As Kyle and the two cars escorting his pulled into the supermarket parking lot at Western and North, an Eagle Security helicopter was dropping into the area that had been cordoned off by a phalanx of police and security vehicles. Enough Truman guards were mixed in with the Eagle troopers that Kyle's motorcade was waved directly into the center of the area, alongside a huge armored police command van.
Kyle jumped out even before the vehicle had stopped, protecting his eyes against the bits of flying debris kicked up by the landing helicopter. Beyond it, Eagle officers were attempting to clear away the small crowd of gawkers that had begun to gather. Kyle wondered if any of them were secretly from Knight Errant.
The side door of the command van slid open sideways, and Hanna Uljaken waved from inside. Kyle hurried over and climbed into the red-lit interior.
Cramped together within were a small technical staff and four Eagle officers. One bore the clear insignia and simple uniform of a chief, but Kyle's untrained eyes could not decipher the ranks of the other three, who were decked out in dark, close-fitting body armor and associated weaponry and gear.
The chief stepped forward and extended his hand. "Mr. Teller, I'm Chief Lekas of Eagle Special Operations." He gestured at the other three. "This is Commander Joshua Malley, leader of the Special Ops team," he said, working his way from left to right, "and Sergeants Peter Woodhouse and Kennera Walsh, also of Special Ops." Each nodded in turn.
Kyle shook all of their hands. 'Thank you for responding so quickly."
"It's quite a tale your Ms. Uljaken has been telling us," Malley said. "You don't mind if we ask a few clarifying questions, do you?"
Kyle shook his head. "No, not at all, but I'm concerned about time. They may have already moved on."
Malley turned to the other two men. "Go ahead," he said.
Walsh spoke first. "We haven't had time to verify any of the story. Can you tell us your qualifications to assess the situation?" Walsh gestured vaguely to Hanna Uljaken. "Ms. Uljaken has told us some of your background, but we'd like to know more."
Kyle frowned slightly, wondering whether they were going to start playing "who's the boss" games with him. Aloud, he said, "Of course. I have a degree in comparative metaphysics from Columbia-Manhattan with a minor in behavioral psychology. My practical experience includes seven years as a field agent and special investigator with the UCAS Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Paranormal Affairs. If you're so stuck on my cred, I can give-"
Woodhouse held up his hand in a halt gesture. 'That won't be necessary," he said. "You're the one found Wilhemina Keene, aren't you?"
Kyle paused. "Yes." Keene had been a registered nurse and adept mage performing ritual sacrifices with newborn babies stolen from hospitals throughout New England. She killed twelve before the FBI finally caught up with her on the verge of murdering her thirteenth, the final element in whatever bizarre ritual she'd been performing. Her ultimate goal had never been determined. That was five years ago. "Maybe I should say I led the team."
"We saw the locked file last year as part of a special training program," Woodhouse said. "Can you tell me what her primary ritual instrument was?"
"Now what the frag does this have to do-"
Chief Lekas cut him off. "Mr. Teller, Truman Technologies is asking quite a bit from Eagle on this. And most of it has to be taken on faith, if you will. We'd like to confirm that you are who you say you are. If so, we're ready to roll. If not, well…" Lekas let his voice trail off. "The boys tell me that the Keene woman's actual methods were never disclosed to the public, but you, of course, would know."
Kyle sighed and glanced at Hanna.
She smiled weakly. "Please, don't spare any details on my account."
Kyle drew in a breath. "All right, you win. She used a surgical scalpel to drain some of her own blood and the child's into a tub of water. Just before the baby got too weak, she drowned him in it and then burned the body."
The four men looked at each other and nodded. Hanna had gone pale and seemed to be struggling to hang on to her composure.
"Happy now?" Kyle asked.
"Look," Walsh said, "you seem to be forgetting that-"
Kyle cut him off angrily. "No, you've forgotten that every second we stand here playing games might be the one by which we miss them."
The two junior officers looked like they wanted to continue the argument, but Commander Malley silenced them with a glare. "You're right, Mr. Teller," he said. "Sergeants Walsh and Woodhouse are the magicians on the team. Sometimes we all get a little territorial. Why don't you give us the tactical situation as you see it?"
Kyle nodded. "No offense taken," he said, though no one had offered an apology. "A force of unknown number, consisting of powerful spirits, has kidnapped the son of my client. From everything that I've seen and heard, these spirits resemble insects and they breed using human hosts. I've specifically seen one in the form of a cockroach."
Walsh blanched slightly, as did Malley, who said, "We've had the occasional unexplained contact with insect-like spirits before, but nothing we could categorize or build any information from. They seemed to be anomalies rather than something we needed to be concerned about."
"Aberrations," Kyle said, "Well, I'm afraid we might be dealing with entire nests or hives, or however they group themselves, including queen spirits and Coyote knows what else. There might even be more man one type of insect spirit present"
"So we're facing significant opposition?" asked Malley.
"You'd better believe it. And most normal tactics won't work against them because they're spirits. How experienced are your people in fighting spirits?"
Malley frowned. "Trained against them, but not experienced."
"The one I fought was pretty powerful, but if your people keep their heads, I think they'll manage."
"But we don't even know where they are," said Chief Lekas.
"I know where they are," said Kyle. "I just haven't found it yet."
"Ritual?" asked Walsh.
Kyle nodded, pointing north and west. "That way, not too far. Can your people take me up in a helicopter? I can find it faster that way than trying to reconnoiter on the ground."
"Makes sense," said Malley. "I'll head my team in that direction, and once you find the location, we can go straight there instead of blindly driving around."
"Excuse me, sir," said Woodhouse. "I've got a suggestion."
Malley raised an eyebrow. "Of course. Sergeant. Speak up."
"Mr. Teller could recon astrally. It would be a lot faster than the helicopter."
Kyle shook his head. "Thought of that, but I don't know Chicago well enough to recognize where I am by positions of roads and buildings." He turned to explain to Hanna. "You can't read signs from astral space, only sense emotions associated with the information on them. If they're anything, road signs are unemotional."
Hanna nodded, giving him a wan smile. She seemed lost, out of her element with tactical and mystical matters she barely understood. But he could see that she was taking it all in, absorbing it, and most likely learning from it.
"One of us will go with you," said Walsh.
Kyle paused to think. "That would work."
"If you stay in view, I shouldn't have any trouble following you," the sergeant said. "We can leave our bodies in the truck and then start north along Western."
Malley nodded. "Sounds good to me, if you agree, Mr. Teller."
"Yes. It'll speed things up."
The commander gestured to two observation chairs near the truck's telecommunications suite. As Kyle and Walsh settled into them, Malley jacked into the tactical system and began issuing orders.
"If you need me while I'm out, slap me as hard as you can," Kyle told Hanna. "I…" she said, obviously surprised. "If you say so."
"If you hit me hard enough, it'll jerk my spirit back into I my body. Otherwise, there's no way to get in touch with me."
"I should warn you, I'm pretty strong," Hanna said.
Kyle smiled. "Great." He looked at Walsh, but the mage had already lapsed into unconsciousness, his astral form probably floating free. "Gotta go," said Kyle, and he leaned back, relaxing his body, shifting his focus, and finally slipped free of his body as the tone and texture of the command van shifted.
Walsh was waiting there, standing next to his body, surrounded by a nimbus of blue and gold energy. Otherwise, except for Woodhouse and the mundane auras of the others present, the command van interior was cold and sterile, and reeked faintly of hard emotions like anger and fear.
"Lead on, Mr. Teller," Walsh said. "Though you might want to dampen yourself somewhat."
Kyle nodded, realizing that his foci were radiating considerable magical energy, energy that would serve as a flare to anyone or anything looking for them. With a quick thought, he subsumed the radiating power into his own aura, masking the overflow. It was uncomfortable, but bearable. Walsh nodded approval.
Kyle turned toward what he knew to be the direction in which Mitch Truman's body had been just over an hour ago.
He slipped through the walls of the command van, Walsh drifting after him, and then shot off, as quickly as he could, toward the lake.
Walsh followed on his tail along the dim, life-accented, careening track of North Avenue and then finally out over the bright lake itself. "I thought you said the site was to the northwest," the sergeant said, drawing abreast of Kyle's floating astral form.
"It is. I'm concerned about pursuit or surveillance."
The two hung there for several heartbeats, but saw no sign of any other astral presences.
Kyle signaled, and they dropped down to the surface of the lake and skirted its edge, skimming over the various sun-bathers, bike-riders, strutters, dog-walkers, and other denizens of Chicago out to enjoy the afternoon sun. As the coastline changed at where Kyle believed Fullerton to be, he soared inland, Walsh close behind.
The effects of the earlier ritual pulled at Kyle, guiding him ever farther north and west. He pushed on, passing across the breadth of Chicago's northside in a few blinks of an eye. Then, sensing he was near, he slowed and dropped closer to the ground. Walsh drew up alongside him.
"Any idea where we are?" Kyle asked him. "I sure as drek don't."
Walsh nodded. "Near Harlem and Irving Park."
"I'm going to go low and coast. I don't want to suddenly be on top of this place."
Kyle drifted down to just above the level of the cars passing on the major road beneath them. He tried to judge the distance carefully to keep from being brushed aside or sent spinning by the physical mass of the people in those cars. At the approach to a major intersection, he could sense a surge of emotion as the light changed and a slight gridlock developed. When Kyle finally came down to the ground, he chose to land in a trash barrel so no one would bump into him. Walsh dropped down a short distance behind him, pressed half into a storefront. They both hoped the auras of the mundanes passing by would conceal them from anything that happened to look their way.
"We there?" asked Walsh.
"Yes," said Kyle, pointing north along the intersecting street. "It's right up there, third one in." There was little that could be seen, just a dim storefront. Nothing magical. Nothing extraordinary.
"Looks normal," said Walsh. 'They could be gone already."
"Let's hope not."
"Why don't you head back and tell them where," Walsh said. "I'll stand guard here."
"All right," Kyle said, and lifted off to the south, traveling in that direction for a while, then turning west to find the intersection with Western, where the police convoy would be. From there he turned south again, following what he believed to be Western.
Then, seconds later, he passed over an interstate highway, which he was certain was Interstate 90/94 headed in toward the Noose. But that, he thought, was too far south. Kyle paused and hung in the air trying to remember if Western crossed 90/94 north or south of North Avenue. He continued on, watching for the presence of the large command vans and the helicopter that would be flying cover.
He paused again when he came to another expressway, one he knew to be Interstate 290 heading directly east into the city from the western suburbs. That told him he'd gone too far south. Not for the first time in his life, Kyle cursed the fact that there was no simple way to follow the connection with his body back to it.
Kyle shot east, to the lake, arriving there in a fraction of a second. He then followed the shoreline north, looking for the lakeshore at North Avenue, where he and Walsh had passed over it. He continued north, finally stopping at the break in the shoreline which he knew to be Fullerton. He was now too far north.
Kyle cursed again, knowing that his stupidity was costing him valuable time that he couldn't afford to waste, when he felt a shock, a short, quick pain in his left arm. His perception blurred, and he felt himself pulled back to his body by the force of what he took to be Hanna Uljaken’s blow. Then he felt the sensation again, harder across his neck, and he slammed into his body and a wave of pain.
His physical senses returned and he was on the floor, covered in something warm. A man yelled. "Grab him! Grab him!"
Kyle rolled over, pushing against a booted leg near him, just as another spray of blood exploded from Sergeant Walsh's neck. Still in the chair, pinned there by another Eagle officer, Walsh's body thrashed and the side of his head darkened as blood vessels ruptured and bone shattered. Still on the floor, Kyle cast a web of protective magical energies around Walsh. He could do nothing to stop what he took to be a vicious assault on the mage's astral form, but he was suddenly afraid that any magicians present at the other end could use the connection between Walsh's spirit body and physical form to "ground" a spell directly into the command van. The best he could hope for was to disrupt those energies if they leaped through.
Walsh's body jerked again, and his bloodied eyes flew open as he screamed and pitched forward even against the strength of the two officers holding him. He fell across Kyle's legs and onto the floor. Kyle immediately dropped the protective energies and placed his hand on the man's neck in an effort to staunch the arterial flow.
The thrashing subsided as Walsh's resistance collapsed and his body slipped rapidly into shock. His eyes glazed and his breath faltered.
"Harlem, north of Irving!" Kyle screamed, and then focused his magical talents on me dying mage. He quickly synchronized their two auras and began channeling living energy directly into Walsh's being. Kyle felt the other mage's spirit faltering when it needed to be strong, at least strong enough, if he was going to be able to continue healing him.
Walsh's spirit flickered, slipping from Kyle's control. There, just as Kyle's essence meshed with his, Kenneth Walsh died, his True Self dissolving into chaos, back into the dance of energy from which it came.
Kyle leaned back, releasing his grip and allowing the last spurts of blood from the mans sputtering heart to arc across the room. He was covered in Walsh's blood, as Malley and the other trooper who'd tried to restrain his thrashings. Beyond them and equally as stunned, Hanna Uljaken stood ashen, except for a spray of Crimson across her face and blouse. Kyle collapsed back against the cold wall of the van.
“Harlem, north of Irving," he said again. "That's where they are…