The Gates of Troy (Lopez Time Book 3) Read online

  Lopez Time: Book Three

  The Gates of Troy

  Phillip S. Power

  Orange Cat Publishing

  Copyright 2017

  Chapter one

  Magic was, Troy couldn’t help but think, a wonderful thing. At the moment, as he sat in the office of a psychologist that kept trying to examine what his subconscious mind meant by delivering the image of a god to his waking life, it was saving lives.

  More to the point, it was saving a particular life. That of the feminist in front of him.

  “Now, Troy… Do you think that you could have invented this being, as a way of expressing how conflicted you are about your sexuality?”

  Smiling, he shook his head a little.

  “I don’t want to scare you but this wasn’t a delusion. I get that it… Look, there wasn’t a half mile tall being sticking out of the building that everyone could see. Even in my office, someone else standing there might not have seen it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. It’s a magic thing. I’m a vampire… It happens.” The only real issue there was that Troy wasn’t certain that other vampires wouldn’t have missed it being there as well.

  At least if Baphomet didn’t want them to see it.

  There was an annoyingly paternalistic look from Doctor Boyajian. A thing that would have massively annoyed the fudge out of her if he pointed it out to her. It was a part of her personality, to look down on men. Worse, it had been backed up with years of training, so she didn’t understand that she was biased and prejudiced against people like him.

  Being a human that had lived most of her life believing that things like vampires and magic not only weren’t real but couldn’t be, meant that she was fighting reality, in order to try and make things understandable to her stunted mind.

  Which, he knew, wasn’t her fault.

  Finally, wanting to get her signature on the piece of paper that was needed, Troy realized that he was going to have to handle the situation in two parts.

  The first was to establish that magic was real.

  “Ah… Here, I can do a bit of magic. Let me…” It took focus and a bit of energy to make anything of note happen. Troy had been given years of lessons in it but only recently had he worked out what was needed in order to do anything useful. The primary thing he had going on at the moment was emotional control. Unfortunately, that part wasn’t being noticed for what it was by the half insane woman.

  The Doc was pissing him off, trying to use her silly ideas to proclaim that he hadn’t faced off with an ancient god and survived. He didn’t feel proud of surviving, or anything like that but it had happened. Ignoring that factor wasn’t going to aid anything.

  So, using a tiny sip of power, part of what he was taking in and collecting with each breath, Troy added a trickle of it to the concept of a ball of light. He could have done fire, or water as well but fire might trigger the alarm system and he’d just gotten his new clothing from Avery Rome.

  The girl had hand made everything he was wearing, which made it worth thousands of dollars. Before that, his new clothing had all been purchased at Wal-Mart. Everything else he owned had been burned beyond use, in a fire that had been directed at him from the outside. Probably at the command of the same god that had allowed him to live, for some unknown reason.

  Instead of crushing him, like a bug.

  The glowing white light wasn’t that impressive. A good LED flashlight would have been brighter. Only the fact that it hovered over the fingers of his right hand, in a ball that was about an inch and a half across made it special at all. With a bit of focus, he caused the thing to float out from him, so that it settled in front of the aging hippie woman who was being a problem for him.

  It wasn’t her fault that she couldn’t get basic ideas about reality though. Even if it was annoying to him at the moment, that part needed to be kept in mind. Something had happened to leave human beings mentally crippled that way. It didn’t exist in all realities, either. So far, it was a thing that only his world had, as far as he knew.

  Just being out and open about magic and other things, like his undead kind, didn’t make it any easier for humans to move past that kind of thing. Not in more than an abstract way.

  The Doctor nodded. She wasn’t an idiot after all. Just wrong about the current situation.

  “That is very interesting. You’re saying that there was a god though. A hallucination…”

  Troy had been about to up the ante, pushing her brain to accept what he was saying, when he understood something on a very deep level. This woman was going to fight for her beliefs if he challenged them. His goal though was only to have her sign off on his mental fitness.

  Which meant he focused on the light, causing it to grow larger. Then he formed it into an image for the woman. It wasn’t a thing that he’d tried before but he overlaid things in complex layers, until there was a being in front of her. One that looked like what he’d seen in his own office.

  Nearly at least. The likeness was pretty good but probably not perfect. He’d been a little distracted at the time, after all.

  It was an image of a being that was about six feet tall, with cloven hooves, brown long hair over its entire body, breasts and two sets of genitals. It also had horns on its head, like a ram. Then, past that, there was a giant sense of a being at the same time. It wasn’t a perfect likeness but it was enough that the Doctor gasped.

  “Uh…” She was shaking a bit, since the thing was, in a very real way, awe inspiring. The bad kind of awe that tended to push people into wetting themselves, if you weren’t careful. He really didn’t want that. Making her lose bowel control would probably have her trying to commit him. That or suing him for mental abuse.

  “Don’t worry, this is just an image of what I saw… Though…” He stopped for a second, mentally, then went on. The thing was, what he was doing was, at least possibly, very similar to what he’d seen and felt at the time. “I can’t swear that someone else wasn’t doing this to me, from the outside. What I can tell you is that when it happened in my office, a greater demon ran away, rather than dismissing the event. I can’t see one of them doing that over this, even if it isn’t that poorly done. Let me drop this now.”

  That happened with a pop that was more of a sense of relief than a sound at all. Doctor Boyajian sat up straighter then.

  “Well. That’s at least a thing. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a delusion though… Originally”

  Troy smoothed his emotions, using nearly as much power as it had taken to generate the powerful mental image that he’d produced moments before. Then he smiled a bit. He didn't mean it but he seldom did. Vampires had emotions but those were mainly negative in nature. They felt anger, rage and a sense of territoriality that humans almost didn’t have at all. Love was still possible but tended to be mixed with that last bit so solidly that it normally caused problems instead of fixing them.

  “Okay. I can see that thought as valid. What I saw was at least very similar to what I just showed you, though. It was as real, if not more so. I can show you again, if you want? You aren’t having a psychotic break or anything. Neither am I. You weren’t made to see that kind of thing. You wouldn’t make it up, meaning it came from the outside. The same is true for me.” He thought so at least. Now he was doubting himself though. At the time, he’d been certain it had been a god.

  Now he was wondering what the nature of that kind of thing really was. Gods didn’t exactly walk out of the bushes, most days.

  “You know… I tried to send it into the sun, at the time. I can do that kind of thing… I’m also a line walker, so…” That, he knew, would take a lot of explanation.

  Most human
s didn’t really get the idea solidly at all. Most vampires didn’t either, so it wasn’t really a weakness on their part for that one. It was kind of a new thing, that was all. Basically, it meant he could teleport things between realities. Recently he’d learned to do a better than average job doing things inside his reality as well. New York to Hawaii would take him about thirty seconds to set up now. Then he could hold the bridge between those spaces for hours, without too much work. It took a lot of focus but his line walker training had really left him pretty good at that kind of thing.

  Troy nodded as the woman just looked at him. Like he were speaking in tongues in a freaky cultic church.

  “I can teleport people and things? It doesn’t work precisely like that but close enough. I tried that, with Baphomet, and it screamed but then just undid the whole thing. What if…” His mind didn’t want to go toward the idea he was forming, since it didn’t fit with his previous guesses about what had happened. Even if the data worked into place a lot better than a real god having shown up in his office at the police station.

  The Doc just stared at him for a bit, her face seeming almost relaxed.

  “Yes? What if… Follow the thought.”

  “What if it had just been a magical projection? I was on the phone with a mage at the time. One that is part of a cult that worships the god that I saw. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t real, or a being in and of itself but there could be overlap there.”

  She leaned in, her face schooled. It was part of her job, so Troy didn't let that part bother him. It would have been worse if she’d been gibbering and acting scared, which was what he’d done after seeing basically the same thing. At least that was how he’d felt. Troy had probably seemed fairly cool and collected, being awesome like he was.

  That got him to make a face.

  “Wait…”

  Shaking his head a bit, he tried to focus everything inside of himself on the woman. Nothing happened at all. She seemed just like a regular human woman.

  “Which… Which greater demon are you? Also, why do this? The psychologist thing? The bit from before where you asked me to try and think like a woman.” It was his second visit after all.

  The first time, the doctor had gotten him to agree to try and find his feminine side. Which he’d done, in a rough fashion. Not well but he’d given it some thought, a few times.

  Troy waited for the being to lie, or even tell the truth and claim that he was being a pain in the behind that was making the wrong assumption. Instead, the doctor snorted at him.

  “It’s me. Zack.” She looked at him as if he wouldn’t believe her or something. That was probably a good plan, actually.

  After all, if the demon in front of him could fool him as well as she had, then trusting what he was told on that score was foolish. It could just be another trick. After all, Zack was his best friend in the whole world. It was more than possible that a different greater demon might lie to Troy about being him, in order to prevent a fight, or even to keep going on with whatever the current trick was.

  It had been a guess in the first place but thinking about the whole thing got Troy to shake his head. There was a sense of something being very wrong in the psychologist’s bare bones office. For one thing, his face felt numb. Inside his head, things felt slow. As if he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was happening, because he was being stopped. There was no sense of magic coming from the doctor. What that meant he didn't know. Some kind of trick, designed to make him believe things that weren’t real.

  Using magic that was already inside him.

  “Um… That isn’t it. Let’s… Stop this now and just… Tell me the truth?” It was a question and he was fighting hard to try and push the words out. A big part of him wanted to just go along with the fuzzy sense of things being cast at him. It had to be coming from the woman in front of him. Zack… Only… There was no reason for Zack to do that kind of thing. That was a lie. The whole thing was different than that. He could feel it. On a very deep level.

  Not that greater demons didn't lie. Zack might even do that to him, as a joke or an assignment… It… The person in front of him wasn’t his friend though. Not that one.

  Troy struggled against the fog, shaking his head like a dog that had been hit with an unpleasant smell.

  “Stop…”

  Taking a deep breath, the form in front of him flowed. It wasn’t like wax melting but rather a morphing of shape. Like from a movie about shape shifting, without the pain or yelling they always liked to put in. After about five seconds, the person sitting there was a man. One with dark skin and a bright white smile. He had a red t-shirt on as well.

  One that said Fun Zone on it.

  Worse, as soon as he saw it, Troy’s memories came back. This man wasn’t just Riley, the Trickster but had been Officer Washington. His training officer on the Lincoln police force. A thing that he’d known at the time, but had forgotten.

  Troy nodded then.

  “Seriously? You’ve been fucking with me for over a year? What did I ever do to you?” Tricksters weren’t called that because they made sense all the time. Still, it felt rude, given everything.

  Tricking him like that. Part of him was willing to fight about it.

  Riley smiled at him, his face pleased and eyes dancing mischievously.

  “It wasn’t about punishment, Troy. You haven’t been wrecking the world around you or getting in my way. We just needed to get you into place, by making a few minor tweaks. That’s all. I suppose that part is well enough done. Unless you plan to kick my round and supple behind over this? In that case I’ll make sure you can’t remember this at all. It’s part of what I’ve had to avoid with you, you know that? Preventing a solid beating at the wrong time. That would have screwed the plan up more than almost anything else. After all, you can do it. That would give too much away, too soon.”

  The being barely made sense to Troy but he nodded, and smoothed his thoughts, using a bit of meditation.

  “So, you were behind the thing in my office? Baphomet?” That made as much sense as the being having been his training officer. At least as much.

  For a moment, he wondered if everything he’d been seeing and working against had been a trick, the whole time.

  Riley shook his head, smiling. The man did that most of the time, for some reason. Smiled like everything was a bit funny, for some reason.

  “Nope! That was just an escaped god. Your take on what you saw though wasn’t bad. I can’t swear you nailed it but I know that what you showed me felt about right, even if it was just a mental trick. Do you mind if I use that one, in the future? Just showing things like that… Brilliant. I’ve been wasting all that time just trying to convince people to do what’s needed, instead of setting the scene like that.” The man was actually asking, which was odd.

  Troy nodded.

  “Sure. I can go over what I did, if you want. Um… So… What’s the deal here? If I’m allowed to know? Unless it was just about screwing with me for real, for a prank. In that case…” Well, in that case, Trickster or not, the man was having his supple and firm behind kicked, as he’d just suggested. Even if it meant stepping back for a while and planning in secret.

  He’d never heard of anyone tricking a Trickster like that, who wasn’t one of that kind of being in the first place but Troy was willing to give it a try.

  The other guy gave him a slow smile.

  “The deal here? Well, that’s pretty simple. If we don’t beat this god and the others that have escaped their prison, then the face of the world will change in the coming years. Not always in ways that are horrible or anything. The problem is that this world needs to be a specific thing, for the whole plan to work out. This would force it into a different shape. One in which the powerful rule the weak a bit too directly. The gods that once walked the Earth weren’t kind or sweet all the time. What they were good at though was being a part of people’s daily life in a way that would seem oppressive to people now. Also… they were kind of
annoying. Especially the Tricksters. Talk about chuckleheads, you know? Really obnoxious.”

  Troy still wasn’t following the whole thing, though his mouth nicely worked on its own. Almost as if a part of him was tracking the insanity without a problem.

  “Wait, so you’ve been messing with me, so that I’d be in place to fight these things… Because it might be a bit annoying, if they get out and take over?”

  He was pointed at. The move was big and over the top, done with a bit of bouncing, even if the Trickster was sitting in place.

  “Exactly. Close enough at least. It’s why Troy Lopez was needed in the first place. Why you had to become what you are right now. The one being on this world that could, possibly, handle these kinds of beings without sending the world into a war that will destroy everything. The Officer. The one who follows the rules, while caring about the outcome for the little guy and gal in the heartland. If you’re in on this now, maybe I could just explain what will be needed? I don’t have all of it. Or, really, I do but telling you all of it will make it come out wrong. You’ll get that one, eventually. It was what we had to set up for you. The end goal is the important part. You get that, right? We aren’t tricksters at all. We just seem like that, because most people won’t go along with what’s needed. Things can be hard at times, so I can’t really blame them. Not all of them. Nothing we do is really random. You being here wasn’t just something that was dreamed up one day. It’s been in the works for longer than Troy Lopez has existed.” He shrugged then.

  Holding the move, which was so odd that Troy was drawn to it. To the shifting of muscle under the t-shirt. It seemed real and solid, if that meant anything.

  Troy wasn’t at all certain that it actually did have meaning. It could have all been inside his head. Something was still happening that way. As a mere thought, or idea. It was fuzzy and hard to think. Blinking, he realized that it had been, an awful lot, over the last year. Possibly longer than that.

  All his life, it seemed like. Which might be possible. Or a lie meant to get him to do something in particular.