Page 68 of Curse of the Wolf
We walked down the hallway, pausing at the infrequent doors. Like the one we’d blown up, they were made from metal, all shut and locked.
As Duncan had pointed out, I sensed magic in what had to be a basement or crawlspace underneath us. More than ingredients for potions. Something moving. Something alive?
Before we reached the elevator, abingsounded. One of the green circular lights brightened.
“Uhm.” I pointed my flashlight in that direction, picking out a stairwell next to the elevator. From down the hallway, it was hard to tell, but it looked to offer up and down options. “We may want to?—”
Run up the stairs to avoid being spotted, I’d intended to say. But the elevator doors opened first.
I crouched, tensing. Duncan also crouched, his fingers curling, and growled. Could he summon the bipedfuris in his weakened state?
Rapidtinkssounded as something skittered out of the elevator. A giant metal… bug?
The mechanical construct was beetle-shaped, its carapace more than a foot wide. Including its eight legs, it rose equally tall. It lacked a distinct head, but when it rotated toward us, two glowing red eyes pointed in our direction, and something like a jaw lowered to show a round orifice. One might call it a mouth, but it didn’t have teeth or appear flexible.
Without moving its legs, its body rotated left and right, though those red eyes never shifted their focus from us. The jaw opened and closed a couple of times, and a faint cloud of vapor wafted from its orifice, reminding me of one’s breath on a cold morning. It hazed the air in front of the glowing eyes, but onlyfor a moment before dissipating. Then the mechanical creature skittered back into the elevator, and the doors closed.
“Huh,” Duncan said.
“Nothing you’ve seen before in any of their lairs?”
“It is not, but I did sense that it was magical.”
“Yeah. If it’s what we’re sensing in the basement, there are a lot more of them.”
ThetinksI’d been hearing continued on, drifting up from the stairs. The sounds of mechanical beetle legs on a hard floor? I imagined a horde of those bugs down there.
“Why don’t we see what’s upstairs first?” I suggested.
“I’m amenable to that. Though the garage doors on the far side of the building would be that way, if we want to see if we can escape through one of them.” Duncan pointed toward a metal door at the end of the hall.
“We haven’t accomplished our mission yet. Besides, the garage doors probably have bars over them now too.”
“A distinct possibility.”
I headed for the stairs, hoping the upper level held offices filled with filing cabinets of information, or something else useful. Such as a collection of potions that could lift curses…
As we reached the stairs, the door at the end of the hall opened, seemingly of its own accord. I expected a squad of Radomir’s potion-enhanced thugs to charge through it with guns. Instead, another large metal bugtinkedout, red eyes glowing. It was identical to the first one.
The construct looked at us for a long moment, then skittered back out of sight. I had a glimpse of a dark cavernous room that might have been the garage before the door thudded shut.
Moretinkssounded behind us, from the direction we’d come. A side door along the hallway had opened, one that we’d tried and had been locked. One of the bug robots skittered into view. It stopped in front of the bars of the gate that had descended,then turned to face us, as if it were a guard dog prepared to defend that exit.
If we needed to depart that way, I would happily throw one of the grenades at it as well as the gate.
“Upstairs we go.” Duncan glanced uneasily at the creature watching us, then took the lead.
“You’re not intimidated by those little bugs, are you? You tore a robot dog to literal pieces not long ago.”
“I did. There was only one of it, though, and an intriguing water-filled hole behind it to explore.”
“The things you find intriguing are a little odd.”
“I findyouintriguing.” He smiled over his shoulder at me.
“Yeah, and my kids would be the first to tell you that’s odd.” I thought of Austin’s letter and what he might have discussed with Cameron but pushed the musings away. This wasn’t the time to be distracted.
As we climbed the cement steps, I wondered if the bugs were capable of clambering up them. Maybe they always took the elevator. How they pushed the buttons from the floor, I couldn’t guess. Magic? Access to a wireless network? Who knew?
