Chapter 20 – Heretic

Once again it was obvious why he couldn’t just hide in a hole. He had a moral imperative to do something, in addition to his own personal responsibility. Technically, Lucy couldn’t be used to get at him if he didn’t allow it, but he refused to even entertain the possibility of abandoning her. Callum didn’t want to leave Lucy in GAR custody for any longer than he needed to, but it was just like the couple down in Florida. He needed to prepare and do things right.

An unavoidable delay was letting Chester’s people smuggle the portal anchor in. The fifteen hours was in a way a good thing, because it forced him to take the time to make sure he had everything ready on his end. Since he’d been stocking his cache for so long, it wasn’t actually much a survey, but it was better to do that without feeling overly rushed.

There was one stop he did have to make before anything else, and that was to get a vacuum flask from the nearest industrial shop. The beat-up old thing wasn’t rated to protect from something like lava, but it’d still prevent ambient heat from getting at the portal focus. The focus itself was metal so it could stand more heat than he could, but mordite had such a low melting point that he didn’t want to take the slightest risk. He didn’t even care if the dewar got trashed, so long as it worked long enough. His portal focus falling apart mid-rescue would be a problem.

After he recalled to his cavern-cache, he changed into the civilian body armor and helmet he’d gotten, which felt overly cumbersome but it wasn’t like he was going to be running around. Nor did he expect it to block any serious offensive spells. He was more worried about shrapnel and debris and other incidental things, like what had hit him in France. Especially since he was going to be hanging out somewhere fairly dangerous even before the attack.

Callum’s ability to work through portals gave him a ridiculous flexibility that he’d only just started to explore, but he’d already figured out one application. Not too far south and east of his Mexico hide out was Pacaya, Guatemala, which was in a near-continuous state of eruption. There were lava rivers all over the place, which was precisely what he wanted.

Fortunately, a thermal-reflective blanket was one of those things included in the basic camping equipment he had stashed away, and even though it wouldn’t be all that effective, it was better than nothing. That combined with the breathing apparatus he’d already gotten was enough that he felt safe getting near an active lava flow, especially with the six hundred yard buffer.

Once again he used the chair to get around. It was annoying how dependent he was on GPS to figure out his location, but it wasn’t like he could see what was going by whenever he was in mid-blur. By this time he’d picked up an old-school GPS hiking handheld, and while he wasn’t completely sure he trusted it, at least it wasn’t a smartphone.

While flying chair trips were still fairly draining on the vis front, the new model didn’t need carrying capacity so it was just a little bit smaller, and every bit helped. So did the excess mana in the area, which helped him recover between jaunts. For some reason, the mana generated by the sixth portal world didn’t seem to drop off as rapidly to the south as to the north, so he didn’t even need to tap his gut-portal for the boost. It was only maybe four hundred miles, so it really didn’t take him long at all, even though he was being far more conservative than the panic-driven stunt that had seen him to Mallorca.

Nighttime made it easier to navigate, actually, since the lava flows stood out starkly against the dark ground around the volcano. It was a sort-of tourist area and so not supposed to be terribly dangerous, but even so he had his breath mask out as he aimed himself down toward a dark patch near a particularly large flow. There were still hours to go until he expected a message, so he was going to have to camp out for a bit while he waited.

The value of a portal focus was made very clear with how he could leave it open without spending any focus or vis on it. That meant he could just keep his gut portal active and occasionally open a small portal to the area above his cave-cache. That was where he left his phone, since he could get a cell signal from the tower in the nearby town. It wasn’t a great signal, and it wasn’t a great phone, but it worked and that was enough for him.

It turned out that he didn’t actually need the thermal-reflective blankets if he didn’t try to walk right up to the lava itself, so he stayed on the rocky, ashy ground on the next slope over. He knew he had to nap before it was showtime, even if it was just a couple hours, but he was too keyed up to manage it right away. Instead he pulled up the layout that Chester had given him and looked it over for the fourth or fifth time.

The black site was surprisingly large and small at the same time. It sprawled out over a big compound with training and housing and storage and all the things a completely independent operation would need. Teleporters should have meant that a lot of that wasn’t necessary, but he appreciated that the base was set up so it could be run independently if necessary. It made the place a lot different from most of GAR’s centralized infrastructure, which made him think that whoever ran it was independent of the stuff he’d seen so far.

The actual holding cells were just in a small central area, underground, which was all he was worried about. There weren’t many of them, so it wasn’t like it’d be difficult to find Lucy, but at the same time it meant he wasn’t likely to be able to cause a distraction by letting a bunch of prisoners loose. An isolated cell was better for him anyway because if she was surrounded by mages he had no idea how he’d deal with that without massive collateral damage.

Hopefully they didn’t realize that themselves.

Even with all the preparation, with his boulders and water grenades and the lava flow, he actually didn’t want to fight anyone. In fact, real combat was very much a losing proposition for him, since he didn’t have training or proper magical defenses. The best thing would be if he could portal in, grab Lucy, and bail before anyone was the wiser. That didn’t seem likely though, since they surely knew at least some of what he could do.

They’d be ready for him. He just had to make sure they weren’t as ready as they thought.

***

“Are you sure he’s even coming?” Harold Harper, head of House Harper, glanced up from the document he was signing and gave Ray Danforth a frown. “You said he hung up on you.”

“Fairly sure.” It was not a secret that they’d put Lucy in the BSE facility. In fact, they were making it as public as possible, because they needed Wells to know where she was. There was no use baiting a trap that was hidden away from the prey.

Ray had actually been surprised by how Wells had cut off the communication. Usually people listened and responded, even when it might not be in their best interests to do so. But Wells hadn’t even hesitated, which made it difficult to know if he had enough information to actually come after the Harper dud. Lucile was the only connection they’d found inside GAR, and she was even the go-between for Wells and Alpha Chester.

So far, there hadn’t been a hint of Wells contacting the shifters, though it wasn’t like they could stop every subordinate that came to Chester’s house for business. Not that they were making any secret of their scrutiny, and Duvall had even sent someone to demand the teleportation pads that Wells had supplied them. She had hit the roof when she’d found out, but she was far too busy to go deal with that sort of thing herself. Or at least so she claimed; Ray suspected the reason might be she just didn’t like dealing with shifters.

Still, Wells had been shown to be resourceful and the more people who knew her location, the more likely it was to get back to him. Considering the effort he’d taken just to retrieve a pair of mundanes from custody, it didn’t seem likely he’d leave Lucile Harper to languish. It still wasn’t a sure thing, but they were acting as if it were. They had to.

“Here,” Harold said, pushing the document across the table. Ray glanced at it before putting it in the folder. Officially removing Lucile from the Harper family was probably unnecessary; their loyalty wasn’t in question as a cadet branch of House Janry, and it wasn’t like they needed more leverage on Lucile. But Harold had insisted when Ray had come to spread the news.

“Thank you for your cooperation.” The words were rote, and Harold barely glanced his way as Ray stood up to leave. He collected Felicia on the way out, who was half-glad and half-sad to be visiting the Janry-Harper estate on Faerie. She hadn’t told him the full story of how she’d ended up on Earth and unaffiliated with any of the fae enclaves, but on the rare times they wound up in the portal world she was visibly uncomfortable.

“Should just hold her in Faerie,” Felicia said quietly, even though she clearly didn’t like the idea. “It doesn’t matter how sneaky he is if the land itself is looking for him.”

“What fae king would we owe if we did that?” The question was more rhetorical than anything, just like Felicia’s comment. Felicia nodded in acknowledgement.

“My family would love to offer, and you’d be a fool to agree,” she said. Her voice was more resonant than usual, the siren heritage coming to the fore along with a brogue that she’d worked hard to hide.

“You okay?” Danforth asked, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m worried,” she said, the sky darkening with her words as just the tone of voice called in cloud cover. A good reminder of how the human portion of Faerie was still Faerie, and fae magic held sway. “They’re already telling stories about the Ghost. Maybe that doesn’t mean much if he’s a mage, but there are fae undercurrents in motion. I’m not sure what happens if we can’t catch him.”

Danforth glanced around. The vestibule of House Janry was not exactly private, but there also wasn’t anyone about at this time of night, so he pulled her closer. Underneath the glamour he could feel the corded muscle of her real form shift as she leaned into him for a moment.

“Time to get back to work,” she said soon enough, thumping her head against his shoulder, then pulled away and straightened her uniform before turning back to the teleporters. Danforth followed, giving her a little bit of space. She wasn’t overly touchy in general, especially not on the clock, which told him how worried she really was.

When they returned to the BSE facility, it was in the process of being locked down tight. There were guards around the perimeter, in case Wells came overland with his flying artifact, and around the teleporters, if he could use the GAR transportation system. Lucile’s cell was protected not by wards, which hadn’t been very effective in the past, but by a high-powered mana jammer to keep any kind of vis construct from manifesting.

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The two of them passed through a new set of magical scanners and a hastily-installed airport scanner to hopefully spot any implants that Wells or any of his group might have. It was annoying to have to pass his focus folio through the checkpoint, but that particular security measure was only temporary. Felicia had her token, and some bits of jewelry that she was equally reluctant to give up. One of them was the necklace he’d given her, but others were of purely fae origin and she clearly hated giving them up.

The pair passed deeper into the facility, through the hallway of the central building, past the interrogation rooms, and outside. The holding cells were in a completely separate building, forcing people to cross the open courtyard inside the walls of the BSE base. The grass there was the oddly springy, wiry stuff of the Deep Wilds, and outside the walls the canopies of the monstrous trees broke the horizon like distant mountains.

Unlike the Night Lands, where there was only ever the moon, or Faerie, where the time of day depended on location and the general mood of the inhabitants, the Deep Wilds had an actual light cycle, though twilight and dawn lasted a lot longer than they should. The oversized sun beat down overhead, through the dome that protected the courtyard from the similarly oversized wildlife that wheeled and circled in the too-blue sky.

Ray was already starting to sweat just in the short walk between buildings, and resorted to conjuring up a breeze to keep Felicia and himself comfortable. It didn’t help that they were dressed more for Earth weather than the portal worlds, since they generally didn’t spend too much time in any of them. Cooling enchantments brought the air to a more comfortable temperature as they stepped back indoors, in the vestibule of the jailhouse.

“Ah, good.” Jahn looked up as they entered, the agent overseeing operations by sheer inertia, though the BSE employees knew what they were about. “You can’t by chance lay a geas, can you?”

Felicia shook her head. Jahn heaved a sigh.

“Guess I’ll have to ask King Ravaeb. He’s about the only one we can use who’s not involved, one way or another.”

“Hopefully not,” Ray replied. Ravaeb had a brutal streak, which could make an already nasty business even worse. But it wasn’t his business, so he just moved on and held out the folder. “For what it’s worth, House Harper severed all ties with Lucile when I filled them in.”

“That’s not too surprising,” Jahn said, taking the folder and put it on the desk behind him without looking at it. “Nobody likes a traitor.”

“Out of curiosity, what is the geas for?” Ray was only passingly familiar with what exactly constituted a geas rather than a compulsion, despite having a fae partner. It was more of a fae royalty thing, and while he suspected Felicia was closely related, she definitely wasn’t in that power bracket.

“It’s because despite all this,” Jahn said, waving his hand around to indicate the activity, “there’s the possibility we won’t catch anyone. So it’s insurance. If we can get Lucile to report on whatever base they’re operating from, we can come in full force.”

“Ah.” Ray couldn’t argue with that. Everything they’d seen indicated a group whose strength was stealth rather than raw power. Wells hadn’t been particularly impressive back when they’d first accosted him in Kennecut, and he hadn’t even tried fighting back in the Ardennes. If they could locate his home base, they could attack him on their terms. “You think he’d slip past the Grand Magus? Or Archmage Hargrave?”