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I glanced in the mirror again and couldn’t see our tail. “Do you see another black car behind us?” I asked Evelyn. She leaned to check her mirror.
“There are black cars, but I can’t tell if one is right on us. I’ll ask the people in back.” She triggered the intercom again and asked about our follower.
“They’re still there, but farther back, and they shouldn’t be able to see us,” came the reply.
“You didn’t make us entirely invisible, did you?” I asked in a panic. Looking like a huge, blank space of pavement in Manhattan would be very dangerous. Any huge, blank space of pavement would immediately be filled, and physics said that two things couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time.
“No. We just look silver instead of black.”
I actually said, “Whew,” out loud and tried to relax a little while maneuvering an ocean liner through city streets full of smaller cars that kept darting in and out when they found an opening.
By the time I crossed Houston, I was feeling a little more comfortable, but soon I found myself in the more confusing layout of lower Manhattan, where the simple grid pattern dissolved. I navigated on instinct from that point, turning onto streets headed in the direction I needed. I whooped in triumph when I saw the building ahead of us and pulled up in front, behind the other limo that was already parked there. It wasn’t a legal parking place, but the car wasn’t registered to me. I figured the Collegium could pay the parking ticket or impound fee.
I jumped out, ran around the car, and opened the passenger door. “Okay, everybody out,” I said.
While the former frogs did their impression of a circus clown car act, with one after another emerging, I glanced up at the building’s turrets. I didn’t see any sign of a fight going on. It looked perfectly ordinary.
The black Collegium car pulled up just as the last person made it out of the limo. “Hurry, get inside,” I shouted. I ran in at the tail of the group before the car’s driver opened his door. Inside, I found Trish, Philip, and their group waiting in the lobby. “We weren’t sure where to go,” Trish said.
“I guess we could listen for the sound of battle,” I said, but everything seemed awfully peaceful.
Just then, Owen came running down the lobby stairs, Rod and Jake in his wake, holding a small, glowing object. “I think I’ve got it shielded, but I don’t know if it will work against his countermeasures,” he said, panting, as he sprinted through the lobby toward the door. We all scrambled to get out of his way.
“How long did it take you to get here?” I asked Rod. “I’d have thought you had plenty of time to move it.”
“Sorry, my fault,” Jake said, wincing. “I put it away, and it took us awhile to find it.”
Owen had almost reached the door when I heard a sizzling sound. There were a couple of pops, and several harpies fell out of the sky, crashing to the floor to lie motionless. A second later, another group appeared, along with a few of the skeletal creatures, and they surrounded Owen. More harpies and monsters arrived, and then, finally, Roger stepped out of thin air.
He paused to straighten his tie before glancing around at his surroundings. “Interesting. You moved the beacon. Obviously.”
Merlin came walking down the steps into the lobby. “You may as well give up now,” he said. “You won’t get any farther into the building, and your organization is on the verge of collapse. You were playing into your boss’s trap, all along.”
“Yeah, you should thank us,” I said. “He was setting you up, giving you enough rope to hang yourself. You’d never have taken over.”
“It’s been done before.” He was as calm as ever. I had to wonder if this guy was maybe a robot. Nothing seemed to rattle him.
“The book was a fake,” I said. “It’s been the same boss all along, for the past thousand or so years. He was getting you to do his dirty work, and then he’d have trapped you and got you out of the way.”
“Where is he now?”
Merlin pulled the frog out of his jacket pocket and smiled. “I’ll find a good home for him.”
Roger laughed. It was an eerie sound, more like an evil “mwa ha ha” than true mirth. “Then the way is clear for me.”
“Not so fast,” Sam the gargoyle said, swooping down from the ceiling. “Now what say you take your ladies and your skeletons out of here. Go try to take over what’s left of your company.”
“You won’t find much left,” I said. “And you’ll need an airplane to get to your office. Things are kind of falling apart.”
“It’s only a building,” he said with a shrug. “It’s the organization that matters.”
“I believe you’ll find that’s gone, too,” Evelyn said.
He turned to her, raising an eyebrow. “Really—you, too, Evelyn? Et tu, Brute.”
“Obviously, you’re not as sharp as you think you are, since you had two plants working closely with you,” she said with some relish.
“But why? Didn’t I treat you well? I was a good boss, to both of you.”
