Chapter 9 – Dividends

“Man, I’m glad I’m not doing the stakeout,” Lucy remarked, holding out her hands to catch the foam ball Alex was aiming their way, then had to lunge when it went wide. “Oof! Good throw, sweetie.”

“It’s not exactly exciting,” Callum admitted, waiting for his turn in the game of catch. All he could do was pay attention through the anchor sitting in Felicia’s pocket, so there was no point in holing up inside. Playing out on the front lawn seemed like a great way to pass the time. “Even if it was my idea. Go long, kiddo!”

“They probably would have done the same thing without you,” Lucy shrugged. “It’s just that The Ghost makes it more likely to work.”

“If I can keep up,” Callum said, scooping up the ball and then throwing it back to Alex. “That’s the one thing I’m worried about.” He well knew that supernatural speed was just too fast, and when they moved flat out he couldn’t react in time. But they couldn’t use that speed to the full inside buildings or on city blocks, so with teleports he might prove a match. Just obliterating the vamp with an alpha strike would be preferable, and he had the antimaterial rifle loaded exactly for that reason, but it would be unwise to rely on it.

“You’ll do fine,” Lucy said. “Hard to defend against a bad penny, you know?”

“Yeah,” Callum said, and missed catching the ball. He teleported it back to his hand, somewhat amused by being able to cheat that way, and threw it back to Alex.

While he was enjoying himself, he was pretty sure that Felicia and Ray were not. It seemed like a lot of tedious work, interviewing person after person, writing things down, and just generally spending enormous amounts of time on minutiae. He had to credit that they were genuinely digging into the fae influence, and not just making noises.

“Contact!” The scry-comm tapped into Felicia’s group suddenly blared, and Callum almost jumped. Acting as Felicia’s guard was a dangerous thing, considering how easily the vampire had broken both mage and fae defenses, but nobody would believe she had no protection. Besides, Taisen had his own grudge against the person who had nearly shattered the secrecy of the supernatural. Who still might, since the fallout from the vampire killings hadn’t exactly gone away.

Callum held up a hand to show Lucy and Alex something was happening – earning a foam ball to the gut – and focused on what he could sense through the anchor, reaching for the remote on the table. He didn’t think he’d have a chance to use the rifle right away, especially not in a populated area, but there was no telling how fast things would move. Ray and Felicia were actually two rooms away from where their doppelgangers were conducting interviews, being impersonated by two of Felicia’s retainers.

He didn’t like that those two were probably going to die, and felt personally responsible for it. They were protected as best could be done and they were volunteers, and if they were fae Secret Service it was their job to take that risk. But he’d suggested the idea and if anything happened it’d be on him, even though he couldn’t think of a better way to deal with the kind of threat the vampire posed. He was still agonizing over it as he looked for the intruder.

A moment after he began searching a blur crashed straight through the interior walls of the building, sending brick and drywall flying everywhere. The vampire just smashed straight through like a cannonball, barely slowed by the architecture. He teleported himself down the war room, since he didn’t want to fight while out on the front lawn with his child, and spoke into the scry-comm.

“On it,” he told them tersely as the vampire exploded into the room with the decoys, and Callum tapped into his vis crystals to make anti-mana portals. He had to be at least a little careful about it; anti-mana would go straight through walls and he didn’t want to hit any of the other mages or fae with it. Normal people, thankfully, wouldn’t be affected at all.

He pulled his cloak to him and donned it as he opened a pair of portals once again, in the rooms on the floor above. He aimed them to intersect in the middle of the room where the vampire and decoys were, but kept ahold as best he could to sweep them and saturate the room. It’d been maybe half a second, but before the anti-mana could reach the room it looked like one of the decoy fae had been torn in half, the other smashed against a wall.

Callum had seen fae survive that kind of thing before, but then the anti-mana splashed over both the fae and the form of the vampire as it paused for a fraction of a second. Without magic, being cut in half was probably lethal, and he winced but he couldn’t redirect the massive columns gushing from the portals. Just swiveling them rendered them unstable, and they started to collapse moments later.

The vampire emerged from the blank, mana-less area at speed, back through the hole he’d punched in the walls on his way in. But it wasn’t as fast or with as much power as before — the anti-mana hadn’t instantly dropped him, like the vampires that had assaulted his house, but it had clearly taken a toll.

“Pursuing,” he said over the scry-comm and teleported the anchor after the vamp. Despite being able to move a thousand yards in a second he could only barely keep up as the target blazed out onto the city streets. There was clearly more magic than just body augmentation as the vamp could take corners without digging massive furrows in the asphalt, somehow redirecting the momentum of its incredible speed.

It was less careful about the people in its way, and more than one bystander was sent flying as they were clipped by a speeding vampire. Callum caught them as he went, using a teleport to reposition them and absolutely cheating by removing their momentum in the process. It was only three or four people, since the cold rain kept most people off the streets, but it did come close to making him lose track of the vamp.

Callum couldn’t tell whether that was purposeful or it just didn’t care that it was flinging people into traffic. On one hand it created a trail, but on the other it could have easily forced anyone else to slow down or stop to deal with the chaos. It clearly wasn’t stupid, and whether or not it realized it’d been had when it came to Felicia and Ray, it was moving faster than even Taisen’s mages could manage. It also was taking a complicated route through the city, crossing roads at a single bound and going down alleyways or crossing rooftops.

For some reason Callum had thought that the vampire would slow down when it got a few miles away, but it did not. If anything, once it reached the metro line it sped up, no longer having to worry about running into things or people. He had to stretch to his utmost to keep up, chain-teleporting along after the thing, and he didn’t really register where they were until the vamp left the tunnels.

They were headed for downtown Washington, DC, Capitol Hill and the National Mall. The only reason he even realized it was because they passed near enough to the Smithsonian for him to recognize a building. Part of him was wondering whether the vamp was intending to kill the president or part of congress, though he had no idea whether anyone was even there. Not that he knew why the vampire would bother, save for general disruption — something that the vampires clearly were aiming for.

Fortunately, the vamp veered off toward the Mall, beelining for the Washington Monument. Callum knew exactly where the vampire was going when a tangle of fae magic came into his perceptions, covering part of the reflecting pool on the monument side. The vampire stopped for a moment, right on the edge of the pool, but before Callum could line up a shot the vamp dived into the pool.

The fae magic unfolded, and Callum hastily shoved a thread of vis through to follow in the vampire’s wake. It wasn’t a portal, but it still folded space in some way so he had to follow close so he wouldn’t be left behind. The moment he teleported into the place the fae passage led he winced, the space inside so displaced and distorted that it grated on his nerves. It seemed like it was a piece of Faerie, but not like any of the places he’d seen before.

As disconcerting as it was, he didn’t need to unravel its mysteries immediately. Despite the weirdness inherent to the place, it wasn’t so contorted that he couldn’t get a shot. The vampire had finally slowed down, clearly thinking it was safe.

Callum was tempted to bring in anti-mana once again, but he didn’t know what it would do to such a seriously distorted space. It might end up unraveling and putting the vampire in some random corner of Earth, alive and intact and ready to cause mischief. So instead Callum stuck to the tried and true method of using a big gun.

He snapped open a portal and toggled the remote, firing the bane-loaded antimaterial rifle. Whatever protections the vampire had against mordite had probably been stripped away by the anti-mana, but if not there wasn’t much Callum could do about it. Though without anywhere to hide, he could just hammer the vamp with brute force.

The first shot sent it stumbling, blowing a hole through its midsection. But it didn’t drop immediately, and it darted forward even as the rifle cycled, and Callum’s second shot missed. He cursed under his breath, since even if the vampire couldn’t dodge bullets, hitting something that was zigging and zagging was difficult even with Callum’s advantages.

He waited for a few moments as the vampire zoomed forward, making its way through the bizarre interstitial space, teleporting the anchor up ahead between what was probably a tree and what was probably a bush, but the intense magic flux made it hard to know for certain. The vampire’s head was bobbing around, but after a second to line up a shot Callum put a second hole through its torso.

No matter how much vis the vampire had, punching bane material wounds through the thing’s chest had to slow it down. It was a shame that he hadn’t killed it instantly, but by sticking itself in this odd place, Callum didn’t even need to worry about his backstop. Sure enough, a few seconds later it had slowed down to almost human speed, but at the same time it jumped through another fold in space — one leading to a familiar destination.

He hadn’t even noticed it thanks to how strange the entire surroundings were, but he wasn’t about to let the vampire go. Given the slightest chance, Callum knew that such an enemy would come back and wreak as much havoc as possible. As powerful as the creature was, that would be a lot of havoc. He shifted through and teleported the anchor once again, into the Night Lands.

It was the missing castle, and Callum knew that there were negative healing traps about so even before he took another shot he tapped the vis crystals and opened up another anti-mana portal before shoving it through into the Night Lands. The stuff billowed out, snapping all the wards and whatever they were connected to with contemptuous ease, and not coincidentally aimed right at the vampire.

Callum had no idea what anti-mana looked like to anyone else. Neither he nor Lucy could see it, and from a pure visual inspection the other side was just the same as a normal portal worlds; some random liminal space with a vague relation to the local surroundings. But clearly others could sense it, since the vampire dived out of the way, but that just delayed the inevitable.

He hit it with another bane bullet, and then a last one to the actual brain as it dropped to its knees. Considering how much punishment it had taken, Callum wasn’t satisfied it was dead until he saw the vis start to fade from it, bleeding out into the surroundings. Only then did he reach for the scry-comm to report.

“Subject terminated,” he said, feeling like he was in a movie or something for using such language. “Tracked him back to the Night Lands,” he added, glancing at the clock. The entire pursuit had taken maybe ten or fifteen minutes, which wasn’t long but it was also one of the most involved actions he’d performed since figuring out anchors.

“Understood,” the response came back, and Callum blinked, then rubbed his eyes. They were dry and gritty from staring, despite only using his perceptions. He left the gun remote in the war room and returned the cloak to the earth-side storage, then teleported himself back outside where Lucy was helping Alex read from a storybook.

“All done?” She asked after she finished a paragraph.

“Pretty much, but could you get Felicia on the horn? I need to ask her a few things. Whatcha reading, kiddo?” He added, taking Lucy’s place with the book. They’d pretty much rejected the books that the magic community had. Along with subtle anti-mundane sentiment, they just weren’t as good as the books Callum’s parents had used.

Callum managed to finish the book before Lucy got through to Felicia. The delay wasn’t too surprising; the vampire had done a lot of damage and probably set off all kinds of alarms and gotten everyone detained. Even if they could use the scry-comm network instead of cellphones, everyone was likely busy dealing with the chaos.

“Yes?” Felicia asked.

“The vampire tried to escape through some strange fae passageway thing,” Callum said, getting right to the point. “It was located at the reflecting pool in the National Mall, on the Washington Monument side. There’s another exit at the castle in the Night Lands, though where in the Night Lands I couldn’t tell you. Figured I’d check with you before I tried closing them.”

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“I see,” Felicia said after a moment. “Yes, thank you. I can take care of the passageway on this end, but I would be obliged if you removed the Night Lands end of it.” He noticed she didn’t bother asking how he would close it, or even question that he could.

“Roger that.” He wasn’t incurious about what exactly the vampire had used, but he didn’t want to prompt any fae secrets over the phone. They’d probably be meeting face to face at some point anyway, simply because they were working together. He did find it amusing that he actually was meeting people in person, after so long keeping everyone at the other end of a portal. “We’ll touch base later.”

Destroying the fae passage was easy enough. While he couldn’t get through it with just his own talents, there was still a magical and material framework that held it in place in the castle. A quick anti-mana portal destroyed the magical part, and he simply teleported the framework away to storage. It seemed to be nothing more than a large mirror, and without magic it probably wasn’t anything else. But he was sure Felicia would want to see it regardless, in case the source could be tracked.

“H’okay, all done,” he told Lucy. “Free for the rest of the day, barring catastrophes.”

“Don’t tempt fate!” Lucy said. “I’ll see about going over to Chester’s this afternoon. I know Alex is missing some of his friends.”

“Gonna see Jason?” Alex piped up.

“Yeah, we can go see Jason,” said Callum, teleporting the foam ball to himself and tossing it from hand to hand. “Should be nice and relaxed.”

He took over while Lucy went to call up Chester, just to make sure it was okay to visit. The portal anchors meant they were functionally neighbors, and heading over didn’t take more than a thought, but it was rude to intrude without notice. Unfortunately, as it turned out, it wasn’t just a friendly visit.

“I do have some business to discuss,” Chester said, a few hours later, after they’d settled in.

“Lucy did say I shouldn’t tempt fate,” Callum sighed. “What’s going on?”

“We’ve been managing to keep the feds off our backs for now, thanks to your work,” Chester told him. “Unfortunately, someone leaked a list of all my people and they’re all being targeted now. Plus we’ve all had our social media accounts banned off a bunch of platforms for no reason. You know, standard harassment tactics.”

“Ugh.” Callum scowled. The power of government bureaucracy was essentially unlimited and lacked any real oversight, so the amount of mischief someone could cause with it was also unlimited. In a lot of ways it wasn’t any better than the supernatural bureaucracy, but he wasn’t prepared to start fighting that war. At least when it came to supernaturals there was a clear line. “I take it you need more IT support?”