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  The crowd grew louder as they observed my hesitation.

  “Is that a yes?” Brian asked them, his breaths deepening.

  Vega tugged my sleeve again. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “I need to see something,” I said, handing her Tabitha’s leash.

  The crowd broke into loud cheers as I made my way up the aisle toward the stage. Brian watched my approach, a confident smile stretching his goatee. As I arrived in front of him, he extended his chubby right hand. His grip was damp but firm.

  “Now there’s a good sport,” he said, continuing to squeeze. His eyes peered into mine for a long moment, sweat glistening across his brow, before they fell to my cane. His gaze was much more intense than it had appeared from across the room. “Is that your famous casting implement?” Before I could answer, he drew a slender wooden wand from his robe and held it up. “Well, this is mine.”

  He showed it to the audience to more cheers.

  I discerned nothing magical in the wood or in the runes he’d scratched along the side with what appeared to have been a dull knife. “We’ll make this a classic duel,” he said. “Five paces, turn and fire.”

  His eyes flicked to my right. When I glanced over, I saw he’d come with a small entourage. A block of about twenty people in identical red robes sat off to the left.

  Brian took me by the shoulders and spun me until I was turned away from him. A moment later, his warm back was heaving and falling against mine, and yeah, it felt as gross as it sounds. I tried to create a little separation, but he seemed determined that we remain in contact.

  “So, should I pretend to go down or you?” I asked over the shoulder away from the audience.

  His upper back tensed. “Oh, you won’t need to pretend anything. I’m going to drop you like a stench cow.”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  He snorted derisively. “You wouldn’t.”

  I wasn’t sensing any magic in him up close, and from my new position, I seemed to have lost sight of the crowd’s energy I’d picked up earlier—if it had even existed in the first place. And yet Brian’s confidence bothered me. He was either delusional or, like Mae, he possessed an ability I couldn’t observe.

  “Can you count for us?” he asked the audience.

  “One…!” they shouted. When Brian separated from my back, I realized he’d taken his first step. I quickly did the same. The only way to know whether he had any magic to his name was to see what happened at “five.”

  “Two…!” the audience continued. “Three…! Four…!”

  I gripped my cane and invoked a low-level shield just in case.

  “Five!”

  When I pivoted on my right foot, I saw he’d turned a half step early. He thrust his wand toward me and shouted a nonsensical word: “Kon-a-rahk!’

  Instinctively, I braced for impact. But nothing collided into me.

  He gave his wand another hard thrust. “Kon-a-rahk!” he repeated, this time sending bits of spittle flying from his lips.

  A few chuckles rose from the crowd.

  When he attempted to blast me a third time—and I went absolutely nowhere—the laughter spread. Brian glanced at his wand, then at his entourage. A look of outrage came over his face. He then fixed his eyes on mine.

  “You’re supposed to go down,” he said.

  “I thought we weren’t playing pretend.”

  I couldn’t resist saying that loud enough for the crowd to hear, which infuriated him even more. But why was he acting so surprised? He stalked toward me, hands clenching into doughy fists. Okay, I wasn’t going to fight this guy.

  I whispered a minor force invocation. The skirt of his robe wrapped his legs, and he pitched forward. The murmurs of laughter gathered into a surprised burst as he went down.

  Brian caught himself against the stage floor, the impact snapping his wand. One end went flying into the crowd, prompting more laughter. Several members of the audience, probably those who had come to see actual magic, got up to leave with mutters and shakes of their heads.

  Brian’s eyes turned desperate. Straightening his glasses, he heaved himself to his knees. “Wait!” he cried. “Watch!”

  He jabbed his wand toward me again before realizing he was only holding the handle.

  Meanwhile, the exodus grew in volume. “Go back to Hogwarts!” someone shouted.

  As I looked down at Brian, I started to feel sorry for him. Especially when someone threw the end of his wand back on stage and it bounced off his head. By all appearances, he was an enthusiast who had taken the role-playing a little too far.

  I extended a hand down to help him up. “Hey, everyone has an off day.”

  Brian glared at my hand, then up at me. “Not today,” he said through clenched teeth.

  And then his entourage was moving past me, shouldering me out of the way. They were men and women ranging from teenaged to what looked like forties and even fifties. A couple of them stooped to help Brian back to his feet. I picked up an exchange of harsh whispers before Brian spun and marched from the stage. The rest of the group fell in behind him as he shoved his way past the departing attendees.

  “All riiight,” Stan Burke said, rushing back up to the stage. “Let’s hear it for Brian Lutz!”

  The smattering of applause was overtaken by boos and some shouted obscenities.

  Stan looked from the emptying room to me and mumbled, “Tough crowd.”

  Vega was waiting when I came off the stage.

  “Well, that was entertaining,” Tabitha remarked from the end of her leash.

  “You were wondering about the turnout?” Vega said. She showed me a short description of the session in the back of the program. Beneath a few sentences of empty boasts and promises, an asterisked line read: “At the conclusion of the session, attendees will receive a ticket for a free drink in the Copper Lounge.”

  I raised my eyes to the back of the room. At a table, a woman in a red robe was handing out tickets to the remaining few who had even bothered to line up. Most of the attendees had simply left in disgust.

  “So, I guess we can safely cross him off the list, huh?” Vega said.

  “He’s no magic-user,” I replied. “But he seemed so damned convinced he was going to blast me out of my shoes.”

  At that moment Stan Burke walked past.

  “Hey,” I said, catching his arm. “What do you know about this Brian Lutz?”

  Stan shrugged. “Not much except that his session was a bust.”

  “Then why did you vouch for him?” Vega asked.

  “He paid extra for an intro from an organizer, so that’s what he got. Hey, don’t look at me like that. If we didn’t generate dollars wherever we could, Epic Con wasn’t gonna happen. And if that meant whoring ourselves out…” He gave another shrug.

  “So you don’t know him?” I asked to be sure.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  As Stan strode away, I turned to Vega. “I think I’d like a background check on Brian anyway. There was an energy I may or may not have picked up. Plus, my magic seems to be nodding its head a little now.” I was also curious how someone like that had managed to attract a following. More inducements, or something else?

  “I’m on it,” Vega said, already pulling out her phone.

  As she spoke to the appropriate department, we made a circuit of the rest of the floor, which held the main conference rooms. I even poked my head into a few of the sessions.

  When Vega finished her call, we toured the first floor. But after thirty minutes, I wasn’t seeing anything besides a growing number of costumed attendees, and neither was Tabitha. I decided it was time to switch with Bree-Yark and Mae, have them do a tour of the lower levels to see what they could pick up. Maybe there were more fae around.

  “How’s it going up there?” I radioed.

  “We were just about to call you,” Mae replied.

  “What’s up? Something with the fae
?”

  “No, I’ve still got eyeballs on them,” Bree-Yark said. “They’re checking out the video games now.”

  “It’s Buster,” Mae replied. “We passed a room up here a moment ago, and he started squealing and carrying on. Didn’t stop until we were past it. When I backed up, he started right in again. Door’s locked, but I believe he’s reacting to something in there. You might want to come up and have a look.”

  “All right, stay back from the door,” I said, my heart rate picking up. “We’ll be right there.”

  16

  “There it is,” Mae said as we arrived. The door she was pointing to was one of those mysterious doors you often see in large hotels, nothing to indicate where it leads, barely more than a feature of the wall itself.

  “Officers claimed to have searched all the rooms on the convention floors,” Vega said, but I could hear her doubt. Her troubled eyes dropped to the pet carrier in Mae’s grip. It shook as Buster squealed and snapped his claws toward the hotel door, even though we were a good twenty feet back. The little guy was picking up something all right.

  I looked down at Tabitha.

  “It’s not demonic,” she said before I could ask.

  “Where’s Bree-Yark?” I asked, glancing around.

  “The fae started moving again,” Mae said, “so he followed.”

  I would’ve felt better if someone were chaperoning him, but I wanted Vega and Mae here as backup.

  The officers Vega had radioed began to arrive. While she filled them in, I secured Tabitha’s leash to the leg of a table. She was thinking about protesting—I could see it on her face—but this meant she’d get a break from walking. She settled for a discontented grunt before retreating beneath the table where no one would see her. As I straightened again and eyed the door, Mae clutched Buster’s carrier nervously.

  “Be careful, baby,” she said to me.

  A shield crackled to life around me as I approached the door and opened my senses to any magical wards or energies. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake as downstairs. But I didn’t pick up anything this time.

  When I reached the door, I tried the knob. Locked, like Mae had said. The hotel would have a key, of course, but the less people I had to involve, the better. I eyed the bolt. My normal MO would have been to nail it with a force invocation and burst in—element of surprise and all—but with so many people on the floor, I didn’t want to inadvertently release something.

  Fortunately, I’d come prepared.

  I tucked my cane under an arm and pulled a potion from my pocket. Unlike the other vials, a brush was built into this one’s cap. I whispered an incantation. One by one, the tiny crystals inside the potion ignited, turning the liquid a luminescent silver.

  I drew out the brush and began painting a small circle beside the doorknob. Within moments, I could see the layer of door just beneath the surface. To the untrained eye, it would have looked as if the glittering liquid were eating through the door, but the spell was actually a form of remote viewing. It was just that the viewing worked across inches, not miles—and for someone at my level, even that little bit required a good amount of potion.

  I was nearing the bottom of the vial when the viewing potion finally “broke” through the door, and I was peering into the room beyond. It appeared to be a storage space for spare tables and chairs, which were folded and stacked against the far wall. A light source just outside my angle of sight cast everything in an eerie electric glow. As I leaned in to dab on the last of the potion, a large yellow eye appeared opposite mine.

  “Christ!” I shouted, and shoved myself backwards.

  “Something in there?” Vega asked into my earpiece.

  As suddenly as it had appeared, the eye disappeared from the viewing portal. Even though I’d only glimpsed the eye for a moment, its horizontal pupil suggested amphibian. Whatever it belonged to was frigging huge. Heart pounding, I secured the door with a shield invocation.

  “Yeah. We’re going to need to clear the floor.”

  “How about the conference and hotel?” Vega asked.

  I thought about it, but evacuating the floor was going to be challenging enough.

  “Let’s wait and see what we’re dealing with,” I replied, easing back to the hole.

  Vega went quiet, then came back on a moment later. “Okay. They’re clearing the floor.”

  I angled my head trying to get a better look into the room. The remote viewing was a one-way spell, so the creature hadn’t seen me. More likely it had picked up the sound of the brush strokes. I peered over a shoulder. Already, officers were herding vendors and attendees away from our area.

  Need to tilt this encounter further in my favor, I thought, and with the least risk to the attendees.

  I seized the edge of the rubber seal that ran along the bottom of the door and, with the help of a force invocation, ripped it aside. I then produced another potion, pouring it along the line where the rubber strip had been. As I spoke the activating words, a pink mist drifted up. With another invocation, I pushed the sleeping spell beneath the door.

  Through the small viewing portal that continued to waver in place, I watched pink smoke gush into the room. Any moment now, I expected to hear the thud and rattle of something enormous toppling. But when the sleeping potion thinned and there had still been no response, I became nervous.

  Maybe it slid quietly to the floor?

  The door banged open, and a gargantuan form stood in the mist.

  Or not.

  I shouted and thrust my sword forward. The force invocation nailed the creature in the chest—and broke apart. The creature didn’t so much as wobble. It ducked beneath the doorframe and through the mist. In the next moment, I found myself peering up at something I’d never seen.

  The thick, muscled body looked ogre-ish—which would have suggested faerie realm—but its head resembled a frog’s. Warts and random thorns protruded from its mottled skin. But there was nothing random about the hooked claws that extended from the back of its fists like the tines of a garden rake.

  The hell are you supposed to be?

  My sleeping potion hadn’t affected the frog-beast, and it had just walked through my force invocation as if it were a light breeze.

  With squelching sounds, the creature’s eyes rotated in different directions. Before it could get a fix on me, or anyone at my back, I invoked through my staff. Light crackled into a dome around the creature, but the shield felt shaky.

  Jaw clenching, I pulled more ambient energy from the room and channeled it into the shield. I strained to close it like a fist, to overcome the forces holding the creature together like with the lizard in the basement. But something in the creature was pushing back.

  Its dull, frog-like eyes took in the crackling light around it. Almost faster than I could follow, it lashed out an arm. The claws crashed through the shield as if it were made of breakaway glass. Sparks rained over the carpeted floor. I staggered from the sudden release of energy, spots flashing in my vision.

  Thing’s resistant to magic, I realized. Or at least my magic.

  The frog-beast leapt forward, this time lashing its hooks toward my head. I threw my sword up and myself down. The metal blade clanged off a hook. I hit the floor hard. I was eye level with the thing’s right foot, a webbed splay with gelatinous toe-pods the size of softballs. Gritting my teeth, I drove the blade into the meat of its calf.

  Gathering energy to disperse it, I shouted, “Dis—!”

  Releasing an ungodly guttural sound that was somewhere between a croak and a scream, the frog-beast swatted the blade aside. The energy I’d pulled in broke apart as my sword clanged away. Knowing the next blow would be aimed at me, I thrust myself back with a force invocation. The frog-beast’s hooks gouged into the floor where I’d been and came up with two ragged strips of carpet.

  “You stop that ridiculousness right this second!” I turned to find Mae stalking forward, the sleeves of her jacket pushed up, an honest-to-God look of a
nger in her eyes. “You might be ugly, but you don’t have to act a damned fool!”

  I gained my feet and whispered another invocation to return my flung-off sword to my grip. The frog-beast was fixated on Mae now. It blinked its eyes and slowly lowered its arm with the strips of carpet hanging from the hooks. Mae must have sensed nether energy in the creature, but would her power hold sway over something this powerful?

  I showed her a hand to say she’d come close enough. Mae stopped and placed her fists on her hips. Behind her, Buster squealed from his carrier.

  “Now, sit down!” Mae ordered.

  This would be the test. If she could lull the frog-beast into docility, I could drive my blade into it from behind and channel enough energy to send the monstrosity back to wherever it had come from. But the creature only stared at her.

  “I said, sit,’” Mae repeated.

  When its knees started to bend, I thought we had it. But they were flexing to leap. I threw up a shield just in time. The frog-beast crashed through it in a brilliant cascade of sparks, but that modicum of resistance prevented it from reaching Mae.

  Gunshots sounded, and the creature staggered back. I turned to find Vega firing from a wide-legged stance. A pair of pale-faced officers on either side of her joined in. I doubted their standard rounds were having much effect, but thick smoke corkscrewed from the impacts of Vega’s silver bullets.

  “Its eyes!” I called. “Aim for its eyes!”

  Vega adjusted her aim. The frog-beast’s right eye blew out. It released a croak-scream and flailed its arms. A moment later, the left eye failed in a burst of black goo. In one long croak, the creature flopped into a drunken series of pirouettes, the hooks on the backs of its fists swiping blindly.

  I signaled for Vega to hold fire while I edged closer. I bounced on my toes, looking for an opening. I could already see the yellow orbs of its eyes reforming, the pupils migrating back into place.

  On its next turn, the creature’s hooks whistled inches from my face. I lunged. My blade broke through the skin of its low back with a wet sound and plunged to the hilt. The frog-beast threw its head back in its most horrid scream yet, then jerked its body from side to side, trying to force me—and the blade—off of it.