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  “We’re rather conspicuous here, aren’t we?” said Robert, looking around.

  “Yeah,” I said, “and we’ve got another problem.”

  Robert snorted. “Just one?”

  I nodded. “Vastarion can use his magic to track Russell.”

  They all looked at him.

  “I can block the effect somewhat,” said Vander, “but if we stay in the same location for more than three or four hours, Vastarion is going to find us.”

  Alexandra grimaced. “What are we going to do?”

  “Well,” I said, “we’re going to kill Lorenz. Vastarion, too. Lorenz promised everyone in the clinic to Vastarion as payment for his help. I’m afraid we’re all in this together.”

  I expected someone to object. I saw that Rusk and Jill had gotten out of the van, and I expected Rusk to refuse on behalf of his daughter. But no one did. Maybe that shouldn’t have been surprising. Robert was a veteran man-at-arms. Alexandra had escaped the Shadowlands. Rusk had lost his wife to the Archons and nearly lost his daughter.

  It was like Vander had said. They knew they couldn’t run from this fight.

  “Well,” said Robert. “If we’re going to have to kick some Rebel ass, let’s get on with it.”

  “Robert, language in front of Felix,” said Alexandra, though she smiled and touched his arm as she did.

  “You should hear me when I’m on duty,” said Robert. “Besides, he’s not even one yet.”

  “Bet you’ll be embarrassed if Felix’s first word is ‘ass’,” I said. The others laughed. Alexandra looked alarmed.

  “Let’s start,” said Murdo, “by finding out what Lorenz left here.”

  “Right,” I said. I glanced back at my van and winced. The fender had collected some more dents, and the hood had been warped, to say nothing of the cracks in the windshield. The van had collected so much damage that it was going to start drawing attention from Homeland Security patrollers when I tried to take it on the freeway. If we lived through this, I had to get the poor van fixed.

  But we had to live through this first.

  I walked up to the garage with the others. The garage was huge, bigger than my apartment, large enough for two and a half cars. Both the doors were locked, but I used my telekinetic gauntlet spell to grasp the padlock and rip it open, and Murdo rolled up the left-hand garage door.

  Within the garage, we saw…

  “Holy shit,” said Robert.

  Alexandra did not bother to correct his language.

  Because the garage was entirely filled with an enormous quantity of guns and explosives.

  There were racks of AK-47 rifles and M-99 carbines that had probably been stolen from a Homeland Security office someplace. I saw the familiar black tubes of rocket launchers stacked against one of the walls, next to wooden crates that held ammunition for the firearms. Other crates held mines, grenades, rocket-propelled grenades, and dynamite.

  “That is a lot of guns,” said Russell.

  “Yeah,” I said, walking into the garage and looking around. I stopped by one of the crates labeled MINES, pried it open, and looked inside. Within the packing material lay a half-dozen flat black antipersonnel mines, the nasty kind that sprayed out a payload of steel ball bearings like a 360-degree shotgun blast.

  “Dear God,” said Alexandra, her arms wrapped tight around Felix as if trying to protect him from the weapons. “Do the Rebels really have enough men to use all these guns?”

  “Well,” I said, examining the stack of crates. “All those orcs aren’t going to buy their own AK-47s.”

  “In truth, orcish technology is not very sophisticated,” said Vander to Alexandra. “For that matter, they dislike projectile weapons in general and prefer to fight hand-to-hand whenever possible.”

  I listened to the conversation with half an ear. An idea had filled my head. The Rebels used mines like this for terrorist attacks, wiring cell phones to the detonators so they could trigger the explosions from a safe distance. Morelli and I had used the same trick both to distract the undead in Chicago and to cut power to the Royal Bank. And that meant…

  There!

  I picked up a cardboard box, set it on top of a crate, and ripped it open.

  “What’s that?” said Russell.

  “Cheap cell phones,” I said. The box was full of forty-eight cheap cell phones, the plastic blister packs adorned with the cheerful cartoon of a smiling anthropomorphic phone. “Burner phones. Useless in the Shadowlands, but here…”

  “They can use them to trigger bombs remotely,” said Murdo, voice grim. “We’ve seen it before.”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a step back, my mind racing. “Yeah. And we can use it against them.”

  “What do you mean?” said Murdo.

  I grinned at him. “I’ve got an idea. We know that Lorenz is going to follow us, right? As soon as he gets a fix on Russell’s position, he and Vastarion are going to come after us again. But with the stuff in here,” I waved a hand at the weapons, “we can set a trap for him.”

  “What kind of trap?” said Murdo.

  “An ambush,” I said. I patted the side of one of the crates, and Vander winced. He needn’t have worried. The mines were harmless until they were armed. “An explosive one.”

  “Then you’re saying we need to find a suitable battlefield and prepare it to our advantage,” said Robert.

  “Exactly,” I said. “We need to locate a place where we can set up an ambush for Lorenz. Once we’re there, we’ll have four or five hours to set up before he can find us and get ready to attack. We’ll need someplace isolated, someplace where people won’t get hurt if they stumble into the crossfire. But it will also need to be somewhere in the city. He doesn’t know that we know Vastarion can track Russell. If we run out into the countryside, he’ll realize what we’re doing.” I started to pace, thinking. “It has to be someplace where it won’t be obvious we’re setting a trap for him, but also somewhere that it would make sense for us to hide.”

  We thought it over.

  “Maybe a park?” said Alexandra at last.

  Murdo shook his head. “The weather’s too nice, Mrs. Ross. It’s the middle of June, and it won’t get dark until late. There will be people in the parks until nine or ten PM.”

  “What about the waterfront?” said Robert. “Lots of empty stretches of beach.”

  “But like Mr. Murdo said, it’s summer,” said Alexandra. “There will be a lot of boats out. Swimmers, too.”

  “Maybe someplace on the outskirts of the Milwaukee area,” said Vander. “There are a lot of patches of woods and fields out there.”

  “A forest might be perfect,” I said. “So long as there’s cell phone signal. We could lure Vastarion’s undead into the trap and blow them to hell.” I frowned. “But we could get encircled pretty easily if Lorenz realizes the danger.”

  “No bottlenecks in a forest, either,” said Murdo. “That’s the best way to fight creatures like the undead. Lure them into a bottleneck so only a few of them can come at you at once. For that matter, that’s also the most efficient way to make use of explosives.”

  “I have an idea,” said Jill.

  We all looked at her. She was leaning on her father’s arm, pale and wan. She really shouldn’t have been out of bed, but Lorenz had left us with no choice in the matter.

  “What is it, dear?” said Rusk.

  “What about the Ducal Mall?” said Jill.

  I blinked, opened my mouth, closed it. I had a lot of memories about the Ducal Mall. Russell and I had nearly been killed by the Archons and their orcish mercenaries there. Later that same day I had returned to take the Cruciform Eye from Sergei Rogomil, and I had wound up killing him and a bunch of other Rebels in the process.

  I regretted many things in my life, but I sure didn’t regret that.

  “That…might work,” I said. “But there will be a lot of people there.”

  “No, there won’t,” said Russell. “The entire mall is still closed for re
novations after the attack.”

  I frowned. “Really? After so long? It’s been decades. Shouldn’t they have finished by now?”

  “Decades?” said Russell, puzzled.

  “The Archon attack was last year,” said Murdo, frowning at me.

  Last year? Oh, right. From everyone else’s perspective, it had been last year. From my perspective, it had been nearly a hundred and sixty years past. I had to watch that.

  “The mall’s closed to the public,” said Jill. “There won’t be anyone there after 5 PM when the workers go home.”

  “You spent the last year in a coma,” I said. “How do you know that?”

  Jill blushed a little. Given how gaunt and wan she was, it made her look prettier. “Well…the Ducal Mall was my favorite mall, you know, before.” I nodded. “When I felt well enough to use my phone, I looked it up.” She looked embarrassed. “I lost so much weight while I was sick I’ll need to buy new clothes. I wanted to see if I had any coupons for clothes in my email. Then I looked up the mall to see if they were open.”

  “Very thrifty,” said Rusk. “I approve.” Given that he was going to be the one paying for her new wardrobe, that made sense.

  “The Ducal Mall is the best we could hope for,” said Murdo. “The main concourse is four stories tall. That gives us lots of places to hide. Even to act as snipers. We’ll have numerous avenues of retreat if this goes badly, and just as many places to hide Felix and Jill during the fighting.”

  “And bottlenecks,” I said, meeting his eye. “Don’t forget the bottlenecks.”

  “I wasn’t,” said Murdo with the ghost of a smile. “I think we can do this, Nadia. If we have four hours…it will be tight, yes. But we can do this. We can set up a trap for Lorenz, and we can kill him and Vastarion both.”

  “Vastarion’s an Elf,” said Robert. “Bullets won’t work on him.”

  “Magic will,” I said, “and I’ve got plenty of that.” I looked at the others. “Does anyone have any better ideas?”

  No one did. Alas.

  “All right,” I said. “Then let’s build ourselves a Rebel trap.”

  Chapter 10: It’s All My Fault

  We loaded up the back of my van with enough explosives and ammunition to blast one of the development’s mini-mansions to dust.

  I thought we had sufficient explosives and weaponry, but Murdo insisted on more, and we filled every inch of my van with guns and bombs, and as much as we could squeeze into his SUV as well.

  “If we get pulled over,” said Rusk, eyeing the cargo nervously, “we’re going to end up on a Punishment Day video.”

  I shook my head. “We’ll drive the speed limit. And if we get pulled over, well…” I didn’t want to kill any Homeland Security traffic patrollers. “I’ll just wipe their memories of the last half hour or so. They’ll wake up confused with a nasty headache, but they’ll be fine, and we’ll be long gone.”

  “You can do that?” said Rusk.

  I grinned my humorless grin at him. “I learned it the same way I learned everything else in my life. The hard way.”

  Rusk swallowed and nodded.

  With my van so full, most of the others had to squeeze into the SUV. Murdo took the front seat, and Alexandra the passenger seat, Felix in her arms. That broke all kinds of laws, but we didn’t have a baby seat handy. Vander, Robert, and Rusk squeezed into the back, and Jill was halfway onto her father’s lap. She didn’t look good, and I really hoped we could get her to a bed or at least a cot or something soon.

  I took the driver’s seat of my van, and Russell got into the passenger’s side.

  “You want me to drive?” said Russell.

  “Nah,” I said, easing the van down the driveway to the gravel road. Carrying a thousand pounds of explosives definitely messed up the vehicle’s handling. “The last time you drove my van you ran over someone.”

  “You told me to do it,” said Russell without missing a beat. “And he was already dead. It doesn’t count if he’s already dead.”

  “Tell that to my fender.”

  Russell laughed, and I turned the van around and headed down the gravel road for the main street. Murdo followed me in the SUV. I planned on driving exactly the speed limit until we got to the Ducal Mall. If we got pulled over, I could wipe the Homeland Security officers’ memory, yeah, but too many things could go wrong. Better to avoid official entanglements entirely.

  “You think we can win?” said Russell.

  I glanced at him. It wasn’t a plaintive question, like a child asking his mother for reassurance. Nor was it boastful. It simply sounded sober. The sort of question a grown man would ask.

  I felt a little pang. But I couldn’t expect Russell to remain a child forever, could I? The frostfever had forced him to grow up quickly. The attack of the Archons last year had also made him grow up.

  And my own actions, whether that was what I had intended or not.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do I think we have a good shot at winning? Yeah, I do. Especially if I can take out Vastarion right away. If he dies, all his undead just turn into corpses. But there’s no such thing as a sure thing in a fight. Anything can go wrong…”

  “Because once the bullets start flying,” said Russell in a quiet voice, “there’s no way to predict what will happen.”

  “Yeah,” I said, easing the overloaded van to a stop at a red light. I hoped the tires or the suspension didn’t give out. The last thing I wanted to do was to break down in the middle of rush hour traffic with a load of military-grade explosives. “Suppose you learned that the hard way.”

  He sighed. “Yeah.”

  “Seen the elephant,” I muttered, remembering what Murdo had said.

  “Like in the American Civil War,” said Russell. “But we have better guns and technology.”

  “How did you know about the Civil War?” I said. “Did they cover it in school?”

  “Nah,” said Russell. “I read about it in one of Malcolm Lock’s books.” He hesitated. “You…um, ever read any of his books?”

  “Just the one you made me read,” I said. “He writes novels about the Crusades.” Russell and James gobbled up those books. They were okay, I suppose. I thought the parallels between the medieval knight serving his lord to defend the Holy Land from the Saracen horde and the modern man-at-arms serving the High Queen to defend Earth from the Archons had been a little heavy-handed.

  “He writes books about the Civil War, too,” said Russell. “Good books.” He paused. “You know, I met him once.”

  “Really,” I said. “Book signing or something?”

  “He came to Sergeant Bob’s shooting range,” said Russell. “I think you’d like him. He’d probably ask you out.”

  “For God’s sake!” I said, but I laughed. “I’m not girlfriend material for a lot of reasons. And even if I was, I wouldn’t want to date some old history professor.”

  Russell grinned. “He was actually really buff.” His smile faded. “And…you’re too busy for that kind of thing, I know. Because of me.”

  “Don’t start,” I said, leveling a finger at him as the light changed. “I made my choice, and that’s that. Besides, Riordan was a pretty great boyfriend, and I screwed it up. That’s another choice I made, and I have to live with it.”

  Russell considered this for half a block. “Maybe you should give him a call. I think he’d be glad to hear from you.”

  “No,” I said. “I…well, I wasn't thinking clearly when I broke up with him. I…said some pretty cruel things to him. I don’t think he would forgive them.”

  “He might surprise you,” said Russell.

  “I don’t want to talk about Riordan,” I said, my voice sharper than I would have liked.

  “Okay,” said Russell. He took a deep breath. “But…I think there is something I should tell you before it’s too late. It’s not about Riordan.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Happy birthday,” said Russell.

  “Birth
day?” I said, baffled.

  Then the math clicked in my head. Today was June 16th. Tomorrow was June 17th, which was my birthday. That should have been my twenty-second birthday. Except it was actually my one hundred and eightieth birthday, thanks to Arvalaeon and the Eternity Crucible. Inside the Crucible, there hadn’t been calendars, and the only way to mark the passage of the days had been to look at that damned metal clock. Birthday after birthday had passed without my knowledge.

  In fact, I had totally forgotten I even had a birthday. Or that Russell used to buy me presents for it. Or that the Marneys used to make me dinner. Or that I had spent my last birthday before the Crucible with Riordan, and he had taken me out, and…

  The road was getting blurry. I growled and wiped at my eyes.

  “I…didn’t get you a present,” said Russell, watching me. I don’t think he had expected me to start crying. “Sorry.”

  “No, no, it’s okay,” I said. I took a deep breath, forcing myself to settle back down. “It’s just…no one’s wished me a happy birthday for a really, really long time.”

  “I did,” said Russell. “Last year.”

  “Yeah,” I whispered.

  “Um,” said Russell. “Just now, when we were talking, you thought that the battle at the Ducal Mall had happened decades ago. And…the day you disappeared, the day you went out to get steak sauce. When you came back the next day, you said you hadn’t seen me in a really long time.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to take my eyes off the road.

  “Nadia,” said Russell.

  “What?” I whispered.

  “Do…you want to tell me what happened to you?” said Russell.

  All kinds of protests rose up in my mind. If I told Russell, it might put him in danger from Arvalaeon and the Inquisition. Or that talking about it now might be a distraction from the danger of Lorenz and Vastarion.

  But I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to tell someone.

  I was so, so tired of carrying it alone in my mind.

  “Okay.” I swallowed and took a deep breath. “Okay. The day I went out to get steak sauce…I got caught.”