Sapphire Flames Read online

  The empty stores flew by. My steps sounded too loud in the cavernous mall, scattering echoes through the abandoned hallway. Traces of Fright Fest still lingered—a plastic curtain stained with fake blood hanging from Payless shoe store, a synthetic spiderweb in the broken window of a prom dress shop, a plastic prop knife on the floor . . . As if the place wasn’t creepy enough already.

  Twenty people. At least two to watch from outside in case I came out, two each for the two escalators inside the mall to make sure I didn’t keep switching floors on them. Fourteen people to hunt me down. Way too many. I never tried to beguile more than three without going all out with my power.

  The entrance to JC Penney loomed ahead, shrouded in shadow, like the mouth of a cave. The weak sunshine from the skylight barely reached it. Empty metal clothes racks crowded the floor, pushed all around at odd angles. Abandoned jewelry counters and wheeled displays added to the chaos, turning the inside of the store into an ominous labyrinth. The place was a mess and it was perfect.

  I padded inside, running on my toes. Glass crunched under my feet. Someone must have taken a bat to the glass display cases. A cloying mélange of fruity scents hung in the air, the ghost of broken perfume bottles. To the right the boxy walls of Sephora waited, still painted black and white.

  A thud echoed through the empty hallway. Glass shattered. The hunters were here.

  I turned toward the Sephora. An empty counter blocked my way. I sidestepped it and saw the outline of a person in the gloom behind it.

  I dropped to the floor, the gladius still in my hand. My heart hammered against my ribs. Crap.

  That was too fast. They couldn’t have gotten here ahead of me. Was it some junkie or a squatter? Shooting him would sign my death warrant. The sound of the shot would carry. I might as well ring a bell and scream, “Here I am, come and get me.”

  I strained, listening for any hint of a noise.

  Nothing.

  Maybe he hadn’t seen me. I inched to the right, trying to get around the counter in front of me. If I could get a better look . . .

  The deep ink-black shadows under the counter shifted.

  I froze.

  An eerie rustling sound came from the darkness, the whispery noise of some sort of creature moving around. The stench hit me, a foul, sour reek of excrement and animal fur.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up.

  Don’t see me. I’m not here. Just stay where you are.

  The thing in the darkness crept forward.

  It had to be a rat. Just a rat. Nothing special.

  The thing shimmied closer.

  Not a rat. Too big. An opossum? A raccoon? A small monster? I could stab it with my sword, but I didn’t want to kill it before figuring out what it was.

  The dry staccato of claws on a concrete floor echoed softly. Click. Click. Click.

  I lay perfectly still.

  Click. Click.

  Click.

  A long black muzzle framed by matted hair emerged from under the counter. Two big round eyes stared into mine. The muzzle split open, showing sharp white teeth. A little pink tongue slid out and licked my nose.

  A dog. A small, filthy, matted dog.

  The dog licked my face again and whimpered.

  Whoever was hiding behind the counter had to have heard it. I had to strike first.

  I took a deep steadying breath, rolled to the right, came up on one knee, and lunged, thrusting my sword. The gladius sliced into fabric and fiberglass.

  A zombie face, half rotten and stained with dry green pus, leered back at me with plastic eyes, its mouth twisted in a grin, showing off rotten yellow fangs.

  Fuck!

  I landed on my butt and let out a breath. The zombie mannequin laughed at me, a hideous sequined dress the color of blood hanging off its bony shoulders. Prom Queen Zombie. Fucking Fright Fest.

  The little dog trotted over to me, curled up against my thigh, and licked my pant leg. Its black tail wagged, sweeping broken glass in all directions. You could barely make out its shape under the mass of matted fur.

  I reached over and gently stroked its back. The tail wagged harder.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered. How had it survived here? What did it eat? On second thought, I didn’t want to know.

  The dog stared up at me with big brown eyes full of endless canine devotion. It seemed to be saying, Please don’t leave me alone in the dark. I’m hungry and dirty and lonely with no one to take care of me.

  The beam of a flashlight sliced through the gloom in the hallway behind me.

  “Bad people are coming,” I whispered. “What am I going to do with you?”

  The little dog scooted closer to me.

  I scooped the dog off the floor. It was so light, it had to have been starving.

  Another thud. They were getting closer.

  If I left the doggie in the open, it would make noise and they would shoot it and me. No, that would not be happening.

  I squinted at the store, taking in the width of the entrance, the distance to Sephora, and the piles of debris. I’d have to take off my shoes for this plan to work.

  “Time to go.” I ran into Sephora. Here’s hoping I had time to prepare a nice surprise.

  Ten minutes later, the hunter team entered JC Penney in a standard formation for clearing large rooms. There were three rules all SWAT and military teams lived by when searching a building: never enter alone, don’t move faster than you can think, and stay out of your partner’s line of fire. I had hoped for some wannabes who would wander around in groups of one or two doing the dynamic entry with dramatic jumping and running, but no. These people knew their business.

  The first two hunters, dressed in black tactical gear and wearing ballistic vests, walked in at opposite sides of the wide entrance and halted, each of them covering their sector of the room, slow and methodical. They knew I was alone, and they had cleared the rest of the mall, so they had me cornered.

  The two sentries stopped, just as I thought they would. The one on the right halted less than five feet from where I lay under dirty plastic stained with fake blood. I had arranged the debris into a pile of generic garbage identical to other such piles scattered around the mall and buried myself in it.

  A five-man team moved forward between the sentries, passed them, and cautiously walked deeper into the store, heading for Sephora. There should have been more of them. They must have split up and left the second team upstairs to clear the upper floor.

  The clearing team kept walking. Nobody spoke. No static came from their radios. Nobody wore low-light gear. The inside of the store wasn’t dark enough.

  Five minds. I had hoped for smaller teams of two or three. I would have to beguile them with voice alone and do it fast. My magic took a little while to gain a hold. The moment the first word came out of my mouth, they would shoot at me. I needed to be heard but not seen. There was no margin for error.

  They should’ve been close enough by now. I held my breath.

  Behind me, my cell phone alarm went off.

  If they had been amateurs, they would have dropped everything, and all run over to look for the phone. Instead, the clearing team ignored it. Looking for it meant they would have to turn their backs to Sephora, and since the ringing cell was obviously a distraction, they surmised that I wanted them to keep away from Sephora, so they stayed on their present course.

  The sentry closest to me turned right and walked toward the sound. His buddy didn’t move, covering the left side of the room.

  A step.

  Another step.

  A black combat boot landed mere inches from my face. Glass crunched under the heavy rubber sole. I could reach out and touch it.

  Another step.

  I tried not to breathe.

  Another.

  He moved past me. The phone kept playing, eerily loud in the silence. I had hidden it under more plastic. It would take him a bit to find it.

  Now. I had to do it now.r />
  I slipped from under the plastic and dashed to the remaining sentry. He never saw me coming. My magic pulled me. I lunged, following its lead, and sliced his throat, severing the jugular and the carotid in one smooth thrust. Blood wet the blade. The sentry spun, choking on his own blood, unable to cry out. I thrust, putting three years of practice behind my sword. Funny thing about ballistic vests, they were designed to disperse the kinetic impact of a bullet, not stop a blade. My gladius cut through the Kevlar like it was a quilt, severing the man’s aorta. I sprinted to the other hunter, my socks muffling my steps.

  He’d reached the counter where I’d hidden the phone and was pulling the plastic off it. I clamped my left hand over his mouth and drove the gladius into his lower back, just under the body armor and into his kidney. The sharp blade sliced through the bundle of nerves and pain receptors, drowning the hunter in agony. I jerked his head back and slit his throat, cutting through the carotid and the trachea. The man sagged, and I gently lowered him to the floor.

  A harsh metallic taste washed over my tongue. My hands shook. Blood dripped from my gladius onto the floor.

  I’d just killed two people.

  This was it; they were dead, and I could never take it back.

  A two-shot burst crackled inside Sephora. Someone found the Prom Queen wearing my favorite coat.

  In a moment, they would come out and realize they were missing two of their own people. I had to move or die.

  I sprinted to the right, behind the clothes racks, which I had pushed together into a crescent shape around Sephora. The still ringing phone would buy me a few precious seconds but not many.

  A dark, human-shaped shadow moved away from the group and came straight for me. That was not the plan. I crouched to the right of the gap in my makeshift barricade.

  The sound of his footsteps drew closer. The dark outline of a gun emerged, followed by his arms, then his leg.

  I held my breath.

  The hunter turned to my left toward the phone, exposing his back. I lunged from a crouch and slashed across his spine, just under the bulletproof vest. He cried out and swung around. I stabbed him in the throat and withdrew. He collapsed. They had to have heard his gasp. Now or never.

  I took a deep breath and sang out, pouring carefully measured magic into my words, “Baa, baa, black sheep . . .”

  Gunfire tore through the store, but I was already moving, sprinting behind the metal clothes racks. To my magic-enhanced vision, the four remaining hunter minds fluoresced in response to my song, pale smudges of grey light in the darkness of the store.

  The shots died.

  “Have you any wool?”

  Bullets ricocheted from the clothes racks, tracking my voice. I dropped to the floor and crawled behind some wooden displays. They stopped shooting.

  “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.”

  A bullet tore a chunk from the plywood counter just in front of me. I scrambled to my feet and dashed the other way. The rest of the hunters moved toward me, closing in on my position like sharks.

  “One for my master, one for my dame . . .”

  The gunfire died. Silence claimed the store. I inhaled.

  Four voices chorused in perfect unison. “And one for the little boy who lives down the lane.”

  I had them. They were mine.

  Oh my God.

  I straightened. The four hunters emerged from behind Sephora’s walls. The leading hunter pulled his ski mask off his head, revealing the scarred face of a white man in his thirties, and gave me a shy little smile.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi,” they chorused. A woman on my right gave me a little wave with her HK MP5. If she had shot me with it, the spray of bullets would’ve cut me in half.

  “Tell the team upstairs that everything is clear. So they don’t have to worry.”

  The scarred man got on his radio. “False alarm. Continue the sweep. Clear. Over.”

  A static-softened answer came back. “Copy.”

  I slid the sword into its sheath on my belt. “Can one of you bring me my cell phone and my coat? It’s the one that was on the zombie mannequin.”

  The scarred man jerked his head at one of the other hunters. The hunter took off at a run and returned with my cell phone and my expensive coat, which now sported a couple of fresh bullet holes. Damn it. I turned the phone’s alarm off.

  “Follow me, please. I have to get my shoes.” I walked to the corner of the store, where a lone cash register had somehow survived the looting. The hunters trailed me.

  “Who sent you here?”

  “Mr. De Lacy,” the scarred man told me.

  “What were your orders?”

  “We’re supposed to apprehend you and bring you back to his residence.”

  Benedict was a sick asshole.

  “We’re supposed to kill you if we couldn’t capture you,” a female hunter added.

  “Sorry,” the scarred leader said.

  Sorry didn’t quite cover it.

  I took my boots from where I’d hidden them under the counter and put them and my ruined coat back on. My new bodyguards watched. I pushed aside the debris I had piled against a cabinet to keep it closed, opened the door, and took the little dog out. It licked my face.

  I cradled the dog in my arms. “The people upstairs don’t realize I’m nice. They’ll try to kill me. You’ll keep me safe, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” the leader said. “Don’t worry, Ms. Baylor. We’ve got this.”

  “We’ll keep you intact,” another man said.

  “We need to take them out,” the leader said. “It’s the safest way.”

  The woman with the HK smiled. “The escalator is nice and narrow.”

  The scarred hunter touched his radio. “We have her pinned down. Take the escalator down and cover us.”

  “Copy.”

  The leader pointed to a spot on the floor. “Stand there please.”

  I stood. The four hunters flanked the escalator. Two hunters came down the steps, sticking close together, a third slightly behind. My four bodyguards let them get halfway down. Gunfire burst, deafening in the silence of the mall. Three bloody bodies fell.

  Three more people I killed. I would deal with the guilt later. Right now, I had to survive.

  The leader turned to me. “We should take care of the rest of the crew as well, while we’re at it. Safer that way.”

  I forced my mouth to move. “Good idea.”

  The hunters fell into a defensive formation around me, the scarred leader in front, two people on the sides, and the female hunter covering the rear. We walked back to the Keystone Mall entrance.

  “Do you often capture people for Mr. De Lacy?”

  “We’ve done it a few times,” the leader said. “Mostly we’re given termination jobs.”

  “Was Sigourney Etterson one of your contracts? It would’ve been last Sunday.”

  “No,” the scarred man said without a pause. “We did a wet job last Saturday. Sunday we were dark. I got some killer fishing done.”

  Killer fishing. He didn’t even realize what he’d said.

  “Did you go out on your boat?” the hunter on the right asked.

  “Naah. Went kayak fishing on Lake Anahuac. Got a six-pound largemouth bass.”

  “Nice!” the hunter on the right said.

  “Who did you kill on Saturday?” I asked.

  “Some lawyer,” the leader said. “A clean, easy job. He came home, we put a gun into his mouth, pulled the trigger. Left him for the wife to find.”

  “I wish they were all that easy,” the female hunter said.

  “Ain’t that the truth?” the hunter on the left added.

  The first set of escalators came into view, a pair of guards by it. My escorts snapped their weapons up. The guns spat noise and bullets, and two corpses hit the floor. As we moved past them, the female hunter kicked one of the bodies. “I never liked that guy.”

  “What kind of work does Mr. De Lacy do?
How did you end up working for him?”

  “Technically, we work for Diatheke,” the female hunter said.

  “I don’t know what he does,” the leader said. “All I know is we get a name, we show up, do our thing, and we get paid.”

  “Yes,” the guard on the right said. “Do you have any idea how much a year of college costs? I’ve got two kids in elementary, and the wife and I already have to start saving.”

  “Did the lawyer you killed have any kids?” I asked.

  The guard on the right nodded. “Oh yeah. Two girls, both in Texas A&M. That’s some money, right there.”

  The female guard snorted. “Hope he had insurance.”

  “His kind always do,” the leader said.

  It didn’t even bother them. Maybe it had at some point, but not enough to stop.

  We reached an abandoned booth in the middle of the floor.

  “Wait here,” the scarred man said.

  My escort halted. The leader moved ahead along the wall and out of sight. His mind receded, tendrils of my magic stretching after him. Two twin bursts of gunfire popped. The scarred hunter came running back, a big grin on his face. “Never saw me coming.”

  The woman chuckled. “Fucking amateurs.”

  The leader smiled at me. “It was hard being gone. I was worried bad things might happen to you. I’m not letting you out of my sight, young lady.”

  “Let’s go to the door,” I told him.

  “You heard her.” He indicated the way with his index and middle finger. “Move out.”

  We approached the escalator. A dead hunter sprawled on the floor, blood pooling around his body, a shocking vivid red on the once white floor. A pair of boots stuck out from behind the escalator rail. We skirted the first corpse, and the scarred hunter moved up the steps. The two hunters flanking me followed. I was next, with the female hunter guarding my back.

  At the top we turned left. The food court came into view.

  “Act natural,” the leader advised me. “Pretend you’re in our custody.”

  We turned the corner. Four hunters guarded the entrance. They focused on us, guns raised.

  The leader opened his mouth.

  Alessandro shot out of the movie theater entrance, blindingly fast. A long piece of broken metal pipe appeared in his hand. He stabbed it into the closest hunter’s throat, turned, graceful, like he could hear music in his head, and drove his makeshift spear into the second man’s mouth.