Chapter 2

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The unsuccessfully larcenous magician’s transportation was obvious to Spector as he left Harry’s workshop - it was blocking his own car in the driveway. He clicked buttons on the looted key fob and lights flashed and a horn briefly honked. Spector conjured a low enough force spirit that even if he totally failed the summoning backlash commonly referred to as drain by most magic users, his trauma damper, a bioware system he’d had surgically implanted, would let him avoid feeling any pain. Spector asked the spirit to open the unfamiliar vehicle’s door. It did so without incident. After programming his car’s autonav to proceed to the Nakitomi arcology parking lot, Spector got in the commandeered Porche and headed for the Sea-Tac airport.

Along the way, the benefit of the spirit he had been channeling ended. The drain hit Spector, leaving him with a dull throbbing behind his eyes. Spector wished he could put the car on autonav, sit back and relax, and give himself some time to let the headache pass. At least blood had not started pouring out his nose, or his ears and eyes for that matter like a poor fragger who he had seen knock himself unconscious trying to cast a spell. When Spector arrived at SeaTac, he reclined the seat and tried to relax. Spector felt the tension start to leave his body as the rain tapped away at the sports car’s roof. It wasn’t long at all until his headache eased then subsided.

Spector got back to the tasks at hand. He found another Porche and with the aid of his pocket multi-tool soon had the plates switched. Spector looked for a shuttle bus, saw none and started walking to the terminal rather than standing in the pouring rain. A shuttle came into view just as Spector arrived at the terminal. A soaked Damon Spector caught the first available air taxi. As he seated himself and dripped, the pilot recommended everyone leave their seat belts fastened for the duration of the flight because storm winds were swirling. Spector considered calling upon one of his spirits to use its guard power to ensure the flight’s safety, realized one had only a single service remaining and decided to go ahead and channel it.

Damon Spector thought

Spector used the channeled spirit’s guard power on himself, the helicopter, the pilot and the woman seated next to the door. During the flight, he noticed there were advertising zeppelins sharing the night sky

Spector thought.

The air taxi dropped him as requested atop the Mayflower Park Hotel, the pilot commenting about the surprisingly smooth ride. Spector took the elevator down and exited the building right next to the monorail, spotting a train approaching the nearby station. He rushed to catch it. It only took a moment to realize he was doomed to fail if he relied purely on mortal means and used the channeled spirit’s movement power on himself to hasten his pace. Spector quickly ascended the stairs to the monorail platform, and out of breath, deposited a cred just missing a train departing the station.

Spector considered walking the ten blocks to the arcology plus more to get to the public parking area and who knew how much further to where his car had decided to park, tossed aside the idea and found a seat on a bench.

Damon thought then reconsidered

he laughed to himself. Damon stopped the internal debate before it went any further but then his mind shifted to reflect on his confrontation with mortality. The adrenaline rush was gone and he could almost feel himself trembling. Damon threw off the onset of the jitters with a shake of his head and looked around. A couple teenagers in leathers with a definite swagger were heading his way like predators sensing vulnerable prey. Damon shifted his posture just a bit, making his long coat fall open, letting the butt of the automatic pistol peek out. The more perceptive teenager clasped his friend at the elbow and steered him away from the now not so easy prey. Another train arrived before any more incidents, and Damon Rev Spector rode it alone to the arcology.

He made it safely from the stop to the parking lot and started searching for his car. A click of the key fob button returned a faint honk and Damon went down a level. Repeating the process, Damon eventual found his ride and thought someone needed to invent a tracker with position relevant to ground or sea level. Or if it already existed, he needed to go buy one. He set the autopilot to drive him home, trusting the computer more at this time than his own distracted driving. Relaxing a bit and watching the rain hit the windshield, it became apparent to Damon that the autonav did not need to wipe the rain water from the windshield. Although watching the rain drops hit the water covered glass was relaxing, like watching fish in an aquarium, it soon became boring, like watching fish in an aquarium and Damon activated the wipers.

The first thing to come in view was a billboard showing a sunny day on a sandy beach with several young women wearing a few strips of material, obviously because their inhibitions were lowered due to the advertised beer. Suddenly a cold beer and a few aspirin sounded great.

, he thought.

Damon searched his memory and realized he wasn’t sure if he had anything to drink at home. Snapped from his thought by this small dilemma, Damon noticed a Grab-N-Go™ sign through the pouring sheets of rain. He took over from the computer and guided the car into the convenience store’s parking lot and into the space as near the door as possible.

Which turned out to be not too close at all. Damon looked at the vehicles parked closer to the door than he as he waited for the rain to let up. A Tradesman van sat nearest the door and Damon Rev Spector’s first thought was the perfect runner vehicle. Also in view was a nondescript Ford Americar, an aging pink Cadillac, and a couple of motorbikes on the pock-marked plascrete sidewalk blocking his way. He couldn’t see what lay beyond the van blocking his view and he hadn’t noticed as he pulled in other than to note the spaces were occupied.

Damon thought.

Thinking about donning the helmet to his Action Jumpsuit™, Damon weighed how silly it would make him look versus the protection it might offer from the acid rain. The thought of using the ballistic shield as an umbrella seemed almost as silly. In a moment, the roar of the torrential downpour on the vehicle roof lessened to individual thumps, then the thumps decreased in volume to patters and Damon decided this may be as good as it gets for a while, and made a run for it, using the channeled spirit’s power to hasten his dash.

It was not fast enough to avoid getting wet anew, it actually resulted in more water hitting him from face to toe, instead of mainly atop his head. Damon entered the Grab-N-Go™ with a dog like reflexive shake as some of the water dripped from his hair down his neck and then his back, soaking into his armor, irritating him with a sensation verging on ticklish. The floor was a slip and fall artist’s wet dream and thoughts of easy cred flashed through Spector’s mind, then the reality of trying to collect on the lawsuit and burning his lone good fake ID evaporated the scam faster than the water tracked into the store. It was ample reason for Damon to call on the spirit’s power to guard him against accidents.

Damon looked around and saw a couple of soaked people wetter than he, then decided to head to the aisle with the disposable umbrellas first, hoping he beat any other shoppers before the inventory was fully depleted.

Damon thought. He noticed the strikingly beautiful elven cashier, her single spike of orange hair marring perfection. Her name tag identified her as Candy.

Damon thought, slowed his step, considered striking up a conversation, noticed what looked to be the girl’s boss nearby, decided against striking up the contemplated conversation and turned down the next aisle.

Damon almost ran into a thigh height little boy, maybe the spirit power helped avoid a collision. As he passed the boy, who seemed to be asking for every item that came into view, and his apparent mother, who repeated, “No, Barney,” in a robotic monotone, Damon decided to use the gap midway down the aisle to move to the next aisle over and get out of sight. The aisles ran parallel from one side of the store to the other. A break midway down these aisles created an aisle running perpendicular to the rest. The halves nearer the side of the store where the checkout counter was located were odd numbered, the halves on the other side of the bisecting aisle were even numbered, with aisle 1 closest to the entrance doors and aisle 18 ending in the furthest corner.

To Damon’s left in aisle 7 was a middle-aged man dressed head to toe in white synth-leather accompanied by a middle-aged woman dressed head to toe in black, the unflattering, skin tight synth-leather of her outfit adorned with about 23 working zippers and seven meters of chain wrapped around her body and appendages. Damon wondered if they were entertainers before mumbling from the opposite direction in aisle 8 drew his attention to a man who seemed to be having a conversation with a toaster.

Damon thought,

The next aisle over yielded pay dirt in the form of Use-N-Lose™ disposable items. Damon found the last two umbrellas and chose the fluorescent green over the neon hot pink one and headed toward the end of the aisle and the refrigerated coolers. Although of course, they weren’t just coolers, they were freezers, so Damon made his way toward the back corner of the store and the coolers on the back wall.

he thought.

As Spector walked he noticed the camera in the corner near the ceiling watching him with its unblinking eye.

Rounding the back corner, Damon started checking the cooler contents through the plexiglass doors. Soymilk, synthjuice, kafsoda, and finally beer. Damon avoided the soybeer, it gave him a headache instead of a proper hangover, and grabbed a dwarven import when a gunshot rang out.

It was followed by a high-pitched woman’s voice shrieking for all she was worth. Followed quickly by another blast and continued shrieking. The shots hit something near the entrance of the store. Then another shot, barely less deafening than the first two, and an explosion of sparks at the far end of Damon’s aisle as the Heat-N-Go™ microwave met its maker. The female wail continued unabated.

Damon turned to the gunshots and watched over the tops of rows of aisles as a guy in a Stetson with an alligator skin band scrambled atop the first row of shelves, threw back his head and roared. Due to the spirit he channeled, Damon could see the astral as well as the mundane plane and easily identified the climber as a shaman. If the man’s aura hadn’t given him away, the swamp spirit in the form of an alligator hovering on the astral plane at his shoulder would have. Nigh inconsequential to the current crisis, Damon thought

The building was strangely silent after the sounds of violence and intimidation. Humming from the overhead fluorescents seemed deafening in the stillness. Listening a bit closer, Damon could hear the subtle sound of the rain hitting the roof. The stillness was broken by a raised voice that tried to sound menacing but failed with its nasal tone.

“I’m with the Infernal Revenue Service and it’s tax time! Get out yer credcards, yer car keys, yer jewelry yer ... Whatever else ya have we’d want because we’ve come to collect!” Damon’s gaze trailed over the rows of aisles following the voice to its owner, standing behind Candy, the cashier, and using her as a shield.

Damon Rev Spector asked himself,

Then Damon looked at Candy. Damon always had a thing for elven women, but this one, though possessing raw natural beauty didn’t really appeal enough to him to put his life in harm’s way.

Spector thought.

Candy started screaming again at the top of her lungs.

, Damon grimaced as the off pitch wail resonated in his ears. The ork kid’s sobbing combined in disharmony with Candy’s screech. Damon plotted his path to the back exit. It looked like the safest path might be through the refrigerated units into a back passageway, but Damon ruled it out for now due to all the shelving he would have to deal with. If a more direct route proved impassible, going through the coolers one way or another would be plan B. Then Damon heard a loud smack of flesh on flesh and a little boy’s scream of anguish.

“Slitch, shut that little fragger up or I’ll shut him up permanently,” came the yell from the area where Damon had almost run into the little, obnoxious boy. The demand fell on deaf ears, or rather on deafened ears as the mother joined her son shrieking in panic.

Damon stopped in his tracks. “You had to do go and give me a reason,” he said so quietly only he could hear.

Spector directed one of his spirits with a thought,

and showed the commanded spirit a mental image of the shaman, the spirit, the man hiding behind Candy, the man he saw in the aisle where the boy and his mother had been.

Spector gave it a mental image of Candy and the manager. Something nagged for Spector’s attention, but at the moment he could not bring it into his mind’s focus. The spirit moved to a better position and materialized, mostly atop shelving, then in a blink of an eye somehow managed to blend in with the surroundings, even somewhat drawing shadows to itself as the concealment took effect.

Spector watched as puzzled expressions came over the features of the shaman and the man using Candy as a shield.

, he thought and cast a stun bolt at the shaman, then anticipated the backlash from channeling a huge amount of mana to ensure he took down the shaman. It reminded Spector of electricity running through a circuit. Too much juice and you threw a breaker. More energy and you melted the wire’s insulation. Even more energy and sparks started flying or fire ignited. But the pain never came. Spector wondered if karma was on his side for choosing to intervene, or did he just get lucky?

The shaman’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell from atop the shelves and out of sight. The thought about his strategy, geek the mage first, occurred to Spector and he put the umbrella and beer on the closest shelf and drew both his pistol and the machine pistol from their holsters, hoping to conceal and distract from his magical nature by wielding the mundane weaponry.

Shouting drew his attention. “Wally!” Was the single word scream from a feminine voice. Looking toward its origin, Spector glimpsed a young woman as she clickity clacked past the end of his aisle, something hobbling her gait and making her take short, hurried, noisy staccato steps.

Ducking a bit to get his head below the level of the top shelves, Spector made his way between the gap in the aisles and toward the side of the store with the entrance doors where he had seen the boy and his mother. Toward where the woman ran. Toward where the shaman fell. Toward the sound of gunfire.

Spector took a quick glance from the aisle gap, seeing only a stock boy taking cover.

, Spector thought, shot the mental image to the spirit he had tasked with concealing employees, and quickly crossed the aisle to the next gap. Another quick look disclosed empty aisles and Spector moved to the next gap. The preliminary glance this time revealed the manager who’d given Spector the eye earlier taking cover behind shelves at the end of aisle 11, having bigger and more urgent worries now than guys wasting his cashier’s time. Spector listened, hearing the clattering high heels of the running girl, the dwindling sobs of the little ork boy, shushing and low consoling from his mother, panting from Candy as she tried to get her breath - maybe prepping for another bout of shrieking, but not a sound, much less more threats from the ork boy’s attacker or the man menacing Candy. Spector contrasted it with the near silence from when the robbery started after the initial gunshots and how loud the fluorescent lights had seemed. Then Spector pinned down the nagging thought.

Spector used the channeled spirit’s power to cause an apparent accident. The overhead lights blinked once then quit working, dropping a veil of darkness over most of the store. The collective gasp from the store inhabitants was followed by a pause of silence and then whimpers of worry and despair. Scant light found its way from the parking lot lights through rain and glass entrance doors into the Grab-N-Go™. An alcove near the entrance doors benefited from the glow of the video arcade machines installed there. Neon advertising glowed near the soft drink dispenser and hot food section. The exit sign was visible but cast off next to no illumination. Beer ads glowed neon above the wall of refrigerated coolers. Now Spector had a few distinct advantages. The living illuminated the astral plane and Spector could see it. He maintained the channeled spirit’s guard power and used its power of concealment to blend in with the shadows and darkness even more.

Commanding three spirits to confuse anyone whom he attacked or attacked him, Spector went looking for trouble.

The next aisle was absent the glow of life, but up by the relatively high ticket, electronic items at the front of the store, where a cashier could keep an eye on things if they were so inclined, a thin humanoid form was reaching for the ceiling tiles. The terror displayed through the aura was obvious. A tall form, with hair tied in a ponytail, stood between Spector and the teen. He could make out the dead metal shape of a katana in the glow cast by the two figures. Spector considered shooting the katana wielder, discounted the idea after considering the difficulty of making literally a shot in the dark, and discarded the idea as he remembered he was currently loading capsule loads, making his guns about useless for the current predicament.

Spector threw a stun bolt, the katana lowered as the man grunted and his aura changed from rage and excitement to pain and worry and the man’s head turned as he searched. Deciding to close the distance, Spector stage whispered, “Over here, big guy,” and moved toward his target.

The man raised the katana to a high guard position and moved toward the sound of Spector’s voice. He bumped into the end of the aisle shelving with a forearm. The man’s free hand shot out toward the bumped shelf, batting packaged cupcakes onto the floor. Spector cast the spell while the man was somewhat silhouetted by the neon glow and before he entered the darkness of the aisle. The katana slipped from the man’s fingers, clattering to the floor. Then the man pitched sideways clambering for purchase on the shelving but accomplishing nothing more than raking baked snack confections as he fell.

Approaching the fallen man warily, Spector holstered his guns, picked up the katana and brutally kicked the man in the chin. He saw no signs of consciousness, only flying blood and broken teeth and backed down the aisle, turned and moved through the gap that perpendicularly bisected all the aisles. Spector checked behind him and noticed the neon beer advertising on the wall, realized he might be silhouetting himself and moved down aisle 10 toward the back wall with the frozen food units.

Spector stopped just within the aisle, put his back to the shelves and squatted to take advantage of the available cover. Dropping the channeled spirit’s powers he’d been using, Spector summoned a new spirit. A big new spirit. A spirit to help him exploit the advantages he was manipulating for himself. Spector told it to attack anyone who attacked him or whom he attacked then reactivated the guard and concealment powers on himself and the new spirit.

Steeling his nerve, Spector rounded the shelving into the aisle fronting the freezer cases, saw no one and continued around to aisle 8 and saw the white haired guy who had been talking to the toaster. The toaster talker held out an arm in a protective gesture in front of the toasters. The other arm held a shotgun as the man looked up and down the aisle. Spector tried recalling what he’d noticed before the robbery started. The man had not been in any strategic position, or even looking like he was casing the place. He’d looked wet like perhaps he had ridden in on one of the bikes out front. His aura was about one-third dark, evidently due to cyberware. His aura showed confusion, concern, and worry.