Walking Death, Chapter 5

Sam’s second spell was to cast darkness about himself. It filled a sphere five yards out with impenetrable blackness. The darkness itself was simple, making it so that he could see through it was one complication, but allowing select others to see through it took the greatest finesse. That Jericho and Petra had already gunned down three soldiers testified to their sight through the dark.

The first spell had been a fireball into nearest truck before most of the men inside could get clear. The rest, lacking any cover from both the warehouse and the outside guns, fell quickly.

For the moment, Sam found himself without a target. He kept a wary eye off to his right, the direction from which forces from the front of the warehouse would do the most damage. Unless Liberty got his people out of the warehouse in a hurry Sam’s position would become untenable in an all-fired hurry.

The gout of white smoke that erupted from the rear doors answered that concern very quickly. The smoke was thick, and it further reduced Sam’s view more than the burning panel truck had.

Sam ran to Jericho’s position at the edge of the circle of darkness. From there he was able to see a half dozen men hunkered down behind the second truck. That truck had been parked so that it was directly opposite the doors in a semicircle with the other two.

“Cover me,” yelled Jericho. Sam obliged with three shots toward the rear of the truck as the Resistance fighter took cover behind the corner. One Imperial had been spraying rounds randomly into the darkness, peppering holes into the car but making little real damage. Sam’s shots forced the man to pull back behind the decreasingly effective cover of the truck. From his new position, Jericho had traded the relative safety of the mage darkness for a better attack angle. He made the most of it.

Meanwhile, Liberty and the inside Resistance came rolling out of the warehouse, taking cover behind the truck that had picked up Dr. Kellner. He kept Frieda close to his side as he fired over the bed of the truck at the position to the right of the doors.

“When we get as far as we can, get across to the alley and make for your escape…” started Liberty.

“VIENTO” pronounced a loud voice from within the warehouse. With that, the Resistance was again covered by rapidly thinning smoke as a sorcerous wind purged the air.

“Move, move, move!” ordered Liberty. Once the smoke was gone, there would be nothing left to cover them from more magic. Nothing except an out of position Quisitor.

Sam’s blood ran cold when he heard the voice. Incantations were as unique as the casting mage, and Sam knew that Captain Bren was aiding in this raid. Sam looked to his two compatriots. Neither responded very much to the sound of the spell being cast. That left Sam to protect them and the rest of the Resistance.

He ran for the burning truck, praying that there weren’t any rounds yet to cook off. By the time he got there, the truck had nosed itself into the far enemy vehicle. Sam prepared to block an attack from the inside, but the tactic used caught him flatfooted. The truck lifted an inch off the ground and then rolled over on its side. Sam reacted, but too slowly to prevent it from landing on Spanner and two others. The best Sam could do was preventing the vehicle from crushing the men to death.

Liberty and the other men moved to roll the truck back off of their fellows, but a fresh barrage of gunfire from inside the warehouse stopped them, killing one man in the process.

“Retreat, retreat,” yelled Liberty. To the rest he said, “Be strong, we’ll get you out.”

Sam ran for his car, giving Petra and Jericho the wave off signal. Driving away, he did not know if they had managed to free the scientist.

Walking Death, Chapter 4

Liberty watched as his team unloaded the casket-like box from the rear of the truck. Tarrytown and Goodyear hopped out of the truck while Sampson, Digger, and Cross did the unloading.

Liberty knew he had a good plan, and good people to see it through. He was still bothered, however, bothered beyond the usual anxiety inherent to any operation. The defection of a scientist of Kellner’s stature had rightly caused a furor back in the Old World. It was also a given that the Resistance would somehow get her to the Free States. The blockade of all Free State ports meant smuggling through a controlled port.

That was the first part of Liberty’s worries. The only means available to the Resistance was the Trident, the world spanning smuggling ring controlled by “Zeus” Pandareos. He was let in on neither the contents of the package nor who was paying him to move it. Both pieces of information were classically taboo in Zeus’s line of work, but he was still able to put two and two together with respect to the timing to know that four was going to cost more than normal. It was a gaping hole in the security of the transport, but there was no way around it.

The second thing that had him worried was that the local garrisons hadn’t seemed to react to the news. No extra security at the ports, no extra crackdown on freelance practitioners of weird science. The Count seemed to be making a show of his pants being down.

That was why Liberty had laid on so much protection for this operation. Five men in case the Imperials made their way inside, in addition to himself and Spanner, who was there for his technical expertise. Outside, he had four more: Quisitor, Lamb, Jericho, and Petra. They were primarily lookouts, but Jericho and Petra were fair gun hands, and Quisitor was the sole mage in Liberty’s New York operation. Should fighting start, Jericho and Petra would form on Quisitor and provide him cover. Both sides of this war knew: when in doubt, shoot the guy throwing fireballs. If things went particularly badly, he had Lamb holding back as eyes to gauge the activities of the Imperials post raid. Lamb may have been more than just a girl, but she was far more valuable for intelligence than fighting.

Sampson didn’t bother with a pry bar as he removed the lid from the crate. He was one more surprise in case things went bad. Sampson’s strength was normally impressive. When pushed, he could use some of the world’s magic to augment his might.

Once the lid was removed, Spanner was right over the doctor and snapped a capsule he had removed from his heavily laden vest under her nose. Sawbones was right next to him checking the doctor’s vital signs. Frieda sat up with a gasp and a long fit of coughing. Liberty waited until her coughing came under control before speaking.

“Knocker?”

Dr. Kellner had to pause for a moment to focus her eyes on the masked man standing next to the crate.

“White Rabbit?”

Liberty smiled under the mask at his alternate codename. It was his first in truth, selected due to his heritage. Henry Fitzpatrick counted himself a descendant of Patrick Henry and saw it as a duty to re-fight the Revolution as fate would have it. “White Rabbit” had been a joke made by one of his commando platoon during the Great War to mean that he was “late for the Tea Party”.

“Good to have you here with us, Doctor,” said the Resistance leader.

Before she could respond, Spanner’s miniaturized wireless gave out a call.

“Base, Quisitor: the wolf is at the door, the wolf is at the door.”

“Soldiers front!” called Cross.

“Soldiers rear!” called Goodyear.

“Hold them back!” ordered Liberty.

With that, two men each at the front and rear opened fire with their Thompsons through windows at catwalk level. Liberty could not see anything from his ground floor position. The warehouse faced the waterfront to the west and had a second set of loading doors on the east. North and south were unbroken brick walls.

Glass rained down when the Imperials opened fire. Digger screamed and fell backward off of the catwalk. Liberty grabbed Dr. Kellner and pushed her into the truck.

The light bloomed through the windows of the west face.

“One of their trucks just blew!”

Liberty knew that it must have been Quisitor engaging the enemy.

“Digger, Cross, pin them down up front. The rest, get ready to punch our way out the…”

A crash of wood and metal prevented Liberty from completing his order. The doors flew inward as if a truck had hit them. The force was enough that the doors took out three of the supports for the catwalk. Digger and Cross found the metal they were standing on suddenly no longer supporting them, and they fell in front of the now open maw that had been the front doors.

“Mage!” yelled Liberty. “Spanner, smoke now!”

“Spectacles down, smoke now!” Spanner removed two canisters from his vest, popped a pair of levers, and tossed the small smoke generators toward the doors. With the spectacles he had provided, the Resistance members could see as well as a clear day. Meanwhile, the Imperials, and most importantly the Imperial mage Captain Rupert Bren, could not see more than five feet into the smoke.

It sadly did little for Digger and Cross, for whom the pain of their injuries magnified ten fold under the magic of Captain Bren. Their capture would be easy enough, and the Anti-Resistance Force wasted no further thought on them.

Liberty grabbed Frieda by the arm and moved quickly to the rear doors.

“Spanner, notify the outer teams that we are coming out the back. And have your smoke ready.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Sampson, hit the door.”

The rear doors buckled outward with little less force than the front ones had. The new cross ventilation threatened to dissipate the smoke more quickly, and Liberty knew they didn’t have time to waste.

“Charge!”

Walking Death, Chapter 3

     Sam and Rachel met up prior to the meeting and made their way. Virtually everyone on the call out list was present. The meeting was to make plans for the recovery of a defecting Imperial scientist who was referred to only by the codename Knocker. Knocker would be arriving via a cargo ship and in a casket sized box. Sam shuddered to think about a passage of three weeks inside a coffin, and thought that the woman had to have ice water in her veins.

The plan was simple: two men would recover the box and transport it to a warehouse rented for the night from the Rinaldi Family. Once there, Spanner, a weird science specialist, and Sawbones, team medic, would awaken the scientist. Goodyear would be standing by to drive. Four others, not including the pick-up men, would be present as close security. All of this would be overseen by the masked Liberty, head of the New York City resistance. That he was in on this was too much of a risk so far as Sam was concerned, but Liberty made it clear that he would not remove himself from the plan.

Outside of the warehouse, Liberty had placed four lookouts, Rachel/Lamb among them. Sam was to be outside as well; ready as magical back up and to cover the escape should the Law come down.

Sam and Rachel took a position a couple of blocks away from the warehouse.

“I feel ridiculous,” said Rachel as she leaned into the passenger side of Sam’s car. She was wearing a low-cut top and old flapper dress purchased from a second-hand store.

“What? I’ve seen you wearing less than that during dance numbers.”

“At least those outfits had class. And they matched. These look like you just dug them up from random out of a charity bin.”

Sam decided to button his trap on that one. He did pull them out of a bin at the store.

“Hey, I had to work hard to find something that would class you down. Anything you might have had would have been too nice for a working girl in this neighborhood.”

“Well, I would have found something better.”

Rachel was had to remind herself to keep from stomping as she made her way up and down the street. She was running ways of getting back at Sam for this indignity. Not only was she passing up a night at Club Hades, but she was positively mortified that one of her sisters might spot her done up like this. The Lilliam were certainly not uptight when it came to sex as a business matter, but they definitely considered mere street walking beneath their station. Besides, cash was not the true medium of exchange in such matters.

She continued her walk up the street, back toward Sam to report nothing of interest. She even managed to put on a smile and a cant of the hip to the whistle of the shotgun man of a panel truck heading toward the docks. The whistler’s truck was the first of a half dozen traveling in convoy. Rachel stopped her strut and looked closer as the trucks traveled in convoy.

They were all commercial lorries, but something about the drivers bothered her. The passenger of the first truck made a smart whistle and got a punch in the shoulder from his driver. None of the others made any sign of having seen her. The last truck’s passenger did notice her, however. In a brief flash of eye contact, Rachel recognized the scarred face of the last passenger: Major Helmut Stein of the Imperial Anti-Resistance Forces.

Panic flashed before composure resettled over Rachel’s mind. She gave the major a wink, a twitch of the hip, and a lewd comment. Stein’s gaze slid right off of her. Rachel hoped that he had just brushed her off his mind like he would a speck of lint off of his normally perfect uniform. He had been wearing coveralls. She did the math as she hurried to Sam’s car: driver and passenger in each truck was twelve, plus unknown number in the back of each.

She had to get back to Sam immediately.

Walking Death, Chapter 2.5

The most powerful men in New York City waited for the meeting to start. They stood about the long mahogany table set with coffee cups, water glasses, pens and dossier folders. None of them had yet moved to look into the folders, instead preferring to conduct what business they could with the underlings that had come with them to the Cloisters.

The largest such group stood behind the man seated at the end of the table. That man was Jasper Addney, the meeting’s host and Count of the City of New York and Long Island. He spoke quietly to each of the functionaries that came to him for instruction or authorization for the many issues that demanded his attention. The County of New York was far from a quiet sinecure from which to plot future political advances, but Addney relished the potential that the largest city in the re-established colonies offered.

The Count’s ambition was well matched by his youth. It was rare for someone to rise to the rule of a county before the age of forty, but it was also rare that someone would actually want the rule of the New York City powder keg.

He forswore the affectations common to the newly minted nobility of the reconquered Americas. Rather than wear medals, ceremonial swords, or sashes of office, Addney preferred precisely tailored Saville Row suits and ties. The only concession to noble accoutrement was his coat of arms executed in a silver pin attached through his lapel. He felt, in this modern age, that people should recognize him more from frequent newspaper photographs than from trappings of office.

One person in his retinue kept to the back of the crush. Her name was Babette de Loring, and the others always kept clear of her space. She was the Imperial Court Sorceress, a position from where she wielded almost as much political influence as she did magical power. She wore a long skirt, tailored jacket, and a white ruffled blouse. She kept her chestnut hair in a bob cut. The faint smile on her lips added to the sense of youth about her, maybe a decade shy of her true age of thirty-five. She held her arms crossed in front of her, and lightly drummed the fingers of her right hand on her left elbow. The silver ring she wore on her third finger seemed to reflect more light than fell upon it.

Uniformed men, and one woman, were the balance of the other groups in the room. The right hand side of the table was dominated by Lord General Einhard Ubell, commander of all Imperial military units for the county. He was a tall man in his fifties. His hair was two shades of silver separated from his rock grey imperial uniform. He stood ramrod straight, and the monocle he wore was the only indication of decline with age.

With Ubell was Major Helmutt Stein, head of the Anti-Resistance Forces in New York City. His silver-fringed uniform was similarly immaculate. The wound badge on his jacket was superfluous measured next to the long scar on his cheek. His dark brown goatee was the only hair on his head.

The far side of the table hosted an odd assortment of people, all in black uniforms trimmed in red. Two men, one slight and the other gigantic, and a beautiful blonde woman waited in attendance to a dashing figure of an apparent fifty years. No one in the room mistook them for human, the red on black marked them as members of the Imperial Demonic Division. The center of the group was Colonel Aldrick Meinrad, a name that was no more true than the face he showed.

“Gentlemen,” said the Count, his voice cutting through the conversations taking place around the table, “we all have a great deal to occupy our time. Let us get to business.”

“That would be greatly appreciated, Your Excellency,” said General Ubell. His tone was cool. A lifetime military man, he knew precisely were the line of insubordination rested. His willingness to dance that line with respect to Count Addney was something that did not go unnoticed in the city’s court.

Once again, Addney chose to allow the unspoken slight to pass by. Strictly speaking, Addney was the one in command, but he knew that the military was fiercely loyal to Ubell. If anything, Ubell’s ruthlessness was a useful threat against those who proved less than cooperative. It was Ubell’s command that brought death, complete and merciless, to the population of Scranton. It played to Addney’s advantage to appear to be the one preventing a similar fate from befalling New York.

All of the attendants took the cue to leave the room save for de Loring. She remained next to one of the guards flanking the double doors behind the head of the table.

The Count remained standing, and rested his hands on the table.

“I have been given leave to discuss a new weapon developed on the Continent that shall be produced here within the County for deployment along the Mississippi front.” The count reached over to a small console and pressed down a toggle.

“Edna, would you please show in the gentlemen?”

“Right away, your Excellency,” replied the tinny voice from the speaker.

A matronly woman opened the double doors behind the foot of the table. She stood aside so that three men could enter. The first, a tall, reed thin, man in a wool overcoat and gloves, stopped and handed the coffee cup in his hand to the taken-aback secretary.

“Might I trouble you for a refill, madam?” he asked.

Edna regained her composure and said, “Of course, Doctor.”

“Thank you, my dear.”

He proceeded to the table and took a position behind the chair at the foot of the table. Two other men entered close on his heels. The first was a man of fifty-odd years. He had an intellectual’s high forehead and a pair of pince-nez glasses. The other man stood no more than four foot six inches tall and nearly that abroad. He was of indeterminate age and sported a beard that nearly obliterated any evidence of the necktie that he wore. The man went to the left side of the table and the dwarf took the right.

“I am certain that you gentlemen are familiar with Doctors Hobbard and Tabbert of Research Division 9,” said the Count. The second man and the dwarf inclined their heads in response to their names and took their seats. “Well, allow me to introduce Dr. Everet Felson of the Imperial Bureau of Advanced Sciences. He shall be the one to brief you on the new weapon that shall be manufactured in the County of use along the Mississippi front. Dr. Felson, the floor is yours.”

“Thank you, your Excellency. It is my pleasure to present to you the latest in advanced technological achievements for use on the battlefield. In the folders before each of you is the technical data on what has been named Ambulamort. While delivered as a gas…,” the doctor was interrupted by a knock at the secretary’s door. The guard looked to the Count who gestured his leave to open the door. Outside was Edna with a fresh cup of coffee on a coaster. She stepped into the room, although the confident stride she showed previously was now gone. Instead, she seemed unsteady on her feet. She was concentrating fiercely on delivering the cup of coffee to Dr. Felson.

“Shut the door please, guard,” said the Doctor. The guard looked up again to the Count who again gestured his consent.

“As is was about to say…,”

“I believe,” interrupted Major Stein, “that I must point out that she does not have the clearance for this briefing.”

“Her clearance,” rejoined Dr. Felson, “is of little concern at this point. If I may continue without further interruption, I was saying that while Ambulamort is dispersed as a gas, its action is actually through skin contact. It can be spread via, say, a glove or a coffee cup. The compound remains active in the environment for fifteen minutes before oxidizing to an inert state. The subject experiences an intense headache and dizziness before all neurological activity shuts down, causing death.”

Edna tried to walk back to the doors, oblivious that they had been shut behind her. She was two steps away from them when she fell boneless to the floor.

“This seems to be nothing more than another generation of nerve gas,” said Gen. Ubell. “While the forces of the Rebel States may not have an antidote for this one, what is so special about this compound?”

“The difference, my Lord, is in the secondary effects.”

One of the guards from the secretary’s door had been checking the woman for signs of life. He screamed in pain and pulled back, his sleeve tattered and bloody. Edna rose to her feet, her face the color of dirty chalk and contorted in rage. She leapt at the soldier, slashing with grossly extended claws in place of fingers. Her victim brought his bayoneted rifle up, but Edna ran upon the blade with no concern. The damage to her gut was extensive, and blood clung to the bayonet, and yet she charged down on the hapless soldier and tore out his throat.

The other soldier opened fire, striking the creature that had been Edna full in the back of the chest. All that it accomplished was get her attention. She turned quickly, sending the embedded rife flying.

“Lamnas!” came the cry from the sorceress. A barely visible ripple of air leapt from her hand as she made a cutting gesture. The spell struck the zombie precisely in the neck, severing the head in the blink of an eye. The headless corpse fell to the ground.

De Loring turned on Felson.

“Necromancy,” she hissed.

“I prefer necrotic revitalization.”

“What is there to prevent our forces from coming under attack from these, creatures?” asked Ubell.

“If you will note, neither I, Doctor Hobbard, nor Doctor Tabbert were attacked. That is because prior to our coming in here, we applied a repellant pheromone compound. My research indicates that a person might as well be invisible while protected. Additionally, our forces can be inoculated to prevent casualties during the brief interval of chemical activity.”

“Thank you very much, Doctor,” said Count Addney. “Are there any questions from the table? No? Then I adjourn this meeting.”

Walking Death, Chapter 2

     Sam stepped out onto the street through the front door of his apartment building. He bid a half sincere good morning to Mrs. Kranski. Not that he had anything against the old lady who lived in the single first floor apartment. Merely that, to Sam’s reckoning, no morning was good until he found the bottom of his first cup of coffee.

For that he always went to Molly’s Café at the ground floor corner of his building. Molly had perhaps the second best cup of coffee in the city. The first best belonged to an alchemist of Sam’s acquaintance by the name of Akbar al Faruq. Akbar made coffee as if hoping that the drippings would come out gold.

Molly didn’t have such pretensions. She just made the coffee and kept it coming for your nickel. Either way, the difference between them was like the difference between a night at the Plaza and a night at the Plaza with an extra C-note in your pocket.

Molly’s husband Stan worked the grill behind the pass-through window, and Sam knew that his morning eggs and bacon would be passing through it very soon.

A twelve-year-old boy stood on the corner calling out the headlines. Sam thought that it must be one hell of a verge if Detroit was still about to fall off of it. He was picking through a handful of change when a roar overhead startled him into dropping the changed. Looking up, he saw a long formation of eight single engine fighter planes fly over at no more than four stories off the street.

Sam straightened up and looked up and down the street. Other people were doing the same. Most probably remembered the Invasion, and the sound of low flying craft was not one to be recalled fondly.

“Damn fly boys,” muttered Sam as he picked up his change. “No one’s sleeping now.” The kid with the papers merely looked impressed. He was too young to remember the war in all its glory.

Sam folded the paper and stepped into the diner. The air was thick with the scent of coffee and the heat coming out of the kitchen. Despite a brisk breakfast crowd, Sam managed to find a stool at the counter.

“Heya, Sam,” said Molly. Molly came to just under eye level when Sam was seated. She poured him a cup of coffee and handed over a menu. Sam didn’t even blink at the change in routine. Instead, he took the menu into the same hand as he had the folded Imperial Times. Sam always had the same thing each morning. What he didn’t always have was the latest issue of the Liberty Press, the underground resistance newspaper. He made a show of reading the menu while separating the newssheet from the back of the menu. Someone would have to be looking very closely to see that the front page of the Times had changed during the exchange.

“What the hell, Molly, I’ll have the ham steak rather than the bacon today.”

After breakfast, Sam took the paper back to his office.
“So what was all that noise about?” asked Calliope, the secretary he shared with Dr. Moss next door.

“Just a gaggle of flyboys making a nuisance of themselves.”

“Ooh, pilots,” said Calliope with a vaguely hungry look, “they’re always good for a little fun.”

Sam knew that that meant some pilot somewhere was going to get a better time than he could handle.

“Too bad,” Sam thought, “that he’d be waking up and writing it off as a hang over.”

It was three weeks since the Tierney case, and the truce with Boss Ambrosi seemed to be durable enough for Sam to finish what work he could. So long as no one was looking to lean on him, Sam was happy.

Happy, that was, until he opened up the Liberty Press and looked over the coded messages in the back. The codes were arranged in small boxes, and some wag ages before had the brainstorm to label the page “Classified Ads”. The name stuck.

So had Sam’s codename: Quisitor. Sam sighed as he mentally de-coded the message next to his name. Meeting, the next night, back room of a local pub, standard security protocols.

There were a few other names getting call-outs. Sam ran down the list and found the one he was looking for: Lamb. While he couldn’t make out her code, Sam was sure that she would be at the same meeting. The two of them worked most often together, typically as a means of vetting potential recruits into the Resistance.

If the others were also going to be there, then something big was going to happen.

Just what he needed.

Walking Death, Chapter 1

Dr. Frieda Kellner slipped away from the ballroom of the Court of Luxembourg on the balmy August night. Despite her formal court dress, she moved quietly and unobtrusively through the grounds. The guards were less alert than they should have been. Luxembourg was far from any place the Resistance considered important. If anything, their vigilance was focused inward. That vigilance was precisely what Dr. Kellner sought to avoid.

She slipped in between a pair of shadowed topiary. Two guards walked down the path, more interested in the previous night’s football match than in looking for people out of place. Their direction took them toward the palace, destroying their fragile human night vision. Frieda knew that the ork sentries would be the greater threat to her escape.

Dr. Kellner was a member of the Imperial Bureau of Advanced Sciences. Frieda was one of the small circle of scientists who designed the super weapons that aided the victories across Europe and the Americas. Fueled by excelsiol, the fuel derived from pure magical energies, their devices were of a technology that would have boggled the minds of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

Her course though the garden was no less roundabout than her path through life. Orphaned young, she made her way through the streets of Berlin avoiding the police and the pimps. She taught herself to pick pockets and slip through second story windows the by the time she was ten. Her burglary was as often to satisfy her curiosity as to find valuables, and books were often among the pilfered items.

When the Resurgence occurred, she found herself facing ever more sophisticated burglar alarms. That set of an arms race of sorts, as she had to devise ever more precise methods and tools to get by them. Her victims of choice became the scientists and universities that practiced the New Science. Each new piece of knowledge was added to her repertoire and refined her devices, while the Empire was driven to distraction by the near constant violations of its security.

Her anonymous career came to an end when she was nineteen when she failed the last part of a burglary, namely the “get out” portion of “get in, get the goods, and get out”. The scientist, Dr. Erick Reinwald of the University of Berlin, had set a surprise gas trap in his safe. After examining the gear Frieda was carrying, he considered himself quite lucky to have captured her, and he made the offer of joining him as a research assistant or be turned over to the Empire as the spy they had been looking for.

Her work in an academic setting made Dr. Reinwald regret that he had not had this prodigy to work with ten years before. She rapidly caught up in the mathematics and old science needed for her position and was soon pushing the boundaries in fields beyond her street experience. Not that her previous skills went dormant, Dr. Reinwald had many rivals in the field and having someone who could break and enter into the most secure facilities was a tremendous edge for her mentor.

It was one of those forays that led her to discover this latest alchemical abomination of the Empire, one that she could not allow to come to pass.

She had made contact with the Resistance a month previous, and the night to make her escape had arrived. No guards were in sight and she made her way down to the parking lot. A Resistance driver should have arrived by then, and she saw him by her car. Unfortunately, there was also an ork guard giving the driver a hard time. All of the drivers were to be kept in the garage. Nominally they were there to get food and drink, but really it was to limit the options of the party’s guests to slip their minders. Frieda’s driver was still in that small gathering; the man in the lot was a second. The guard was threatening to drag the driver to the watch commander as Frieda made her way behind the guard.

“Pardon me,” she said in her native German.

The ork turned to look into the business end of a pump atomizer. Frieda squeezed and a mist of fast acting knockout solution caught him square in the face. A human would have dropped like a stone, but for once an ork was doing a fair impression of a feather. Frieda gave him a sharp chop with the edge of her hand to the ork’s neck just under his jaw line. Only then did the stone-like quality set in.

“Frau Doktor,” said the driver, “we must be going.”

Frieda nodded and entered the held open door.

They changed vehicles three times by the time they reached Marseille the next day. She was dressed in a man’s work clothes as she exited the car. At a dockside warehouse, she was escorted to a body-sized crate that held a small device of her own design. A visibly nervous man handed her a tiny canister of the tremendously volatile excelsiol. Frieda dropped three drops of the precious fluid into the reservoir of the device. To that she added the powdery contents of a vial. The device would refresh the air of the soon to be sealed crate. The powder would be aerosolized by the air generator and would allow her to make her journey in a state of deepest sleep.

“It is time,” she said.

“New York has been alerted and will be awaiting your arrival, Frau Doktor.”

“They had better.”

She climbed into the crate. She contemplated the secret project that had found her conscience after all these years. There were things worthy of war, but the new plans were beyond the pale. Thoughts of the new world occupied her mind when she was given the signal that sealing was complete, and she toggled the device at her side to on.

Her last thoughts were on New York City.

Intangible Assets, Epilogue

Akbar was indeed impressed with the knife. He said that he could use it to make an enchanted weapon that would allow a corporeal user to effect spiritual entities. That end result was enough for him to trade even for Renfroe’s Compendium. Score another one for the Sam Watson not-yet-Memorial Library.

The jewelry I had lifted from my first visit to Allison’s apartment had been enough to get square with my landlord, kick Calliope a nice bonus, take Rachel out to dinner, and keep me off the soup line for a couple of weeks.

All that and one more thing. I walked into Cutler’s alley with a bag tucked under my arm. Removing the flask-like bottle of good whiskey, I pushed power into it. It took a bit more than the cigarettes, but I figured I owed him. The bottle broke easily against the wall, and I carefully set its ghost on a trash can lid.

Cutler was right there to pick it up. He unscrewed the cap and took a sniff and a snort.

“I’ve had better,” he pronounced, “but not recently. Thanks, Watson, you’re a pal.”

“I try,” I said, “I try.”

Intangible Assets, Chapter 19

     Allison stood looking about her burnt out apartment. The firefighters had done what they could, but they didn’t stand a chance against the professionals Ambrosi had sent to torch the place. She remained intangible to the normal senses, but I was still keeping an Eye on her. It was several hours after sunset of the day after my meeting with Ambrosi.
     
     A single candle burned next to me as I sat in a corner. Its light failed to penetrate into the room; my magic turned the feeble light around and into a circle about me. Only darkness and the faint luminescence of Allison’s astral form remained outside of that circle.

     The apartment was a difficult place for Allison to be. Now that I understood her story, I could understand why. I reminded myself to apologize later for the moll crack I had made the first time I was here. The sense of sadness coming off of her would have been palpable to anyone in the room. No one would have needed my senses to be able to tell that this room was haunted. Where before the fire I hadn’t been able to keep my senses active, the desperation of putting the fire out and the fear of the neighbors diluted the resonance of Allison’s murder.

     We had been waiting there for those hours before the other presence made it felt. Arrogance and Hatred imposed itself into the room. Allison turned toward it quickly, lashing out with her spectral stiletto.

     The new form coalesced around its wound. It was a man of maybe thirty-five, although the look of rage on his face made him seem practically ancient. Despite the fine suit and hat, there was little about him that seemed human. His face appeared frozen, as if incapable of holding any other emotion, and at the first manifestation of his form he seemed to be drenched in blood all down the front of his jacket from a gaping wound to his throat. Without his body, there was no pretense as to what Sylvio Tenebrisi was deep down.

I drew the last of the warding spell as he appeared in the room. This time, the ward was set so that he could not get out.

Allison leapt backward away from Sylvio as I drew my gun and pulled the trigger. The report was both silent and deafening at the same time. To any other living person in the building, the round in the gun failed to fire. In actuality, the gun was only loaded with spent brass that I had fired off at a Resistance shooting range. Before I had fired them off, however, I had pushed some of my power into them, much like the cigarettes I had given Stewart Cutler. The crack of exploding powder reverberated through the ghostly aspect of the room, and my theory was born out by Tenebrisi falling to the ground.

He turned at me with a snarl of rage on his face. His move was like lightning; I had failed to consider what not having a body could do for one’s mobility. He was almost as fast as Bloody Giuliano had been in the warehouse.

I did learn another lesson very quickly after that. I learned that what my instructors had said was true in that looking at the spirit realm makes one vulnerable to that realm. He cut at me with his knife and I felt life flow out of my arm as I missed the clean block.

Tenebrisi had forgotten about Allison at this point, and she made him pay for that sloppiness with a stab to where his kidney once was. Evidently Victor had taught her how to use the blade when he gave it to her.

“Get clear of him!” I told Allison.

She again got clear before I hit Sylvio with a spell of Motion. He went flying back and to my right until he ran up against my ward. Despite the hard slam into the wall, he still managed to keep his feet. He kept his feet until I put a spectral bullet into his leg.

His form and fight went out from under him.

“You have to be a special kind of stupid to be messing with me, flatfoot. Your life ain’t gonna be worth a plugged nickel once my boss hears about this.”

I hunkered down at my spot across the room from him. Allison came over and stood to my left.

“I’d be concerned about that, Sylvio, if your boss didn’t already know about this little set-up here. You have to be the first I’d ever heard of a guy getting sold out by his boss twice.”

The realization crossed his face as the understanding dawned. In truth, he was only half of the deal. The other half was that I got to keep the journal. Ambrosi had been fit to blow a gasket, but then I pointed out that he had deadly blackmail on me. All he had to do was drop a dime on me and my soul would be fueling one of the emperor’s war machines by the end of the week. So rather than doing that, he could let the standoff continue indefinitely. Treaties had been signed on less, and that treaty would be keeping Allison, my friends, and me safe for as long as it lasted.

Tenebrisi did the math, and realized that he wouldn’t be getting out of here as alive as he entered. He leapt at me; the look on his face very reminiscent of the proverbial cornered rat. Again, however, he wrote off Allison as a frail and not a threat. She was in my line before I could get the shot off.

Sylvio’s knife slashed a new slit through Allison’s dress and into her side, but her knife caught him square in the chest. She took him right where his heart should have been, and that was enough.

She leaned into him and said into his ear, “Victor avenged me on you, now I do it for myself and him.”

Sylvio’s face was a mask of confusion. He must have never considered that a woman could ever have been a threat. It had driven him to murder her, and it had led him to die on her blade. The look of confusion faded with the rest of his form. He slowly faded, as if he was retreating into a black mist, and then the rest slid downward like sand through an hourglass.

Allison watched Sylvio disappear. Once he was gone, and there was no doubt that he was gone forever, she looked down at her knife and threw it aside like something evil.

“I don’t suppose I’ll be needing that anymore,” she said.

“I don’t reckon you will, either.”

It was then that I noticed a faint glow growing brighter in the former living room of Allison Tierney. I saw that the light was the perfect source for the sparkle of the sequins of her dress.

“He confessed,” said Allison through a smile and a sob, “thank God, he confessed.”

I couldn’t see anything either in or through the light. It wasn’t my time to know that, yet.

Allison turned after taking two steps toward what awaited her. She was already partly obscured by the glow.

“Thank you, Sam.” She giggled and took a last look about the place. “Help yourself to what you can find. I’m sorry I can’t pay you better.”

“Just go, and be happy.”

“I’ll visit if I can.” With that, she continued walking until she disappeared in the mists. Once she was gone, the light dimmed until I was alone in the burned out apartment.

I lit a cigarette and considered the apartment. Then, I took my handkerchief, pushed a touch of power into it, and used it to pick up her discarded knife. I was surprised it was still here, and I figured that I could get a decent trade from Akbar for it.

Intangible Assets, Chapter 18

     We had a lot to do and not a lot of time to figure out just how to do it.

     There were few options to my situation. I considered, briefly, finishing Marquis Dunkirk’s mission and killing Ambrosi. That would be the path suggested in fables and tales of yore. What those tales never took into account were the dozens of men that the monster could have surrounding himself. Beyond that, there would be no guarantee that the other bosses wouldn’t thank me by rubbing me out on their way to a bloody war over the spoils. The Families might not like each other all that much, but they do have a certain esprit de corps when it comes to outsiders messing with their own.

Second option: make it so that pursuing either Allison or me would not be in Ambrosi’s best interests. I preferred not to use the term blackmail because it sounded so sordid when it was being applied to my actions, but there you have it.

I was going to have to speak with Ambrosi, and that meant I had to make arrangements. More than time and place, just getting the word to him would be difficult. I also needed to find a venue that was secure enough for me to walk away from. The more I thought about it, the more certain the answer became: Tempeste and Club Hades.

I carried the book with me in my pocket as I headed for the club. Calliope called ahead for me, and Tempeste was apparently intrigued enough to grant me an audience. Having my secretary call from a phone booth outside a church to arrange a meeting with the Princess of the Isle of Grey was just another note to the surreal history I had lived over the past week.

     So far as the Fae are concerned, Tempeste is the one in charge in New York City. The Isle of Grey is technically only Manhattan, but Tempeste oversees operations in the other Burroughs as well. Not many mortals know that, and how I came to know it is part and parcel with how I came to the city in the first place.

Samira was at the door to greet me when I knocked. She was dressed casually and didn’t seem to mind that I was there in the middle of the day. The interior of the Club was dim, and the chairs had all been turned over onto the tables. All of the chairs except those at Tempeste’s table. Those were being used by the Mistress of the club and a thin, sallow faced man with wire-rimmed spectacles. A pair of leather bound books sat open between them.

“That’s enough for now. Thank you, Nicolai,” said Tempeste.

I had to do a double take. I hadn’t recognized the gentleman who heads the club’s bartending crew during the evening. It also went to say that I didn’t recognize him as Tempeste’s go-to messenger. Those would be the messages that get delivered via a meaningful item left on your pillow while you slept. He cleared the books away, and I filed away the information that he was also Tempeste’s accountant. I would have hated to get a message from him about outstanding debts. Thank God my landlord doesn’t know him.
“To what do I owe this visit, Sam?” Tempeste asked. She rose from the table to meet my en route. She wore a silver silk blouse and a pair of black pants over her long legs. She always carried herself with the air of one who makes their own rules, and fashion was the least of those. I appreciated the aesthetic, and mentioned as much.

“Thank you, but I doubt that couture is what brings you at this ungodly hour.”

“Ungodly? It is two in the afternoon.”

She smiled.

“Perhaps not for barbarians, but certainly civilized folk prefer the night.”

“And the not-so-civilized in some cases. Say, Giaccomo Ambrosi and Bloody Giuliano.”

“Why whatever do you mean?” She was so clearly enjoying our little game.

“I couldn’t imagine Club Hades being the place it is and not attracting at least a couple of vampires.”

“Vampires? My, that would be scandalous, even if they didn’t advertise the fact.”

“A few prefer to play their cards close then?”

“Oh yes, a few prefer to earn their reputations through more mundane avenues. Business, for instance.”

“The old family firms, I should guess.”

“Certainly. You get all sorts here.”

Samira approached the table and set a Bloody Mary at my elbow.

“I hope you don’t mind,” said Tempeste, “I asked Samira to fix one up for you. You look like you could use one after your adventures last night.”

“You heard about that?” I asked as I held up the drink, as if examining the glass in the light. Instead, I was looking it over with my Sight. No enchantments were noticeable. So it was to be a gift of another nature.

“I’ll let you have that one for passing a small test. Tell me something I already know.”

Interesting game. She wanted to know that I knew something, as opposed to what I knew.

“Alright, how about that Giaccomo Ambrosi is a vampire?”

“And I would know that already?”

“He’s been to the club,” I said, making a broad gesture to take in the environs. “And no one gets in without you learning their natures.” I can’t say just how much that had scared me after the first time I had been there.

She nodded, and I enjoyed the drink. A little light on the Tabasco, but I always took my drinks strong. I didn’t know how much I needed that drink until the first swallow. Leave it to the Fae to get me feeling human again.

“So what is it that you need, Sam?”

“I need one of the private rooms for a very private meeting.”

“I’m sure the Sheraton would have something available for that.”

“Not if one side is very concerned about it turning into a lead swapping party.”

“And I would want such a party happening in my establishment?”

“No, but Ambrosi has done business here before. Your reputation of neutral ground is too useful for him to trash on my account.”

“It would be expensive for him as well, I assure you.”

I nodded over another sip of my drink.

“Something like this could be expensive for you as well,” she said.

I knew that was coming, and there was only one thing that I had to pay her with.

“Then let me tell you the secret that I am counting on to keep me alive.”