“Who can tell? But he’s not moving right now and that’s good enough. Let’s go.” I continued toward the stairs, this time with Devona at my side.
Skully’s patrons didn’t know what to do at first. They merely sat and stared. Then one particular Einstein among them shouted, “Hey, free drinks!” and a stampede for the bar commenced. I hoped Skully wouldn’t get stepped on too badly, even if he had been prepared to turn me into filet-o-zombie.
The iron door that led to the bar’s upper level was locked and-as Devona had figured it would be-it was protected by some seriously powerful wardspells. But Shrike had managed to borrow some magical lockpicks for us from a thief he knew, and using the knowledge Devona had gained from years serving as guardian of Galm’s Collection, she was able to bypass the wardspells and open the door in surprisingly short order.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “If you decide to stop working for your father, you can always take up a career as a cat burglar-or maybe I should say bat burglar.”
She grinned, and we hurried up the stairs as fast as my bum leg would allow and exited onto the second floor. The short hall had only three wooden doors, all closed. I turned to Devona and touched the side of my nose. She nodded and inhaled.
“That one.” She pointed to door number two.
“That one it is, then.” I took out my 9mm, which was now loaded with purely ordinary bullets, stepped to the door, and was about to try the knob when Devona stopped.
“Let me see if it’s warded.” She waved her hands over the door’s surface, careful not to touch it. “It’s clean. I guess the Dominari figured the wardspells on the door downstairs were enough protection. Idiots.” She tried the knob, but it wouldn’t budge. “At least they weren’t too stupid to lock it.”
“As a macho type, I’d ordinarily kick the door in myself,” I said, “but seeing as how you’re somewhat stronger than I am…”
She smiled, leaned back and executed a swift, powerful kick to the middle of the door, which exploded off its hinges and flew into the room.
Devona stepped back and I moved past her into the room, fighting the urge to shout, “Police!” Instead I said, “Nobody move!” Hardly as satisfying, but it was the best I could do under the circumstances. At least it fulfilled my quota of tough-guy talk for the day.
There was no one in the room. I kept my gun out, though, just in case. Inside sat a table filled with chemical apparatus: copper tubing, black rubber hoses, beakers, vials, the whole junior chemistry lab bit. Next to that lay a stone altar upon which rested various flowers and herbs, along with the sliced-up body of a dead lamb and the rune-engraved obsidian knife which had done it in. Science and magic, working together to create a better world, or at least a more profitable one-for the Dominari, that is.
“So Morfran was telling the truth,” I said. Even with the motivation we’d provided him with, I still hadn’t quite believed what he’d told us. You can never trust drug-pushing scum, regardless of species or home dimension.
“And I’ll make damn sure the bug pays for it, too.”
I recognized the voice coming from behind us, and though I was dead, it sent a chill through my roomtemperature blood. We turned to see the voice belonged to the shaven-headed punk warlock from downstairs. His piercings-multiple rings in the outer curves of his ears, across his bottom lip, in both nostrils, along his eyebrows, down both sides of his forearms, and who knew where else beneath his ratty jeans and A is for Anarchy T-shirt-pulsed with a silvery energy that wreathed his body in a shimmering argent aura.
I might have been a zombie, but right then I felt a fury inside me as strong as any emotion I’d ever experienced as a living man. I fought to keep my voice calm as I said, “Hello, Yberio.”
The warlock smiled, displaying metal-encased teeth. “Surprised to see me back from the dead, Richter?”
“Are you kidding? This is Nekropolis. Half the people you meet here are one kind of dead or another. You’ve changed a bit from when we last met.” I looked him up and down. “The new look suits you. What does Talaith think about it?”
Devona’s jaw dropped. “Wait, this warlock is the one who created the Overmind for Talaith, the one who-”
“Killed Richter’s partner,” Yberio finished. “Indeed.”
At that moment, I was painfully aware that I still held my 9mm in my right hand. It was down at my side, and I calculated my chances of raising the weapon and getting a shot off before Yberio could do anything to stop me. My reflexes would’ve been slow even if my undead body had been in its peak condition, but as beat-up and decayed as I was right then, I wasn’t in danger of being crowned fastest gun in the Sprawl anytime soon. Yberio must’ve guessed what I was thinking-or perhaps he literally read my mind-and he evidently thought more of my threat potential than I did, because he made a small gesture with his hand and tendrils of silver energy flowed forth from his aura, snatch the gun out of my hand, and tossed it into the corner of the room with contemptuous ease.
“Not that I couldn’t stop a bullet if I wanted to,” Yberio said, “but I’m more conservative in my use of power these days, seeing as how I don’t wield quite so much as I used to. But then again, what’s the point of possessing power if you don’t enjoy it from time to time?”
The warlock stretched his hands toward us and before we could react, two gouts of silver energy blasted forth, slamming us backward into the table holding the chemical and mystical apparatus used for creating veinburn. Vials and beakers shattered, noxious chemicals spilled, the dead goat went flying, and the table broke from the force of the impact. Since I couldn’t feel pain, I wasn’t stunned, and I immediately tried to sit up. But before I could manage to do so, Yberio gestured again, and two more tendrils extended from his aura, the tips shaping themselves into large silvery hands as they came at us. The energy hands smashed into our chests and pressed down like iron weights, pinning us where we lay.
Yberio laughed softly. He sounded pleased, but also a bit sad. “You know, there was a time when I could’ve destroyed both of you far more elegantly than this. I was a Demilord once…but that was before you came to town, Richter.”
I managed to wriggle my right arm free enough to reach up and attempt to clutch the wrist of the silvery hand holding me down. It remained attached to Yberio by an umbilicus of energy, but while it felt solid enough on my chest, when I tried to grab hold of it, my hand merely passed through as if it wasn’t there. I felt a distant tingling sensation, as if I’d come in contact with a strong electrical field.
“Don’t you mean before you decided to start killing people in my jurisdiction back on Earth?” I countered.
“Details, details,” Yberio said.
I turned my head to check on Devona. She appeared unharmed, and while she too struggled to free herself from the grasp of Yberio’s argent energy, she met with no more success than I had.
“Matt checked your pulse after the Overmind was destroyed,” she said. “You didn’t have one.”
“I did,” Yberio said. “It was just hard for him to feel it-especially since he’d become a zombie and wasn’t used to his newly deadened sense of touch. I wasn’t dead, merely in a deep coma as it turned out, and I spent a number of months in that state as my mind and body worked desperately to heal themselves. Talaith helped as much as she could, but she’d suffered her own injuries from the Overmind’s demise and needed the bulk of her magic to heal herself. And when I finally awoke, I found myself…diminished. I still had my knowledge of magic, but I was only capable of accessing and channeling a fraction of the mystic energy I once could. It seemed the psychic backlash caused by the destruction of the Overmind had burned out a portion of my own mind, and I was no longer a Demilord, but merely an ordinary warlock.” He paused, and his tone grew bitter, “And not a particularly strong one at that.”
I couldn’t reach any of my pockets, and even if I could, I didn’t have anything that I could use against Yberio. I looked around at the wreckage of the lab table that I was lying amidst, hoping to find something, anything, I could use as a weapon. My gaze fell upon a half-broken beaker that still contained several ounces of a yellow-green chemical. Not veinburn itself, but one of its ingredients. The beaker lay just outside of my reach, but if I could manage to stretch a bit…