Gunmetal Magic(79)

If I tried to bust my way through the walls or run through the slime, I’d be wrapped up like a mummy ready for burial faster than I could blink.

New plan. I pulled out my knife and worked a square of the parquet floor aside. Concrete. Great. Just great. That’s the second time I had gotten trapped after breaking and entering. Maybe God was trying to tell me that I should give up my life of crime.

I dug in my duffel bag and pulled out the small flask of alcohol. The chair yielded a leg, the medkit gave me the gauze, and once I soaked it in alcohol, I had myself a torch. I set it on fire and carried the torch up to the wall. The flame licked the slime. The web bit at the torch, jerking it, and I let go a fraction of a second before the slime touched my fingers.

The torch stuck to the wall, cocooned in webbing. Fire didn’t work. Fire pretty much always worked.

I looked around. Throwing something heavy at it wouldn’t do either—there was too much web and the walls were solid enough that I’d have trouble breaking through.

Think, think, think…

My gaze snagged on the staff.

I walked up to the desk and grabbed the phone. Phones were strange. Sometimes they worked during magic and sometimes they didn’t. The phone clicked, once, twice, and I got a dial tone. I fished a card out of my wallet and dialed the number.

“Ullo,” a familiar Russian voice said, dripping fatigue. “Yesli ehto ne catastropha…”

Well, it looked like a catastrophe from my end. “Hi,” I said. “This is Andrea.”

“Oh, hello.” A new life came into the voice. “How are you?”

“I’m great. Never better. Hey, listen, I have a staff here I thought you might be interested in. It’s about six and a half feet tall, part wood and part bone. There is writing on the shaft and a face with a mustache. Interested?”

Roman fell silent for a second. When he came back on the line his voice was calm. “Can you read the writing?”

“Some of it looks like runes and some of it is Cyrillic. Let’s see, the top one under the face looks like backward number four, then e, then p, then something that looks like capital H except it’s lower case…”

“Are you holding the staff now?” Roman’s voice was still very calm.

“No, it’s in a case.”

“Do not touch the staff. It’s a very bad staff.”

“Noted.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in the back of a warehouse. I broke into it illegally, and I’m now trapped by some strange ward. Looks like spiderwebs made out of slime. If you were to come and help me with the web, the staff is yours.”

“Give me the address.”

I recited the address.

“I’ll be right there. Don’t touch the staff. Don’t touch the web. Don’t touch anything until I get there.”

I hung up. The dark scary servant of all evil was on his way to rescue me. Somehow that thought failed to make me warm and fuzzy.





* * *


I had just finished going through the last box of documents, when the door across the warehouse opened, and Roman called out, “Andrea?”

“In here,” I yelled. “Don’t touch the webs!”

I got up and walked to the office doorway. The large warehouse space with the shelves stretched before me, shrouded in the curtains of the web. I could barely see him. From where I stood, he was merely a gray silhouette in the opposite doorway.

“Okay, okay, I got this.” The silhouette muttered something in Russian. A dull roar issued from Roman’s direction.

Roman’s voice rose, chanting, mixing with the roar.

The webs shuddered. The curtains bent toward Roman, turning concave, as if pulled backward.

Roman’s chant gained power, preternaturally loud, words pouring out, whipping and twisting through the roar like a live current of power.

The curtain of webs snapped taut and broke. Roman stood in the gap, arms spread wide, his black robe flaring as if caught by a ghostly wind. He grasped a wooden staff topped with the head of a monster bird in his right hand. The bird’s beak gaped wide open, filled with darkness and grotesque, so big a watermelon could have fit through it. The pearl-colored web twisted into a knot, sucked into that cavernous mouth.

The floor of the warehouse shuddered. Roman stared straight up, the chant bubbling from his mouth, each word vibrating with power. Splashes of pure darkness swirled around his black boots. Something peered at me through that darkness. Something ancient, malevolent, and cold.

The temperature in the room dropped. I shivered and watched a cloud of vapor escape my mouth.

A choir of deep male voices sang in tune to Roman’s chant. The web kept hurtling into the staff’s mouth.