The Myth Manifestation, Page 3

  My paint pistol and I were there to help them shoot what they couldn’t see.

  SPI’s R&D department had come up with ammo for my pistol and rifle that had a much wider splatter radius than a standard paintball. Plus, the dye was brighter and had the added advantage of glowing in the dark.

  If a monster was sporting any kind of cloak or veil, I tagged it so our commandos could bag it.

  I’d felt silly at first, carrying guns that fired dye pellets, but after dealing with the first few veiled baddies that had nearly killed two of our commandos, I carried my lethal-by-association toys with pride and honor.

  Rake was wearing a suit, a suit that probably cost a month or more of my salary. He didn’t seem concerned that things could happen to the suit that even the best dry cleaner and tailor couldn’t fix.

  I found myself on the receiving end of one of Rake’s bemused glances.

  One corner of his mouth twitched in a quick grin. “Worried about me?”

  “You can take care of yourself. I’m worried about endangering an innocent suit.”

  Rake glanced down. “Good point. At least I can preserve the jacket.” With that, he shrugged out of the suit coat with one smooth movement, tossing it over the back of a nearby chair. Then he deftly removed his cuff links, which had probably cost more than the suit, tucked them in a pocket, and rolled up his sleeves. “Shall we?” he asked.

  Ian gave a sharp nod.

  A rafter-shaking roar came from what sounded like the middle of the ballroom. The buka was still there, but at least it had moved away from the door.

  Our opportunity to get inside without the buka getting outside wouldn’t be any better.

  Rake opened the door.

  Chapter Three

  The air thickened—not like from humidity in the South, but with something that made it difficult to put one foot in front of the other. It felt as if I was trying to walk through water.

  That meant magic, the heavy-hitting kind.

  Something didn’t want us getting in.

  Rake and his team powered up their magic, their hands glowing a bright red. A lesser glow raced to cover their bodies. Ready for offense and defense.

  That something was about to be disappointed.

  The Regor Regency ballroom was an intimate space by New York hotel standards. It had been built in 1893, a time when a ballroom was used for dancing. The hotel had originally been lit by gas lamps, but had soon been wired for electricity. The original gilt-framed mirrors still hung around the room, their purpose to reflect the light from the gas fixtures and any candles, to make the room brighter. A few sepia-toned photos of past soirees had been artfully framed and hung between the mirrors. Rake had had the room restored to match the Gilded Age glamor of the earliest photos.

  The buka in the middle of the room was neither gilded nor glamorous.

  We were all professionals here. Experience with things like what we were seeing kept us from reacting verbally to what hulked in the middle of the Regor Regency’s opulent ballroom—but mostly we didn’t want to embarrass ourselves in front of our coworkers.

  That didn’t mean there wasn’t cussing. There was plenty of that.

  Some from fear; mostly from disbelief.

  I felt safe in saying that none of us had ever seen anything like that in our lives.

  It was ten feet tall, maybe more.

  It stood up even straighter.

  Definitely more.

  I winced, remembering the scene from the first Ghostbusters movie in that fancy hotel ballroom.

  The monster roared and the chandeliers shook.

  I didn’t see this going even that well.

  I tried not to do anything that could provoke it, like breathe too loud. “You sure this isn’t a delegate who’s just not a morning person?” I asked, trying not to move my lips.

  Rake never took his eyes off the buka. “Yes.”

  The monster in question looked like a mashup of a rabid Chewbacca and a really pissed-off, supersized baboon.

  It stank, it was angry, and it didn’t look any happier to see us than we were to see it. How it got here wasn’t the problem, at least not the first one we needed to deal with.

  The buka appeared to be alone.

  I swept the room with my seer vision. There was nothing or no one concealed behind a cloak.

  “We seem to be clear except for the big guy on the dance floor,” I said into my comms unit.

  “Think he’s waiting for a partner?” Roy drawled from his position next to a potted palm on the other side of the ballroom. Roy Benoit was a fellow Southerner in the sweet-tea-deprived wasteland that was north of the Mason–Dixon Line. He was a Cajun out of the Louisiana swamps from a long and proud line of gator hunters.

  “She,” Rake said absently, his eyes darting around the buka looking for something I couldn’t see. Must have been a dark magic thing.

  Ian flashed a quick grin. “Rake’s volunteered to be first on her dance card.”

  “Back home, that’s what we call a big girl,” Roy said.

  Rake’s six battlemages were primed and ready, hands glowing either bright red or acid green. Ready and waiting.

  On Rake.

  His hotel, his guests endangered, his fight if he wanted it.

  We all knew he wanted it.

  His mages knew the unspoken rule, and so did we. Our teams entered the ballroom and fanned out along the walls to surround the buka, weapons and magic at the ready.

  Rake’s hands glowed so brightly, I couldn’t look directly at them. I opted instead for his intended target.

  The buka didn’t have the kind of face that could express emotion well, but I could swear her yellow eyes glittered with what could only be described as “bring it.”

  Rake Danescu brought it.

  Not in the hits from two solid spheres of raw power that I’d expected. Just before impacting with the buka’s body, the two fist-sized spheres exploded into dozens of smaller, but no less potent, chunks of magical buckshot.

  Every last one hit the buka.

  And all were absorbed into the buka’s body.

  The thing shivered as if Rake’s best shot had merely tickled.

  Then she grinned in a slow spread of rubbery lips, exposing entirely too many sharp teeth.

  One of Rake’s battlemages said a single word in Goblin.

  Since I’d been dating a goblin, I’d been learning the language. I knew that word. It’s true what they say about learning a new language. The cuss words are the easiest.

  “That should have worked,” Rake noted mildly. “Ladies and gentlemen, a group effort, if you please.”

  Rake and his six goblin dark mages unleashed what sure looked like hell on the lone buka.

  The thing added what sounded like a giggle to its grin.

  This was not good.

  “Bullets?” Ian asked Rake.

  “By all means.”

  “Snipers,” Ian said into his comms. “She’s all yours.”

  Both of our commando teams had two sharpshooters. There was a procedure for a situation like this. They coordinated, two taking head shots, and two taking chest shots, centering on the heart.

  All hit their targets.

  All bullets were absorbed.

  The buka coughed. Or maybe it was a laugh.

  Either way, she was still upright, and even more pissed off.

  The buka glanced up at one of the huge and sparkly—and knowing Rake, obscenely expensive—chandeliers, reached up, and ripped it out of the ceiling.

  Then Rake started swearing in Goblin.

  The lack of that chandelier dimmed the room a little, but the force of the ripping must have done something to the wiring of all the others.

  In an instant, the room went pitch dark.

  Rake barked something else in Goblin and the emergency lights came on, lights I had a feeling weren’t connected to the city power grid. In Rake’s opinion, if it was an emergency, he’d rely on his magic, not Con Edison.
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  When the lights came up, so did a nightmare.

  More bukas.

  And to my seer vision, the four newcomers had squiggly lines running horizontally across their bodies, like a TV with a reception problem.

  That meant they were cloaked, and I was the only one who could see them.

  I got my paint gun in my hands, and talked fast into my comms. “Five bukas. Four cloaked. We’ve got five, repeat, five bukas.”

  I got a literal earful of responses, all colorful.

  I opened fire with my glow-in-the-dark green dye pellets. “From my position: two, four, and eight o’clock.”

  The bukas attacked the nearest commandos.

  While I came to New York knowing how to shoot, I quickly found that there’s a big difference between shooting cans off an old, rusted washing machine and taking down a living, breathing whatever. For one, cans wouldn’t chase you down to tear you limb from limb. A lot of the things SPI hunted believed that an uneaten human was a wasted human, and they didn’t care if you were still alive when they started in on you.

  Needless to say, I quickly became intensely motivated to become an expert at hitting moving targets.

  Especially if none of the hotshot commandos around me could see them.

  I was hitting my targets.

  I only had one extra extended-capacity mag on me for my paint pistol. I hadn’t thought I’d need more just to come downstairs for breakfast. Each mag held twenty pellets. Forty pellets for five bukas. Shouldn’t be a problem.

  It was a problem.

  The bukas kept disappearing and reappearing.

  This wasn’t a cloak. It was something else, something I’d never seen or heard of.

  I went for head shots with dye, so our shooters could take head shots with bullets, hopefully making the bukas die. At this point, I’d be happy with slowing them down, and aimed for the eyes. They were already pissed off; dye in their eyes couldn’t make it much worse.

  When one of our shooters got a good head shot, the buka with its green-dyed head would vanish. No explosion of red, or whatever color these things bled, to indicate a kill or severe injury. Just poof. Gone. Then a new one would appear to take its place, one that only I could see, and the lethal game started all over again. Like whack-a-mole, except in this version, the moles were invisible until I tagged them, and they were the ones trying to do the whacking, with fists the size of our heads.

  I’d already had to change mags, and had lost count of how many pellets I’d used.

  The gunshots sounded muted in the room’s thickening air, as did the shouts as our people and Rake’s battled the bukas by any means they could. Contrary to what you’ve heard on TV and in the movies, silencers on guns aren’t silent, meaning the delegates who’d already arrived were getting an earful right about now.

  Some of our enterprising commandos had switched to firing high-velocity tranquilizer darts.

  The first buka to the party now had five darts sticking out of her neck. The additions hadn’t decreased her consciousness or improved her mood. Magic, bullets, and even the dye weren’t working any better than our sharpshooters’ sleepytime in a dart.

  Rake shouted something in Goblin to his team, who had spread out around the ballroom to try to keep up with the buka population flux. I didn’t recognize any of the words, though their magic did change color from red to bright blue, and any buka that blue magic touched yelped and jumped back. The mages increased the glow, extending and linking it with those on either side of them. When the bukas were corralled, the goblins started maneuvering them toward the middle of the ballroom.

  “If you can’t kill, contain,” Ian noted with approval.

  My paint pistol clicked on empty.

  Some of our commandos were likewise ammo-challenged. Who knew you’d need this much firepower to eat breakfast in peace?

  The blue barrier Rake and his team had conjured and were now strengthening reached from floor to ceiling, effectively boxing the bukas in. It seemed to be working like one of those invisible fences for dogs. As the walls began to solidify, the air on all four sides crackled with tiny bolts of blue lightning. The bukas couldn’t escape, and no new ones manifested.

  Then something pushed back. Hard.

  The air thickened even further with the smell of ozone, of two powerful magics colliding—that of Rake and his team, and the strength of an unseen and unknown force.

  Rake snarled and redoubled his efforts as his team did the same.

  I could see through cloaks and detect portals, but I’d never felt magic at such a level of intensity. The air had thickened to the point that it was getting difficult to breathe.

  “Get out!” Rake shouted to us.

  “I’m not going—”

  “Mac, there’s nothing you can do here. This is going to get bad very soon.”

  It wasn’t bad already?

  “I need to stop this, and I can’t with you or any other mortal here. Ian, tell your people to fall back.” Rake gritted his teeth against the effort he was exerting. “Please.”

  I’d given Ian my real gun when he’d run out of ammo, since he was the better shot. Even that gun was empty now.

  The only option if we stayed would be hand-to-hand combat, and I didn’t need anyone to explain to me how badly that would turn out. Neither one of us wanted to leave Rake, but—

  A new buka manifested right behind Rake. It wasn’t cloaked, but Rake didn’t see it.

  Before I could draw breath to warn him, the buka lunged, lashing out with one of its massive arms and backhanding Rake into one of the ballroom’s columns.

  He crumpled to the floor.

  The containment field buckled.

  Gethen Nazar screamed orders to the rest of his team as they fought to close and hold it.

  Ian drew the only weapon he had left—his ancestor’s spearhead.

  It blazed to golden life as it cleared its scabbard.

  The buka saw and ignored it, scooping up the dazed Rake and tossing him over its massive shoulder. The buka used its other long arm, complete with claw-tipped fingers, to keep Ian and his spear at bay.

  My blood ran cold. The buka could vanish any second, going back to wherever it came from—and taking Rake with it. We’d never find him. I’d never see him again.

  With a growl, I reached down to where I kept my Bowie knife.

  It wasn’t there, because I’d only been going to freaking breakfast.

  My hand brushed against the only other thing I did have.

  The man I might be in love with in the future, and had strong feelings for now, was in danger. As was my partner, the big brother I never had.

  And all I had was a bacon biscuit.

  I screamed in impotent rage and threw it.

  Everything kind of went into slow motion as the biscuit flew toward the buka’s face. The monster’s nostrils flared as he caught its scent and, reaching out with the hand that wasn’t holding Rake, snatched the biscuit out of the air, and stuffed it in his mouth.

  Its yellow eyes turned almost dreamy.

  Bacon. Meat candy of the universe.

  That was all the distraction Ian needed.

  Ian embedded the spearhead deep into the buka’s lower back. The buka roared in pain, dropping Rake. I ran in to drag him away before he got stepped on and squashed.

  There was a blinding flash of light. When it faded and I could see, all that was there were our people and Rake’s.

  The containment field was still in place, but the bukas inside were gone. Vanished.

  My partner was left holding a bloody spearhead without a buka attached.

  Ian was trying to look in every direction at once. “They’re gone?”

  I sat back on my heels where I crouched on the floor beside Rake. “Yeah. No cloaks, no creatures, no nothing. Gone.”

  Ian cautiously lowered the spearhead’s tip, eyes continuing to sweep the room. “Portals?”

  “I’m not sensing anything.”

  “The s
tink is less,” Roy chimed in.

  Gethen ran over to us and knelt by his boss’s side. Rake was now unconscious, but he was breathing, though we’d have to get him checked for a concussion after getting his bell rung against that column.

  “Where did they go?” I asked him.

  The goblin security chief snarled in a baring of fangs. “Your guess is as good as mine, seer.”

  Chapter Four

  Rake had been taken to his hotel room.

  Naturally, it was the penthouse.

  Ownership had its privileges.

  Rake had moved into the Regor Regency for the duration of the summit. When it came to talks of this importance, he believed in hands-on management. And when it came to Rake, comfort was equally important. He had claimed that taking the penthouse had kept the delegates from arguing over who would get it, and that for the summit’s duration, he would probably feel less like a host and more like a supervisor of petulant children.

  Now those children could have monsters in their closets.

  Two of Rake’s security team/battlemages went with him as bodyguards. Considering that a monster no one could kill had tried to kidnap their boss, I thought it was a good move. I wanted to go with Rake, even though I knew we had doctors here for the summit should any of the delegates require medical attention, and Rake was in the best hands.

  Protecting and healing Rake were their jobs.

  Pointing out invisible bukas to keep anyone else from getting hurt was mine.

  Considering the level of destruction within, the ballroom doors were closed with two SPI agents posted outside each entrance. Entrances mortals could use by turning a doorknob, that is. We needed to find the entrances the bukas had used to get in, and we needed to find them fast.

  The hotel staff was trying to clean up the mess we’d made, or at least get rid of the evidence that we’d battled monsters there. The excuse to the delegates who had already checked in was that we were holding a security sweep before the others arrived later this afternoon. Fortunately, most of the delegates had been on a tour of New York’s touristy destinations, and not in the building for the shootout at the OK Ballroom.