threaten us for long when 'Machine Gun Miranda' sprayed them down nicely and left them jerking on the ground mortally wounded. Still pulsing with stolen nether energies, my shields help up nicely against the remaining limited silver gunfire as flame, and Miranda dwindling magazine of silver ammo cleared a safe path before us. No one else decided to stop us and or even considered a standard Deseret suicide charge. Even the remaining zealots decided that they either didn't like their odds or we'd cleared out their officers, leaving the rest of the soldiers to wisely to wait behind shelter and await some new orders. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13 After I gave our no longer bored guard sentinel at the secure warehouse containing the BattleCar a hefty meloning, Miranda grabbed his fully loaded assault rifle and then kicked open the door in gleeful teenaged enthusiasm and began shooting anyone or anything moving inside. I kept her covered with a shield, but the gal was more than a bit reckless and had much too fun gunning the pair of interior guards and a half dozen or so unarmed maintenance workers. I did have to admit that she knew exactly what she was doing and her shots were nicely controlled bursts with nice chest shot patterns. Like a good kingpin of crime, daddy had taken his little girl to a gunnery range, early and often! "All aboard!" She laughed and then gave a couple of mercy shots to the head of the poor mortally wounded gunnery officer who had been so helpful to us last night. Daddy had also taught her to never turn her back on a possible foe, even if you think he's dead. Soon they all were. I never heard a peep out the guards that were out in front of the main hanger. They never showed up so I assumed they had been a part of the mass 'burnination' closer to the main facility. Messy, but I told myself that they'd be all dead when the portals went Boom! later anyway. "Wait! Not yet!" I shouted, as Miranda started to help the women into the grounded BattleCar. "We need a few things first... starting with a road map -- assume everyone would like to get back home! Everyone, scatter out and search for one. We don't have a clue where we are! Also more ammo for this beast! They come in green and white metal ammo cans that look just like this!" I said, showing the ladies one the metal cases that had been loaded earlier. I knew that there were no more power modules just sitting around, but there was a possibility of more silver ball ammo and we just might need it. Also for good measure, I told Bel to search the corner office area where the officer's worked and to locate if possible a training manual and any and all serious technical diagrams and blueprints, and in a few minutes she shouted that she had found some. It ended up being two full file cabinets full of various classified documents she thought were related to this project and when everyone and everything was now loaded, there wasn't two square inches of free space left inside. Miranda had found a local road map pinned up on a wall and had grabbed it for me, but some of the other ladies did find some more extra ammo and even with everyone working that took a few minutes to gather those and Bel's captured boxes of documents. Sean was getting audibly impatient. Yes, I know... a lot of real estate was going 'Boom!' in a few minutes and we needed to be gone already. The idea of putting a pair of bullets into Probert's head and leaving his fat ass right here was looking better. I didn't need to power up the vehicle to know that we were now dangerously overloaded and overweight! But it couldn't be helped! The BattleCar was built to seat just one, up at the front and below where the driver's seat was, with just a tiny bit of clear protected crystalline window to look out of. I guess that meant me, and I climbed in. Above me at 9 o'clock, 12 and 3 o'clock were the three gunnery stations that required the shooters to stand but they had some side defensive structure and a bubble shield around the big chaingun and a large oversized targeting helmet with an attached apron-like protective vest of heavy leather that seemed to be more or less bullet-resistant. From this machine's killing distance it would take a hell of a crack sniper to nail any of the gunners, let alone the well protected driver down in his internal pit. I told Bel and Miranda to take the two side guns and we crammed in the five rescued ladies behind them next to the storage bins for the spare power modules and ammo. They wrapped up into a huddle surrounded by blankets and boxes of files and extra tin cases ammo. They were going to be cramped, but walking wasn't an alternative this time. I fired up the engines (with the help of a big friendly 'Start' button) and we were finally set to go. "Miranda, let's have a little chin music please to take down that front door -- and anyone lurking behind it!" She smiled and pressed the two red trigger buttons with her fingers and the door just about evaporated into molten shreds with three short six round bursts. She'd remembered everything she'd heard spoken last night and could handle now every part of the gunner's job... except lifting into the mounting bracket by herself the massively heavy chain gun. I'd had to help with the mounting, but she'd loaded and powering up her own weapon and then had enough time to setting up Bel's and give her some terse but helpful instructions. "Just press one firing button to engage the laser guidance tracking light and then just follow the bouncing ball!" She laughed as I drove through the wreckage of the hanger door. "Keep the selector on 'Semi' and press both firing buttons once for a six-round burst, then repeat as necessary... and kept your fingers off that Full Auto' selector switch!" It was just about as easy as that! My brave women had themselves a blast, figurative and literally, and between the pair of them they carved up anything that even remotely looked like trouble in our path. Oh yes, very definitely... a single accurate burst of super-heated magical silver plasma could and did carve up a Deseret battle tank just like a cooked chicken! Heading out to the main gate, Miranda had to jump up and shout (with her gunner's helmet armor set taken off) and was just about ready to get out and climb up the hill after Janice, when our sleeping beauty at last appeared, wrapped up like the rest of the women in her blanket, came running down the hill to join us. While we waited, Bel had to stitch up a convoy of infantry carriers that had arrived hot on our trail chasing us and she turned the lot into burning scrap in just a couple of bursts. Those chain guns were absolutely lethal! My Emperor was going to make me a Knight for retrieving these alone! One more body added to the enhanced combat load was just about too much. Janice said that the levitation field holding the BattleCar up off of the ground wasn't much higher than about six inches. From what I expected, it should have been at least a foot or more. Going over uneven ground (even slowly) now was probably not a good idea. This was going to really limit our options... and the massively extra passenger weight was going to also drain the power modules even faster than a regular simulated combat mission. I needed to think and decide where we were going, but first I stopped to let the ladies shoot up the main security gate to the Fort. Miranda gave Janice a quick gunnery explanation and let her take over the left side gun so she could move now to the main central one, just over my head. The grown women and highly-trained government agents didn't quibble. The young lady could out-shoot either of them! Anything she aimed at was instantly toast, on the first burst. Both Bel and Janice usually needed two or three bursts to nail their target, and like I suspected, the crystalline gun barrels started to glow after a couple of bursts in a row! Stopping for a map check outside of the main gates, I let the ladies do some target practice and let each rip through a hundred silver rounds or so and then conduct a practice battlefield condition ammo reloading. Even Miranda needed to try the pneumatic tube disconnect/reconnect operation twice to make sure she'd do everything right in a panic. We still had lots of ammo, at least 90% of our combat load by my quick calculation... and I was pretty sure we were going to need every bit of it before we'd be anyplace safe! *************** Discovering that we were just about as far west in Wyoming as we could get, I turned the BattleCar east, down the two lane unpaved highway 80 and floored it. Miranda swept the road ahead of us clear but we had to crash over the remains of a few burning trucks in our path. We had just passed Rock Springs when Sean gave me a sudden warning to find some cover fast. Just ahead of us was a small highway overpass and I'd just crossed it and turned a bit to the south behind the earthen sidewalls when the entire sky lit up on fire behind us. The shock wave that arrived about fifteen seconds later would have flattened us or knocked us upside down at the very least, but for now we didn't have to worry about any more pursuit from behind us... there was pretty much nothing there! That Fort was now just a smoking hole in a ground... a really big hole! No one at the earthquake ravaged ruins of the religious center at Rock Springs wanted to deal with us or probably even knew we'd passed them by on the highway. That facility wasn't going to ready for business as usual for very long time either. But another five minutes later the vehicle began to significantly slow down and in another five minutes we were at a dead stop on the highway. One full power module drained in less than fifteen minutes. I'd really hoped we could manage twenty, but the gals had been keeping their trigger fingers busy that for a big chunk of that first ArcCell. We did manage almost twenty minutes of power life for the second cell, but Miranda didn't have much to shoot at in front of us and no one yet was in pursuit behind us yet. Overloaded as we were, 40 miles an hour seemed to be our best speed, not the fifty to sixty mph I had expected from the notes I'd briefly read in the driver's training manual. Any thoughts of evading pursuit by traveling overland were laughable. Even on the relatively smooth highway our over-burdened vehicle had issues. The weight balance wasn't good either and at any speed higher than thirty-five the front end started to ride up and the back end down, screwing up my view of the road ahead and the road handling , of which this huge pig had almost none even at a crawl, got dangerously worse. My steering was quite unfavorably compared to that of a drunken sailor on shore leave. I had to focus on staying right in the middle of the lanes to avoid bouncing back and forth off of the road. The nose lifting and body-frame bouncing and gyrating wasn't going to help Miranda's aim in a critical situation, like when a combat helicopter flew towards us and started to dive towards us for a strafing run. The word was out on us now, but Miranda's aim was better and maybe the pilot didn't live long quite enough to report us. She walked six rounds of magical plasma right through the bird on the first burst and it exploded right in the air ahead and to the side of us just about instantly. Five minutes later and still at least ten miles out of Rawlins we stopped to change out ArcCels and Miranda topped off her ammo can to its full load of one thousand. She burned through about half of that carving us a path through Rawlins, where a decently sized military police task force was waiting in ambush for us. We shot better and faster, and with way more oomph and my three ladies all acquitted themselves in battle nicely! Half of the town was a burning wreck after we shot our way through the ambush, and the treated frame of my waddling pig was barely scratched. The crystalline windscreens and bubble shields in front of the chain gun mounts stopped every small arm weapon fired. Even a pair of hand-held rockets didn't do more than scratch the paint of the BattleCar's composite armor when they hit. Everyone had some minor scratches from flying shrapnel, but nothing bled more than a Band-Aid couldn't cover, and the first-aid kit was nicely stocked for our minimal needs. Getting through Fort Steele depleted our supplies considerably more. Fort Steele seemed to be the main rear area supply base for the region, about thirty miles west behind Elk River, which was the rear reserve area for this part of the front, and something like another sixty miles from where highway 80 crossed the main combat zone, which was apparently somewhere near Laramie. At this rate, we weren't going to make it to American lines, burning through ArcCells in heavy combat operations far faster than we had budgeted to use our limited replacements. The battle at Fort Steele got so hot that I had to retreat twice to try and find alternate routes around the town to reach the river. This was pointless as there was only the one bridge along the main highway and any more cross country-travel was virtually impossible for our waddling overladen pig! Just shooting our way through the town, like we did at Fort Rawlins, would have been suicide. It was time to think with our heads a bit more and take advantages of our superior weaponry. In the end, we just crawled up around the flanks of the town to rejoin the road just at the bridge over the river. We had superior range and firepower and with binoculars Bel would spot targets for Janice and Miranda to take out at long range. In typical courageous but stupid heroic style, some dimwit armor commander ordered his brigade of light tanks to attack us right out in the open across a level grassy field with no protective cover, and only slightly supported by infantry. Miranda turned the field into a smoking abattoir and the tanks became melted smoking coffins from which none escaped. The wind at our faces carried the smell of burning flesh strongly as we passed through the field of slaughter and removed any thoughts of hunger that I might have had. With a sharp flanking power turn I put the accelerator pedal to the metal and we crossed the bridge without further difficulty... mostly, except for stopping three quarters of the way across to stop to change out yet another power module. We now just had two left, and we'd need at least three more to make now it to safety, assuming we didn't have another major firefight. I had an idea, but I'd need some downtime to try it out, and so about ten miles down the highway I pulled off onto a dirt farm road surrounded by trees that seemed to lead down to a small lake. This close to the front, I didn't expect to find anyone at home, and we did even spot a lone wandering cow. This was all territory captured relatively recently by Deseret in the last year or two. Even on a quiet front, they can't help but slowly pickup fresh ground every month or two. Their US opponent was just not up to the job of even slowing those bastards down! Parked inside an abandoned barn at about mid-day, we shut everything down and took a long cautious look around us, and didn't see anything particularly of interest. No residents (long hauled off deeper into Deseret for their new life as slaves) and not even any reserve soldiers out scavenging. Always a favorite military occupation in safe captured zones, but the pickings here were lean. The tired women made an exhaustive search of the abandoned farmhouse, and even the next two closest neighbors but didn't find anything worth scrounging. No food and definitely no overlooked weapons. We were still all on our own. *************** I used the next hours fairly productively and put my years of Arc-Tec experience to a good use and took a lot of trial and error, mostly error, but I found a way to slowly manually infuse magical energy into the ArcCell. Since I was still quite filled with stolen magical energy that I hadn't had the need to fully expend, it took me only about two hours to sort of fill up one of the drained matrix batteries. That would give us maybe another fifteen minutes on the road, so I'd have to do this at least twice more... and I did, after a delightful interruption. The women had a lot of splattered blood to wash off, a good bit of it their own, and after the fruitless search parties had returned, it was now time for some more serious cleanup and bandaging. Sitting on a big rock near the lake, concentrating on slowly charging an ArcCell, I got to watch eight naked women all splashing about in the cold water. Heck, there would have been ice on the surface probably less than a month ago. Still, women will endure nearly anything to get clean. I knew I was in trouble when Miranda, Bel and Janice all huddled up to conspire and give me some pointed looks. I knew what was coming and dealt with it with grace and forbearance. Damn that water was cold! In a few moments, the ladies had my scorched rags that only slightly resembled my old suit off and soon I was exacting my own revenge by splashing them with icy cold water. This also make made sure that three rather nice sets of extremely cold and rock-hard nipples stayed that way! There was one rather embarrassing moment when Bel and Janice had to laughingly explain the concept of male 'shrinkage' to a confused Miranda who was wondering why I was now so much 'smaller' than I had been before. This lead to an additional complicated explanation of exactly 'why and how' had this rather intimate knowledge in the first place that sent all of the ladies into fits of laughter. We really played much too long and the shadows of the too-short day were catching up with us. No one wanted to drive through friendly (or unfriendly) territory in the dark and risk getting shot up, so we agreed to just stay here for the night. Being about five miles off of the main highway, our nastier friends would be looking for us elsewhere. To avoid copters with night vision we planned to stay invisible in the barn all night. Now freezing cold and with wet clothes to boot, I decided I'd had enough and borrowed a towel so that I could sit and get back to fixing our problems with a drained ArcCell in both hands. The women were scouting around in the fading light once more for something we could use for food, but didn't find jack. Really, there was no place I'd seen where we could have stocked up on some groceries. We were going to be cold and hungry... two things a woman never wants to be! Sorry, fires were strictly out as well. We had to stay hidden, silent and in the dark tonight. *************** I charged up another ArcCell before bed and asked the gals to wake me up when they thought it was an hour or so before sunrise so I could do one more. Miranda still had her wristwatch, so she agreed to take the last guard duty and wake me up at about 5 a.m. Another pair of women however, woke me up first at around midnight when their cold naked bodies pressed up against my own cold nude self inside my blanket on a stack of hay to cuddle up and keep warm. "Go back to sleep!" Janice whispered in my ear on one side of me while Bel curled up on the other side, sandwiching me. "I'm too fucking cold to even think about playing around and we're all way too tired and this certainly isn't the time or place. So hush and don't wake up everyone else or we'll take our frozen cold tits elsewhere." I remained good, and they both stayed... and we all almost got almost warm enough to enjoy some decent sleep. Almost. Miranda woke me at the dot of five and gave me the teenaged glare of death that I'd been snuggled up against by two soft pairs of female breasts, of which none were hers! She was more than a little annoyed and jealous, but I convinced her that nothing had happened. She was very good at truth-reading, and she eventually left me alone to dress in my cold and still slightly damp clothes and then concentrate at transferring energy into another drained ArcCell as quickly as I dared. Too fast -- poof! I had destroyed two of them yesterday before I found the right pace and rate of maximum flow. Morning came and I finished my last efforts on charging the cell and thought I'd done a decent job on the four new charged replacements that would hold up long enough to get us the rest of the way home. This ought to give us energy enough now for at least two hours or so of travel time and at least one moderately complicated battle. We still needed to bull-rush our way through Deseret's reserve area and then shoot our way through the front lines. I really wanted just one more additional cell charged up, but with the sun coming over the hills our enemies would be again hot on our trail. We couldn't afford to let them build up enough forces to block us before the US lines. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 13 We had to get going now! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 14 Never let anyone misinform you that 'violence never solves anything!' Violence solves a great many problems, especially when there are hundreds of people in your way all armed to the teeth with firearms and the willingness to use them upon you. Gleefully, and with all of the ammunition they can carry! I had to admit that the road block in front of us at Elk Mountain looked scary, but looks can occasionally be deceiving. They had arrayed lots of heavy armor units out in front and spread out to keep us from flanking, but not much defense in depth and not nearly enough infantry in front of them to offer much protection from our superior range advantage. I let Miranda snipe the field clean for us, and seeing that not much of anything was in reserve behind them in town, I just floored the 'Prissy Pig', our nominated name for our battle tested veteran and told the gals to keep their heads down, and they mostly did. Janice picked up some more scratches from wildly shrapnel but nothing she couldn't deal with and she remained at her post. Frankly, none of us considered any of our other refugees of much use, especially for gunnery replacements. The five captives had had it hard since their capture... and not just in the breeding pit either. They collectively flinched at every loud sound and they remained constantly huddled together for moral comfort. Each had been a witch or Adept back home. Four of the ladies were US witches and the other gal was a GWA Adept from California, caught nearly right from the start of her military service a few months ago. They'd all been on drugs for some time to eliminate their ability to use magic and none of them were even remotely up to scratch yet, let along capable of helping out in a magical fight. The stress of our long running battle while escaping hadn't helped their nerves one little bit either. Miranda made a token effort to encourage the gals to become a little more helpful but soon gave it up as a lost cause. They were too stressed, too cold, too hungry and too frightened to now do anything other than complain. Even Bel and Janice were about on their last nerves now too and were shivering uncontrollably from the cold mountain air in just their single blankets. Only Miranda was close to fully dressed, with my mangled and shredded suit just barely holding together as well. Spare clothing for our other females continued to evade our quick searching efforts and they remained naked underneath their blankets. When we stopped to replace power cells about 20 miles out of Laramie, Bel realized that her lover Janice had stopped shivering entirely, and this was bad. Second stage hypothermia had kicked in from being naked except for a single blanket for the last thirty-six hours of so. A quick check of Bel indicated that she wasn't really doing that much better either and her teeth were chattering now so much that it was hard to understand anything she was saying. Miranda, ever now the dependable one of our trio, slammed down her gunner's helmet and armor rig and laid down the law to her elders. Both Bel and Janice were to join the other five ladies in their wrap of blankets, huddling together underneath for warmth. Through hell or high water, Miranda was determined that she would man that center chain gun alone and all by herself shoot our way through the main battle line at the front. Bold and scary stuff, but amazingly it wasn't quite necessary. The actual final advance through Laramie and across into US lines was almost anticlimactic. There were no further roadblocks and the grav-levitation propulsion of our 'Prissy Pig' made crossing a couple of miles of open mine fields almost trivial. The local Deseret infantry here was fairly loosely scattered with defensive in depth and for the most part they assumed our BattleCar was 'theirs' and almost none of them actually fired at us. As for the US front lines, if we actually had been the enemy we could have routed several companies at minimum. The dispirited US troops would fire a bullet round or two at us and then throw down their weapons and either try to surrender or else just run. If anything, it was worse than that old joke about the British Army -- 100,000 rifles for sale, never been fired and only dropped once! Now within friendly lines, more or less, this was no time to suffer any unfortunate accidents. I told Miranda keep her head down even more and not make any grand sweeping movements with her chain gun to avoid provoking any more incoming small arms fire. By the time we reached the rear of the friendly lines the US soldiers had mostly stopped shooting at us at all and when we drove up right into the middle of their battalion HQ it was disconcerting and severely depressing just how quickly everyone surrounded to the 'Prissy Pig' and one lone seventeen year old girl and her big plasma chain gun. The Deseret R&D officers had been spot-on right. Even a dozen of these BattleCars at the very point of an offensive could and would have cleared out all resistance in hours, and in time (and with enough ArcCell batteries) would have swept the entire US army all the way to the Mississippi River. By stealing their only prototype, perhaps this forthcoming spring offensive would be delayed and I now had to hope that with some forewarning that at least one US general could take this new threat seriously and prepare for it. The light colonel commanding this particular battalion of infantry was certainly not a suitable candidate. As the Pig pulled up to a halt right in front of the HQ he and his officers came out to greet us with their hands up and eager to surrender. Miranda was just pissed off enough at the lot of them that she ran the laser sight back and forth across their chests and muttered (mostly) under her breath about how she wanted to purge the army of this lot of cowards and do everyone a favor. "What are your terms for honorable surrender?" The Lt. Colonel asked, who was getting increasing nervous at staring down the barrel of Miranda's chain gun. I was struggling to get out of my driver's seat harness and climb up to talk, but my young assistant was doing just fine on her own. The only thing she needed for her rough image was a cigar to chomp upon. "For starters you craven worms, you can show some proper military respect for the great GWA wizard from the Republic of Texas, the Zyphyr, and commander of this BattleCar. So get on your knees you cowardly swine and show some deference to your betters!" She barked, and they most certainly did. By the time I made up top to look down upon our 'captives', the colonel and his staff were quite upon their knees and giving me an entirely adequate bow. In just my mangled and scorched old suit I probably didn't look much like a great GWA wizard, until I climbed up upon the front bonnet of the BattleCar and gave the lily-livered officers a good look at my Texas cowboy boots. "You can rise gentlemen and stand at ease. We're allies remember? First of all, let's try to avoid any more confusion in your ranks. Your men at front lines are running like frightened deer and at least three companies of troops have left their forward positions. Please go fix that minor problem now before the Deseret fucktards realize your position has been left wide open." The colonel turned pale and nodded at a major kneeling next to him to go off and rally up the retreating troops. He'd need a horsewhip to do it and if it were my battalion, I'd be replacing a few lieutenants and captains shortly afterwards. "Next," I added, once I had the Battalion commander's attention again. "I need you to get me down that US flag flying over your command tent and hand it over to my lovely and rather trigger happy assistant. People keep shooting at us and us Texas folks find that a mighty unfriendly act. With a flag, maybe your undisciplined troops might think twice the next time. Then I need directions to your nearest medical facility, I've got some rescued young ladies of quality that have been out in cold for much too long that need hot food and some even hotter baths. Oh, and a couple of cigars and bottle of something stimulating would also do, if you can manage those!" He could. The whisky was Canadian but entirely adequate and I let Miranda have a swig (and one of the cigars) and I took two swigs before leaving the rest to Sean. One of the staff captains climbed on-board and after having a nice gawk at our bevy of disturbingly under-clad female cargo, directed us around to the back side of a nearby hill where the local hospital tents had been set up. Chomping our stogies for dramatic effect, Miranda and I discharged our half-frozen ladies into the hands of some Army nurses only to discover that hardly a drop of hot water was available at all! My first thought was to just find a few 55-gallon drums of water and using a little fire magic warm them right up, but not even any of these were immediately available. The unit was getting their water from a local river, and probably also the start of cholera or some other foul water disease soon. I knew the US was backwards, but this was disgraceful! I still hadn't worked out of my system even half of the rage I'd felt yesterday and I decided it was time for the 'Great and Terrible Zyphyr' to publically express his anger and might. The Army doctor in charge of this field hospital didn't seem to realize just how pissed I was with him at not having a proper and secure water supply and the rest of these Army idiots didn't seem to be nearly afraid enough of me enough to leap and obey my instructions, but this could be easily corrected. "Major," I snapped to the chief medical officer, "is this open field to the north of the hospital of any particular importance? If not, I'm going to adjust it to better suit our present needs, so get everyone clear of this area now!" This wasn't really a polite request. If you're going to go through the time and trouble of scaring the piss out of people just to get their attention properly, you might as well make it memorable enough so that a repeat demonstration later on isn't necessary. In this case, I had a little bit of everything I magically needed relatively close at hand, so I could afford to be subtle, and perform a little stage presentation. "Behold! Now let the earth now bend to my will!" I cried, with a bit of an evil magician 'mwuhahaha!' thrown in just for the creepy effect. Down about a thousand yards deep into the earth there was a lovely geothermal pocket with some lovely hot water just ready to come bubbling to the surface to bath my ladies. Well, after I'd created a suitable pond to contain it. With far more dramatic hand waving than was necessary, the earth moved and shaped itself to suit the new hot water lake that would soon fill it and if the vast earth-moving wasn't enough to impress everyone, the water ballet that followed certainly did the trick. Grunting with unnecessary strain, I lifted my arms high and shouted upon the heavens "Bring forth the boiling waters from the depths of the earth!" And they came. The water was a bit too mineral over-rich for tasty drinking, with a bit too much sulfur, but it would soon be just right for bathing purposes. I gave the chief medical officer a pointed glare and then turned my baleful glare against the head nurse, who did look quite properly terrified. "Soup's up!" I calmly stated. "Now I assume I won't hear anything more about no hot water being available. Are there any other minor issues that would prevent those seven women from being in a hot bath within the next five minutes? No? Good... I didn't think so. Now you will let me know if you have any more little problems that you can't resolve on your own, won't you?" The head nurse was already fleeing away from me and shouting order to her staff. Bel, Janice and the others were in big canvas portable bathtubs soaking in steaming hot water in well under my five minute deadline, and orderlies were being given instructions to find each of them clean warm clothes for later. Since my bullying presence wasn't needed around the hospital for awhile, Miranda and I decided that it was time to give the mess hall staff a crack at my displeasure and we trotted over to see if we could get an early hot lunch. Word of our arrival had already spread and no one even thought about giving us any lip service, but we never got to enjoy a bite of the hot chow. Our disruption of the US front lines had been finally noticed by the Deseret field commanders and the nearly empty salient was now being filled by Deseret infantry. ************** We drove the Pig back to Battalion HQ and quickly got an update on the situation. The three companies that had fled and retreated from the line at the sight of the BattleCar were only now just halting and getting reorganized for a return to their trenches. Two flanking US companies were trying to delay the advance of a brigade sized force of Deseret infantry, but had poor expectations of being able to do so for long. No immediate reports of armor, but that could change at any moment. We'd done a decent job the last two days at disrupting the reserve enemy forces behind the lines and it was likely that no overwhelming force could be gathered anytime soon to exploit this salient. Especially if Miranda and I could park the Pig right smack at the sharp end of the assault once more and break up their advance. Miranda was game for anything, and reluctantly putting aside her chewed up cigar she donned her gunner's helmet and protective gear once more, but we now needed two new gunners. The staff officer captain who had been assisting us agreed to take over one gun and he called over for one of his lieutenants to man the other one. I switched out our very last fully charged ArcCell power module while Miranda give the officers a quick instruction of the workings and reloading of the plasma chain guns. This was way more firepower at their fingertips than they'd ever been trained to handle but they caught on fast. With the laser guidance system for aiming, it was close to idiot proof (even for a pair of US officers), and all they had to do was aim and shoot... and keep their damned fingers off of the 'Full Auto' switch. For good measure we grabbed a pair of loitering NCO's to join us to help hump ammo to the gunners. We still had a half-dozen full ammo cases of silver left and lots of Deseret bad guys heading our way. The formerly retreating US companies were supposed to be now following us in support, but they quickly got left behind and lost to sight in the tree covered hills. The Pig was performing much better now that she wasn't operating dangerously overweight and was handling the uneven ground and small brush and forested landscape of eastern Wyoming with little complaint. Maybe the Deseret ArcTec engineers knew what they were doing after all. Our new pair of gunners caught on quickly, and within three minutes of heading back west from the Battalion HQ we starting to encounter the advance elements of the enemy infantry force. The braver ones got blasted into oblivion by the squad-full, as the superheated magical plasma turned thick tree and ground cover into instant explosive shrapnel that shredded everyone for dozens of yards around. Neither officer had the aptitude for exuberant wholesale destruction that Miranda had, but both caught on quickly to the demands of their on the job training and upheld their honor. Behind us in our wake we left a trail of destruction that no one could possibly miss, a half-mile or wider trough of wreckage, of shattered trees, smoking craters in the earth and acres of seared and obliterated flesh. We had one bad moment about thirty minutes into the battle when the Pig started to hiccup while beginning to drain the last reserves of juice from her final charged ArcCell but I was in no mood to stop our advance. Yanking out the drained power module, I trusted to desperation and shoved the fingers of my right hand right into the empty module slot and willed my magic to flow into it. Without even thinking about it, my artifact on right hand began to extrude the left-over silver that I had not fired off a pellets in the battle with the Wizard of the 2nd Circle, and once again it flowed like liquid quicksilver to make a better connection to the circuitry. Without asking, my weird right arm with its peculiar Inca artifact melded right into the power circuitry and seemed to know just what needed to be done. This was serious creepy, but darned if it didn't work! The Prissy Pig was once again good to go, and just in time we rejoined the battle and became once again the spearhead of our advance. Not only had we reclaimed the lost ground, but we were advancing well into Deseret held ground now, reclaiming in minute's territory the US had lost the previous year. Miranda calmly wasted a trio of scout flyvers that each coasted a bit too eagerly above the next hill rise. A company of a dozen light tanks was hunkering down into cover in the forest behind them and my trio of gunners made light work of them, and the six heavies on the next hill behind them. I'm not sure if it was my voice that was laughing at the destruction around us or if it was Miranda... or if we were both laughing together at the carnage. At the western edge of the forest about ten miles on the old Deseret side of the former front lines, a ridge with a reinforced concrete bunker and heavy gun emplacement rather suddenly gave us all of the opposition we could handle. A direct hit from their big 107mm anti-tank gun probably would have put us out of action, and one glancing round quite obliterated about half of our left crystalline shielding and over 65% of our left gunnery officer, the unfortunate lieutenant, not to mention spraying Miranda with vaporized bone fragments and blood. Another near miss just over our heads obliterated a huge fur tree and turned it into a hail of sharp wooden shrapnel, seriously wounding then in turn the captain, and giving Miranda a couple more slight wounds. For just a moment she was a normal frightened seventeen year old girl once more, but she set her jaw and began conducting some savage paybacks while I shoved the Pig into reverse to back us up behind some cover. Two more near misses dinged up our front grav-skirts, but we limped out of observation range to lick our wounds. Those anti-tank gunners were good and much too accurate for my taste! Our two NCO's scrapped up what was left of their lietenant and casually chucked the remaining bottom leg parts of him over the side and applied a tourniquet to the badly wounded captain. The left side chain gun mount was twisted but the weapon was still serviceable, and stoutly the pair of Sergeants readied themselves to take charge of the weapons. We were way out in front of our infantry support, by maybe five miles or so, and a tiny little voice of reason was now knocking inside of my skull wanting to be heard. For once I listened to it. "Miranda, we've won the US a nice little victory with our counter-attack and we didn't sign on for this... and we are definitely not getting paid for this sort of fun either. Let's call it a day and leave those bastards in the big bunker for the ground boys to sort out." "Fuck that shit." She snarled. "I want to waste those fuckers! That could have been Bel or Janice on those two guns! If you can figure out how to use those two front mounted rocket tubes, we could blow that fast bunker before they get us sighted in again." We sure could... except that in two separate bouts of fiddling, I couldn't figure out how they worked. They weren't chain guns or other automatic weapons powered externally by the Pig and I hadn't found anything like conventional ammo shells or rockets that would fit inside. Miranda delegated the problem to our NCO's and like good problem solvers they figured out what was wrong. The larger breech-loaded tubes only fired a single shot at a time, but had a similar but larger feed system that turned a larger hunk of silver into plasma blasted down the bigger 4cm bores of the pair of front loaded launchers. With a little searching around we found a small box full of individual quart-sized sacks that would each hold two big handfuls of normal silver ball ammo. Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 14 Turned into magical plasma, one launcher would turn an entire hillside into superheated gravel and smoke. I gave the big bunker both barrels just to make sure. I could aim the big 4cm crystalline tubes right from my driver's station on a little TV screen and both massive rounds of plasma hit right on target and turned the entire hillside in a smoking saddle-backed crater. If I'd figured these two fixed guns out earlier, our tactical problems getting around Fort Steele could have been avoided and the fortified town would have become a smoking maelstrom of fire and glassy rubble. True, it did take these front two barrels nearly half an hour afterwards to stop glowing cherry red. A second volley taken anytime sooner might have melted the entire front end off of the Pig. Clearly, this was an 'oh shit' weapon of limited use... and preferably just one barrel at a time, but oh man could it turn tons of rock and reinforced concrete into fingernail sized rubble! **************** Sitting alone finally at the very edge of Bamforth Forest about fifteen miles northwest of Laramie and nearly completely now out of silver ammo, I coasted the Pig to a stop at the top of the first small hill outside of the forest to inspect our domain, as we were masters of everything that we could survey. In front of us for several miles we could see the shattered remnants of what was perhaps an entire mechanized infantry division and a good deal of smoking armor. The disorganized leftovers of the reserve armor units we'd torn up at Elk Mountain had showed up late and in rather poor defensive array and sacrificed themselves to magical plasma one at a time for the better part of an hour. A few attack helicopters also made rather uncoordinated forays into Miranda's line of sight, a mistake that nearly all of them came to regret within moments. A couple of fixed wing aircraft suffered identical fates. If Miranda could see it, then she could shoot it down. We were the battle-lords, rulers of this field of carnage and if my feisty young partner had any regrets about slaughtering, not just merely killing, perhaps thousands of people in the last few days, she didn't show any. Like a trooper, she was chewing our last unmangled cigar into oblivion, and scanning the horizon for more things to shoot at. The fact that they didn't have a prayer at shooting back at us didn't make the slightest difference. Her thumbs, sore and swollen as they were, were more than ready to teach the soldiers of Deseret that they weren't at all welcome here, and that she'd just as soon send them all straight to hell where they belonged than just send them packing with their tails between their legs. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, the bastards had been taught the meaning of fear. And Miranda still had half of one remaining ammo can of silver left to teach any of the slow learners a final lesson! If the US could get its head out of its ass long enough, the entire frontier all the way to Elk Mountain was theirs for the taking, right now! Maybe, perhaps, we'd ignited just enough of a spark to push the local units onwards. But that was now someone else's job now. I let Miranda pick off one last overly brave scout car about a mile or two ahead of us and I turned the Prissy Pig around to take us back home. I was hungry and wanted a long, long nap... and was tired of the smell of ionized silver and burned flesh searing my nose. I wanted to check on Bel and Janice and quietly give Miranda a comforting hug. Someday, maybe not today or even right away the enormity of the slaughter we had committed would hit her... and I wanted, needed... to be there for her. Reaching the Battalion HQ, I parked underneath a wide spread of trees as close to the hospital tents as I could manage. Even with Miranda's skillful clearing of the skies earlier, Deseret did have air superiority in this region and when things started to quiet down they'd use to try and find us again. A few gentle hints to the staff gathered up enough troops to gather up enough brush to give the Pig some decent cover. In my book, the wounded captain had been pretty courageous during our part of leading the spearhead, and I hinted strongly that the crippled officer deserved some significant recognition. He was probably going to lose an arm and his legs didn't look particularly healthy either. I also needed to check on the women and then get some food and sleep, in about that order. Then, after that, I could charge up another pair of power cells to get us safely further east to Fort Cheyenne. Just five miles from the GWA border of Western Colorado, the US and GWA had set up a training ground at a joint international camp that straddled the border between GWA Western Colorado, and US Eastern Colorado and Wyoming. Once there, I'd find some generals... especially a GWA or two to hand the keys to the Pig over to. There was no way in seven hells that I was gifting over this baby to the barbarians on this side of the border. US Arc-Tec was just so lame that it would take them a decade just to figure out how the Pig worked... and we were going to need either BattleCars of our own, or a host of Pig-killers by early this summer at the very latest. That meant my home team, the GWA and its competent cadre of Arc-Tec wizards... like me. Bel and Janice would scream bloody murder, but I didn't give a rat's ass. This was my baby and it was going to be parked in the GWA garage just as fast as I could manage it! Maybe we'd play nice and let our US allies shine up the bumpers or crystalline windscreens, or even play gunner! *********** It took us three days to make our departure from our camp near Battalion HQ, and during this time it moved further west for three days in a row, although the medical unit stayed put. Eventually, some General did get off of his ass and realized a big chunk of central Wyoming was now available for the taking. Still, in my very definite opinion he'd sat on his hands dithering too long and advanced much too cautiously and eventually massive Deseret reinforcements killed the counter-offensive a good five miles east of Elk Mountain near Medicine Bow. Things returned to a nasty stalemate and battle of attrition and I just gritted my teeth and screamed at any officer who would listen about lost opportunies. A few did. The 'God-damned Zyphyr' had really stolen all of the military credit for stopping the Deseret attack and turning the tables by leading the spearhead of the counter-attack. The local Division commander, a certified dithering two-star asshole, tried to spin his version of the story but too many actual front line officers and war correspondents soon knew the real story and the name of the 'Zyphyr' started to feature as the shining hero, 'the wizard of wonder from Texas that helped lead the way to US victory', as one national newspaper put it. The morons got most of the facts wrong, as usual, but at least they gave me the credit for being the inspiration for the spirited defense and counter-attack, and more importantly there was zero mention of the Prissy Pig. That was at least one good thing about government censorship! The women were more or less recovered, warmly clothed now and decently fed. And even slightly back into a better frame of mind, but both Bel and Janice were fairly quiet and subdued. They'd both missed enough of the fun that they both felt like very second-class hangers on to the great and mighty Zyphyr, and even playing my usual Texas 'aw shucks' routine didn't seem to mend that fence. About an hour before we reached Fort Cheyenne an advance group arrived to greet us bearing a set of nice Texas and GWA flags that soon decked the front of the Pig, and we soon entered the multi-national fort grounds in victorious slender. The gals both disappeared into the waiting arms of the local US magician cadre, which included a relatively senior FMBR civilian official, and they more or less disappeared entirely for the next two days. So be it. I, in return, handed off my rather scratched and dented 'Prissy Pig' off to a resident group of GWA magical engineering combat team members and they started calling in the nearest big Imperial wizards from Denver to come take my baby away to one of our R&D bases for some serious reverse engineering. For the next two days I told my story repeatedly to groups of increasingly higher ranking GWA officers and wizards, and even a few selected US guests. I kept Miranda as close to my side as possible and let her play both sides of the political fence; to my pals at the GWA she was a US citizen, but to her native officers and wizards she was my legal GWA apprentice. All of the benefits, I hoped -- with none of the responsibilities. That strategy more or less worked. Everyone truth-spelled me until my brain felt like tapioca, but nothing too embarrassing spilled from my mouth that I didn't want revealed... like Sean. Mason Probert now started his career as a snitch, and allegedly implicated several higher ranking US federal officials as being at least aware of the weapons smuggling scheme. His capture quite corroborated everything that Bel, Janice and I had to say. The five rescued minor witches and Adepts added their own additional reports of what they'd seen and heard during their captivity and the intelligence services of both countries were going to get more than they could chew on for quite awhile to come. I only saw Bel and Janice just once more while at Fort Cheyenne, at a rather over-attended joint military conference that did little more than rehash the events of the last week. For fun however, a GWA intel officer did show us nice aerial photograph of the huge crater that used to be the secret Deseret R&D facility. That was one really big crater, just about a mile around. Another picture showed the damage I'd done to the Rock Springs pyramid and religious center, and seen from above the destruction was rather frightening. After the meeting I just barely had time to say goodbye and then the pair of them were bundled off onto a military plane for yet more meetings back in Chicago. The US brass wanted me back in Chicago too, probably for more questioning without any GWA handlers around me to play interference, but the magical combat engineering team and ever arriving hosts of military Arc-Tec specialists wanted to keep me around awhile longer to demonstrate my prize in person, and explain how everything worked... and how the heck I'd managed to both recharge the ArcCells on the fly and power the Pig on direct Zyphyr current only. I had to be a bit vague there and claim blind luck and inspiration. When my poor Pig was at last bundled into a covered railcar in the dead of night and shipped off towards home, my handlers were pretty much done with me. I'd filled out reports until I had writer's cramp and pretty much told the story straight and factual, filling in the minute details the best I could. I was sure that other big 'visitor nests' were scattered around Deseret and that they were providing a lot of unhealthy ideas and dark spirit power to those crazy assholes, and someone needed to find out some more about that damned breeding program of theirs using captured wizards. My best guess was that it was hard for this nasty alien race to exist at all upon our world with our own magical energy apparently being nearly the opposite sort from their own. Newcomers were shades without substance here, immaterial and invisible, and they needed to drain a lot of our life energies to be able to seize bodies that they could occupy and use. With still more effort needed to mold and enter hybrid-forms, half human and half alien, where they could then utilize our magic, as well as their own. Constructs like Chuckles were apparently advanced hybrid forms created by earlier breeding programs, but with each new generation their powers would increase. Chuckles was already bad enough, and his children could be really, really nasty to evict! Especially if they were destined to become the next front rank of Deseret battle mages. The idea of Deseret working hand-in-hand with an especially dark and malevolent race of visitors scared the robes off of every single wizard I'd talked with. This was fucking insane and serious and the GWA need to go on a war-footing now, and get ready to clean house on Deseret once and for all... with or without the help of the inept US wankers. The Brits in Columbia would probably be happy to pitch in, but no one counted their army as being much if any better than the US's. Still, any help was better than none. I wanted to get back home to Texas, and probably more months of interviews and reports back in Austin, but the US top government brass wasn't done with me yet. They wanted to pack me onto another airship to return to Chicago and then probably a few weeks in Washington. I didn't want to go and they really couldn't make me! Eventually, some big cheese Imperial wizard from San Francisco took me aside and very politely (but firmly) asked me to be nice and play ball for the home team. Surprisingly, both please and thank you were parts of his vocabulary, and sincerely used in appropriate context. I shuffled my feet a bit and eventually gave in, but I sensed that the Great Wizard Conway wielded a lot of clout within the top Imperial branch of the GWA, and he was playing awful nice with me. He either hadn't read my Texas GWA file that said that I was a fuck-up, or else he was willing to make his own judgments without prejudice. I actually suspect the latter. Besides, you just don't say 'no' to any Imperial Wizard! I probably could have manipulated the situation to earn me a whole bunch of goodies, but I kept my requests for 'favors' simple. I wanted my Adept's license reactivated from suspension and I wanted the Imperial and Republic of Texas GWA folks to keep their paws off of Miranda. "Let's all play nice and treat this like a new joint GWA-US magical partnership program. Give her something official on paper to keep the FMBR assholes away from her too. She's a maverick and raw as they come, but she's got more spirit than any of the other US magicians I've encountered and she's got the will to succeed, and I want to help her!" Conway agreed, and two hours later Miranda had an official Imperial document that put her powers under GWA authority and protection. If some senior FMBR numbskull wanted to make a diplomatic incident over grabbing my girl for their own use, I could justly threaten war! As of now we were both under diplomatic immunity. A nice little piece of paper of my own announced that I was now a GWA official delegated to the Magical Assistance Authority as part of the GWA Embassy in Washington. A minor official to be sure, but still with diplomatic immunity! I had the feeling I was going to need it! The US bastards could threaten to question me for weeks in some dark dungeon, but they had to say 'Please' now first... and I was going to say 'No!' ************** After the morons tried for the third time to get me on-board another airship to Chicago, I had to pull a bit of the Great Zyphyr act, much to the amusement of Wizard Conway. I demanded (and received) a first class train ticket and they ended up giving me my own private passenger car, complete with bedroom suite, private bath, a kitchen and a parlor. It was actually pretty darned nice and I don't know what VIP they'd stolen or borrowed it from, but it came well stocked with its own private bar, complete with a butler who was a decent sort and willing to play bartender and head chef, and even sit down and play cards and drink with us. They even managed to find me a nice new suit that only looked vaguely late Edwardian instead of mincingly Neo-Victorian. It would do fine until I could reclaim the rest of my clothes back in Chicago. It was something like eight hundred miles or so to Chicago, and as expected it took nearly three full days, but they were happy ones. We slept, ate and played cards for hours, or just quietly detoxified ourselves from the stress we'd been in for most of the last week. And it was wonderful! Miranda was a bit young still to corrupt her with a seemingly endless supply of bootleg booze, and I had to admit that the gal handled the situation well. She stuck to champagne for the most part and sipped like a lady rather than guzzled the nice bubbly down. Not my sort of stuff, but that said, the vintages were all nice GWA California ones. I started off mostly enjoying the wine cellar, trying a dozen different things until I discovered a dry Cabernet with some interesting character. A rather nice bottle of very forbidden CSA whiskey from Tennessee sort of distracted us later for some augmented late night consumption. Sean helped himself to everything else but appeared to find four bottles of bootleg Pennsylvania Schnapps of especial merit. At bedtime, there was a nice master suite at the rear of the car that had a real king sized bed big enough for the two of us, but eventually I'd wake up with Miranda all curled up next to me under the covers. I was wearing shorts to bed and she'd found a warm sleep shirt somewhere at Fort Cheyenne so our nocturnal encounters remained mostly chaste. She cuddled and kissed, but kept her hands largely to herself. She was dead serious about making me make the next move... and I was going to wait those last few months until she turned eighteen. I had enough of a checkered reputation and didn't want to add 'baby-snatcher' to it. Legal age of consent in Texas or not, I was damned determined that if I was going to do anything more than sleep with her, that she was going to be a fully-legal woman, and not just a pretty and very willing teenaged girl! ************** When the train stopped a few days later in the early morning, I took a peek outside the carriage window of our bedroom and noticed that we were back east now as far as Rockford, and this reminded me of one last errand that needed taking care of. After gently prying Miranda's arms and soft tits off from around my chest, I went to check with the conductor handling the rest of the normal passenger cars behind us, and I found that we'd be parked here for at least another three hours and probably longer, waiting for a freight train that had priority to get out of our way. This would give me plenty of time to run my errand and I woke up Miranda and asked if she wanted to join me, and she did. Wherever I went, she was once again certain to be my shadow! My butler had located the station master who was now in the process of flagging us down a taxi and as we left he promised to hold the train for us if necessary. The word had been given very clearly to the train's engineer that I was his primary cargo and he was not to appear in Chicago without me! Nice to know! *************** The dragon, still ensconced downstairs in the ruins of Probert's farmhouse, wasn't at all happy to see us again. The portal at this end was gone of course, but the entire cellar floor positively glowed with molten dragon guano. The smell was indescribably worse, and I retreated nearly immediately back up to the top of the stairs where I could hope to catch my breath again. "You again..." it whimpered. "Why Me? You've defeated me, slain my summoning masters and closed the portal with extreme and excessive primitive brutality! I could feel what you did from this end. I thought this society had laws, protections against barbarians like you. Clearly I was mistaken. I'm trapped among savages now - you and your primordial race have no sense of proportion! I'd weep, if I could manage it." "Thank you! I certain did my best over there. I did meet with a rather unfriendly reception. Did I understand you right in that all of your summoning masters are now dead? We left the Wizard Probert in suitable hands for discussion of his numerous dishonorable deeds and he should be alive... or is he?" Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 14 "No, his death yesterday released the last of the geas hold upon me and I am now masterless." This was not good. Probert should be alive and squealing in some federal holding cell in Chicago, unless someone had gotten to him to silence him. Damn... well, that was a problem for Bel and Janice to deal with. "Masterless... that's excellent. So why are you still here? You should be free to go home, or fly off and strike terror across half of Illinois instead, but I'd rather you wouldn't. Please feel free to depart on homewards anytime you'd like... right now would be remarkably convenient, in fact." "I cannot... you have quite undone me. I have nearly consumed myself with digestive ruin and fever. I cannot fly. Nor can I summon such magicks necessary to return home, for I am now quite at the mercy of my vanquisher. Nor could I, even should I wish to do so. My honor is humbled -- my nobility tarnished. Being so defeated, I remain bound to serve the term of my remaining 99 years and 137 days, and abide in my den of shame I shall do, to serve my punishment, should you will it." The dragon was serious. Cringing at my presence at the far and least soiled corner of the cellar, his sad fevered eyes just limply looked at me with shame. They looked like sad puppy eyes and my ferocious partner Miranda melted nearly at once and wanted to comfort the creature. Yikes! "Zak, there has to be something you can do to help the poor thing!" She babbled. I wasn't too sure, anything short of an industrial sized bottle of Pepto-Bismol probably wouldn't work, and that's if human antacids would be of any relief to dragons. Still, it was worth a try. "Let me get this straight." I asked the miserable creature. "You're here and stuck because I defeated you and robbed you of your honor?" "Entirely so. By honor, and the release of my geas, I am now bound to you, to await your mercy, in the unlikely event you should display any." Ouch... talk about unexpected complications! I needed to think about this for a bit. Bidding the creature to wait, we hopped back into our taxi and directed our driver to return back to Rockford and take us to the nearest pharmacy. I didn't have much in US dollars, most of my converted money was still in my hotel room in Chicago, but he happily took a few Texas silver dollars. We gathered up a big handful of everything suitable for a badly upset human stomach and returned to our hapless dragon, after first finding a shovel from the ruins of a barn to clear a non-smoldering path to the incapacitated creature. "You are now bound to me and must do my bidding, and for another 99 years and 137 days?" I asked the wincing creature. "Quite. In the unlikely event that I should continue to live, I must do so in shame, in obesceance to your will and terms of service. Oh, the ignominy and infamy of such service under your clemency! I doubt there shall be two bricks left standing on this earth anywhere! Dust and fire... and dishonor. I would weep, if I had any misery left to yield!" "There will be no dishonor, if I can help it. I would bid you to drink this medicine we have brought and we hope it shall restore you. It would work for human ailments of this nature but I cannot guarantee corrective results for you." I told it, as the dragon weakly lifted up a head to take a better look at me and my collection of pills, powders and bottles. "It is of no matter." The unhappy creature muttered. "You have defeated me and brought me low. I lie humbled before you and defenseless. I must submit to you in all things great and small and yield to your will, my honor now diminished and made low. I can do naught but your will and I am at your mercies." We emptied about three bottles of various anti-diarrhea concoctions into her (she was a female dragon) and let her sniff and nibble an assortment of antacid and analgesic tablets for good measure and after about half an hour we began to slowly coax her to crawl her way from out of the fetid stench of the cellar. Which reminded me that I needed to find out what powers, if any, dragon shit had. Sean, who had been disturbingly quiet, just laughed and suggested that I stick to ranching bacon. I had to pay another silver dollar as a bribe to the taxi driver, who was none too happy about having a dragon, sick or otherwise in his cab. Fortunately there were no accidents there. The mess that ate though a good part of the wooden railway station platform just before we lifted and pushed the dragon onto our suite-car was another matter. I tried to put out the fire but even water didn't do much to put out the flames and I had to smother it with earth before the entire station went up in flames. Miranda fed the miserable creature another bottle of medicine and she curled up into a nap right in the middle of the rug of the parlor, looking much now like a scaly oversized dog... and with far worse farts. I won't discuss how we later had to help hold the dragon's head, body and wings firmly at the back door of our railcar so that she could do her still rather unsolid business of nature without falling onto the tracks below. Nope, I really don't want to discuss it at all. *************** Reaching Chicago at last, I was delighted to be once again greeted at the station by Bel, also this time by Janice and a few other top level Assistant Directors of the FBI and FBMR visiting from Washington. All of them were less than delighted to meet my pet dragon. Trixie, short of Belladoncyatrix, was a bit more stable on her four clawed feet now and was almost feeling hungry and audibly wondered if this collection of bleating federal employees were edible. Miranda promised her a lamb dinner as soon as possible. I wanted to call her Bella at first, but then we realized that would be too similar and confusing to 'Bel', so the name Trixie won. Somehow this railroad platform avoided a repeat of the Rockford station incident, but I'm not sure that the grass will ever grow again in that small city park across from the Chicago federal building. At least the stool looked to be a lot firmer now, but it was still smoking and smoldering over a week later. ********************* With Trixie and Miranda, now inseparable by my side at all times, I caught up on local events. Every girl I guess wants a pony, assuming they can't lay their hands on a real dragon instead! I spend untold hours writing or dictating reports, crossing the last 't's and dotting the 'i's on another round of bureaucratic twaddle that would be read by everyone... but no one would do anything. For the moment, Bel was acting Station Chief for the FBMR in Chicago and had a better than decent shot at keeping the promotion permanently. Her Washington boss-clowns seemed to like they way she'd done her best to keep the FBI from getting all of the glory and she looked good in a suit in front of the media spouting the currently company spin on events. Janice had also received a promotion to Assistant Bureau Chief and was more than adequate at handling the increased load of politics that came with the job. Officially, the two rival federal departments had declared a truce, at least in Chicago, and Bel and Janice were going to be given carte blanche to make their offices cooperate together in the future. This would also bode well for maintaining their rather more private and intimate relationship. Trixie had been right - someone had poisoned Probert in his highly secure federal cell and while he had spilled a few beans he had held out on informing on some 'really big names' in the hopes of making a better deal for himself other than a certain hangman's noose. Everyone was pissed and a few fingers got pointed to for the blame but nothing was going to stick. Apparently some higher notch conspirator hired a wizard to charm someone in food service for the prison. They not only poisoned Probert, but nearly every other prisoner on that entire high security ward, just to make sure that a poisoned food tray would reach him. Damn! Nearly every night we met for dinner at the kingpin's Italian place. Sebestyen Dénes had been slightly wounded by a last-gasp ambush attempt by the remaining Harrison brother but was healing up nicely. His organization had taken over about 70% of the Harrison Group's former operations and they were in complete control of the Clinton Street territories as well. Both defeated groups had sued for peace and the cease fire had been holding now for over a week and seemed likely to remain so indefinitely. The majority of the Clinton Street gangsters had signed on with the winning team and this had more or less replaced Dénes' not insignificant combat losses, but it would be a long time before these newcomers would fully gain his trust. The last Harrison brother was still alive and going to remain independent, but his defeat had cost him most of his political protection. He was now a very wanted man by the feds for this role in the gun smuggling operation and the sneaky bastard had done a pretty good job of crawling into some hole and covering himself. Bel and Janice would find him eventually. Any way the scales were measured, 'Boss Dénes' was now running things in Chicago and just about all of the remaining other independent gangs were nominally bending their knees to him. We all had hopes that under the watchful but friendly eyes of Bel and Janice, his business operations could start to become a bit more public and 'legal'. Chicago was still a political and bureaucratic nightmare, but the new boss had the clout now to get some things done, and all for the better. "Just take good care of my girl!" The new kingpin said to me in private at our goodbye party at the restaurant the night before I was to take the train (and my assigned VIP rail-suite once again) off to Washington. His eyes were steady and I couldn't read a thing in them. Was he just handing over his daughter for a long bout of education or was he talking privately now to his anointed son? I just couldn't tell! His generosity in helping to restock the private stock onboard the train was certainly excessive, and probably expensive. Those bottles had an awful lot of dust upon them and some of the bottles were over a hundred years old. Some of Miranda's favorite champagne also happened to find its way onboard too. Not to mention the three full crates of Limoncello for Sean. The dragon, bless her scaly heart was soon feeling much her old self now and tried a bit of everything, but her tastes turned out to be simple. Given her druthers, she preferred beer, as dark and bitter as we could find it. For special occasions she took a liking to the really high octane stuff, preferably 151 proof Jamaican or Barbados rum. While drinking it, she was highly amused that she could create flaming smoke rings with the stuff, just as if she were smoking a pipe. After the second night or two at the restaurant, none of the wait staff thought twice about walking around a napping well-fed dragon. A full stomach of roast lamb put her right to sleep. Cheesecake didn't do a thing for her, but hot baked bread or pizza quite delighted her. ************ For my last night in Chicago we as usual trooped out to dinner and stuffed ourselves excessively. The ladies, Bel and Janice were in an unusually good mood for most of the long evening of wine and fine dining it was just like the 'old days', before we had hurried off to Rockford and an adventure that defied reason or much common sense. I knew something was up when Bel and Janice took Miranda aside for a private and long chat in the ladies room and they didn't return for over half an hour. When the ladies return, their noses well powdered, Miranda had now reverted back to being a surly teenager and she snarled out something that I didn't quite comprehend and stomped off home for the night. Bel casually mentioned that she'd gone to do her final packing at home to gather up her clothes and cherished items for the trip to DC and then Texas, where she'd be gone from home for a rather long time. She'd meet me at the train in the morning and then 'things will be fine', they assured me. I hate that statement. That's what Aunt Millie used to say back home just before things got either weird or worse, often both. It didn't help that both women were now looking entirely too smug and pleased with themselves. "Well, goodnight folks!" Janice stated, as she and Bel arose together from the dinner table and took each other's hands. "We're off ourselves for the night and just might stop at O'Grady's for a nightcap... or a bit longer. Zak, I don't want to lug my purse along just now, can you be a dear and drop it off for me there later, like in about an hour or so? That's a sweetie!" Just in case their loud hints had been somehow too subtle for me, both women gave me torrid lingering and wet kisses together on both sides of my cheeks before they left, and with a wink, I said I'd make sure to deliver it to her. That left time for just a little more and a bit of cheesecake, and one more slice of fresh combo pizza for Trixie before I poured my tipsy Ùruisg and sleepy dragon onto our waiting railcar suite for the night. Since we were leaving early at just after 6 a.m. I'd already checked out of my hotel, much to the relief of the management. "You know that you're free to depart from my service, now... at any time, and with my leave and blessing." I reminded the heavy-eyed and yawning dragon. "You have incurred no dishonor in my eyes and are now fully mended, able to return to your home." "Bugger that." Trixie mumbled with a slight happy full-tummy belch. "Like your other little hidden friend, I too find you... amusing. Besides, I'm certain you're destined to destroy every civilization that you encounter... gloriously and with excessive magical overkill! Your Ùruisg is up to something... and I want to be there when it happens!" "I could banish you home! Your fetish for lamb and pizza is going to bankrupt me!" "You can try... but do you happen to know my entire true name?" "No, but I can easily find and feed you another corned beef sandwich that's decades old and utterly indigestible by any living creature!" "No, you wouldn't... that would be dishonorable, and I think I have the measure of my new master now. You're sloppy, inept and have way more talent than is safe or good for any mortal, but your heart is good. You'll do... now go away and rut with your females and let me sleep for a day or two!" And so I did. I wanted to have a little talk with Sean too while I was at it, but he was avoiding me for now. **************** The stout and surly matron bartender at O'Grady's remembered me and had apparently been forewarned of my imminent arrival. She had nothing in particular to say to me but just jerked her head up towards the stairs, and the upstairs private bedrooms. Being a weekday night, things in the downstairs parlor were rather quiet and neither of the two necking and half-dressed female couples even looked at me twice. They all appeared to be nicely warmed up for some more intimate fun upstairs themselves... just like Bel and Janice. When I knocked on their room, their familiar and rather friendly voices called out for me to enter and I did. Like I had figured, the ladies had wanted a bit of warm-up time all on their own before my interruption and they both were already naked under the covers. "Well," I commented, smiling at my amorous lady friends, "the time and the place do seem to be a lot better now. Am I invited here to be a fly on the wall and just watch, or did you have something a bit friskier in mind?" "Friskier, if you've the inclination... but just a bit later. You did once express an interest in watching us, and I'm sure that will help you warm up to our company in another half hour or so. Assuming you haven't quite over partaken of the kingpin's wine cellar?" "Oh, I'll be ready alright, right after a fast bathroom break... assuming my rather over-possessive apprentice doesn't decide to castrate me in my sleep tomorrow night. She is just a tad bit over-excitable." "That she is." Bel commented. "But we've had words with her, as I think you can tell, and we very carefully explained the situation to her. She'll steam and grump for a bit but she'll soon get over herself. You're not her exclusive property for another five months or so and she needs to understand that... and besides, we both owe you. And a lot more than just an erotic floor show!" "How much more, exactly?" I laughed as I started to undo my belt buckle. "Oh, oodles!" Janice giggled, as she and Bel together started to pull down the top of the bedspread that covered them, exposing their already well nibbled breasts. I dropped my pants and trotted off to drain my bladder and returned to find the ladies fully exposed on the sheets and both now rather busy with their tongues in each other's intimate regions. Happy as a clam, I finished undressing and found a comfortable chair to sit and admire the view. I was in no hurry at all and the show more than lived up to my expectations, and my fantasies had been more than a bit exotic. Wet and happy... and much later, the ladies invited to join their bed where it was carefully demonstrated to me that both women had at least some moderate familiarity with the male body, and how to make it very, very happy. Much, much later, two very tired but happy women drove me to the train station and we made our final goodbyes and it was clear but unspoken that it might be a very long time before our paths ever crossed again. They softly each kissed me goodbye and then they turned to walk away holding each other closely and they didn't look back behind them. They had shared their love with me once and all too briefly, but their real love would always be for each other. **************** "You look disgustingly pleased with yourself!" Miranda told me when I returned to our railcar and sunk a peek into our bedroom to check on her. She was sitting up in the large bed bare chested with her arms crossed in apparent annoyance at my late arrival, just before our train was scheduled to depart. Then she hopped out of bed, quite naked and deliberately trotted over slowly with a lot of exaggerated bounce and wiggle to give me a hug and kiss. "You smell like cunt..." she muttered with a theatrical sniff of mock disdain, and kissed my mouth hard again and with a bit of tongue. "and taste of cunt too, but it's not a bad flavor. Did you have fun?" "I did. They were very grateful and last evening was important to them." I replied giving my delightfully nude and cuddly apprentice a hug. "I know. They told me. It's more important to both of them than you'd know and I forgive you. I don't expect my great lord and master to live like a monk, but in few short months I am going to expect you to at very least share your future bedtime dalliances with me! We're partners, my wonderful lord and master, and a team! And that means after the lights go out too! Any questions?" I couldn't think of any. She gave my lips and face another long lick to make sure that the last traces of the foreign feminine juices had been removed while she gave my cock a gentle stroke with her right hand, tender and loving. Then, to emphasize that she was still her own woman and that he was a shrewd cunning temptress, she wiggled her ass off to our private bathroom and then casually dressed herself as if I wasn't even there. I had more than an inkling that my tease of a ward was going to be playing the seductive temptress for the full week of our long slow train trip to Washington. But I also was quite certain that I was going to enjoy nearly every minute of it! Conceal Me What I Am Ch. 14 ***************** I was almost asleep myself when I heard Sean giggling next to my ear and the two of us quickly settled some old business. "Alright you little scheming bastard. What's up with the hive business, and the 'us' part of tracking them all down?" "Humans do take great pleasure at establishing and achieving long term goals and this one is going to keep us busy for awhile. There are things that need doing and I won't, or rather 'can't' do them alone. Like the dragon said, I too find you interesting... and possessing of the potential do what needs to be done. I like to think that actually I've chosen my partner for this enterprise rather well and that when all is said and finally done, that you'll not be the worse for it, or much regret the actions we will need to take." "So, right from the start, you picked me to hide yourself with, so that some great task can be done?" "Greater and more important than you. Essential even for the survival of your world, at least in the long term. Think of it this way if it makes you feel any better, that many, many other so-called 'visitor' races don't like your nasty negative energy friends much either." "So the enemy of your enemy is your friend, more or less?" "Not that absolute minded, but my people have always been amused by your primitive struggling race and would prefer that no significant changes in management occurred. Thus tasked, I concealed from you what I was, that I might better provide thee with aid, and thusly hidden in disguise to serve this mission, I shall doth in turn serve you and the young lass within the rules I am bound by!" I had a few more questions... maybe a hundred of them, but was all that Sean was going to say. We were united in common cause against a great foe and I'd be taking Miranda once again into harm's way, probably sooner than later. The next time, I swore we'd all be a little better prepared! **************** THE END