All the office buildings and stores he could see had their windows smashed out. Bullet holes filled the huge orange globe of the 76 gas station across the street, and someone had set all the prices to $6.66. There was a pile of machinery in the station’s parking lot and in the dim light it took St. George a moment to realize they were dozens of smashed stoplights.
The one exception was the large brick building south of the intersection. The entrance sank below street level and thick ivy grew wild and untrimmed from the balconies. There were silver letters under the green plants, but something about the structure said law firm to him. The building was untouched and illumination poured out of the doors and windows. It was a beacon of clarity in the flickering firelight. He could hear the low purr of generators under the music that blared through a half-dozen speakers.
Most of the upper windows along Beverly had lamps or candles flickering in them. Dozens of tall torches lit the road, each one using a set of wheel rims as a weighted base. A huge fire pit had been built on the top level of a nearby parking garage, and he counted close to fifty people gathered around the pungent tire-fire. They laughed and joked and passed bottles back and forth. Down the road behind him he could see another bonfire with its own crowd. There were a few hundred people out wandering, partying, or making half-hearted attempts at guard duty.
A large, single-story structure stood just southeast of the intersection of Olympic and Beverly Drive, right in the middle of a turn lane. A handful of guards circled it and yawned. In the shifting light of the torches, St. George could see the chain link and the supports and the slow, swaying figures packed inside.
Stealth reappeared next to him. “There are no rooftop guards anywhere,” she whispered, “and no evidence the sentries include them as part of regular patrols.” She sounded annoyed. She pointed across the street at a tall building bearing the letters FI ST PROPER. “I believe that will give us the best vantage point, and the added height decreases the chance of random searches.”
Hidden by the night, they circled around, crossed the street, and scaled the building. The two heroes settled down and St. George shrugged off the backpack. They peered over the short rooftop ledge.
Beneath their last position, a single torch in the lower parking lot threw random shadows across the front of the building. In the flickering light, something large was crouched before the grocery store. Its arms were unnaturally long and spread wide. The figure shifted and steel chimed and clanked.
Stealth pulled a small, squat monocular from her belt and held it to her eye. She cursed a moment later and slid it back into its pouch. “Too bright for the starlight scope,” she said, “and it does not register on infrared.”
“So it’s big, inhuman, and dead. Narrows the choices a bit.”
She nodded. “Its lack of movement implies it is bound. I believe we can rest until sunrise.”
They settled down behind the rooftop ledge.
He shrugged out of the leather jacket. “How long do we have?”
The hooded head turned to the east. “Two and a half hours. I will take the first watch. Get an hour of sleep.”
St. George balled his jacket and tested his head against it. “You’re not going to burst into flame come sunup or anything, are you?”
She stared at him. “This is neither the time nor the place for humor.”
“Sorry.” He threw a last glance across the intersection. “Windows are all good and it’s got working generators. That says town hall to me.”
“Something of importance,” she agreed, “but I would prefer not to guess until we have more evidence.”
“Care to guess on their lack of exes?” He settled back down on the makeshift pillow. “They must be a hell of a lot more aggressive about cleaning them out than we are.”
“Except we rarely hear gunfire,” she said, “and there are no bodies.”
Pick a Card. Any Card.
THEN
Son of a bitch this hurts. No chance of getting a …what is it, a morphine drip? A couple Vicodin? Novocain? Something? Where was I …?
Magic, right. Magic gets a bum rap these days. When you say magic, people immediately assume one of two things. One is you’re an entertainer. You’re someone like Houdini or Copperfield who does a lot of work with handcuffs, scarves, and playing cards. Not a magician so much as a conjurer, a sleight of hand artist. Someone who excels at distraction and misdirection to get a laugh, some applause, and maybe a contract in Las Vegas.
That’s the positive assumption.
The negative assumption, the one I’d been living with since college, is you’re a nut. You’re someone who wears too much eyeliner, memorizes episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer , and grew up in a strict Catholic home where dad was a deacon and made you be an altar boy and now you’re trying to rebel. You went out and bought all the books by Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, and Nostradamus. Probably have bookshelves full of crystals and star charts and sage hanging over the windows and all that other new age bullshit.
Here’s the thing, though. Amidst all that bullshit there are grains of truth. Really, there are. If you put any serious effort into it and dig through all the shit, you’ll find the seeds of real magic. It’s like …It’s like if you want to be a successful writer, but you need to wade through a thousand books written by hacks and wannabes to glean a few useful hints and tips. And then you use those to improve your actual craft, which makes it easier to find the real stuff the next time you go digging. Crowley, Nostradamus, all those guys—-they were like the Internet idiots who manage to get one thing right for every ninety-nine things they get wrong.
No, not Edgar Cayce. He was a complete charlatan. Hell, Houdini proved him to be a fake twice while he was alive and once after he died—Houdini, not Cayce. Yeah, Cayce was such a predictable fraud Houdini exposed him from beyond the grave.
But I digress.
So, yeah, there’s real magic in the world. Just like you read about when you were little. Fireball-casting, demon-summoning, mysticwarding magic. Most of it isn’t that flashy computer game stuff, but it’s real. And it’s like any other art. You have to practice a lot, even if you’ve got some innate talent for it. You keep researching the craft and you keep digging for those seeds of wisdom. Eventually you feel good and give yourself a title, and then if you’re lucky someone who really knows how things are done beats you down and reminds you you’re still just a novice. If you’re unlucky, you end up dead. But I’ll get to that in a minute.
The other thing is, like any art, all the artists are being challenged to do something new. Yeah, you can learn all the basics and do the same things everyone before you did. Nothing wrong with that. But if you want to stand out, if you want to be remembered, you’ve got to do something new.
Jesus, doc, can’t I get something? At least an Advil or two? Some kind of anti-itch cream? No, antibiotics wouldn’t do a damn thing and we both know it. I’ve been fighting these things for five months, where the hell have you been? For that matter, why am I off in a trailer and not the field hospital? Where the hell is Regenerator? Isn’t he supposed to be dealing with all of us, to get us back in the field as quickly as possible?
Bitten? When? Jesus. Is he …I mean, hell, what did it do to him? I’d think if anyone was safe from all this beside the Dragon it would be—Seriously? A full-on coma, not just knocked out? Jesus.
Not that well. He’s sort of like any coworker, y’know? But you say it’s not spreading much past the actual bite? That must look creepy as hell.
Okay, fine. Where was I?
Still on magic, right. Doing something new. No, this is all going somewhere. If you’re not going to give me any good drugs you can at least humor me in my final days.