Reign of Evil

Walker shrugged. “I’m sure they’ve figured it out. They’ve been starving for a while. Let’s get back on mission. Trev, you still watching our six?”

Trev replied from his sentry position in the hall, “And seven and eight. Roger.”

“I don’t see the woman who took the photos.” Walker prepared a second Black Hornet. “I’m going to check out the windows on the second floor.”

It took him a few moments, but he was soon controlling a second MUAV, flying it well above the trees and bringing it in over the top of the Tudor house. He could see the party in full swing down below. He decided to check the front of the house first.

If he thought he’d seen it all in the backyard, he was terribly mistaken. The view into each room was a different study in debauchery. Men on men. Men on women. Some were tied. Some were being taken violently. In all cases, their faces were covered by brightly colored carnival masks.

He moved around the eastern side of the home and found a room where several men and women were putting their clothes on. Walker figured this for a dressing room and was rewarded with the sight of two men dressed in masks and nothing else entering into the room. They removed their masks and could have been the most normal people one would encounter. They glanced at each other, their gazes lingering for a moment, then went about putting on their clothes.

That’s when Walker noticed that one of the women was staring directly into the camera.

She couldn’t possibly have seen the Black Hornet, but just in case, Walker backed it away from the window. But she came closer and began to point.

He swung the camera north just in time to catch a flash of light from high up on Glastonbury Tor, as if there’d been an explosion. He glanced out the window, to where he could see it in real time, but the light was gone.

The feeds on all the cameras began to static.

It dawned on him what was happening about the time the camera on the northwest pole winked out.

He directed the Black Hornet to pull up and head south of the area, hopefully getting far enough away to be out of the disturbance zone.

YaYa took a knee and stared out the window, now that the feed on his screen had gone blank as well. “Do you think it’s the Hunt?”

“What else could it be?” He let the craft hover and put in a call to Holmes, using his MBITR Bluetoothed to his cell.

Holmes answered on the first ring. “We’ve been watching.”

Walker peered into the night but couldn’t see anything. He focused on the view from his remaining Black Hornet, but the Tor was too far away for him to see much of anything except blobs. “Then you can tell us what the hell is going on.”

“Sassy says it’s the Carnival of Fools. They’re using sex magic to pool power.”

“You can get magic like that?” YaYa asked.

Sassy got online. “Jack, it’s the collocation and derivation of energy. Magic is all about gathering and transmitting energy. By the looks of it, they’re creating enough energy that were I on the astral plane, I’d be able to see it from here. Think beacon.”

“Well, I think the beacon is working. Looks like the Wild Hunt is coming.” Walker strained to see, but the images were too grainy.

Laws joined in. “They’ve been busy. We have seven more reports of missing persons, including an entire population of Basques who’d established a sheep farm in Wales. MI5 is keeping everything quiet, but the Prime Minister is raging.”

Holmes returned, “Stay put. Looks like we may have found their headquarters.”

Walker rogered out. If they were going to stay put, he could at least see how close he could get. He began to ease the Black Hornet forward. He was at about two hundred feet and the wind was buffeting him pretty badly. As soon as the camera found the yard below, it would turn away. The view was akin to looking through a porthole on a small boat on high seas.

YaYa wondered aloud, “I wonder which one of them it is.”

“Which one of who is what?” Walker realized his sentence was an egregious violation of the rules of grammar, but in context it made sense.

“Which one of them is the Lord of Misrule,” YaYa said. “If this is the Carnival of Fools and they’re celebrating Saturnus, then someone has to be the Lord of Misrule.”

Walker was finally able to get low enough on his bucking MUAV to get a glimpse of the backyard. Several hounds from the Wild Hunt were climbing over the wall. No one seemed disturbed by them. He saw one of the hounds approach a naked woman, leap at her, only to disappear inside of her. The woman arched her back—

Then the feed blacked out.

Walker felt a moment of panic. The last thing he wanted was for the MUAV to fall into the yard where it could be found. So he turned the MUAV south, or at least he was hoping he had, and he powered it out of the area. Only the feed never came back on. He continued powering it away, praying every second that he’d get it back. He really had no way of knowing if he was powering anything.

Finally, he gave up and slapped the remote control into his lap.