Unleashed (5 page)
Authors: John Levitt
“No idea,” I said.
“Are you going?”
“I have to. He’s not the sort to show up on an idle whim.”
“You want some company?” I thought about it.
“Couldn’t hurt,” I said. “He can be very particular about who exactly has been invited, but I think he likes you.”
“Oh, wonderful,” she said. “At last, an admirer.”
BY NOW IT WAS GROWING LATE, SO WE WENT back to my place. I was still living in my in-law apartment in the Mission, converted many years ago from a garage. It was a lot nicer than that sounds—blond wood paneling throughout, a garden in the back, and a landlord upstairs who traveled a lot. It was a good thing he was seldom home. If he’d been there full-time, he would eventually have noticed some very strange happenings indeed.
A dog door provides Lou with the freedom to come and go as he pleases, and the warding around the house, designed mostly by Eli, keeps out most unwanted visitors, at least those of the magical sort. It doesn’t do much to keep away the occasional Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon missionary, though.
I made some coffee and we sat at the little kitchen table. Campbell knew the basics of how the fake Ifrit had come into existence, but now that we were going to the very spot where it had happened, she wanted details. I could tell her what had happened, and how, but not why. I still didn’t understand a lot about it.
“So the creature just formed out of nothing?” she asked.
“Not exactly. It’s an embodiment of something, I think, brought into existence by that guy we met. As far as I can tell, he was once a practitioner himself.”
“Like you?” That was a sobering thought.
“I guess maybe he was. But he’s since evolved into something different. Or devolved.”
“Into what?
“I’m not quite sure. The closest I can come to would be a troll.”
Campbell looked at me, the corner of her mouth lifting slightly to let me know she understood I was putting her on.
“Folklore troll, or the kind you find in bars? Or the Internet sort?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Anyway, he and a couple of friends like him tried to create an Ifrit, using Lou as a template and some strongly magical objects that I obligingly supplied.”
“Why would you do that?”
“It’s complicated,” I said. That’s what people usually say when they’ve screwed up and have no good explanation.
“I’ll bet,” Campbell said, well aware of that.
“The long and short of it is that something unexpected showed up, and we’ve been trying to deal with the after-math. And now, apparently, there’s another problem.”
“Which is?”
“That’s what we’ll have to see.”
We talked about other things until it was full dark, then headed downtown to the construction site on Harrison, under the shadow of the bridge, the place I’d first met Rolf and the place he’d held his ritual.
It had been a few months since I’d been there, so I expected at least some change, but it was like time had stood still. In the darkness I could make out the same pallets of lumber, the same piles of broken rebar and industrial trash, the same silent backhoe parked in the same place. Not unusual for a construction site, come to think of it. Construction time moves at a very different pace from normal time—like dog years.
But there was one difference. The fence and gate. Lou ran over to the place he’d squeezed through before, but it had been replaced with strong new mesh. The new gate was taller, with an even heavier chain and padlock and an extra strand of barbed wire all along the top of the fence. I hadn’t counted on this.
A figure detached itself from the shadows inside the site and strolled over toward the gate. Rolf. He reached one thick hand through where the chain met the post and tapped the lock. There was a faint snick and the shackle moved a fraction. It was now unlocked.
“Show-off,” I muttered. I wasn’t good with metal objects myself; few practitioners are. Rolf wasn’t exactly a practitioner anymore, though.
I unhooked the padlock, pulled the chain free, and swung the gate open. If Rolf was surprised to see Campbell with me, he didn’t show it. He beckoned to us and led the way to a familiar area. We were right under an access ramp to the Bay Bridge at the base of the massive concrete pylons that supported it. The sound of traffic far above us was surprisingly loud.
I had no idea what he wanted to show me, and I wasn’t sure what he expected me to do about it in any case. My strength is improvisational magic—I use my talent to pull together various threads gathered from the environment around me and weave them into useful spells. Much like the way I compose jazz tunes and play solos.
But as far as understanding things or investigating odd occurrences goes, I’m not the best choice. Victor is far better at that sort of thing, and so is Eli for that matter, despite his relative lack of intrinsic talent. But at least I could report back to them if there was anything worth reporting.
And there was. A faint glow was coming from the site of the area of the original ritual that had called up the beast we had been hunting. As we got closer, I saw what was causing it: an area about five feet across. A whirlpool of smooth swirling colors, one-dimensional, flat against the ground, but hinting at depths like a pool of water. The colors were separated into discrete bands of different widths, but they blended into each other at the edges and each band slowly changed color as I watched.
The colors moved with a slow, pulsating, hypnotic motion. The whole thing reminded me of the pattern I had seen while looking into certain jewels I once had the misfortune to find.
Lou walked up and stared into the center of the pattern with an intense yet curiously detached interest. That wasn’t like him; he was usually all for something or all against it. There are few shades of gray in his world. Campbell came up and stood beside me.
“What is Lou so interested in?” she said. That surprised me. Campbell isn’t technically a practitioner, but she does have talent. She wouldn’t be the healer she is if she didn’t.
“You don’t see it?” I asked.
“See what?”
Rolf chuckled, although his voice was starting to slur as it sometimes did so it sounded more like a gargle.
“She can’t see it,” he said. “Just about no one can, except me and those like me. Even practitioners.” He pointed down at Lou. “And him, of course. He’s an Ifrit, after all.”
“I can see it,” I said. “Why is that? What is it, anyway?”
“I figured you might be able to see it, ’cause you were here when it was made. You helped, remember.” Indeed I did. “There might even be a little bit of you in there.”
Half the time I had no idea what Rolf was talking about. I bent down closer to the swirl. Raw power was coming off it, wild talent. The only other time I’d felt something like this was in the tunnels by the Sutro caves.
“You might want to take care,” Rolf said. “I don’t think touching it would be a good idea.”
I appreciated the warning, but it wasn’t needed. He might as well have been a shop foreman telling me, “I wouldn’t stick my hand in that circular saw if I was you.”
Lou was still staring intently, motionless. His eyes had gone vacant and were starting to take on a glazed expression. The edges of his fur were beginning to glow, ever so slightly,
“Lou,” I said. “Back off.”
He ignored me. I don’t think he even heard me. I reached over and grabbed him by the collar, which I make him wear for just such situations. He gave a start, as if I’d rudely woken him from a nap, shook himself, and rapidly backed away from the lip of the swirling pattern.
“What the hell is this thing?” I asked Rolf.
“It’s the energy pool,” he said. “You remember; what that creature came out of? It was small at first. I never even noticed it; I thought it had gone, but it never went away. I think that has something to do with those stones you gave me. They had a lot of magic in them, and I think the power they contained may have caused the pool to become self-sustaining. After you left that night, after the fake Ifrit we called up ran off, it started growing. And then something else came out of it.”
“Like the first creature?”
He shook his head.
“No, something else. I didn’t get a good look at it, but it made me nervous.”
“I didn’t think there was anything that made you nervous,” I said.
“There’s not too much. Not anymore. But this was . . . well, different.”
Campbell had been listening intently, at the same time scanning the ground, hoping at least to catch a glimpse of what we were talking about.
“How long ago was this?” she asked. Rolf looked momentarily baffled. I don’t think he had much of a sense of time.
“A few months ago,” I put in, helping him out. “About the same time as all that other stuff.” She stared at him, quizzically.
“And you’re just now getting around to telling someone about it?”
She spoke in a gently reproving manner, something I wouldn’t have wanted to try myself. Rolf wasn’t entirely human, not anymore, and I was always leery of pissing him off, which isn’t difficult to do. But Campbell, for some reason, seemed to have a different effect on him. He shrugged, but at the same time shuffled his feet in embarrassment.
“I didn’t think much about it,” he said. “It wasn’t doing anything to me. Live and let live is my motto. But a few days ago I was over in Marin with Richard. Richard Cory.” He turned to me. “You remember him, right?
I did. Richard was one of Rolf’s circle, a man who had gone so far along that same strange path that he was now a walking embodiment of what used to be called the fey. He made me extremely nervous, and Lou even more so.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Well, we were out at the Marin Headlands—”
“What were you doing out there?” I asked.
Rolf stared at me without answering, and what little I could see of his face in the dark started to subtly shift. Apparently I wasn’t being given the same latitude as was Campbell. I put both hands up and ducked my head in the universal “sorry, my bad” gesture.
“We were out at the Headlands,” he said again, pausing for just long enough to give me a chance to interrupt again. I looked at him with polite and attentive interest. “Richard was up a little ahead of me when he stopped and put up a hand as if he had heard something. All I heard was a meadowlark singing in the tall grass. Then he got this look on his face, kind of blissed out, you know? He took off running, crested the hill, and by the time I got to the top he was out of sight. I haven’t seen him since.”
“I don’t get the connection,” I said.
“Well, I never heard anything and I never saw anything, but I did feel something.” He waved his hand toward the swirling pattern. “Feel that energy? I felt the same thing coming from the other side of the hill. I don’t know what came out of that thing, but whatever it was, it took Richard.”
“Maybe he just decided to leave,” I said, hearing how lame that sounded the moment I said it.
“I can’t do anything about it,” Rolf said. “I can’t mingle like you can, so I can’t really look for him. I can’t get around like you can. You were pretty good at figuring things out the last time you was here, though it took you a while.” He straightened up and became oddly formal. “If you can find Richard Cory, or even tell me what happened to him, I’d be beholden to you.”
That could be useful. It wouldn’t hurt at all having Rolf owe me. Maybe he could even hunt down the Ifrit creature for us—if anyone was suited for the job, it was him. Besides, I was partly responsible for what had happened. I’d like to know what else we’d unleashed on an unsuspecting world.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Any idea at all what it is I’d be looking for?”
Rolf shook his head.
“If I knew what it was, I wouldn’t have to ask you for help,” he said.
We started back toward the gate. I was happy to get some distance between me and the color swirl. It made me nervous to stand next to it. As we approached the gate, I turned for one last look to see if I could find it from a distance now that I knew it was there. There was the faintest glow, more at the corner of my mind than my eyes, but it was there. And something, barely visible in the shadows, right behind it.
Lou had noticed it as well, of course. He was standing stock-still, focused, but without his usual warning growl to alert me to danger. He finally took a few steps toward it, but then stopped again, one paw off the ground, motionless. I can read him pretty well. He’s as expressive as any dog in body language, and a lot more in facial expression. He was . . . “baffled” is the word that came to mind.
“What is it?” asked Campbell, looking at the two of us.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You might want to stay back, though.”
I walked back toward the swirling pattern, Lou paralleling my steps. As I got closer, it became apparent there was a figure standing in the shadows, right behind the energy source. The closer I got, the more familiar it seemed. Then it stepped forward and the glow from the energy bands lit up its face for a fraction of a second.
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