Jayne Castle - Canyons of Night

“They didn’t do a very good job of searching the place,” he said.

But maybe that had not been their goal, he thought. Maybe they had just come here to kill him and had left when it turned out he wasn’t home. Typical thug mentality.

Rex’s low growl rumbled from the living room. Slade went to the kitchen doorway.

Rex was standing on his hind paws, gazing intently into the short hall that led to the bath and bedroom. He had dropped his beloved purse on the floor.

“What is it?” Slade asked. He walked across the small space. “Did they screw up and leave something behind? That would be useful. More hard evidence is always good.”

He heard the sound just as he reached Rex. The scrape-and-clunk iced his senses. He looked down the hall and saw a large, mechanical doll nearly three feet tall coming toward him. The gnomelike figure had long white hair and a flowing beard. There was a floppy velvet cap on its head. It was dressed in elaborately embroidered green-and-gold robes decorated with ancient alchemical symbols. The doll’s glass eyes glittered with dark, malevolent energy.

“Son of a bitch,” Slade said. “Sylvester Jones.”

He had a vague memory of an old Arcane legend, something about a Victorian clockmaker who had created some very dangerous clockwork toys.

The blast of ice and lightning hit him before he could remember the details, threatening to freeze both his paranormal as well as his normal senses. The force of the blast drove him to his knees. Rex crouched beside him, snarling furiously. He was fully sleeked out, a tough little predator.

It took everything Slade had not to crumple to the floor. His heart started to pound. He could hardly breathe. The atmosphere was darkening around him. He was dying, murdered by a damn clockwork toy.

Charlotte, he thought. He would never see her again. He wanted to explain that it hadn’t been just an island romance for him. But now there would not be time.

Rex crowded close against his thigh. Slade managed to put one hand on him. Rex was shivering, too.

The clockwork Sylvester halted a short distance away. Its glass eyes radiated a steady, sustained blast of lethal energy.

Slade grew colder. He tightened his hold on the snarling Rex and whispered the only name that mattered to him.

“Charlotte.”

THE FLASH OF DREAD ARCED ACROSS CHARLOTTE’S senses just as she stepped outside onto the front porch. The chilling frisson struck along with the wind that was bringing in the storm. The sensation was so ominous, so overwhelming, it shocked her breathless. Something awful was happening. To Slade.

She did not know how she could be certain that Slade was in danger but she did not question the knowledge. The Arcane experts claimed there was no such thing as telepathy but no one in the Society doubted the reality of intuition. She did not even try to tell herself that she was imagining things. She yanked her keys out of her purse and ran for her car.

THIS WOULD BE A DAMN STUPID WAY TO GO OUT, SLADE thought. He could see the note in his Bureau file, Agent Slade Attridge assassinated by large doll.

He was still on his knees confronting Sylvester, the snarling Rex pressed close to his side. It was as if they were trying to give each other some psychical support through physical contact. And maybe that was what was happening.

Charlotte.

This time he said it in his head, not aloud, but it had the same steadying effect. It helped him focus and that was what he needed most in that moment. He summoned the full force of his will, the same will that he used to control his talent, and slammed his senses into the hot zone.

He entered the stormlight region of his talent. For an instant the gale of energy threatened to disorient him but he powered through the disruptive currents until he found the eerie calm at the center.

The energy storm flashed around him in multicolored lightning strikes. It was an astonishingly simple, wholly intuitive process to identify the wavelengths he required to neutralize the energy of the Sylvester toy. The pressure of the cold, killing radiation lessened quickly but it took everything he had to maintain the dampening currents. He could not move. It was all he could do to take another breath. All of his energy had to be focused on countering the lethal currents. He knew he would not be able to hold on for long.

The clockwork device, on the other hand, seemed to be able to generate an endless stream of energy. It showed no signs of weakening. Every time he eased off the counterpoint currents, the energy from the Sylvester doll intensified immediately. He had to find a way to shut it down and quickly, before he exhausted his senses. If he did not show up at the station this morning, Myrna would send someone to look for him, Devin, maybe. Whoever walked through the front door to see what had happened to him would fall victim to Sylvester.

He tightened his grip on Rex, willing the dust bunny to understand.

“Fetch,” he said. It was all he could do to get the single word past his lips.

He took his hand off Rex. The steady blast of energy from the doll got a little hotter. He responded by pulling more stormlight. He dampened the currents as far as he could to give Rex a chance.

Rex flew at the machine, moving like the sleek, fast predator he was. He bounded up toward Sylvester’s throat and struck the device with a thud. The force of his momentum toppled the doll. The device crashed backward onto the floor. The mechanical arms and legs thrashed angrily but helplessly.

Slade was suddenly free from the paralyzing energy of the automaton’s eyes. He could breathe easily again. His heart rate slowed.

Sylvester stared up at the ceiling, glass eyes rattling in their sockets as the doll tried to find a new focus. Rex snapped and snarled and tried to sink his teeth into the automaton’s wooden throat.

“Rex, that’s enough.” Slade got to his feet and went forward. “He’s not worth breaking a tooth.”

Rex backed away from the thrashing doll, still snarling. Slade moved closer and crouched, careful to keep out of range of the glass eyes. He rolled Sylvester facedown and began searching for an access panel. There had to be some way to de-rez the gadget.

He found the panel on the back under the robes. He got it open and surveyed the elegantly engineered clockwork mechanism inside. There was a small, old-fashioned metal key. He removed it carefully. The doll went still.

He was still in the narrow hall studying the clockwork Sylvester and working through possible scenarios when he heard Charlotte’s car roar down the driveway.

“Damn.” He grabbed his cell phone, saw the missed call, and punched in her number.

The shades were drawn across all of his windows but he stayed low so as not to risk casting any shadows as he made his way across the living room. Rex watched him from the hallway, sensing that the hunt was not yet over.

Slade hunkered down against the wall and peered through a crack in the blinds. He watched Charlotte bring her small vehicle to a halt in the drive.

She must have been clutching the phone because she answered immediately. At the same time she popped open the car door.

“Slade,” she gasped, rushing toward the front steps. “Are you okay? I got this awful feeling a few minutes ago.”

“I’m fine but I’ve got a situation here. I do not want you walking into it.”

“Oh, my God, what’s wrong?”

“Listen to me and do exactly as I say. I’m pretty sure someone is watching the house. You’re here now so we’ll have to make it look good. Knock on my front door. When you don’t get an answer, act like you’ve decided I’m not home. Get back in the car and drive into town. Go to the café. Have coffee. Remain where there are people around you. Don’t tell anyone what is going on. Wait until I call you and give you the all-clear. Got it?”

“I’ll get Officer Wills.”

“No, I don’t want him going up against a couple of hunter-talents. Just do what I said. One more thing. If this doesn’t work out well, get on the phone to Adam Winters, the boss of the Frequency City Guild. Got it? Tell him to call J&J. This is their problem.”

“Got it. But—”

He closed down the phone, not giving her a chance to argue.

Through the crack in the blind he watched her close her own phone. She dropped it into her purse as she went up the steps. She knocked briskly and hesitated a few seconds as though waiting. Then, frowning, she went back down the steps, got into the car, and started the engine. It was a good act, he thought. But he did not breathe deeply again until she was safely out of the drive.

He made his way back into the narrow hall. With great care he picked up the lifeless Sylvester doll and carried it into the bathroom. He set it facedown in the bathtub. He was reasonably confident that the device could not be activated without the key, but when it came to old Arcane legends, you could never be certain. With luck the tub would act as a shield in the unlikely event that the mechanism somehow switched on again.

He went back out into the hall, shut the bathroom door behind him, and then closed the bedroom door. He took the mag-rez out of the holster and checked the load.

Satisfied with his preparations, he got down on his knees and crawled into the living room. Taking care not to throw any shadows on the blinds, he climbed the narrow steps to the sleeping loft. When you hunted, you had to think like your prey. For some reason he had never understood, prey rarely looked up first. People initially prepared for danger from in front, from the side and, if they were very smart, from behind. But they usually checked out the situation overhead last.