The Phoenix Illusion, Page 3

  As a seer, I could detect auras. The goblin was a mage of a respectable level. He would have needed that much power to have avoided being burned to a crisp before Rake had gotten him out.

  An ambulance pulled onto the sidewalk, followed by another less than a minute later. The logos on the sides indicated city ambulances, but I recognized the paramedics.

  They were from SPI. That meant the ambulances were ours, too.

  Minutes before, one of the paramedics had been at my party. Calvin had been an army medic in Iraq. He’d added a navy windbreaker to the clothes he’d worn to the party and blended right in. He was helping load the unconscious mage into the ambulance. Since joining SPI, Cal had learned the physiologies of our world’s more common supernatural species. The mage was in good hands.

  “Go tell Cal his patient’s a goblin,” I told Ian.

  Ian reluctantly went to deliver the message. I knew he didn’t want to leave me after what’d happened.

  Rake grabbed my hand and pushed something into it. I only had a moment to glance down at it before Rake folded my fingers closed into a fist.

  A broken chain attached to a pulsing red stone.

  “Gethen…quick,” he rasped, right before he passed out.

  *

  I got into the first ambulance with Rake for the short trip to SPI headquarters, where we had a trauma unit that rivaled any New York hospital. When your employees fought monsters and powerful mages and supernatural criminals, their injuries would do more than raise eyebrows at the neighborhood ER. Ms. Sagadraco made sure we had only the best medical care available to us.

  Before we were even a block away from the fire, my phone came back to life.

  I did what Rake had asked and called Gethen Nazar.

  It was a predictably short conversation.

  Gethen was Rake’s chief of security. Normally, he’d be called a bodyguard, but Rake’s “normal” had jumped out the nearest window when he’d reluctantly accepted the goblin governorship. Besides, bodyguard was singular. Chief of security meant Gethen was in charge of the other unfortunates who had the unenviable job of keeping Rake among the living. But since Rake had been spending the evening at my birthday party within throwing distance of SPI HQ, and had been surrounded by SPI’s best and baddest agents and commandos, Gethen had reluctantly taken the night off at Rake’s insistence.

  In Gethen’s mind, that had made us responsible for Rake’s safety.

  In Gethen’s opinion, we had failed in our duty.

  He hadn’t said that on the phone or even alluded to it, but I got the vibe loud and clear.

  It was well after midnight, and after talking to Gethen, my birthday fun was over in more ways than one.

  Rake stirred and opened his eyes. He looked around in a panic and started coughing again.

  “Your mage is in the ambulance right behind us,” I told him, gripping one of his hands in both of mine. “Ian’s with him. He’s going to be okay.” I softened my voice and squeezed his hand. “We’ve got this, hon. Just breathe and try to relax.”

  Rake’s body was wracked with a violent fit of coughing that arched his back off the stretcher. With a gasp, his eyes rolled up in his head, as he went limp and still.

  “Rake?” I tightened my grip on his hand in panic. “Cal!”

  “He’s fine,” Cal hurried to assure me. The beeping of Rake’s heart monitor confirmed it, but my own heart pounding against my ribs wasn’t buying it. “He’s breathing on his own.” Cal repositioned Rake’s oxygen mask. “The coughing makes it sound worse than it is. He just passed out.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the sting of tears and nodded.

  Take your own advice, Mac. Relax and breathe.

  When I opened them, it was to a concerned Cal. “Ian told me you took a spill and wants me to check you over. He’s right. You don’t look so good.”

  “Gee, thanks. Just what every girl wants to hear on her birthday.”

  “I’m serious. What happened?”

  I gave him the short version. It was all my throbbing head had left me capable of doing.

  “I need to check for a concussion,” he said when I’d finished. “Hold still.”

  I heard the click and I groaned. “Not the pen light.”

  “It’ll only take a second.” Cal flicked the light from one eye to the other.

  Thankfully, the driver chose that moment to flip off the lights and siren. Then he pushed a button on the console to activate what I called the “these are not the droids you’re looking for” signal. The mages in our Research and Development department had installed them in all our agency vehicles. One of our ambulances could go screaming down a street, and people would actually ignore it—even more than New Yorkers normally ignored such things.

  The R&D mages had also done some nifty work disguising the five vehicle-accessible entrances into SPI’s underground headquarters. Three looked like the entrances to private parking garages, and the other two were what appeared to be loading docks.

  Less than half a block later, the gates opened into one of SPI’s fake garages.

  Dr. Barbara Carey and a trauma team met us at SPI’s subterranean loading dock doors. She was the lady in charge of our medical center. Her word was law.

  Only when Rake and the mage were in their care did I let go of Rake’s hand. After telling Dr. Carey that Rake needed to be near the mage, I headed toward the waiting room, but Ian and Cal appeared on either side of me, each taking an elbow, and steered me to a treatment bay where one of SPI’s doctors waited by a gurney that right about now looked like the most comfortable thing ever.

  I relented. A nap sounded really good.

  *

  Alas, sleep was not to be.

  Dr. Stephens had deemed me to be concussion free, though he strongly suggested that I get some rest.

  That was not to be, either.

  Gethen Nazar had arrived upstairs and was being escorted down to the medical center. Rake was still unconscious, and I carried a shiny, red rock in my pocket that might shed some light on what had happened to him inside that burning house. Rake had asked me to give it to Gethen. The sooner I did that, the quicker we could start getting some answers.

  After leaving me in Dr. Stephens’s capable care, Ian went upstairs to the agent bullpen to fight some fires of his own. The recordings from SPI’s neighborhood surveillance cameras needed to be examined for the hours prior to the event and the electricity going out. I’d be going over the same tapes later for any sign of my goblin attacker. Also, our own investigation would need to be coordinated with that of the city police and fire departments. Our allies inside the various city departments would be alerted to ensure the incident appeared to be nothing more than a typical building fire. I had no clue what they were doing about the fact that said building had burned on a lot that’d been vacant for months. The solution to that dilemma was way above my ability and pay grade.

  I was sitting in the waiting area when Gethen came through the medical center doors and began walking down the hall toward me, I didn’t say a word. I just looked at him and threw my hands up in what had become our sign for “Yeah, Rake went off the rails again. I did what I could.”

  Gethen replied with his usual eye roll, directed at his wayward boss, not me.

  We’d done this dance entirely too many times recently.

  Rake was gonna do what Rake was gonna do, and he wasn’t about to let anyone stop him.

  “How is he?” Gethen asked when he got close enough.

  “They’re working on him now. Calvin said smoke inhalation.”

  Gethen frowned. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

  I ran a hand over my face. “I know. He was cloaked and shielded when he went in. He was in there less than two minutes. When he came out, his glamour was up, but his shields were down. Something happened to his magic, and I don’t think he knew what it was. He told me to call you”—I started digging into my jeans p
ocket—“and give you this.”

  Gethen looked before he took, and that look told me I probably shouldn’t have let that stone stay in my pocket for a minute, let alone an hour. But I hadn’t had anywhere else to put it, and my thigh didn’t feel like it’d been absorbing evil, so I chalked it up to yet another unavoidable hazard of working for SPI.

  Like Rake, Gethen was a dark mage. Also like Rake, he hadn’t survived the dangers that went with his chosen career path without developing a finely tuned sense of caution.

  “So, what is it?” I asked, wiping my hand on my jeans and wondering if there was such a thing as psychic Purell.

  Gethen’s lips had gone from his usual narrowed in annoyance to vanished without a trace. He quickly hissed a few words in Goblin of what I recognized as a high-powered containment spell, and the red stone stopped pulsing.

  Yeah, I definitely shouldn’t have shoved that necklace in my pocket. I blamed my poor decision-making on a psychic fist to the head.

  “You don’t want to know what it is,” Gethen told me.

  “Want doesn’t have anything to do with it. If I didn’t need to know, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  We’d done this dance before, too. Though sparring would be a better description.

  Gethen was a goblin. While I knew he was simply doing what goblins did, it didn’t make it any less annoying. If you wanted information out of one, you needed to go find yourself a crowbar.

  I blew out my breath. “You’re doing your job; I’m trying to do mine.” I didn’t say “but you’re not making it easy.” Gethen knew what he was doing and how little I liked it. What I needed to know was why he was doing it.

  “The pendant is Khrynsani,” he said.

  “And . . ?”

  “I take it Rake hasn’t told you about them.”

  “Not much, other than they’re basically the goblin version of Nazis. It seems I need to know more now. Rake’s unconscious.” I gave him a tight smile. “You’re not.” I left the “yet” unspoken. We both knew that as an itty-bitty thing, physically as well as psychically, I couldn’t put a dent in any piece or part of him, but I was tired of getting the runaround, and was just tired, period.

  “Very well. This”—he dangled the stone by its chain—“is what in your military would be used as a dog tag. With it we can identify the Khrynsani it belongs to.”

  “You’re losing me. The mage was the only one in the house.”

  “The only one alive. I suspect this particular Khrynsani’s body will be found in the rubble once it cools enough for anyone to get in. Judging from the glow before I applied a stasis spell, this contains said Khrynsani’s soul.” Gethen regarded the slowly spinning stone with a wicked little smile.

  I really should not have put that thing in my pocket. “What?” I managed.

  “Either Lord Danescu or the mage he brought out killed the Khrynsani and imprisoned his soul inside. The Khrynsani call these lifestones. They all wear one. They were created for such a purpose, but the dying Khrynsani’s soul would have fled into it only if he knew that this receptacle would remain safe until his comrades could collect it. He had to know, or at least suspect, that it would fall into our hands, so I don’t believe he went willingly.”

  “He was shoved in there?”

  “That would be an apt description.”

  I’d been walking around with a Nazi goblin’s soul in my pocket.

  It was a good thing I was in the medical center, because I was feeling a wee bit woozy again.

  Then I remembered that Rake had made me take it, and woozy turned to angry. “Rake gave me a dead goblin’s soul?”

  “The soul should be securely locked inside,” Gethen assured me.

  “Should?”

  “Lord Danescu could not risk losing consciousness while the lifestone was on him, in case the soul still had the strength to escape. He would have been possessed.”

  “And it’d be no biggie if I was possessed.”

  “You are human and a female. The Khrynsani would not have possessed you. Lord Danescu would have known this.”

  “So I’m not good enough to be possessed?”

  “In the Khrynsani’s opinion it would be like possessing…”

  I narrowed my eyes. “A what?”

  “A sub-creature. That is a Khrynsani opinion,” he assured me. “It not an opinion held by either Lord Danescu, myself, or any civilized goblin.”

  I was placated. For now. Maybe.

  “Rather than possess another,” Gethen continued, “this Khrynsani will attempt to escape when we extract him for interrogation.”

  “You said normally his buddies would collect his…soul jewelry. For what?”

  “The Khrynsani consider physical bodies to be both disposable and interchangeable. His temple brothers would locate a suitable donor body, extract the soul inside, and imprison it in a receptacle for future use as fuel for powering large spells. Once the donor body was vacant, they would release their brother’s soul into it.”

  I was officially beyond words.

  Zombie Nazi goblins.

  My skin crawled from my scalp clean down to my toes.

  Gethen had said I didn’t want to know. Did I believe him? Nooo.

  “May I see the man he saved from the fire?” I dimly heard Gethen ask.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said in a daze. “Sure. Dr. Carey won’t let anyone in with him, but there’s a glass wall into a monitoring room next door. I can see about getting us in there.”

  “Good enough.”

  *

  The room looked like one in a hospital’s intensive care unit. There were two beds. Rake was in one, with the goblin mage in the other.

  I was pretty sure the room was soundproof, but I kept my voice down anyway. “Rake’s weak from the smoke inhalation and whatever happened to him in the fire. Dr. Carey wants to keep him sedated and intubated for a few hours so he can rest and regain his strength. The mage’s injuries are similar to Rake’s, but more severe since he was in the building longer.” I paused. “That was another thing Rake asked me to do—make sure they were kept together. I don’t think Rake wanted him waking up in a completely unfamiliar place. Ideally, Rake will be up and able to be at the mage’s bedside when he regains consciousness.”

  “His name is Tulis Minic.”

  Now we were getting somewhere, though not very quickly if I had to keep pulling information out of Gethen piece by piece.

  “Who is he?”

  “The Danescu family security mage. My counterpart in the goblin capital.”

  “Has he ever been here before?” I asked.

  “He has not.”

  “Poor guy,” I whispered.

  “And he only speaks Goblin, which is no doubt why Lord Danescu insisted that they remain together.”

  “Does he know you?”

  “He does.”

  I let out a breath I wasn’t aware I’d been holding. Dr. Carey had assured us that Rake would be awake long before Tulis, but I felt better knowing Gethen would be there to keep him from freaking out just in case. SPI’s trauma center was set up to handle almost anything, but that didn’t include an injured and panicked goblin dark mage of Gethen’s level. Predators were most dangerous when they were wounded and felt trapped.

  “I take it you’re staying here until Rake—”

  “I will not be moved from this spot.”

  “Well, we can get you a chair. Unlike the ones in human hospitals, our chairs are comfy and even fold out into beds.”

  Gethen’s eyes remained on Rake’s still form. “That will not be necessary.”

  His expression clearly said he’d made a mistake leaving Rake alone tonight, and that mistake would not be repeated. Ever.

  Gethen Nazar had officially gone from being Rake’s bodyguard to Rake’s shadow.

  Oh joy.

  4

  Dr. Carey removed Rake’s breathing tube two hours later, deeming him abl
e to breathe on his own well enough to let him wake up. The IV was disconnected, and before long, Rake began to stir. Yes, he’d known where he was being taken before he’d passed out, but logic, either of thought or action, wasn’t the first thing to come back online when you’d been out for a while. And when you were a dark mage… Well, Dr. Carey had a nice medical center, and she wanted to keep it and her staff more or less intact.

  Hence, I was sitting by Rake’s bed again holding his hand when he opened his eyes.

  Rake gave me a groggy smile. It was a beautiful thing to see—at least as much as I could see through eyes that’d suddenly gone all misty on me. Then he saw a grim Gethen Nazar standing over my shoulder. I didn’t need to look for myself to know Gethen was grim. It was his perpetual state of being.

  “I’m in trouble,” Rake rasped.

  “You are not in trouble, sir,” Gethen assured him. “You are, however, under guard every hour of every day in perpetuity.”

  “Like I said, trouble.”

  I cleared my throat. “Speaking of trouble, I gave Gethen that red rock with the dead Khrynsani’s soul inside.”

  Rake gave a little wince. “Sorry about that. I didn’t have a choice.”

  I gave him a little dose of guilt. “Um-hmm. So Gethen said.”

  Gethen pulled up a chair beside me and sat. It was about time. He’d been literally standing guard for the past four hours. While I was sure he could’ve stood there for as long as it took, like a good soldier, he was now sitting and resting while he could. I had a sinking feeling he knew something we didn’t, and it had everything to do with that Khrynsani lifestone that was now in his pocket.

  Rake’s eyes widened as another layer of sedation lifted. “Tulis?”