A Maze of Glass, Chapter Seventeen, Pt. 2
They had a lot of work to do.
According to Frank, still locked in a closet at a Malleus safehouse Zoe prayed no other agent thought to use, the Belgian’s team had arrived before Malleus Intel-A division sent out the widespread report. Even before making the situation known to other organizations, Malleus and the Belgian’s ‘Consortium’ had started making moves against Jill. They had a three week head start. Three weeks, two covens, and a small target group.
Comparably, Omar and Zoe had three opposition parties, multiple targets each, and several ritual sites to sabotage. Working to regain lost time, they were outnumbered, outplanned, and outflanked. From such a disadvantaged position, their only hope of coming out on top rested on Zoe’s powerful expertise and Omar’s clever short-cutting, his efficiency and cleverness.
The night after they returned to Salem proper from their first encampment at the safehouse, Zoe laid awake in bed and stared at the ceiling. Why had Leo sent her here? The circumstances seemed insurmountable. Had he told her about it just to get out ahead of the story? Sooner or later, Jill would have called her. Jill would have asked for help and Zoe would’ve agreed. So maybe Leo just handed her the dossier to avoid her getting it from someone else, later.
Or maybe Leo really believed she had a chance.
Zoe climbed out of the top bunk of their rented bedroom. She padded socked feet out of the bedroom and into the living room. Letting her mystically-enhanced eyesight turn the fumbling darkness into mere dimness, she sat on the couch with the lights off and plucked up her pack of smokes from the table. She turned the package over in her hand, staring.
Leo hadn’t called back with an updated offer, yet.
Shoshanna hadn’t gotten in touch about possible defection, either.
Her body remembered the reason she’d picked up the smokes. Absently, she pulled a long black clove from its casement and put the filter between her lips. She switched the pack for the Zippo but paused before lighting the cherry. The flame danced and glowed.
“You okay?” Omar asked from the bedroom doorway.
Zoe flinched, surprise derailing her train of thought. She lifted the Zippo to the clove and puffed. Clapping the lighter closed, she put it back on the table. “It’s almost dawn and I’m smoking alone in the dark. What kind of detective are you?”
“I never did well with behavioral deduction. Or tactical body language.”
Zoe snorted. “Guess not.”
“Zo’…the ad said ‘no smoking.’”
“Fuck the ad and fuck the people who own the place.” She took a long drag, breathing silver. “We’re never going to catch up to this…”
Omar walked into the room, pajama-clad. His breezy silk sleeves and pants made Zoe self-aware; the undershirt/boxer combination she’d relied on since training felt suddenly immature, beneath her. He sat on the floor on the other side of the table. “You want to try the grab-and-go plan?”
Zoe stared at nothing in particular. “If Frank told us the truth, I don’t see how we have a choice.”
“We need to get the tracking and scrying spells off of her, first.”
She shook her head. “Darnell’s losing it, Jill’s getting paranoid…their plans are working. I don’t know if we have time to disrupt every single spell keeping track of her—I don’t even know if it’s worth trying.”
“If we grab her without taking down the tracking spells, they’ll just follow her.”
“Taking down all those spells will take…what, two weeks? Assuming nothing else goes wrong?”
“We both felt the power in those matrices,” Omar said. “We could drag Jill out of that house and drop her in the middle of flyover nowhere and they’d still ping her ass within a hundred feet.”
“Maybe a hundred feet is enough.”
“Maybe it’s not.”
Zoe wiped at her face, took a fevered puff from her smoke. “Goddammit.”
A knock echoed in from the front door. Omar and Zoe glanced between each other. Zoe put out her cigarette, standing. Omar jogged back to the bedroom, socks quieting his footfalls. Zoe followed, walking. The knock repeated, louder.
Zoe took a breath, closed her eyes, and listened to her sixth sense. A vague dread and animal anxiety sizzled beneath her normal perception. When she opened her eyes again, Omar pushed a submachine gun into her hands. Pulling a tactical strap over one shoulder and cross-body, she took her armored jacket from him next. He donned a kevlar vest. Armed and armored, they each took their run kits and clipped them over their waists. Zoe had ditched one of her spare clips to make room for two of her burner phones. She thought about Sung-ho and all of his strange habits. She couldn’t quite recall the connection.
The wards they’d set around the perimeter spiked a warning through their minds. Something non-human skirted around the rental, seeking gaps in their defenses.
Zoe ejected the magazine, checked it unnecessarily out of just-in-case impulse, and slapped it back in. The same standard pattern of ASOD armory munitions filled the mag—silver bullets, alternating armor-piercing and frangible rounds, and tracers—except now she had thirty-one of them and could rattle them out of the barrel in half the time.
Omar had brought them. A decade earlier, after what had happened with the Summoner, he’d asked why Zoe hadn’t filed an armory request before launching the raid. She’d shrugged, offered some half-lie about timelines. Omar never made the same mistake.
She pulled on her jacket, unfolded the gun stock, and peered back over her shoulder at the condo beyond. Everything felt still and quiet and brittle. Omar stepped around her, taking point as they walked back into the living room.
“We can’t get too loud,” Omar whispered.
“Uh… ‘can’t’ is a strong word.”
“If it gets in, we take the opposite way out. Don’t shoot if you don’t need to.”
“We fall back to the car, take off, regroup?”
“Bingo,” Omar confirmed.
Zoe angled her barrel toward the front door. Omar angled his toward the kitchen, the angle of structure that led to the back.
Seconds crept passed.
Glass shattered. Talons clacked and scraped against kitchen tile.
They padded backwards, down a narrow hall leading to the front door. In the hallway, they slow-slow-slowly slipped their feet into laceless shoes. From the kitchen, an inhuman throat grumbled gutturally. Omar slo-mo unlocked the latch and knob locks. “My car,” he whispered.
The creature in the kitchen snorted loudly. Its clawed, clattering movements stopped.
Zoe nodded. She didn’t speak.
Holding his submachine gun left-handed, its strap hanging off of one shoulder, Omar turned the doorknob with his right hand. They braced themselves to run, if need be. They took long, quiet breaths.
One of the phones in Zoe’s kit started vibrating.
Omar glared.
The creature in the kitchen made a noise somewhere between snake-hiss and raptor-shriek.
Omar threw the door open. It banged the side of the condo but they didn’t care—they ran outside and raced for his rental car. Omar worked the locks while Zoe rushed for the passenger side. Behind them, furniture crashed to the floor as some sharp, fast beast pursued.
They clambered into the vehicle clumsy and desperate. Omar brought the engine to a roar. His gun tumbled from his shoulder and Zoe ended up with two of them on her lap. She fumbled through straps and gunmetal to unzip her kit. A phone buzzed inside. As Omar reversed, the headlights showed something impossible burst out of the house. The size of a moose, six-legged, head an elongate combination of lupine and arachnid, it leapt into the driveway.
“Shiiiiit!” Omar yelled, spinning the wheel as he switched gears.
If enough people witnessed the thing, mundanity would kill it within minutes. But who was around to witness it at three-something in the morning in Salem?
The car squealed, trunk swinging wide as Omar spun the vehicle onto a street. Zoe finally dug out the phone. Jill’s complementary burner number flashed on the screen once. It stopped ringing. “Omar, hold on, I need to—”
Something heavy crashed into the side of the trunk. Omar worked the wheel, keeping them more-or-less steady. His submachine gun tumbled out of Zoe’s lap and landed on the floor. Zoe reached for it and a second concussion dented the rear of the vehicle. Omar kept it steady but the phone jumped down to join the gun. It started buzzing again. Zoe reached down, not sure what to grab first.
“Get ready!” Omar shouted.
“For what!?”
Turn Back
...coming soon...
Table of Contents
