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

  Walking around the building, not running, since he was distorting time itself as he did it, Troy moved in on the three in the back. Interestingly, two of them were women. In gang leathers. They all had jeans on, and tattoos of various kinds. One of the women had one on her face. That meant it had to have been placed there, on her left cheek, before she’d died. It was a tree, Troy noticed, as he killed the man with them. That one was the largest of them so far. Nearly seven feet tall and probably close to four hundred pounds. Of muscle.

  That extra size was probably what had caused the man to be picked out to be a vampire in the first place. A lot of vamps had things like that going on. They were larger, or smaller, than normal. Some had unique eyes or hair. It was a bad plan, over all, since being able to blend in was generally the better plan. In this case it caused the large vamp to die first, in a group of three. That was hardly something that his maker would have wanted for him.

  If that bulk translated to extra power in a fight, it was impossible to tell. Especially given that Troy simply walked up behind him and slashed very hard to the back of his neck. That meant reaching upward a bit, but worked as well as if the man had been made of butter. Taking the heads off was probably a bit much for a bar fight but like the ones out front, these folks had weapons out, right at the beginning. All of them had knives but one of them, the last woman, who was hatchet faced and hard looking, also had a handgun. In a way that probably meant she was the smart one. Being all prepared like she was.

  She tried to shoot him, using better speed than the others had managed so far. As the giant man’s head fell, not touching the ground of the gravel parking lot yet, she pointed and pulled the trigger. Missing him totally. Twice.

  Her right hand came off first, as he cut through her slender wrist, then her neck. Her brain box didn’t come all the way off, and she still had a knife, so he kicked her in the middle. It was a mighty stomp, with all of his speed and power behind it. Troy connected with her so hard that she flew backward. It was nearly entrancing, given the high arc that she made as her last friend died. That one, probably by mistake, only had a knife. It was, he noticed, part of a matched set. All of them were identical to the one in his hand. That spoke of dedication to aesthetic, if not cleverness. After her head was falling, still in slow time, he moved to the woman who was still airborne. She was about eighty feet away, her body hanging in the air to Troy’s vision.

  Then, he wasn’t seeing the world in his normal fashion. Everything had slowed way down. To the point that it felt like he had all the time in the world to get things done.

  There was a vampire in the back door of the bar, just standing there, watching him. Not that there was a lot to see. While the former gun girl started to sink back toward the earth, about a hundred feet from the place he’d kicked her, Troy took her head off. While she was still in the air.

  Then he turned, flicked the blood from the knife he’d borrowed, and stood still. Waiting for Harriet, who was the person in the door, to do whatever she was planning. She had a gun in her hand. It was silver and large seeming. It was also pointed at the ground in a low-ready position. Not aimed at him in particular. That either meant she’d come to back him up, which he had to like, or she’d realized that backing the bikers was a lost cause.

  Returning to real time, still keeping all the pain at bay using magic, he nodded toward the weapon.

  “Do you shoot? I need to get out to the range again soon. I try to go each week but I missed a turn, getting busy with work. Well, the djinn that burned my place down helped change my plans but still, it was related. You could come with me?”

  The vampire leader made the weapon vanish then. It wasn’t a big deal, given she had a holster on, which was near her lower back. She was holding still, otherwise. The very unmoving kind of thing that vampires did when they were surprised or scared out of their minds.

  “It seems that you don’t need my assistance?”

  The blade in his hand started to glow. Just a bit. It was probably not even visible to the other vampire, unless she was especially sensitive to energies like that. This was like magic but wasn’t. Instead of being silver, it was more golden in the sense about it. Nearly friendly, even as it tried to rip apart the structure of his hand. The whole thing reminded him of what the killer kami had tried to do to him. Consuming him totally, on the cellular level. It wasn’t managing that yet but was slowly spreading up his arm.

  Rather than answer the lady, he pulled his phone, not even bothering to drop the knife in his right hand. Then he dialed, using his thumb. The number was in the memory of his cell, thankfully. Not on his calling list though, so it took some time. When it picked up, the voice was that of a teen girl.

  “Troy?”

  “Hey, Alison. I’m at the Y-Tavern, in Lincoln. I was attacked by five vampires. They seem to have been working with some god or another? There are these magical blades. Cursed, or blessed? Don’t touch them? I need to handle the one I picked up. This… Actually, it’s a great trick. A test I think, to see how clever I am. Can you come and handle the other blades for me? Please?” He made his voice playful and wheedling, even if he were probably going to die. He either was, and didn’t need to be a bitch about it, or he was going to live. Seeming cool and relaxed would make him seem better, if that happened.

  The voice on the phone sounded interested and slightly humorous.

  “That was silly of them. Did they really think that a mere god from the past could take on Troy Lopez? I’ll do that for you. It will cost you though. Say… A billion dollars?”

  Troy shrugged, picking up on the idea.

  “Nope. Ten million. It’s just clean up. Harriet can get people not to touch things. I just don’t want to lose any more of my people here tonight, if possible. Including the humans.” He stopped then, the golden glow growing stronger. He made himself not care. “Oh, hey, make sure you meet with Roger and Mable? No fair taking them as slaves but I bet you can bribe Roger with enough cash. Or sex. He’s young, so that one will work pretty well.” It was probably just true, after all.

  A greater demon would get that part though, so hiding it wasn’t worth hiding.

  “Fine. Twenty million. I can just take that from your account?”

  He snorted then.

  “Nope. Take it off the billion you owe me for taking care of these silly little pests.” He was making light of it but there was a laugh.

  “Right. Like I’m paying that much? I’ll get the deduction taken care of. I should… Be there in five minutes? Can your vampires protect the blades until then?”

  Troy nodded, looking at Harriet, who seemed to get that something was going on. She’d heard the conversation, after all. Both sides of it. Even if they were being freaks, talking about gods being involved in things. That wasn’t normal at all.

  She looked a bit stiff over the whole thing. That was probably a sign that the vampire was sane, more or less.

  “I can do that…”

  Troy smiled at her then, honestly meaning it.

  “Okay. I’m off to the void then, to deal with this minor annoyance. I’ll see you in a bit?” He had no clue how long it might take to beat the incredibly clever trap that had been set. Still, he could open a node, so it wasn’t stopping that part of his abilities.

  It was either a massive oversight, or a trick, meant to get him to do something like that in response to the problem. The issue was that he didn’t have anything else to whip out as a quick fix. Magic might have worked, if he had five years to work on the problem. Looking at his hand, which was already being worn away, he had to guess that his time table was more like a minute.

  Then, when he was ready, he hung up the cell phone with a single deft move of his left hand and moved into the rift that he’d just built. Honestly, he half expected it to come out in the middle of the sun, or something interesting like that but it was just the familiar nothingness of his old home.

  Nothingness, arrayed in all directions. Except that, of course, d
irection, like time, barely existed in that non-place.

  The thing in his hand, which wasn’t a hand any longer, being that it only existed as an idea, was incredibly complex. Troy stopped each part of it anyway, while holding himself together, by reflex. It was just habit, after all. A hard-won skill built up over hundreds or thousands of years. Troy was ready to take that kind of time in defeating the spell like construct that was still trying to move on him, stretching his body beyond all comprehension on the smallest level of his being.

  The battle… Wasn’t much of one. Oh, Troy would have been beaten, if he’d had a physical body at the moment. It was simply clear that there was no way he would have lived through the process of trying to undo the quantum level effects in time. Very few beings would have managed that at all. Even greater demons might have been pressed a bit by it.

  Sighing, in spirit if not in fact, Troy quieted the energy of the magical, probably god touched, weapon and set it adrift into the total nothingness. It tried to fight and couldn’t, having nothing at all to cling to. The blade was gone as well, naturally. Then, taking a bit of time, he tried to fix his hand, before finding the point that he needed into his own world.

  Something hit him, as he altered the data that made up his hand. He could use it for shape changing. If he’d wanted to, Troy could have come back into being looking like anything he wanted. Not just a human, either. That he knew how to shape shift…

  Well, it was all there, in his head. It was one of his skills, after all.

  A thing that he made himself forget, almost instantly.

  The remnants of the node that he’d made to get there called to him. It was fading, in real time but before it could, he twisted the idea of himself, putting his information at the weak spot. Without doing any extra work to stretch space at all, having already done it.

  Harriet had gotten inside but no one was coming out yet, to see what was going on.

  Troy rolled his eyes then. After all, it was a vampire thing but he was also the police. That was going to be a pain in the behind but was needed. He dialed the right numbers on his phone, to call it in.

  The dispatch person was Janine that night, which worked for him. Carl, the guy who did nights about half the time, was a bit of a prick.

  “Hey, Jan. This is Troy Lopez? Supernatural Division. Anyway, we had an incident at the Y-Tavern. We don’t need to roll uniforms, since I’m on scene. I just need a hold on anyone coming here, for a bit. Some vampires died. Five of them. Trying to attack me. The others here are all good but we have a mixed crowd, human and vampire, so I don’t want anyone getting scared and shooting some innocent bar goer.”

  “I… Think I get it. We need to get with…” There was a rustle, of physical paper. After a bit, the woman spoke, her words slightly stilted as if she was reading things off. “You, of course. Also, Detective Tran and Officer Santos?”

  “Sounds good. We have a specialist coming in to help with some cursed objects, so keep that in mind. We do not want trouble over this.”

  That was the dream, at least. Not that Troy was fooling himself. His career as a police officer was, pretty much, over.

  It would have to be, if only to protect his department from scrutiny. Too many people had died over the last weeks. Some of them at his hand. That wasn’t a thing that human law would really allow. On the great side, he was a police officer. Troy would be protected from prison for it, even if it was determined that he’d been in the wrong. Thankfully that wasn’t true.

  Still, things were going to be messed up.

  Possibly on a level that would impact him for a long time.

  Chapter five

  The crime scene got messy, of course. Not due to the blood or body parts strewn about, either.

  Troy knew the reason why he was standing out front of the tavern at four in the morning, with Tran and Santos, of course. Some idiot had called in the police, instead of carting the bodies away, using a nice bridge that came out over the ocean. Or, given his recent experience, even tossing them into the void would have worked really well. The bodies would vanish and no one, even a line walker, would ever be able to find them again.

  Without proof, it would have been really hard to pin anything on him. Harriet and her people would have covered for him, fearing that it would be their turn next, if they didn’t. Not that the police were being jerks about it. Not toward him. No, he was one of their people. To them, it was about the local vampires having set him up for the kill. That meant there was a lot of fear and a bit of hostility. It showed in how they moved and the aggressive way in which the vamps were being interviewed. That was not going over well.

  When Kratos, an officer with about ten years of experience on the force, tried to physically push Alison, The Technician’s current form, Santos had to intervene. It was done just about in time, as well. Possibly.

  As Officer Kratos grabbed the girl looking greater demon by the arm, pulling her back from one of the knives, he actually growled at her.

  “Keep your hands off! That’s evidence. Stupid bitch.” The last bit was muttered under his breath but Maria got there in time to save him. It was close though.

  Enough so that Troy winced. It was hard not to smile at the scene. He didn’t let himself do it, because setting things off at that moment would lead to Kratos dying, or could.

  Looking tired, since it was the middle of the night for her, Santos shook her head.

  “Cool it. She’s our expert on magical items like this. The best in the world, so don’t alienate her. We might need her in the future.”

  The man didn’t seem to believe her but he finally looked away and nodded.

  “Right. Weird shit going on today. Sorry… Ma’am.”

  The small, slightly plump looking demon… Ignored the whole thing. It was, at least outwardly, as if she hadn’t even noticed the man bullying her. All of her focus was on the blade on the ground, which she finally touched with a single finger. Then, after a bit, picked up.

  “This will be fine for the rest of us. The pattern on it is… incredibly complex. Elegant, to say the least. It’s almost as good as something I would have made. The design will only allow activation against Mr. Lopez. This particular Mr. Lopez, specifically. In this particular reality. That kind of selectivity is… nearly impossible to set up. It isn’t strictly magical in nature, either. I could beat it… But I doubt there are three beings in the world that could. Other than you and I, I mean… Mr. Lopez.” She stopped, holding the gold and white blade, which wasn’t bothering to glow at all, and managed to look refined, instead of menacing.

  The thing was almost pretty, in the delicate etchings on the blade and handle. Those looked like Nordic runes but he didn’t really understand them. Except that some of them told him what they meant. It was a half spoken tale of power and control, he thought. Troy pointed at it, then tried not to sound like a moron.

  “Some kind of early Sumerian?” It was a guess, not a proclamation. One that he knew to be wrong.

  “No. I can see the similarity but at a guess this is something older than that by a few thousand years. Proto Norse, I think. I’d know it if it was any form of writing from that time period or later. It fits with what you mentioned to me on the phone. Other things do as well. The energy used is trans dimensional. Higher properties…. Fifth dimensional fingerprints are all over this…” She was trying to explain it to Santos, not him. At least he was going to tell himself that, for the time being. After all, he understood how the thing worked, more or less.

  Not that a greater demon wouldn’t be looking down on him due to his intelligence.

  That… He knew that it was something to fix. It was the kind of thing that was hard to imagine doing. That was all. Inside his head there was the basic concept about how to do that kind of thing but so far, he hadn’t had a real chance to do it.

  Acting like he understood what the demon was saying, he looked at the blade.

  “Got it. I won’t try to juggle them. Now, the bodies?”


  He was good with the idea of carting them away, or even paying for it to be done by the local vampires, who had to have someone for that kind of duty but one of the uniformed officers, a woman with a hard face who was actually sweet as long as she wasn’t on duty, Farley, hefted a note pad.

  “We have a pickup coming, from the morgue. Roger’s got your statement… We need to do that again, given everything. The Vampires here… It’s about to get light. Do they all need to leave?”

  The call actually showed insight, and Santos took over then. She had to take charge, since Troy was kind of not allowed to be in control of the crime scene where he’d just killed five people. With knives, so it made it harder to see it as a legitimate shooting or anything. Guns didn’t mesh smoothly with super speed though. Not well. You had to stop and steady yourself in order to fire accurately. Then the bullets just didn’t move very fast. Not compared to what he’d done with the blade he’d taken.

  Really, he’d be better off carrying a pocket full of lead balls and just throwing them by hand, as far as speed went. It would be faster, if not more accurate. Honestly, it wasn’t a horrible idea, if he ever needed to have weapons with him again.

  The human officer on their special team wasn’t in uniform or even dressed up. She had on jeans and a t-shirt. The top was tight enough that the blue thing showed she had credible abs under it. She also didn’t have a bra on, which probably wasn’t professional of her. Then, neither was getting into fights to the death at a seedy bar, so Troy wasn’t going to call her on it. No one was staring at her though, given that it was a major crime scene.

  The kind that even got to have yellow crime scene tape and everything.

  Maria nodded slowly.

  “Good call, Farley. We’ve got everyone’s numbers and contact info. Lopez is good that way but most of the rest need to be out of here before the sun comes up all the way. As it is, a few of them will probably have to stay here.” It wasn’t daylight yet but people couldn’t teleport home and driving when you were about to go down for the day was worse than drinking and driving.