Page 26

CHAPTER 26

L uka showed up the following morning at nine with three APCs—armored personnel carriers. Master Adolphus stood in the middle of the Platz at the fountain, and he had me posted on the roof of his house. With the dozen Enforcers Luka had brought with him, it looked as though we had the security issues covered.

Rosita played mother hen, ushering everyone on board and making sure their bags were loaded properly. If they had been flying commercial, they would have been paying a boatload in baggage overage fees, but they were flying on a Guild plane.

Once everyone was loaded and ready to go, I stepped off the roof and floated to the ground, then climbed in with Amelia and Jodi. I was sorry to see them go but glad I was staying behind.

“Wish you were coming with us,” Jodi said, giving me a pouty, downcast face.

“Wish there wasn’t a war,” I returned. “Hopefully, things will sort themselves out by the time classes start at the university. But we’ll have email and be able to chat on the internet. You’ll be excited to start at Mines, and we’ll exchange our experiences. You’ll meet a lot of new people and have fun.”

Amelia winked at me.

The driver cast a shield over the vehicle and started out, with one APC ahead of us and another behind.

The drive to the airport was uneventful. Traffic was very light, and the streets were practically empty, even for a Sunday. The city seemed almost deserted—eerie feeling, as though the city itself was holding its breath, waiting for the next disaster to manifest.

We crossed through a security checkpoint manned by a dozen or so Knights without even slowing down. They made no move to stop us. The lead APC turned away from the main airport terminal toward an area where cargo jets were sheltered in large hangers.

The gravity of our situation was brought home to me when we approached the large jet liner our party and other evacuees would be boarding. Three fighter jets marked with Guild insignia were parked around it. I had never dreamed the Guild had a military air force.

“What are those planes?” Jodi asked.

“They will fly in a formation around our plane,” Amelia said. “They will block any weapons—physical or magical—that might be hurled at us.”

Jodi’s eyes widened. “Geez.”

“Simply a precaution,” Luka said. “We haven’t had any intelligence that the Swiss Air Force has elements that have joined the insurgency, and the Knights don’t have their own warplanes. But a sufficiently strong mage might try to bring down a plane. That fiasco at Sechsel?utenplatz showed that the Knights don’t give a damn about collateral damage, and we haven’t exactly announced who is going to be on those planes.”

All of the luggage was transferred to the waiting airplane, and I saw a number of people I recognized from either the Guild Hall or Master Adolphus’s restaurant boarding. Very few men, and most of them elderly, but a lot of kids and women shepherding them. A few of the women were young, but most—like Rosita—were in their thirties or older.

Looking beyond, I saw three more passenger planes with Guild insignia and their accompanying warplanes.

“We’re sending about seven hundred people out today,” Luka said to me. “Mostly women and children, but also a few scholars from the university—mages who don’t feel as though they have the power or stamina to engage in a battle. It may not be necessary, but we’ll have fewer non-combatants we have to protect.”

Before she boarded the plane, Amelia came and stood in front of me, looking up into my face.

“I think I understand why you’re staying,” she said. “But, Katy, don’t be stubborn to the point of stupidity. If it’s time to get out, then do it.”

“Okay. I promise.”

She pulled me into a hug, then turned and climbed the stairs into the plane.

Jodi stood there, staring at me. I took her in my arms, and she whispered, “Don’t be a stranger, okay? I love you, Katy Brown. I’m gonna miss you.”

“I’ll miss you too. Study hard, and try not to set too many people on fire.”

She looked up into my face, tears glistening in her eyes. “I’ll try.” Then she turned and ran up the stairs onto the plane.

We waited until first the fighters, then the three passenger planes, one by one, taxied to a runway and took off. When they were too far away to see anymore, Luka turned to me and said, “Time to take you home.”

Crawling back into the APC, I asked, “What’s going on in the city?”

“Right now, a lot of waiting and sidestepping each other.” He chuckled, “Everyone is waiting for someone else to do something. Hopefully, the people who are talking—negotiating—are getting things figured out. Müller really isn’t much of a problem, although some of his adherents inside the Guild are being difficult bastards. The elephant in the room is the Church. Their shots are being called from Italy, so the local archbishop is simply deflecting anything resembling compromise.”

I knew the power and influence of the Prelate in Venice was fragmented. There were more than a dozen archbishops in the States, but some of them barely paid lip service to the Prelate, who was rumored to have risen from the ranks of the Knights Magica. For those clergy who despised magic users, that connection tainted him in their eyes. But it really didn’t help the current situation, since those same people weren’t friends of the Guild, either.

The Church and its storm troopers—the Knights Magica—had attempted a worldwide coup several years earlier and were thwarted. Evidently, they felt they had recovered enough of their strength to try again. It wasn’t a good sign.

On our way back into town, we passed two or three of the large black SUVs the Knights used and one APC carrying Kantonspolizei.

“Damn Müller,” Luka said under his breath. “We used to be able to consider the police as neutral parties, dedicated to keeping peace. Now they’ve become the Knights’ cannon fodder. Three APCs full of police hit a lycan village in the foothills last night, and the Knights followed to mop up any survivors.”

My stomach did a flip-flop.

“That sounds pretty gruesome.”

He nodded. “It’s ugly, and it’s just started. Make no mistake, Kaitlyn, our adversaries aren’t civilized. The report I got before we came to pick you up was that the dead included children.”

“Genocide,” I said. “That’s what Müller wants, although he lets others actually say it. He says he wants to deport them, but if there’s no place for them to go…”

“Exactly. The same thing is going on in Austria and southern Germany. Italy is worse. That’s why Master Adolphus wanted you to go somewhere safer.”

“I don’t know what things were like before I came here,” I said, “but I grew up in danger, Colonel. Demons and rogue mages, in addition to lycans and strigoi. And make no mistake—humans, whether they have magic or not, have their share of monsters.”