A Maze of Glass, Chapter Nine, Pt. 2
Zoe focused on the magic, tried to push her will into and through it. The door at the top of the staircase swung open. Sweat dripped from Zoe’s face. She struggled to keep her breath quiet. Closing her eyes, she brought her sixth sense to the fore. She needed to feel the threads of the magic. At the basement threshold, a woman spoke: “So? You’re so sure it’s a false alarm, you go first.”
“You think they’d go straight to the basement?” the apparently-Frank asked.
“Why else break in at all?”
“And you’re sure you felt it?”
“Can you just check the basement?”
The hesitance and argument only lasted seconds, but Zoe had found herself in an economy where seconds mattered. Her lungs burned. She took a deep breath, straining for control. Her sixth sense brushed up against the shape of the spell she needed to access. She dug in. A cramp sliced up her left flank, knots twisted and tightened around her hips. Gritting her teeth, she strangled a groan.
Heavy footfalls began their descent.
Zoe lurched forward, veins bulging. Tears rimmed her eyes from sheer effort. She swallowed gooey spit down a cracked-sand throat. She took a deep breath. Pushing her willpower out, she dug into the sigil beneath her knees. She tangled herself in the threads of the magic.
It felt like the spell took. She was too dizzy to feel sure.
Blinking away a sea of headrush, Zoe saw Frank at the bottom of the stairs. He was shorter than he sounded—maybe five seven, around Zoe’s height—but wore the shaped, taut musculature of someone familiar with intense physical training. Dirty blond haired and blue-eyed, he wore pajama pants, a tanktop, and a kevlar vest. A pendant draped at his clavicle hummed with some kind of enchantment. Zoe couldn’t tell what.
Frank squinted around the basement. “Hit the lights, yeah?”
“Invoke nightsight.”
“Fuck this. Nobody’s here.” Frank turned for the stairs.
The light flicked on. Darkness glowed to dimness, the few living bulbs buzzing through the last of their filaments. They flickered, hummed, and stabilized. Frank nodded, grunting, and turned back to the basement. He carried a 9mm machine pistol, not of Malleus make. Zoe grasped her own sidearm’s grip, not sure where Frank had stowed his before that moment, not sure how he’d gotten his hands on it so quickly.
As Frank stepped cautiously into the ritual space, a slender, blond, blue-eyed woman followed. Appropriately paranoid for the goings-on, she wore a knife-resistant bodysuit under a kevlar vest. In Zoe’s sixth sense, she felt a couple wards shielding the woman.
“Shit,” Frank muttered, reaching for a belt he wasn’t wearing. “Lacey, you got a—”
Apparently-Lacey turned on a flashlight, burning dimness to brightness wherever she brought the beam to bear.
“Thanks.”
Lacey nodded, squinting around the dimness herself. Frank approached the furnace, the water heater. The shadows behind it. Zoe took a deep breath, index finger on the trigger guard.
“I don’t see shit,” Frank muttered. “No one’s down here.”
Lacey, also suddenly-armed, swept the flashlight beam across the far wall. Lowering her machine pistol to her side, she frowned back up the stairs. “We’ll have to clear the place floor by floor, double back…”
“Jesus, Lace, it was probably just a nightmare.”
“Hold it.”
The flashlight beam swept the furnace, the heater, a series of wards and seals, an old toolbox squatting next to the stairwell. Zoe kept one hand pressed to the floor and the other wrapped around the grip of her sidearm. She held a breath.
“Yeah?” Frank grunted.
“Nothing.” Lacey brought the flashlight elsewhere. “Let’s go wake the others.”
“Fine.” Frank turned away from the furnace and worked his jaw as he scanned the rest of the basement. “For the record, I think you just had a nightmare or something.”
“I’m in charge of wards, so we do a full sweep on my say-so. And I say so.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…” Frank met Lacey and passed her, starting upstairs.
“Contact B team,” Lacey added, still squinting at the basement. “Tell them we might have interference.”
“Sure. First thing in the morning.”
Lacey scowled, brow knit, machine pistol at one hip and flashlight at the other. “I swear I felt something. Something broke the perimeter ward, I’m…” she sighed, turned back toward the staircase. “We’ll put them on alert, anyway. After the sweep.”
They ascended, the basement door closing in their wake. Zoe sat back, collapsed into a wall, and buried her sweat-slick face in her palms. Close. Too close.
(every story ends the)
She stood on shaky, sprint-worn legs. Tapping into the property’s wards against outside notice had drained her near empty. Folding part of the spell around her body as a shield against Frank and Lacey had exhausted her further. Bracing herself left-handed against a wall, she waited for the headrush to pass. Took a few deep breaths. Pushed off.
She smudged some of the chalk around the largest curse, the jerry-rigged ‘death curse,’ but didn’t have energy to do more than cost them a couple of hours of work. At the top of the steps, she stopped. Left hand on the doorknob, right hand gripping her pistol, she listened. She heard movement muffled through the second floor, grumbling voices, closets opening…
Did anyone wait on the first floor?
Nobody she heard.
Through the door, around the corner, a kitchen, a laundry room, a mudroom, a back door. Through that, a screen door, a fence—the screen door snapped shut. Zoe jumped on the fence and climbed. In the house, movement reoriented toward the loud, fast yawp of the screen. Zoe clambered up over the fence. Shouts echoed from the house.
Landing on the other side of the chainlink, Zoe rushed down a narrow alley of parking lot back to the street. Behind her, the screen snapped again. Somewhere, car keys turned over an engine. Zoe sprinted across the street into another yard. Through that, over another fence, across another street; she turned left at the face of a four-floor brick apartment building, an immediate right down another parking-alleyway and into a normal-sized parking lot. The backs of two other apartment buildings and a row of tiny duplexes walled the lot.
Zoe sank into shadows, as far from the building and lot lights as she could get.
She coughed and spat up a phlegmatic smoker’s hock. She wiped her lips backhanded and coughed a couple more times, leaning into shadow. Her breath roughed through her, her heart rattled her bones. Pulling her sidearm from her holster she sank down, crouching. She tried to quiet her breath but couldn’t. Her lungs ached, her legs ached. She felt suddenly unsure if she could stand back up.
A car passed, its windows too dark to show passengers.
Zoe waited, breath starting to slow, heart rate calming…
The same car passed again, heading the other way.
Zoe waited. She holstered her gun to wipe slick-sweaty palms against her coat; unholstered the gun again. Her pounding heart sighed, slowing, and her breath filled her habit-choked lungs. She stood, knees creaking, thighs burning, and peered down the parking-alley in both directions. Sticking to the shadows, she approached the alley exit. Waited.
For a long time, nothing else happened.
Still shaking from adrenaline, even as her breath and pulse normalized, she shivered out of the alley and into the night. No matter how many wrong turns and double-backs she made, she couldn’t shake the sense of being watched. She spent two hours lurking the Salem night, waiting for a counterattack that never came.
She headed back toward her rental car, glancing periodically overshoulder.
The Belgian’s crew were the ‘A team.’ They led the run against Jill. With Malleus’ tacit permission, she guessed, they’d been working in the area before the Board even alerted any other organization.
Malleus didn’t have to worry about its SOP if someone else did the dirty work.
She lit a clove and put it out again. Dawn leaked over the horizon. The sense of surveillance oozed away with the sun.
Zoe parked two blocks from her newest room.
She had to get to those people.
How?
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