The Last American Wizard (13 page)

He visualized the wards they had cast on him as real blankets with edges where a needle-thin shaft would slip past and weak places that a slim point could
penetrate.

It
worked!

He saw his power flash toward Weishaupt like a brilliant golden wire. This time, the painful reaction to a new spell felt like a giant claw ripping out his abdomen, and the overwhelming light blinded him–but not before he saw a shield of the purest black appear between the wizard’s hands and swallow the golden wire into its
depths.

Behind him, he heard a deafening bellow of triumph from the
cadejo
and screams of terror from the gang members standing around
him.

The pain from the spell drove him to the floor, and once again, everything went
black.

Steve came awake with a scream. He wrenched the bulky case that held his cell phone off his belt and started to throw it across
the room. At the last moment, he kept his grip firm and brought the phone up to his
face.

“Listen, you little bastard!” he yelled. “Can’t you just vibrate like every other goddamn phone? You set me on fire again and I swear I’m going to take a blowtorch to your
ass!”

Steve scowled at the screen. “That doesn’t even reach the level of incomprehensible, you idiot peasant.” A riot of ideograms, phrases, and cartoons flashed across the screen. It paused for a couple of seconds
on

Which switched
to:

After a few more screen changes, it finally settled
on:

Steve was curious. “What was that part after ‘This translator sucks’?”

“I assume you were referring to the translator program and not me.”

“Hmm.” Steve wasn’t convinced but decided to leave it alone. “I’ll have to remember that
one.”

He was still on the floor of the MS-13 headquarters. That was a bit of a disappointment, but still being alive was a plus, so he decided that overall, he was ahead of the game. There was no one else in the room. There was a large amount of thick rope just behind him. Next to the orange La-Z-Throne, he could see a body.

At least he thought it was a body. He couldn’t quite be certain, since it appeared that a large hoofed animal had jumped on it for a considerable amount of time. In the end, he stopped trying to fool himself that it was an extra-large order of cherry Jell-O and admitted that it was a severely-flattened
Jairo.

Steve had been to a couple of warzones, so he knew what would happen next. He leaned over and threw up on the floor. His head swam and bile filled his
mouth.

When he could think a bit more clearly, he reasoned that the...no, he wasn’t going to think about that again...but he did, of course, and threw up
again.

At least, he tried to. He hadn’t eaten all day and mostly, it was just painful dry
retching.

When his head stopped feeling like there was a vise clamped tightly on his temples, he sat up, carefully facing away from Jairo’s remains, and asked the cell phone, “Where’s
Ace?”

An arrow appeared on the screen and swung like a compass. He held it flat and it pointed at the door where they’d originally come in. Steve shook his arms, jiggled his legs, and–when none of these
motions
produced
enough
pain
to
knock
him
out–stood
up.

His head spun for a second, but he’d practiced this type of navigation near the end of many long nights. He aimed at the door and walked straight for it, ignoring any visual cues that might have indicated a general instability in the physical
world.

“Just like Hangover 101,” he thought. “And my parents said I never learned anything in
college.”

He managed to navigate through the short hallway with only two bounces off the plywood walls and paused for a second to examine the now-opened front door. It looked like someone had fired a TOW anti-tank missile through it–from the inside. There were a few splinters left in the hinges but the rest was in small pieces, spread in the street in a neat fan
shape.

Ace was sitting on the top step with her back to the door and scratching behind the ears of a large...well, it was more of a dog than anything else. Steve assumed it must be Carlos the
primera palabra
. Steve wondered if he was now the
primo perro ladrando,
which, in Steve's fractured Spanish would have meant First Barker. He staggered out, sat on the other side of Ace, and congratulated himself on keeping that particular little joke to himself.

After all, Ace was sitting on the top step, Carlos was lying down, and she still had to reach up to scritch behind his
ears.

Ace looked up. “Well, if it isn’t Sleeping Ugly. About time you joined the
party.”

“I woke up a while ago when Send Money decided to
barbecue me again.” He pulled the phone off his belt. “Next time, I’m putting him through a George Foreman
Grill.”

Ace shook her head. “You can’t screw with the
phone.”

“I’m just talking about giving him a taste of how it feels.” Steve glared at the screen. The image of the Rolling Stones tongue was
there
again.
“Do
not
get
snarky
with
me,
you
little
firebug.

Figure out some other way of making your demands known or I’ll have to decide between the Fate of the Known Universe and my own
comfort–”

“And there goes the universe?” Barnaby’s voice came out of the
speaker.

“Precisely. In that belt clip, he sits very close to what I
consider to be sacred
ground.”

“Probably surrounded by skulls on stakes like all the sacred ground you see in late-night horror movies,” Ace
said.

Steve just gave her his best withering glare, which had no apparent effect. With as much dignity as he could muster, he asked. “OK, what happened after I bravely took on the leader of whoever those guys with the accents
were?”

“Was that before or after you passed out?” Ace asked. “I’m not going to dignify that with a
response.”

“Well, I really hate to admit this, but you did sort of save the day,” Ace said dryly. “That golden rapier or whatever you produced cut Mr.
Weishaupf’s–”

“Weishaupt’s,” Barnaby corrected
her.

“Let’s just settle on ‘the bastard in charge,’ OK?” She continued. “At any rate, his hand flew off and that dropped his combat capability to approximately that of a combined combat team of
kittens.”

Steve allowed himself a smile of
triumph.

Ace snorted. “Don’t get all puffed up. You immediately did your best imitation of a piece of lumber and went flat on the floor. Well, you did scream like a girl on the way down, but other than that, knotty pine all the
way.”

“They haven’t had any knotty pine since rec rooms were replaced by man
caves.”

“I came from a conservative, if not actually retrograde, family.” Ace
said.

“Where did Weisswurst’s hand
go?”

Ace pointed down to where the
cadejo
was chewing on something leathery. “As soon as it was cut off, it looked like it was a million years
old–”

“More like two hundred years old, actually.” Barnaby
said.

“I guess that could be right. Anyway, Cujo seems to have
taken a shine to it and I’m not about to deprive him of his pleasures.” She gave the big dog monster a couple of hard swats that would have felled most people. Carlos just grunted happily
and continued to chew. “Then Carlos here took the initiative and used the knife I’d tossed him to cut off the ropes from around his neck.”

“How did he do that?” Steve
asked.

“Really fast.” Ace said. “I tested out the mojo factor of the seven dwarves with my last throwing knife, and when it buried itself in Dwarf Number Two’s butt, I decided that their juice had departed along with the boss man’s
hand.”

Barnaby interjected. “Weishaupt is the Ace of Wands, and if you look at the card, there’s not a lot of him except a hand. Well, there is a cloud but mostly it’s a
hand.”

“Makes sense.” Ace said. “Anyway, Carlos here had managed to get his feet on Jairo and was teaching him a lesson in
lèse- majesté
which I doubt he’ll ever
forget.”

“I think that’s a safe bet,” Steve said, remembering the red smear he’d seen
inside.

“Yeah.” Ace nodded and moved to continue
her
ministrations behind the
cadejo’s
other ear. “I could have used a bit of
help,
but
Carlos here–he really doesn’t like to be called
cadejo
, by the
way.”

“Is that one of those
lèse-majesté
sorts of things?” Steve asked.

“Yup. One of the dwarves called him
cadejo
when the action moved outside, and the last I saw that particular fellow, he was about five inches above that church spire over there.” Ace pointed. “See? About two blocks away. The one with the pair of trousers hanging off the cross arm? I think Carlos could have a great future in the NFL if he didn’t face the wrong way when he
kicks.”

Barnaby spoke up from the cell phone’s speaker. “I think Carlos is the red dog in the Moon card. The good news is that there is a white dog who is probably a bi...err...a
female.”

Carlos’s grunt had a certain hopeful timbre to
it.

“In Jungian analysis, the Hero has to not merely appease but actually befriend the two hounds if he ever expects to get to his goal.”

Steve asked, “Am I the Hero or just the
Fool?”

“As hard as it may be to believe,” Barnaby said, “you are both.”

“Which part is hard to believe?”

“You being the
Hero.”

“You realize that you’re capitalizing again?” Steve leaned back against what was left of the doorway. “However, I’ll let that pass. In fact, I find myself in agreement. I am no Hero and I have no idea what my Goal is. Any
clues?”

Barnaby hesitated for a moment. “Sorry, I had to block some seeker-killer malware for a second. The CYBERWAR Division is getting
aggressive.”

“Can’t you talk to them and tell them to lay off?” Ace asked. “You’re not the enemy
here.”

“Sadly, we haven’t been able to get through to them, and they’ve decided that since I’m about the only thing they can see, I must be an enemy. It’s just a nuisance.” Barnaby’s voice sounded thoughtful. “I am a bit more concerned about the singularity that seems to be happening out in Camp
Williams.”

Steve asked. “That’s the big computer in
Utah?”

“‘Big’ is one way to describe it. PRISM is in the exabyte range–that’s a step up from
petabytes.”

“Petabytes are the ones with dirty
pictures?”

“No. You’re confusing it with pederasts–although a number of the big mainframes do seem to have issues with their motherboards now that I think about it.” Barnaby mused. “Enough. Let’s just say that PRISM is to Fort Meade as a nova is to the spark you get when you break a white Necco wafer. The magic hasn’t fully reached there yet, but when it does, you’re really going to have a problem.”

“Me? Why would I have a problem?” Steve asked. “Didn’t I just tell you that I’m not a
Hero?”

“Yes, but you don’t actually get a choice in the
matter.”

“It’s not like anyone would have chosen you for the job,” Ace added.

Steve nodded in agreement. “Even I’m smarter than
that.”

Ace stood up and brushed off the seat of her jeans. “OK, I’m tired of talking. What’s
next?”

Steve gave an extravagant shrug, which brought a glare from the blonde
SEAL.

“I think we need to send Carlos off to see Coyote.” Barnaby said. “That’s what I said we’d do when we first met him. First, because Hosteen can transform him if anyone can, and second, because he can hang out for a bit, run with the pack, and generally learn to put one hoof in front of the
other.”

Carlos got up, hindquarters first, then front legs, and stood. It was damn impressive, since he was well over twelve feet at the shoulder when he stood up. Ace reached up, gave him a two- handed scritch on the chest, and said, “Now, you just go back the way we came in. I really don’t think anyone will bother you–or at least they won’t bother you twice. When you get to the woods. Coyote will find
you.”

“Now, don’t presume on my hospitality,” The voice came from an open window in the second floor of an abandoned house across the street. Steve looked up to see the ageless figure leaning on the windowsill like one of those housewives in a New York tenement circa
1935.