His eyes fixed on the small orb and he slowly set his drink back down. “Come to think of it, Dory, I might have a few special items put away.”
A little over half an hour later, we pulled up outside a large warehouse. “A few items?” I asked as we climbed out of the Jag.
Benny shrugged and struggled with a heavy lock on the thick metal door. “I’ve had this place for years. Usually, I keep it at least half-full. Right now, well”—he pulled back the sliding door—“take a look.”
A large, echoing space greeted us. Empty pallets were scattered about, along with a lot of crushed cardboard boxes and a rusty forklift. The overhead lights flickered on reluctantly, and I noticed what looked like a small office in back. “This way,” Benny said, picking a path through the trash. “Got a shipment in a couple days ago, and lucky for you, nobody’s been by to rob me yet.”
“Why don’t you move your inventory somewhere they can’t find it?”
“If I leave some interesting stuff lying around, I stay up and running and don’t get dead.” Benny’s booming voice bounced off the walls. “War isn’t a time to have people start looking at you as expendable. The Senate knows I got contacts they don’t. That’s what comes of trying to put craftsmen out of business for a couple hundred years—they tend not to want to do business when you get yourself in a jam.”
After disarming a few dozen protection wards, Benny flipped on the fluorescents in the claustrophobic office and squeezed around the side of a desk even messier than mine. I stayed back a few feet, in case any of the towering piles decided to fall, and waited. “But I wasn’t shooting you a line earlier. My selection ain’t what it used to be.” Out of his old metal desk he pulled a small briefcase. There was a wait while more spells were disarmed, and then the lock stuck. When he finally got it open, I had a hard time keeping a suitable poker face while eyeing the stuff inside. Benny waggled a shaggy eyebrow at me. “Well, Dory. Can we do business or what?”
I bent over for a better look, making sure a few of the items were what I thought they were, and barely kept from grinning like a fiend. Oh, yeah. I really thought we could.
Ten minutes later, I had four disrupters with the power of about twenty human grenades each, and a top-of-the-line morphing potion. The latter was a yellow glop that performed a glamour even on nonmages like me. Spread it over your face and within minutes you could look like virtually anyone. It tended to break me out, but there were lots worse things than a bad case of acne, and with Drac on my back, I needed all the help I could get.
Benny and I were dickering over whether four or five disorienting spheres—which made you either very dizzy (demons), forget why you were fighting (vamps) or pass out (humans)—should complete the deal when a faint whiff of ozone suddenly replaced the dry tang of the desert. I hit the ground and the next moment, the glass windows that composed the top half of three of the office walls shattered inward, and a wave of force slammed Benny against the metal back wall, reducing his oversized head to so much jelly. I started to move about the same time that the glass shards hit the stained carpet squares.
I grabbed the case from where it had been knocked to the floor by one of Benny’s thrashing arms, and hopped out a now missing window on the far side of the room. I threw an expensive disorienting sphere behind me as I left the office, since I was now in possession of twelve of them, and took a second to glance about. The office had obviously been an afterthought, perched near the back exit by someone who decided that managers should have a little privacy. It was not near enough, however. I dove behind a bunch of empty crates and wondered if my extensive karmic debt was about to be called in. A foot away, several more crates and half the wall exploded as the giant fist that wasn’t there slammed into them.
Have I mentioned that, sometimes, I really hate magic?
The problem was that I didn’t have a full warehouse offering plenty of cover—the sad state of Benny’s business had seen to that. Since I doubted my ability to survive a blow from whatever was attacking me, the dozen yards to the back door may as well have been a thousand, especially since I strongly suspected that I’d find a welcoming committee waiting outside. Even if I made it in one piece, I wouldn’t remain that way for long.