“How do you plan to pull this off?” Eric asked, voicing my thoughts. “Even if Winters killed half the Enforcers, he still has over a hundred armed men in the Tower, all carrying orichalcum runes. The building is blocked against walking Between, I’m sure!”
“What Gerard Winters doesn’t know,” Oberis said grimly as we drew into downtown and ever closer to the Tower, “is that there is one spot in the building that isn’t blocked against Between. There were times MacDonald wanted things done without going through his people, and he came to me—and having a secret access to his tower has had...other advantages.”
“We’re going to walk right into the heart of the Wizard’s Tower and save his millennial ass from his own prodigal creation,” the fae lord told us. He pulled the Lexus into a dark alleyway, two blocks away from the glittering skyscraper our world knew as the Wizard’s Tower.
Eric grabbed my shoulder as I was about to leave the car to join Oberis. “Jason,” he said quickly. “You should probably use the Queen’s gift. You are never going to be as out of your league as you are tonight.”
For a moment, I had no idea what the old gnome was referring to, and then I remembered the tiny black pottery vial Niamh had given me at Queen Mabona’s insistence—the vial of quicksilver that still rested inside the runic armored vest I wore under my dress shirt.
I took the vial and its leather thong out from around my neck and studied it in the anemic winter sunlight leaking down into the alleyway. The cork was sealed in tightly, and it took a moment of real effort to pop it out.
The tiny mouth of the vial seemed to glow in the sunlight sneaking into the vial, and a spicy scent of cinnamon wafted out into the alley. I breathed deeply of the oddly comforting smell, and then slugged back the tiny dose of the drug.
Nothing seemed to happen for a moment, and then a deep golden warmth began to spread out from my midsection. Everything felt a lot lighter, including the heavy auto-shotgun in my hands. With a surge of confidence, I stepped over to join Oberis, who gave me a questioning look, then shrugged.
“Both of you, stand with me,” he instructed. Once Eric and I were standing on either side of him, he reached out and grabbed our arms, then stepped.
35
THE COLD CHILL that ran over my flesh felt familiar. Bone-chilling but somehow familiar—from my exposure to it by Mabona and previous, shorter trips with Oberis, I assumed. Everything around us faded to dim shadows of the world we’d left behind, intermixed with clouds and shadows of something else.
“Hold on,” the fae lord murmured. “If you lose touch with me here, I may not be able to retrieve you in time—and the Cold Death is our worst punishment for a reason.”
Remembering how Laurie’s defiance had shattered when presented with that possible fate, I shivered—and made very sure to keep my arm in Lord Oberis’s hand. For an interminable and cold moment, we stood there, Between, and did nothing.
Then we moved. There was no stepping, no physical action, just a thought from Oberis, and we were heading up through the mists. After a few moments, the void we moved through felt even more oppressive, somehow, and I knew we’d entered into the area barred on the other side. MacDonald’s magic prevented us from crossing over back into the real world there.
Somehow, I could feel the barrier. Feel its strength. Feel its weakness. And I could tell, before Oberis even shifted his direction, where we would exit. There was a softness to it my quicksilver-fueled senses could feel, a room clear for the fae lord to enter.
Stepping back into the real world brought a surge of warmth almost equal to the quicksilver. It still felt strange for a moment, and then I realized that the drug was letting me feel the barriers erected against the Between—I could feel that other world that stood beside our normal one.
The room we’d entered was very plain. A couch occupied one wall, with a desk and chair on the opposite of the room. It was large, the size of an executive office, but with no windows to either the outside or the rest of the building.
Lord Oberis clearly knew the room well, better than I expected, even. He was heading toward the single door even before Eric and I had our bearings. Careful to keep the muzzle of the shotgun Eric had given me pointing away from the fae lord, I followed him.
We stepped out of the room into an empty corridor. On the inner side of the building was a solid concrete core sporting a number of closed doors, where the outer walls of the corridor were glass windows looking out onto a sunken atrium. Sunlight filtered through the outside wall of the tower, lighting up the downtown core that spread out beneath us—we were at least fifty stories up.
The view, sunlight and atrium distracted me for just long enough to miss several of the closed doors leading deeper into the tower opening. Quicksilver-fueled intuition caused me to dive for the floor as the shooting started regardless.
The Enforcer squad had traded in their standard black suits for full-body SWAT gear in black and gold, orichalcum runes traced over the surface of the well-made mundane equipment. Box-like bullpup assault rifles sprayed bullets in our direction as all three of us scattered out of the line of fire.
I could feel the cold iron in the rounds—the quicksilver sharpened my sense enough I could even say that it was every third bullet. I rode the quicksilver, letting it fuel my motion as I hit the ground, rolled, and came up facing the nearest of the half dozen Enforcers now in the hallway with us.
The heavy auto-shotgun roared, spraying heavy buckshot into the body armored guard. His armor and its enchantments stopped any of the rounds from penetrating but didn’t do anything against the kinetic force of the overloaded shell. The impact flung him back, through the wall behind him, shattering bones and leaving him possibly dead and definitely out of the fight.
With the heartstone-and-mercury mix singing in my veins, I had tracked to the next Enforcer before the SPAS-15 had finished cycling. He tried to turn his rifle toward me before I fired, but his chamber clicked empty, his magazine drained, as the weapon bore on me. This time, the buckshot slammed into his head, ending his involvement in the fight with a very definitive snapping sound.
Oberis’s response to the Enforcers was less advanced, possibly more elegant, and with the power of a fae lord behind it, much more effective. As the second Enforcer I’d shot dropped, he was lowering the last of the other four to the ground, having just scythed through them with the same glamor-blade he’d used to kill Darius Fontaine.
“They’re expecting us,” he said simply, not even panting from exertion. “MacDonald is that way,” he continued, pointing. I didn’t question how he knew where the Wizard was; I simply obeyed the implicit order, heading clockwise around the top floor of the Tower.
This floor, I realized, must have been MacDonald’s actual residence. The open doors we passed showed a kitchen, an astonishingly comfortable-looking living room—whose furniture was probably worth more than my apartment—and the various other rooms and necessities of a home. The entire floor was wrapped in a circular atrium that filled the space that would have been an office cubicle farm in most of the buildings downtown at this height.
There was no sign of conflict or violence on the floor except the remnants of the squad of Enforcers that had tried to jump us. The floor was as silent as death as we ran, following Oberis toward MacDonald.
We’d rounded almost half of the tower when Oberis slowed, gesturing toward a pair of closed double doors. “In there,” he murmured.