Fire & Frost (10 page)

Chanting. They were starting it up now.

Veronica took a deep breath. She’d exaggerated to Max about the witches needing ten days to get in, but surely the wards would hold for the day. The wards ran three layers deep, each embedded with algorithms that would lead to time-consuming rabbit holes. But there was a lot of blood available out there. And four masterful witches.

She twirled the voltage box knob to high and then set to concentrating on Max’s image, letting her mind fill with him.

It was important to avoid experiencing feelings while viewing the image you wanted to conjure, because a computer could be tricked or confused. Not feeling things while looking at photos of Max got harder every time, because she had a kaleidoscope of feelings about him, this man who pushed her and criticized her relentlessly. Him and his overbearing cop attitude and moral views on everything. Max was a bull of a man who didn’t think of himself as smart, but he was smart—his was a strong, simple intelligence that she couldn’t tie in knots, try as she might. He loved whiskey and steak and tropical shirts and sketching funny little things and shoveling the walk until it was bone clear.

She tried not to picture him dead up there.

Max was always telling her that the devil computers were making her weak. Dependent.
Rotting you from the inside-out
, he loved to say.
A drug you can’t quit
.

Well, he couldn’t quit, either. He liked coming back, even as he resented her power. Most every living being wanted to continue living.

Crashes. That would be the paint cans. Max had told her to get them out of the basement. When she’d made to banish them with magic, he’d been disgusted.

“I’ll be as magic as I want to be,” she said to Max in the photo. Max, her bull of a cop and the number-one enemy of organized crime, squinting into a photographers’ flashbulb.

She touched a finger to his thick cheek, as if she could touch him. He had a squarish face—not what you’d call handsome, but overwhelmingly male, right down to his wide brow and the cleft on his thick chin. His eyes were brown. So was his hair, which he kept shorn close. He got his haircuts at an old-timey barbershop he’d gone to since boyhood, he’d told her once. He was squinting in the shot, lips pulled slightly to the side of his face. That’s how he smiled—sheepishly, and more on one side than the other. From the smile, she guessed that somebody must have just praised him, likely for the arrests of all the Salvo high-ups. The string of Salvo arrests that had gotten him killed.

The crashing and pounding grew louder outside her door. Somebody had found her sledgehammer.

A sledgehammer would do nothing against her wards.

She straightened the photo with a twinge in her stomach. A better person wouldn’t bring him back after she’d let him get killed. A better person would leave him there in the photo where he belonged.

She’d promised him,
she told herself.
He wanted to come back
. All excuses.

She concentrated on his image, immersing herself in him.

It was like getting lost in beauty.

VERONICA HIT THE ENTER KEY and sat back, relieved he was on his way. She could hold out one day.

It was in the very next moment that she realized what a spectacularly awful decision it was to conjure Max first.

The plan had been to conjure reinforcements. What was Max to do against the Council? She’d so badly wanted him restored to her world she’d made an emotional decision instead of a tactical one. What was wrong with her? They could kill him yet again!

Shit.

He’d arrive in 23 hours and 59 minutes, and he’d need backup. She grabbed a dusty three-ring binder full of the old Council newsletters from when they still bothered to send them to her. She flipped through to get to the
Now Vanquished
section of each, always on the back page.
Now Vanquished
was the witches’ version of humankind’s police blotters. She needed an enemy of the Council to appear ASAP after Max appeared. But it couldn’t be a being that might harm Max. Or her. She rifled through. Various baddies had been photographed. Some killed, some sent off to other worlds.

Then she came upon the perfect ally: Jophius, a mini-bull dragon the size of large dog. He’d been kept caged by the Council for years as they tried to extract the names he knew, killed during an escape attempt. Oh, how Jophius hated the Council! Jophius would rip apart these witches like a bloody little banshee if he so much as scented them. But he didn’t have a problem with witches in general—just the Council. Perfect.

She repeated the process with the electrodes. This photo had been snapped during Jophius’ imprisonment. She covered the bars with the paper. She needed Jophius to arrive
sans
cage.

ALMOST 22 HOURS LATER, Veronica lay on the computer lab couch studying
Ytonions
, an ancient tome, a kind of Holy Grail of witchdom, conveniently depicted in a 1871 painting by Brugese and now manifested into the real world via her devil computers.

She wondered if it was snowing yet. Malcolmsberg, Minnesota was due for a storm, according to the weatherman who’d appeared during a break in Miami Vice.

She’d subsisted on Dr. Pepper and Bugles while the witches and their hit-man helpers worked beyond the door. How in the world had mobster Johnny Salvo gotten involved with the witch Council? It was smart of him. Maybe she shouldn’t have used magic to mess with Johnny Salvo’s cruel son, but it had felt so good.

The power of the Council pressed in on her. They’d be pushing a hell of a lot harder if they knew Max and Jophius would show up in less than two hours. Veronica was starting to feel home free. Even if they got to her, she could hold up to almost anything for two hours.

Or could she? Max would say she couldn’t.
Devil computers are making you weak.

She frowned. The conjuring power of a god was hardly a weakness.

She surveyed the mini supercomputers that crowded the space with their metal bodies full of wires and circuit boards. The modern advances in computing were amazing; not long ago you’d need a computer the size of a two-car garage plus a massive water supply for cooling to do what just one of her refrigerator-sized computers could do today.

Red coils pulsed inside the space heater on the floor, warming the little lab. Even the electricity here emanated from her now—the witches’ spells out there had drained the conventional electricity. She wished Max could understand how many breakthroughs she’d made. There was nothing she couldn’t do!

Except, apparently, stop caring what he thought.

She hated that he’d have to come back remembering his death on the kitchen floor. It would feel like it had just happened, but Max would go into an action mode. Max was a pro…unlike Don Johnson. She smiled to think of his disdain for that show. “Detective Don
Johnson
,” he’d growl, managing to load up those few syllables with total scorn.

She went back to her studies. This old book was giving her new ideas about extending the duration of things she conjured beyond seven days. She wanted to get the stuff faster, too; it really was inconvenient to have to wait for the entire rotation of the earth. And she wanted the power to cancel things, and she wouldn’t mind more control over the beings she conjured, so she wouldn’t have to use the titanium cage out back ever again.

It had taken her many years and a whole lot of luck she’d never be able to repeat to establish the basic commands for conjuring. Now that she had it down, however, she should be able to alter the rules.

The chanting started up again. Latin. An oldie. That one could do some damage.

Veronica grabbed her Walkman cassette player, cranked Grand Master Flash, and set to creating a modulating counter-pulse of magic. It put off their rhythm for her to be in a different sonic reality, and she loved how the Grand Master Flash guys boasted about their prowess. She liked their winning attitude. A lot of people hated them, too, but did they care? Hell no.

FIVE MINUTES TO MAX time. The witches had punched through two layers of warding and the last ward was getting ragged.

She’d turned off the music; she was fighting them with pure energy now and it wasn’t going well, even with her warding head start. It would be hell fighting them in the open if it came to that. She felt cold already. Power dwindling.

And she wanted to kick herself for not having Jophius arrive first. To let her neediness guide her like that was an unforgivable error. Hopefully Max would take a few minutes to collect himself when he remembered his death. Then Jophius would appear, smell the Council witches, and tear down.

“Snooty Veronica,” Witch-ascendant Tami called, in her sing-song voice. “You had promise, but now you’re merely sad. You see how we’re shredding your walls? Your computer tricks are mere smoke and mirrors.”

She could feel their enjoyment. The Council was on a hunt, and she was the prey.

“My smoke and mirrors are about to blow your mind.”

If only she could hold out. She was at the last of her energy. She closed her eyes, weary of fighting, longing to see Max’s face.

IT WAS JUST LIKE THE FIRST time and all the times after that. One second the camera bulbs were flashing in his face, the next he was on her doorstep.

And then the memories of this timeline came crashing in. Except this time the memories were violent. Painful. He hadn’t blinked out after seven days like he usually did; he’d been shot in the head. They’d killed him.

Max pulled out his Glock and flattened himself to the side of the door, heart pounding, breath puffing out in white clouds.

Jesus.

It would’ve gone down a day ago. More memories. The plan had been for her to hole up in her lab and wait for him. He’d left two of the Kite brothers and those witches alive.

Faint boot prints were visible along the front of the house, made maybe an hour ago, judging from the rate of snowfall. Good. It meant they were still around, and that meant she was still in there, waiting. She’d be frightened as hell and pretending she wasn’t, even to herself. Probably giving them an earful. She always talked big when she felt small.

He peeked in the window. Candles burned. Electricity out. The place looked empty. The Council witches would be downstairs going for the lab, but the Kite brothers could be elsewhere.

Max turned the handle and pushed the door open, quiet as a mouse. Clear. The wood floor was covered in dark footprints—dried blood. He crept across and stopped at the doorway to the kitchen, feeling ill when he realized that this was likely his blood. Some of it, anyhow. His dead body was around here somewhere.

Not me,
he told himself.
I’m here.

Or was he? He sometimes wondered if these re-ups of him had a soul. Max wasn’t frightened by much, but he definitely didn’t want to learn the answer to that one. He’d asked Veronica once, then stopped her when she was about to respond. He didn’t want to know.

The faint strains of a song started up. Singing in the basement? No—witchy chanting. Trying to break through. He took a breath and snuck smoothly around the entry into the kitchen where more candles burned. No bodies. Just a lot of blood splotches, footprints, and drag tracks. Hell, you could barely see the yellow linoleum for all the blood around. In the darkness of the mudroom beyond, he could make out a large heap. That would be the bodies, he thought with a start—his and three of the Kites. Piled up and already starting to stink. Better than outside, he decided, where the crows and raccoons would go at them.

The door to the basement steps was cracked open. The stairs would be a bitch—they creaked something awful unless you walked on the sides of the treads, and even then it was chancy. Murmurs. A man’s voice. So at least one of the Kites was down there with the witches.

He crept down in the darkness, gun in hand, putting as much weight on the wooden rail as possible. Two silent steps, three, four. So far so good.

The front of the basement came into view. Candle glow from beyond. More like a blaze. A lot of candles. They’d be around a corner, in the back part of the space near where the lab was. The candles would help him, lighting his enemies while he stayed shrouded in darkness.