Hotel Cabal - The Gathering of the Gargoyles

Hotel Cabal .................................................................... Cover
Art by J. “Kythera” Contreras
Any Time You Like............................................................ 2
Story by Mary “Stormy” Plersch
At the Hotel Cabal............................................................ 10
Art by Nikki Owens
The Diamond .................................................................... 11
Story by T. J. “Charisma82” Knightly
The Failure ........................................................................ 17
Story by Kathy Pogge
The Failure ........................................................................ 19
Art by Christi Smith Hayden
The Guest List .................................................................. 25
Story by Kimberly T.
Safety in Numbers ............................................................ 29
Story by Rob “Harvester of Eyes” Van Schaick
Stay a While ....................................................................... 32
Art by Nikki Owens
Partners ............................................................................. 35
Story by Kimberly T.
Partners ............................................................................. 41
Art by Christi Smith Hayden
About the Contributors .................................................... 44
Anthology Copyright © 2009 by The Gathering of the Gargoyles
Stories Copyright © 2009 by the individual authors
Art Copyright © 2009 by the individual artists
Title font created by Neale Davidson.
All proceeds from this anthology to benefit the Gathering of the Gargoyles.
Edited by Christine Morgan
Page Layout and Design by Tim Morgan
All rights reserved.
The characters of Gargoyles are the property of Disney & Buena Vista
Television and are used here without their creators’ knowledge or permission.
All other characters or persons presented herein are either fictitious, or used
fictitiously.
1

New York, November 25, 1995
Martin Hacker fingered the Illuminati pin in his
pocket as the airplane touched down in New York
and thought of events coming full circle.
When he was a new recruit to the FBI, his mentor
had liked to blame things on “the Illuminati.” If
evidence disappeared or witnesses left town or the
coffee maker didn’t work, it was the fault of the
Illuminati.
But the Illuminati were real, and they pulled strings
on a global scale. Some joined the Illuminati for
power, some for wealth, some for fame. Martin
Hacker wasn’t any of these. He lived more or less
anonymously on a salary that wasn’t enough for the
amount of work he did. He protected his government,
and his country, and he knew things that ordinary
people never dreamed of.
When he joined the Illuminati, he learned things
FBI agents never dreamed of.
Twenty years ago this month, he’d told his wife
he was skipping out on their anniversary dinner in
favor of a trip to New York City – a trip to the
Hotel Cabal. He hadn’t told her it was for his initiation
into the Illuminati Society.
Membership in the Illuminati could be heaven,
or it could be hell. But you got to choose.
Soon it would be Matt Bluestone’s turn to make
a choice.
* * *
New York, November 24, 1975
The Illuminati’s invitation had included three
nights’ stay at the Hotel Cabal in New York City. He
had needed to show the invitation before the doorman
would agree to let him in. Now, looking around
the lobby of the hotel, Hacker felt a strange sense of
wonder.
The hotel was decorated in a proliferation of
styles: art deco, Victorian, French Provincial, Ori-
2
ental . . . more than he could name. Every piece of
furniture, every table setting, every ornament was exquisite
in its craftsmanship. All across the lobby there
were flowers: tumbling from hanging planters, coiling
around ornate stands, blooming in beds against
the wall. Hacker didn’t recognize the species. Their
heady fragrance was a world apart from the smells
of a city in winter.
Martin tipped his hat as he approached the
woman behind the front desk. She was prettier than
she had any right to be; she could have been a movie
star. Dressed in an exquisite ruby evening gown and
satin gloves, she exuded the old-fashioned glamour
of the glory days of silent film. She wore an ornate
eye-in-a-pyramid pendant on a delicate gold chain
around her neck; the eye was a diamond.
“Welcome to the Hotel Cabal,” she said. “My
name is Tiffany.”
“Martin Hacker,” he replied, offering her the
Illuminati’s invitation.
Tiffany smiled as she opened the card. “And welcome
to the Illuminati,” she said, attaching a small pin
to his lapel.
As initations went, it was laughably simple. Yet
Hacker felt his heart skip a beat. He’d never been
much for ceremony; why did this act seem so momentous?
Tiffany picked up a candle in an old-fashioned
holder and led him towards the staircase. She was
explaining the hotel’s amenities, but Hacker hardly
heard her; he was too busy marvelling at the curious
décor and Tiffany herself. He passed a painting on
the wall which look suspiciously like a Picasso.
The corridors were lit by wall sconces and lined
by planters containing the same flowers. “What are
they?” Hacker asked, leaning over to breathe in the
intoxicating fragrance.
“Colitas.”
“Never heard of it,” he answered.
“One of our members developed the strain. He
was a very good friend of mine.”
How good? Hacker thought automatically, then
chided himself for his irrational jealousy. He was

married, for God’s sake.
But she was beautiful.
They ascended the stairs, only to encounter someone
on the landing above. “This is our night watchman,” Tiffany
said. “Richard Wagner, meet our newest member,
Martin Hacker.”
Martin began to nod; his head froze in mid-movement
as the watchman nodded back.
The typical night watchman was an ex-cop or ex-soldier
gone to seed. The man in the corner looked young
except for his eyes. Hacker had seen that look before; one
of his uncles had fought in Vietnam. Wagner had pale
skin, as though he’d never seen the sun, and a gaunt face,
like a dead man’s. The man’s jacket could have been that
of a valet – the buttons were flashing silver, the trim was
a flamboyant red – but the color of the coat, black as the
devil’s heart, resulted in an overall effect that did not put
Hacker at ease. And he was wearing some sort of cape. He
had no doubt that the Walther PPK in the man’s belt was
loaded, or that the Illuminati pin on his lapel was real. As
Martin walked by, he had a crawling sensation of being xrayed
by the night watchman’s pale, pale eyes.
Led by the light of Tiffany’s candle, Hacker swore he
heard voices murmuring behind the doors. It was as though
the entire place was full, and yet, he hadn’t seen anyone
other than the hotel staff and himself.
“Place seems quiet,” Hacker said.
“We’re having a special event tomorrow evening. I
suspect that most of the guests are already asleep in preparation.”
“Should I stay in my room until morning, then?’
“As an Illuminatus, you can go anywhere,” Tiffany said,
pressing a small object into his hand, “as long as you have
the right key.”
* * *
Late that night, breathing in heady floral-scented air,
Martin Hacker dreamed.
In his dreams he was seven years old again. Little Marty
and his best friend Kevin Kozela were exploring the old
Pries place. The big farmhouse, abandoned for decades,
stood on a lot that was overgrown with weeping willow
and silver birch (and colitas). Marty and Kevin had thought
it would be fun to check it out.
They’d been wrong.
As a spectator, he watched Kevin and Marty descend
the wooden steps to the basement. The dirt floor was
muddy under their sneakers; unidentifiable shapes loomed
3
in the darkness surrounding their flashlight beams. He
thought he saw a painting of an eye in a pyramid hanging
on the wall. A slight tremor sent dust sifting down from
the ceiling.
Get out, Martin Hacker screamed. But history was a
mighty river, and it had carried him so far from his sevenyear-old
self that his words were unintelligible to Marty’s
ears. Marty heard only a sound like a beam creaking, and
presumed it was nothing.
“It’s a skeleton!” Kevin said suddenly, pointing into
the black.
Then there was another tremor, a bigger one, and the
whole house fell down around them.
Where had all the dirt come from? It was everywhere
– weighing down his limbs, filling his mouth, clogging
his throat. He couldn’t get air into his chest.
Martin Hacker woke up, doing his level best to scream,
and realized that he still couldn’t breathe.
His throat was closed. His chest flared, trying to draw
oxygen into his lungs, but nothing was getting through.
Desperate, he formed his hand into a fist and slammed it
into his guts. The clog in his throat broke at last.
Martin gasped, filling his tight lungs with the suffocating
scent of colitas. He wheezed, sucking in just enough air
to sustain life, but not enough to satisfy. His vision blurred.
He staggered out of bed towards the window. He
opened the lock and pulled up, but the window did not
move. He tugged harder; it resisted a moment longer,
then gave.
Marty . . . Martin . . . drank deeply of the New York
night. It tasted sweeter than wine.
Marty had been pulled from the basement of the collapsed
house more than a day later. It had taken his parents
and neighbors that long to guess where the boys had
gone and then dig him out of his living grave.
He remembered being dressed in a grey suit for Kevin
Kozela’s funeral. He hadn’t attended the burial of Mr. Pries’
remains, but he’d wondered why they’d pulled Kevin and
Mr. Pries out of the collapsed house only to put them
back in the ground again.
Martin also remembered talking to Kevin after the
cave-in, through the long, dark hours when he’d fought
for air in the darkness. His parents had told him that Kevin
had been killed instantly, his head crushed by a falling beam.
His parents told him that the bad air had made him hallucinate.
But Kevin had told him what had come for Mr. Pries,
and how it still sniffed around every once in a while. How
its tunnelling had brought down the building around them.

If it wasn’t for Kevin, Marty knew he would have died in
there too – or at the very least, left the core of himself
behind.
Even so, Martin Hacker had never stopped having
nightmares about being buried alive.
* * *
Hacker slept in late and then spent the afternoon in
the Hotel Cabal’s salon, watching people come and go.
Most of them wore the eye-in-the-pyramid pin. He could
have sworn that at different times he had seen Jimmy Hoffa,
Amelia Earhart, and Mace Malone weaving their way
through the crowd.
The air hung heavy with the breath of colitas. Time
skipped like a record. He’d look down at his watch and it
would be twenty minutes later.
The doorman admitted a man who strongly resembled
the chief steward of the White House. He was accompanied
by a creepy guy who looked about a thousand years
old.
Martin blinked; suddenly an hour had gone by. In the
corner, a little girl played with a family of dolls. “My name
is Lissa,” she said, “and my daddy is coming for me.”
Blink. Three hours later. A fat, bald man leaned over
the front desk, speaking very loudly in a foreign accent.
He was insisting on a ground floor room, ignoring the
clerk’s protests that the hotel was full, and demanding to
speak to the concierge.
Out of the back room, Tiffany appeared, dressed in
a stunning emerald gown and her gold necklace. She managed,
somehow, to look even more alluring by day than
she had the night before.
“I’m an ambassador,” the man thundered, waving his
eye-in-the-pyramid-embossed invitation under Tiffany’s
nose. “I should be able to sleep in whatever room I please.”
“You don’t want to go in Room 101,” she told him
with a smile.
“Why, what’s in Room 101?”
“It’s got rats.”
* * *
Time skipped again. Martin was sitting before a mostlyconsumed
dinner plate and holding a cup of coffee.
Tiffany sat across from him. She slid a cigarette into a
long laquered holder, and took a drag, watching him all
the while.
“Those things are going to kill you,” Martin said. Con-
4
fusion had made him irritable.
“I’m not dying any time soon.” Her voice was husky.
She looked him over, forgiving him his faux pas. “You
look tired.”
“Sorry. Bad dreams.”
“Do tell?”
“No, it’s nothing wrong with the service. It’s just . . .”
Martin let out a shuddering breath and put down his cup.
He was tired, and the coffee wasn’t waking him up.
He was halfway through his answer before he realized
that he was speaking, not just thinking. Martin was horrified
to realize that he had just told Tiffany all about the
collapsing house and Kevin Kozela and the tunnelling thing,
but Tiffany was nodding as if nothing were out of the
ordinary.
Then they walked hand in hand to the hotel’s courtyard,
where a band was already playing. Flowers everywhere,
Martin Hacker thought as they began to dance. An
unknown time later, Tiffany excused herself to speak to
someone else – the Jimmy Hoffa lookalike. Every time
Martin blinked, she had a new dance partner. Mace Malone.
Quincy Hemings. The old, old man. They whirled in a
blur of color and sound.
Hacker rubbed his eyes as though waking from a long
sleep. He was standing next to the fat ambassador, who
had lost his thunder from before.
“Did you enjoy your meal?” he asked, for something
to say.
“I don’t remember,” the man said. His eyes were
distant.
“What’s your name, then?” Martin Hacker asked with
a frown.
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember,” he repeated,
over and over again. He began to look agitated.
Tiffany approached and put a drink into the
Ambassador’s hand. Martin Hacker breathed in her perfume.
She smelled of the blooming flowers. Colitas.
* * *
Martin fled from the dance in the courtyard, his heart
pounding.
Lissa was still awake, far past her bedtime. Now she sat
in the corner of the lobby, watching Wagner play solitaire.
The night watchman looked up, realizing he was being
watched, and his pale eyes locked on Hacker’s.
Martin knew he had to say something, but his mind
was blurry and all he could come up with was, “Are there
still rats in Room 101?”

“Of course.”
He paused, blinked. “You’re not trying to get rid of
them?”
Wagner hesitated, studying him, and then reached into
his pocket. He pulled out a fat white rat and placed it on
his open palm. “Are you frightened of rats?” The small
animal twisted about his wrist like an acrobat, then climbed
his sleeve to his shoulder, where it sat on the hook of his
cape and wriggled its nose.
“I’m not scared of rats,” Martin replied, feeling the
need to emphasize his lack of fear.
“I’m not scared of rats either,” Lissa bragged, holding
out her hands for the animal. Wagner gently scooped
up the rat and placed it on Lissa’s palms.
In the FBI office there was a missing persons report,
the six-year-old child of a prominent journalist.
“Of course not,” Wagner murmured, “you’re scared
of the basement, aren’t you?”
There was a name on the file. Alyssa Moran.
Lissa cuddled the rat to her chest.
There was a photo of the girl holding a puppy.
Wagner’s eyes fell on Martin’s, meaningfully, but Hacker
could not decipher their message.
* * *
Another skip. Martin walked arm in arm with Tiffany
down the corridors of the Hotel Cabal.
She stopped in front of a door and opened it with
her key. The room was lushly furnished, with red velvet
furniture the color of Tiffany’s lips. There were mirrors
on the ceiling and a huge king size bed with satin sheets.
The ever-present colitas bloomed in a pot on the lacquered
table.
He had a wife. Shana was waiting for him back home
in Washington, D.C.
So why was he sitting on a plush velvet couch, pouring
two glasses of pink champagne?
“I want you to tell me what’s going on here,” Martin
Hacker said sternly.
Tiffany was too smart to play dumb. “The Hotel Cabal
serves many functions. It is a secure meeting place for
the Illuminati’s membership in good standing. It is a secure
holding place for members in . . . not such good standing.
And it is a tool to further the aims of the Society.”
“Where’s Lissa’s father? And what about the ambassador?”
“Whose father?”
“The little girl. In the lobby.” Hacker frowned. “Is he
5
not cooperating with you, is that it?”
“Sometimes people can be . . . unreasonable.” Tiffany
sipped her champagne and changed the subject. “The
Hotel, or a variation thereof, has been here since this city
was called New Amsterdam.”
“How do you do it?” he whispered. “This job of
yours?”
Tiffany said nothing, but her eyes spoke volumes.
“I’ll get you out. I swear it.”
She looked away. “I don’t want out.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“This is my assignment.”
“Can’t you request another?”
“I could, but . . . there’s no guarantee it’s any better
than here, you know what I’m saying? They could send
me anywhere. Here . . .” She shrugged. “I live well, fine
clothes, fine food, fine wine . . . and interesting company.”
“You could quit.”
Her smile faded. “You can’t quit.” Tiffany took a sip
of her champagne, taking his hand in hers. “Pretend you’re
in the afterlife already. Membership in the Illumanti can be
heaven, or it can be hell. But the choice is always yours.”
* * *
Some time later, Martin Hacker left Tiffany’s room
and wandered the corridors of the Hotel Cabal.
It was still dark out, if the windows could be believed.
The voices still whispered around him, but the hotel
itself was still.
Time stuttered. Hacker awoke halfway down the staircase,
in the lobby, in what appeared to be the kitchen.
When it stabilized, he was standing before a half-open
door. Unfinished wooden stairs led down into darkness.
He was not surprised to realize where he was. Wagner
had, after all, warned him away from the basement.
He took a step downward. He heard a strange chanting,
then voices. He thought he recognized one of them as
belonging to Quincy Hemings. The smell of colitas was
obliterated by the heavy scent of freshly disturbed earth.
* * *
Martin Hacker fled, lungs burning, chest on fire, as
fast as his legs would move him.
The thing . . . that thing in the basement . . . had finally
convinced him. He’d had enough of the Illuminati. He
didn’t care if they sent an assassin after him. He’d seen
something worse than dying.

He ran through the lobby like a madman, drawing
curious looks from Lissa and Amelia Earhart, but nobody
made any move to stop him. He could see the doors
of the Hotel Cabal only a few footsteps away . . .
. . . and the man named Wagner standing beside them.
Martin Hacker balled his fists, preparing himself to
confront the Hotel Cabal’s night watchman. He already
knew that Richard S. Wagner had a loaded gun and suspected
that he had no hope of beating him regardless.
But he would go down fighting.
He stopped just a pace away from the doors. “This is
where you tell me I can’t check out, isn’t it?” Hacker asked,
feeling the weight of predestination pressing him down.
But Wagner did not draw his weapon. Instead, he
gave Martin Hacker a sad and weary smile as he reached
out, tapped the pin on Hacker’s lapel.
“You’re an Illuminatus now. You can check out any
time you like,” he said softly.
There was something in his face that gave Martin
Hacker pause. Hacker’s brain started screaming at him to
just yank the door open and get the hell out.
He expected the door to be locked, but it opened
easily in his hand. He expected a bullet in his back, but as
far as he could tell, Wagner never moved.
What he didn’t expect were the words that followed
him out into the night as he fled from the Hotel Cabal.
* * *
The streets of New York City were hyper-real in the
sunlight. They seemed too solid, too immediate. Noises
were intrusively loud, as though the whole world had its
volume dial suddenly cranked up. Or had Martin’s hearing
become sensitized in the muffled, thick air of the Hotel
Cabal, where all words were hushed and voices murmured
behind closed doors?
Hacker took a deep breath of the city air; it seemed
fresh and sweet despite the pollution. He inhaled the aromas
of car exhaust and hot dogs. He wondered if he
smelled like colitas.
Martin wanted his old life back. He’d have something
to eat, then call Shana, beg forgiveness and put himself on
the next available flight back to Washington, D.C.
Damn, but those hot dogs smelled good.
Hacker joined the lineup of people waiting to buy a
dog; but when he reached the front of the line, he froze in
place. He stared at the vendor who asked him what he
wanted.
Was he, or was he not, the Ambassador from the
6
hotel courtyard?
“I said, what do you want?” The man gestured to his
cart.
Behind Martin, a plump woman yelled, “Get your
food or get out of the way!”
Martin ordered a hot dog with mustard and ketchup.
As the vendor was assembling it, he leaned over and urgently
asked, “What did you do before?”
The man’s face became blank.
“Before you started selling hot dogs?” he prompted.
“I don’t remember,” said the vendor. He handed
Martin his dog. “I don’t remember.”
Across the street, televisions in an electronics store
window were tuned to the news. A newscaster reported
that Alyssa Moran was still missing.
Hacker suddenly found he had no appetite.
Three weeks later
* * *
Not even the pressures of working for the FBI or the
comforts of gin or the struggle to cover up the Kennedy
assassination at the request of the Illuminati Society could
stop Martin Hacker from thinking about the Hotel Cabal.
His memories of Tiffany were remarkably faded. He
could only barely recall what she looked like, and even
then, he was uncertain whether he was imagining her, or a
phantasm based on the old film stars she so resembled.
In fact, much of what had happened at the Hotel
Cabal seemed like a dream. How could it be possible, in
this day and age, for the modern world to dance to a
secret society’s tune?
He had been tired when he’d arrived at the hotel. Perhaps
he’d been ill, running a fever. Perhaps he had experienced
hallucinations, the way he had in the basement of
the Pries house.
But there was one conversation that he recalled with
crystal clarity.
“I’m not scared of rats.”
“Some people are.”
No, Martin Hacker wasn’t afraid of rats. But now he
knew, knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there was
a room in the Hotel Cabal where you smothered in the
dark. It was impossibly small, too small for a human being,
though you were in it just the same. The floor was
made of dirt, its ceiling was lined with stone, and in the
stygian darkness you were buried in earth and rock. At the
end, you swam up through the earth and clawed your

fingers to bloody ribbons on the stone. Who knew how
long a man could survive in there, slowly feeling the life
pressed out of him, breathing just enough to stay alive a
moment more, but never enough to satisfy? Breathing air
so damp and stale, spiced with just the faintest hint of
colitas.
Eight months later
* * *
Martin Hacker had learned small rituals. He lined his
countertop with a neat row of empty gin bottles. Drunks
left their bottles all over the floor. Martin Hacker was not
a drunk.
Shana was gone. She would never be coming back.
He’d dumped her, in a very public, very embarrassing way,
in the middle of her family’s Christmas dinner. It had nothing
to do with Tiffany, even though Martin had used Tiffany
as the excuse.
Throughout the divorce proceedings he kept reminding
himself that Shana was terrified, absolutely terrified,
of sharks.
Shana would never have to find out what room in the
Hotel Cabal contained the sharks. He wished he could
have explained that to her.
He knew he could never have told her that he’d
dumped her partly because of sharks, but mostly because
of Lissa, playing cards in the lobby of the Hotel Cabal
with someone he’d later come to learn was not, in fact, the
famous composer but rather the most infamous assassin
of the twentieth century.
Not his little girl. Not ever his little girl.
It was one thing the Illuminati would never have on
him.
Six years later
* * *
This could be heaven, or this could be hell.
But you get to choose.
Martin Hacker had no children, no girlfriend since leaving
his wife, and no contact with his family. His mother
had passed away; he hadn’t been there. His father wasn’t
speaking to him as a result, which made it easier. He had
no idea what his brothers were doing. Most days he forgot
to care.
Hacker filled his time with his work for the Bureau.
7
His standing rose, because he was always working overtime,
always covering for other guys so he wouldn’t have
to go home to an empty apartment. And the Illuminati
kept coming up with assignments to keep him busy.
On his vacations he could always be found in the salon
of the Hotel Cabal in New York City, nursing a glass
of pink champagne.
The trick had been to realize that working for the
Illuminati meant freedom, not a life sentence. It was only a
confinement if you let it be. When you embraced your
work for the Society – when you did it with relish and
flair – you reaped the rewards. And the greatest of those
was knowing that you weren’t like the other shmucks you
passed on the sidewalk; you were part of something bigger
than yourself, something that would last forever.
Twenty years later
* * *
Hacker wasn’t supposed to meet Matt Bluestone until
the sun rose. Somewhere in the upper floors of the Hotel
Cabal, a gargoyle fought for its life while Mace Malone
and Matt Bluestone looked on. Hacker had planned to
have a few drinks in the salon while he waited, maybe
catch up with Tiffany. He hadn’t expected to find the building
marked “Condemned.”
The front doors were nailed shut. Martin peered
through the dirty glass of the windows; the inside had
been stripped of its furniture, while the walls were caked
with spiderwebs, hanging heavy with the dust of years.
How had this happened so quickly? He’d been here
sipping pink champagne only . . .
Martin was startled to realize it had been over seven
years since his last visit. Where did the time go? In a blur
of work and gin, it was seven years later.
Martin Hacker trudged across the street and walked
to an office building, where he took the elevator to the
top floor and climbed to the roof. He leaned against the
railing, watching the Hotel Cabal as its neon sign flickered
intermittantly in the light. Somewhere along the line, he’d
grown nostalgic. The night air was scented with suggestive
fragrance: tobacco and the breath of night-blooming
colitas.
Hacker whipped around.
Richard S. Wagner leaned on the railing next to him,
smoking, watching the hotel. He held a bag in his left hand.
His cape swirled in the wind. He did not look a day older
than the last time Hacker had seen him, and Hacker had

not heard him arrive.
“That habit’s going to kill you,” Hacker said inanely,
his mind once again swimming in that heady cocktail of
confusion and fear and lethal excitement.
“I’m not dying any time soon,” the assassin replied,
blowing out smoke.
In the years since the last time, Martin had learned
enough to believe him. He had also learned that sometimes
all you could do was play out events to their inevitable,
predestined conclusion. He decided to play for time,
because damned if he was going to die without knowing
what he’d done to get Wagner sent after him.
“It’s condemned?” he asked, gesturing to the hotel.
“Five years ago they decided to make it automated.”
The scorn in Wagner’s voice was audible. “It’s all computers
now, and robots and other technological garbage, which
takes up so much space and makes so much noise . . . it
was easier to hide the tech if the place looked condemned.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand how anyone
can lose their mind in there, when all they need to remember
is what can be done with modern technology.
And apparently the next iteration will offer virtual reality
to its . . . guests.” Wagner didn’t seem impressed by
this idea either. “Once they’ve perfected it, they’ll renovate
and reopen – and there will be room once again for the
membership as well.”
“You still think it was better the way they did it in the
seventies?” Hacker asked.
Wagner opened the bag, let him see inside. Inside was
a pot of colitas. “I don’t consider chemical trickery an
improvement on mechanical automation, if that’s what
you’re asking,” he said. “This is for Tiffany.”
Hacker’s breath caught in his throat. “She’s still alive?”
“She’s not dying any time soon either. More’s the pity.”
He reached into the bag, pulled out a business card, and
handed bag and card to Hacker. “Perhaps you’d like to
give it to her.”
The card was for a well-known psychiatric institution.
A name and room number were written on the back.
Hacker raised an eyebrow. Perhaps Wagner hadn’t
come to kill him. “What happened to her?”
“Reality is a fragile thing.”
“More so for us than them?” Hacker gestured at oblivious
passersby.
“It’s not easy to know what’s really going on.”
Hacker swallowed. “You twist your mind around a
thing or lose your mind completely.” His memory was
reminding him that there’d been something big living under
the Hotel Cabal, and it might still be down there. His
8
mind was telling him that it had been a drug-induced hallucination,
but now he wasn’t so sure.
“And sometimes we can only twist so far.” He nodded
at the bag. “Mr. Pries would certainly agree.”
Hacker was too late to hide his reaction.
“Pries developed the strain,” Wagner said by way of
explanation. “He tried to leave the Society some years ago.”
“They found his body,” Hacker whispered, “in the
ruins of his house.”
Wagner did not ask how he knew. “His body was the
least of his concerns.”
Hacker did not have too much time to think on that,
because at that moment a pair of figures glided off the
roof of the Hotel Cabal: Bluestone and the gargoyle called
Goliath.
“So what do you think about those gargoyles?” Hacker
asked suddenly. “You could breathe colitas for a thousand
years and never dream up something that crazy.”
Wagner looked amused. “Do you want to know how
the Society did it in the old days?”
Hacker hesitated. Did he?
Did he really?
He had to know. Knowledge was all he had to show
for the dues he’d paid.
He nodded.
The Illuminati’s assassin reached into his pocket and
pulled out his closed fist. When he opened it, a small knife
lay in the palm of his hand.
And then the blade shifted shape.
Machine gun.
Spear.
Katana.
Flintlock rifle.
Scythe.
Its permutations evolved faster than Hacker’s mind
could follow. Finally, with a shudder, it returned to its original
form. Wagner put it back into his pocket.
“What is that?” Martin Hacker asked, his voice thick.
“Magic,” Wagner replied.
Not drugs. Not electronic trickery. Not virtual reality.
Just reality being far less solid than we’d ever thought.
“The Illuminati . . .” Hacker swallowed over what
felt like a clod of earth in his throat. “Use magic?”
“The upper echelons.” He nodded at the hotel. “Poor
Mace. He really doesn’t have a clue.”
Poor Mace . . . How many plots within plots do they
have?
“So,” Wagner said, watching him carefully, “are you
ready to quit?”

“Are you kidding?” Hacker retorted. “You know what’s
in their basement. That . . . thing . . . It remembers me.
From when I was a child. It remembers me . . .”
Wagner reached out and flicked Hacker’s pin again.
“That’s how it finds you.”
“It’s as easy as taking off jewelry?” Hacker didn’t believe
him.
“As taking off a soul tag,” Wagner retorted. “That’s
why I told you about magic.” He looked away. “I think
we all know it instinctively. We know a bullet through our
heads is still no way out.”
Hacker felt his breath catch. “You’ve figured out how
to take it off.”
“I think so.”
“You’re fighting them.”
He nodded.
“You wanted me to look in their basement. All those
years ago.”
“Your friend was their collateral damage. And your
marriage. And your nightmares.” He paused. “What are
you going to do about it?”
Hacker hesitated, knowing he was verge of another
choice.
He could have a wife. Kids. Go back to a normal life.
They’d killed Kevin. They’d cost him Shana.
Magic – just when you think you know what’s real.
Martin Hacker felt suddenly like those shmucks he
secretly laughed at every day. He thought he’d known what
was really going on. Now he realized he knew next to
nothing.
But he’d find out.
Oh, yes, he would.
Hacker reached into his pocket and fingered the Illuminati
pin he carried. Matt’s pin. Poor Matty. He only
wanted into the Society so he could learn its secrets and
expose it. Well, he was in for a surprise. Knowledge comes
at a price.
But you can check out any time you like.
Wagner read the answer on Hacker’s face. “I’m disappointed,”
he said softly, climbing up onto the edge of the
building, and falling backwards into the night.
Hacker reached out his arm instinctively. Wagner’s cape
unfurled – no, not a cape, wings – and the demon or gargoyle
or whatever he was soared into the darkness, swallowed
up by the New York night.
Whatever he was, Hacker wouldn’t want to trade
places with him. His spell was certain to fail, and when it
did . . .
Martin Hacker knew the rules. He would teach them
9
to Bluestone.
You can check out any time you like . . . but you can never leave.
* * *
(Author’s note: with apologies to The Eagles)

The Hotel Cabal. She could see the glowing
words of a sign above the old building through her
binoculars.
Usually, at this stage, she’d feel a rush of adrenaline,
knowing that she was near the point of no return.
But this job didn’t excite her. The building was
abandoned. No one would stop her from breaking
in. There wasn’t even some lost tourist next to the
building. At least then she’d have the hope of someone
calling the cops when she broke in, if someone
could even say what she was doing was breaking in.
She dropped the binoculars, letting them dangle
on their string, which resided around her neck along
with a chain she always wore. She stepped off the
ledge of the building, and back onto the rooftop
where she’d set up shop.
It hadn’t taken her long to put the glider together;
she’d done it plenty of other times. Why had she chosen
to take the glider instead of walking through the
hotel’s boarded up front door? For three very good
reasons.
The first reason was style. She believed that all
good thieves had wild imaginations, or else they
wouldn’t be in the profession. Going through the
front door would be a disgrace to that cunning mind.
The second reason was to try to find that adrenaline
rush. Gliding off of a skyscraper to the Hotel
Cabal’s roof would provide that enthusiasm she was
craving. Or so she’d hoped. So far, all she wanted
was to get the job over and done with.
The third and most important reason was that
her client had requested she go in from the roof. She
made sure that her clients’ demands were always met.
So many thieves dismissed this last reason, and in turn
didn’t have many satisfied customers. She ran her
thievery as a business. The clients’ concerns always
came first. For this reason, she was one of the more
successful thieves in the Eastern United States.
She picked up the glider and returned to her position
on the edge of the building. Without hesitation
she jumped off. The best part of using the glider was
the first drop. As the air rushed past her face and into
her short, brown hair, she held her breath. It was a
11
sort of ritual for her to do this every time. Seconds
after she jumped, but what seemed a lifetime of excitement,
she was balanced out and soaring towards
her destination.
She was soon on the Hotel Cabal’s roof, wishing
she were still in the air. She left the glider in a corner,
knowing she’d come back for it once she’d acquired
what her client had asked her to steal. A shadow
moved above her and she glanced up, only to see a
half moon looking back at her. Perhaps it had been
some sort of aircraft. She wouldn’t let it spook her
out of finishing her job.
Her client, Mr. Goyle, had told her that the door
would be unlocked. She hadn’t pressed for the reason
why once she’d learned the building was abandoned.
Who would lock the roof entrance of an
abandoned building? Heading towards the door, she
noticed the sign once again. Still in red lights, it read
“Hotel Cabal.” It hadn’t fazed her before, but looking
at the sign up close gave her a foreboding feeling.
It was as if she knew something about it, something
she’d forgotten . . .
She opened the door and walked in. Not ten
seconds later did she hear a screeching noise, like metal
scraping metal. She stopped, skeptical. It was then
that the stairs underneath her collapsed into a metal
slide. She fell down the newly created chute until she
dropped through a hole into a large room.
“Hello, Skylar. I’ve been expecting you.” The
voice came from a sound system.
Skylar recognized it at once. It was the voice of
Goyle, the man who had hired her. She looked around
the room, trying to get her bearings, only to find some
sort of smoke leaking into the room through vents.
She coughed and gagged, knowing she would soon
be unconscious. The last thing she heard was the man’s
voice speaking again.
“Welcome to the Hotel Cabal.”
* * *
A man in a long brown coat held an umbrella
over the little girl by his side. The rain poured down

around them as the wind picked up. The girl’s dark brown
hair clung to her wet cheeks. Her father noticed and pulled
her closer.
“We’re here now, sweetie. Daddy needs to take care
of some business and then we can go back to the motel
room.”
The girl glanced up at the old, tall building in front of
them. There were bright, red lights on a sign. She spelled
out the letters under her breath.
“C-A-B-A-L.”
“That’s right, Skylar. This is the Hotel Cabal. This is
where Daddy is working tonight.”
The girl hid her face in her father’s coat as he led her
into the hotel. She always did that when she was frightened,
and this place was strange to her. How could her
father stand to work there?
Once they arrived in the control room, her father
kneeled down to her level and smiled. “Skylar? Listen to
me, okay? Daddy has to work, and I need you to be a big
girl. Can you be a big girl for Daddy?”
The little girl nodded, fear of the new surroundings
plastered on her face.
“That’s good.” Her father continued to assure her in
his calm, mellow voice. “What I need you to do is sit over
here in this corner. Can you do that?”
She didn’t like the idea of sitting there, not being in
reaching distance of her idol, her father. She knew, though,
that if she didn’t do as he said, he wouldn’t be able to get
his work done and they’d never get to leave. She walked
over to the corner and sat down, pulled her knees up
against her chest and wrapped her arms around them.
“That’s my girl,” her father said, beaming.
He walked over to a monitor where, the little girl noticed
for the first time, another man stood. This new person
looked older than the girl’s father. The dim light showed
that he had the beginnings of wrinkles on his face, just like
her grandpa.
“You brought your kid?” he asked in a strange, husky
voice.
“Yeah,” the girl’s father replied. “She won’t be trouble.”
“Good,” the stranger said.
Both men were looking at a screen on a wall. There
were many screens on this wall, the girl saw, but the one
they looked at was the largest. The girl wished that she
could watch her cartoons on the big screen. She hadn’t
been able to watch any of her favorite cartoons in a week.
A whooshing sound interrupted the silence. The girl
was startled by the sound, but did not move. She wouldn’t
move until her father told her to do so.
12
“Charlie!” a man said enthusiastically. “You finally
made it to the powwow!”
A third man strutted into the room through a sliding
door which had been hidden by a mirror. The new man
walked with an extra skip in his step, seeming much happier
and more excited than the girl’s father or the older
man. He was also younger, which made him seem ignorant.
“Why’d you bring your kid, Charlie?” the young man
asked her father, glancing at her huddled up in the corner.
“Is it take your daughter to work day?”
“Yeah, you’re a laugh riot, ya know that? Naw. Her
mother left us last week. I’m all the kid’s got now, and I
wasn’t about to leave her alone all night at some strange
motel.”
The young man snickered. “Seems like you sorta did
it anyways, huh? Hey, Bruce? Bruce? Remember the other
day when I was tryin’ to teach you about irony?”
The older man, still watching the monitors, made a
growling noise. The young man laughed it off.
“So,” he continued, “did the old broad leave ya ‘cause
of all the lies, secrets, and unexplained absences? Ya know,
all the perks of the job?”
“Naw . . . Nothin’ like that, kid.”
“I ain’t no kid, pal,” the young man said. “So, ya gonna
tell us why she left ya? Or are we gonna play twenty questions?”
“I forgot to pay the rent again.”
“That’s it?”
Her father shrugged. “She always was particular over
the rent . . .”
The nameless young man doubled over in laughter.
“Will you shut your trap, John?” the man named Bruce
snarled.
John brushed away a tear from his eye before talking
again. “Aw, well, just as well. You know, Charlie, you’re the
only guy I know who has to cover his tracks twice. First
with your line of work in stealing, and second in joining
up with the Illuminati. You ever think of getting a real
job?”
“And give up the thrill of thievery?” Charles grinned.
The girl knew that grin. It was the look that always
overcame his face when he thought about his occupation.
As far as she was concerned, he was the best at what he
did and no one compared to him.
John and Charles continued to talk, but the little girl in
the corner was no longer interested in what they had to
say. She wanted to watch cartoons. All of the small television
screens were boring to her. One was a picture of a

oom turned upside-down. Another room had furniture
that floated above the floor. Her favorite room on the
monitors was the one full of water.
“You enjoying the scenery, kid?” John called out to
her.
The girl froze up and buried her face in her arms. Her
mother had always told her never to talk to strangers. Even
though her mother wasn’t around anymore, she would
still obey.
“What’s wrong with her? Is she some sort of mute?”
Charles smacked John on the side of his head as he
went by.
“Hey!” he complained, but left them alone.
“Are you okay, Skylar?” her father asked, kneeling again,
back on her level. When she didn’t answer, he ran his hands
through her damp, brown hair. “There’s nothing to be
afraid of. Those rooms won’t hurt you. I’ll show you.
Watch.”
She lifted her head just high enough to see something
dangling in her father’s hand. It was a key on a red key
chain.
“As long as I have this, we’ll both be safe.”
“Save the sweet talk for another day, Charles,” Bruce
said. He tapped at one of the smaller monitors. “It looks
like this one is finally ready to talk.”
Charles stood and walked slowly over to Bruce. John
stood behind him, looking even more agitated than before.
Bruce grabbed at a microphone. “Hello, Frank. Are
you ready to tell us the truth yet?” He flipped switches and
pressed buttons until the sound of a screaming man was
heard throughout the small room.
The little girl’s eyes widened in horror at the screams.
“Well, Frank? What’ll it be? Are you going to tell us
where you stashed the diamond? Or do you want to wander
around the Hotel Cabal for a few more hours before
I get back to you?”
The man named Frank stopped screaming, and pulled
himself together enough to speak. “I . . . don’t know . . .
where the hell it is!”
“Wrong answer, Frank,” Bruce said. He was very calm
as he flipped another switch, and Frank began to scream
again.
“Maybe he’s telling the truth, Bruce,” John said. “He’s
been in there a while. He’d have cracked by now, right?”
The older man snorted. “He’s been in there for thirteen
hours. I bet he’ll start singing like a canary within the
hour.”
“How dare you do this to me!” Frank screamed in
13
the background. “I’m one of you! I’m Illuminati! You
can’t do this to me!”
The girl, curious despite her fear, edged her way out
of her corner. The small screen was too far away and too
small to see. As she inched closer and closer, she could
make out the shape of a man in a room filled with stairs
coming out of the ceiling and the walls.
“Skylar!” her father said. “Go back to your corner
right now!”
She frantically slid back to her spot, feeling bad for
making him yell.
“Stop!” Frank’s voice rang through the control room’s
speakers. “I’ll tell you what I know! Please, just let me
out!”
“We’re listening,” Bruce said into the microphone.
“I gave . . . I gave it to one of my partners,” he panted.
He sounded like he’d been running.
“Partners?” Bruce repeated, suspicious.
“Yeah. I couldn’t . . . rip off the Illuminati . . . by
myself. We planned it . . . It seemed like a good idea . . . at
the time.”
“This guy is out of it,” John said. “He’s been in there
too long, Bruce. We already checked this all out. He’s the
only one who had access to it and had reason to take the
thing. Though I’ll never know why anyone who is part of
the Illuminati would want to steal from his own secret
society. He had to know it’d come back to bite him in
the . . .”
“Shut up, John,” Charles told him, full of mixed anger
and concern.
Bruce frowned, then spoke into the microphone again.
“Can you give names?”
“You can’t be serious, Bruce,” Charles said. “He’ll name
anyone to get out of there.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you a name . . .”
Bruce leaned expectantly forward, though his eyes
never left the girl’s father. “And that name might be?”
“Charles Huntington.”
* * *
Her head hurt. She couldn’t tell if it was because of
the knockout gas or the complicated dream she’d just had.
“Finally,” Goyle’s voice said. “I thought I’d have to
wait all night.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
She wasn’t in the large room any longer. She was in a
hallway, lying on her side on the floor. She reached, hoping
to find her gun in its usual spot. It was gone. Skylar

swore under her breath.
“That language, miss . . . It doesn’t suit you. As for
your weapon, I had to take it, along with all your other
thief accessories. Just a precaution.”
Skylar stood. Hoping to find a room with a window,
some way out, she moved to open the first door she found.
“Big mistake.” Mr. Goyle sounded amused.
It opened. Water flooded out. The pressure pushed
her against the wall, pinning her there. She gasped for air
as it spilled, poured, finally stopped and subsided through
unseen drains.
“What . . . do you . . . want?!” she yelled between
breaths.
“I’m glad you asked,” he said. “I want something I
believe you stole a long time ago. Have you ever heard of
the Hope Diamond?”
What thief hadn’t? “The one where legend says a Hindu
temple priest put a curse on anyone who owns it? Yeah,
I’ve heard of it. But you’d better check the Smithsonian.
Last I heard, it’s been there since 1958.”
“Actually, the real Hope Diamond has never been to
the Smithsonian Museum. The rock there is just for show.
The real Hope Diamond was given to a certain organization
back in 1947, which acted as trustees on behalf of
one of their former members, a Miss Evalyn McLean,
when she passed on. They gained permission to sell the
diamond, but instead kept it and sold a fake to make a
profit. That’s what resides at the Smithsonian.”
“A very interesting story. But, as you’ve just verified, I
don’t have it.” She was drenched, humiliated, and running
out of patience. “If you want me to steal it for you . . .”
“No,” he said, anger sharpening his tone. “You have it.
Your father stole it from the organization, and then you
took it from him.”
Skylar’s recollections of her childhood might have been
blurry in places, but she was sure she’d remember if her
father had stolen the infamous Hope Diamond. “My father
died of a heart attack when I was a kid. He couldn’t
have stolen it.”
“But he did. And now you’ll tell me where the diamond
is, or I’ll leave you in here to rot. The Hotel Cabal
has a way of getting into a person’s mind.”
“You can’t do this!”
“Honey, we’ve put people from our own organization
in this hotel and let them go bananas. As far as I’m
concerned, you’re expendable.”
Organization? What was this organization he kept
bringing up?
“If you’re not going to talk,” he added, “then you’d
14
better get moving.”
She didn’t need to be told twice. She got up, her skintight
black outfit soaked with water, and ran down the
hall. When she reached a dead end, she picked a door and
opened it, hoping that nothing terrible was inside.
What she found was a room full of staircases coming
out of the ceiling and walls. The room looked exactly
like . . .
Her mind raced back to the dream she’d had. Except
this time, it was as if the dream continued . . .
* * *
“Charles Huntington.”
Bruce had a gun out before the name was completely
spoken. Her father’s hand was only inches away from the
pocket where he kept his, but he was too late.
“You told me you had nothing to do with it,” Bruce
said, holding the gun to Charles’ head. “I came to you on
my own, without any of the higher-ups. You told me you
had nothing to do with taking that thing.”
Charles let out a sigh and let his shoulders drop. “I
lied.”
“Why? You could’ve told me. I wouldn’t have let them
know it was you.”
He half smirked. “You would’ve wanted a cut.”
Bruce nodded. “I guess now you wished you’d cut it
three ways.”
“Not really,” John said, pointing his own gun at Bruce.
A shot rang through the air. The little girl in the corner
covered her ears and stayed where she was, sure that somehow
her father would keep her safe.
Bruce fell to the floor.
“It already was cut three ways,” John told the corpse.
“What’d you go and do that for!” Charles yelled.
“He had a gun pointed at your head, in case you hadn’t
noticed. I did you a favor.”
“What’s going on?” Frank’s voice yelled through the
speakers. “Did I hear a gun go off?”
Charles leaned to the microphone. “Just hold on Frank.
We’re fixing things.”
“Charles?”
“Yeah, just hang on, we’ll get ya outta there as soon as
we can.” He went to the mirror that hid the sliding door,
holding up his key to it so that it moved aside to reveal a
hallway.
“Not so fast, Charlie.” John stood over Bruce’s body,
his expression not one of regret, but of youthful excitement.

“What’s going on?” Charles asked.
“What’s going on is that I ain’t ending up like Frank.”
“What do you mean?”
“He squealed. He said he wouldn’t, but he did. He
told Bruce your name. If we let him go, he’ll squeal on us
again. I ain’t takin’ that chance.”
The girl’s father shook his head in disgust. “I’m not
leaving one of my partners in the Hotel Cabal.”
John raised the gun, still in hand and hot from its first
victim. “I don’t want to do this, Charles. We can split the
take on the diamond together. More money for us, ya
know?”
“Where’s the honor in that?” Charles spat.
John chuckled. “A thief? With honor? I’ve heard it all
now . . .”
In the blink of an eye three things happened. The first
was Charles reaching for his coat pocket once again. The
second was another loud shot that rang through the small
control room. The third was the horror in the little girl’s
eyes when she watched her father fall.
John stood motionless for a moment, as if stunned.
It had been one thing to kill someone who was going to
hurt someone else, but another to kill someone who was
about to harm him. After the shock passed, John knelt
and dug through Charles’ pockets. When he found something,
he smiled, and drew out the cold, hard diamond.
“I knew it, Charlie. You were always the type to keep
your prize close at hand,” he said as he examined the extravagant
diamond. “All this fuss over you, huh? The
Illuminati are sure goin’ to be angry when they don’t
find ya . . . I guess you really are cursed.”
John pocketed the diamond, then turned toward the
corner. “Sorry about this, kid. No witnesses. Can’t make it
any easier on the Illuminati to find me. Wish I didn’t have
to do . . .”
One last shot sounded out in the room. One last person
fell to the ground.
She looked down at John’s body, Bruce’s gun in her
small, fragile hands.
“Nice shot . . . kid,” John managed to say before his
eyes glazed over.
The girl, tears forming, dropped the gun. She bent
over the dead man and took back the diamond that belonged
to her father. Then she went to him where he lay
by the mirrored door. Her teardrops fell onto his face.
In her blurred vision, she was able to make out a red
something in one of his hands. It was the key.
* * *
15
Skylar came back to reality. Was it possible that everything
she was remembering had actually happened? Or
was the hotel getting into her head, like Goyle had said it
would?
There was one way to find out. She felt under her
tight, black shirt for the chain around her neck. It was still
there; Goyle hadn’t bothered to take it. Who knew he’d be
such a gentleman?
She pulled at the chain and brought out the red key, a
charm that had belonged to her father. When she held it
up, a section of angled staircase in the strange room slid
away, revealing a secret door.
“Hey!” Goyle yelled. “How’d you do that?”
Skylar didn’t answer. She ran through the secret door,
still holding the key out in front of her. More doors obligingly
opened as she raced through the maze of hallways,
leading her safely through the hotel. Though she was unharmed,
she didn’t feel true relief until she came to a room
with a window.
That window was her ticket out of the Hotel Cabal –
“Don’t you take another step.” Goyle’s voice wasn’t
calm. It also wasn’t coming from a speaker.
Skylar turned toward the man with the gun.
“Frank,” she said.
It had been twenty years since she’d seen him last, on
that small monitor. He was older now, in his fifties. But she
knew him.
“So, you remember me. Good. Then you know how
I know you have the Hope Diamond. I heard John over
the microphone, after you shot him. He said, ‘Nice shot,
kid.’ You were the only one who could’ve taken it. I knew
Charles always kept his loot on him until he could sell it
off . . .”
“But I don’t have it.”
“I need it!” he exploded. “Do you know how angry
the organization was with me for helping steal it in the first
place? The only reason they let me out of the Hotel Cabal
that night was because I was the only one with a chance of
finding it, and they want it found. If they find out I’ve lost
my only lead after twenty years . . . ”
“The Illuminati will kill you . . . or worse,” Skylar finished
for him, remembering the name from her dream.
“So you know that, too. Who your old man worked
for. They won’t like that. But tell you what . . . give me the
key, and I’ll let you live.”
“If I give you the key, I’m stuck in this place,” Skylar
said.
Frank Goyle aimed his gun at her head. “There’s always
an alternative.”

“You’re right,” she said.
Skylar held out the key as she ran at the window. A
light blinked, hopefully disarming any traps. She’d also
hoped it would open for her, but, unfortunately, it didn’t.
She crashed through glass, and, at the last second,
grabbed onto the ledge. She heard Goyle curse and rush
toward the window. As soon as he appeared above her,
Skylar grabbed his gun hand and twisted. He yelled in pain
and dropped the weapon. It plummeted past her into the
street below.
Skylar managed to lift herself high enough to kick
Goyle in the chest, knocking him back. He fell winded to
the floor, and she took the opportunity to start climbing
down the side of the building. It wasn’t the first time she’d
had to make such a descent without equipment, and she
was closer to the ground than she was to the roof.
Moments later, she was on firm ground, next to the
broken gun. It teetered on the edge of a drain in the gutter.
There was a streetlight on over her, the glow making
her feel edgy and exposed. It also glinted on something
that caught her eye, a small glint from beyond it, in the
drain . . .
But then, knowing Goyle wouldn’t stay winded forever,
she ran from the building and didn’t look back.
* * *
The night’s events seemed like a blur as she entered
her apartment. The most upsetting part of it all was having
to leave her glider at the death trap hotel. All she wanted
was to get in the shower and wash the night away.
A light on her answering machine blinked and she
pushed it out of habit.
“Hello, Miss Huntington. My name is Mr. Burnett. My
employer has heard of your talents and wishes to hire you
for a . . . personal venture. Your services would be most
appreciated, and you would be generously compensated
for your time. My employer looks forward to hearing of
your response to his offer. You may contact me at . . .”
Skylar turned off the message. She would get back to
him later.
In the shower her mind kept racing back to the vivid
dreams she’d had. Had those been repressed memories?
Or had the Hotel Cabal played her like it had done to so
many others?
She decided she didn’t want to know, and started thinking
about the job offer from Mr. Burnett instead.
* * *
16
The little brown-haired girl, tears streaming down her
face, walked out of the front door of the Hotel Cabal. It
was still raining, and this time there was no one to take her
out of that rain.
She looked down at the diamond in her cupped hands.
It was the cause of her tears, the reason her idol was lying
in a pool of his own blood. She let it drop into the gutter
and watched it as the water pushed it down the drain.
She ran from the building and never looked back.
* * *

“Man, what a place for a training seminar.”
Matt Bluestone, twenty-three and a newly graduated
member of the Federal Bureau of Investigations,
stretched his arms high over head and rolled
his neck from side to side. He shifted in the hard
plastic chair and looked around the room at the other
trainees in the overheated conference room.
Fifteen newly minted federal agents from various
divisions; FBI, CIA, INS, even, a guy from Fish
and Wildlife. He wondered, briefly, what use a seminar
on advanced statistics in crime fighting techniques
would be to a forest ranger, but maybe poachers
were a more wily class of criminal then he’d given
them credit for.
He was hungry, tired and bored. The day had
started badly. There had been a propellant leak in the
fire suppression system at the hotel where the conference
had been originally scheduled. They’d been
ordered to dress and then forced outside into a 5:30
a.m. drizzle. After leaving them loitering in the street
for over an hour, the seminar organizers had herded
them into a pair of panel vans that looked, and smelt,
as if they’d been seconded from Prisoner Transport
Services. A jostling, kidney-bruising commute had
ended in an underground parking garage.
They were greeted in the lobby of a faded Deco
hotel that once, decades past, had probably been the
height of fashion, right down to the gilded staircase
that swept up to the balcony lounge. There, they’d
been offered incredibly bad coffee and donuts he
swore had been fried in axle grease. Both had been
unanimously rejected by the class and they’d shuffled
grimly into their first seminar, unwashed and unshaven,
bellies grumbling.
The only bright spot was one of the two female
attendees, a pretty blonde INS agent named Brenda
Bates, who had tumbled into Matt’s lap as they had
been herded into the van. Now she was sitting next
to him.
He glanced at his watch again. Oh well. The head
lecturer promised to break early after this session to
allow them to clean up and get something to eat, and
Brenda had agreed to go to lunch with him.
17
He continued his methodical note taking, listen
intently to the speaker’s soft, droning voice, despite
his internal musings. Matt rubbed his face and forced
himself to concentrate on the litany of facts and figures.
The lecturer had started out strong. He’d certainly
grabbed their attention with his demonstration
earlier of how seasonal crime statistics could be used
with great effect as a predictive tool forecasting crimes
before they occurred.
Thirty minutes in, and now it was a different story.
Maybe he’d given the lecture once too often. His voice
had become soft and slightly dreamy and he had an
irritating verbal tic of repeating himself every few
sentences.
Or maybe Matt himself was having trouble keeping
his concentration, he conceded. There was an annoying
high-pitched whine that seemed to strobe in
time with the flickering wall sconces. His glance traveled
upward across the faded flocked wallpaper with
its pattern of diamonds in repeating columns. He was
forced to look away. The diamonds seemed to undulate;
crawling upward. His gaze was momentarily
captured by a large gilt framed painting of a horse
and rider that hung slightly off-center. Really, the whole
place was enough to drive anybody a little screwy.
He glanced around at his classmates. They didn’t
seem to have any trouble. All of them appeared to
hang on the speaker’s every word, not taking notes,
just staring intently at the charts and graphs that appeared
with clockwork efficiency on the white board.
* * *
Many floors above the struggling young agent
there was a large, yet cramped, office. In it a telephone
rang. It was answered by a neatly dressed,
brown haired man in an off the rack gray suit.
“Sir.” The Deputy Facilitator put his hand over
the receiver and caught his superior’s eye. “We have a
problem. One of the trainees isn’t responding to routine
induction.”
The Facilitator, a tall and balding man with a
sharply beaked nose, looked up from his paperwork.

“Put it on screen.”
The Deputy flipped a switch and the classroom came
into view. A slightly scruffy young man with close cropped
hair shifted in his seat, clearly uncomfortable but intent on
the lecture.
The Facilitator tugged at his ear. “A resistor, eh. How’d
he pass the initial screening? Interesting . . .” He consulted
the clock and the day’s schedule, glanced at the appropriate
biometric readout, and reached a decision. “. . . interesting,
but inconvenient. Plan B then. Raise the ambient
temperature five degrees. Let’s see if we can’t make
Agent . . .”
“Bluestone, sir. Mathew Bluestone. A substitute,” the
Deputy supplied, frowning as he glanced at the seating
plan.
“Right,” the Facilitator said. “Fall back to chemical
induction. Let’s see if we can’t persuade Agent Bluestone
to drink some water.”
The Illuminati’s Facilitator was, among other things,
responsible for testing and training pawns, cats’ paws and
dupes. Most, like the sleeper agents currently being indoctrinated,
would never know they’d been selected as foot
soldiers in the Society’s cause. But testing, training, evaluating
and keeping up with the endless paperwork took time,
and he was a busy man.
Moments later, Bluestone tugged at his already askew
necktie. He started to shrug off his suit coat, thought better
of it and quietly poured a glass of water from the
sweating carafe sitting in front of the blonde INS agent to
his left. She didn’t acknowledge his apology when he
knocked over her glass, and a disappointed look flickered
over his features. He quietly filled his glass without further
attempts at conversation, took a large mouthful and grimaced
slightly as he swallowed.
“That looks better,” the Facilitator said with satisfaction
as Bluestone’s face became slack and attentive. “Now,
what else have you for me?”
“The results from the California testing center,” the
Deputy replied as he handed over the first set of reports.
The Facilitator removed a pair of thick-framed reading
glasses from the inside pocket of his suit coat. He
squinted a bit and adjusted the ear pieces more comfortably
before opening the folder, skimming the data as his
aide summarized.
“73% have internalized the subliminal voting recommendations
we inserted in radio and television advertisements,”
the Deputy reported without consulting his notes.
“2% were high responders and have been . . . eh . . . convinced
to under go further testing. One of those was a
18
rather prominent celebrity.”
“What type of celebrity?” As a rule, the Facilitator
regarded celebrities as useful nuisances and his voice reflected
his distaste. “Not one of those fluff-brained tabloid
personalities, I hope.”
The Deputy, aware of his superior’s prejudice, pushed
onward. “No sir, an actor. I think you’ll be rather pleased.”
He handed over another folder. Inside, an 8 X 10 glossy
head shot of a face already world famous smiled infectiously
out at them.
The Facilitator raised an eyebrow as he reviewed the
file. “Excellent. Really, this is quite a surprise. Just look at
that smile, it reeks sincerity. If he pans out, he’ll be a wonderful
recruiting tool for the Pyramid project.” He smiled.
“Investing in that science fiction writer and his scheme
was a stroke of brilliance.”
The Deputy smiled modestly. “It’s kind of you to
say, sir.”
The Facilitator waved a hand in the air in a ‘don’t
mention it’ sort of way. “What else have you got?” He
looked away from the reports and the monitors at his
Deputy, a rather plain looking man whose most distinguishing
feature was he hadn’t any.
More files were passed over. “Here are the law enforcement
recruit evaluations; the state summaries by division
in the blue folder, federal in white. The top sheet is
the list of candidates we should consider monitoring for
further evaluation.”
The Facilitator nodded. The distribution patterns were
quite different from those found in the general population.
There was a much higher degree of pragmatism
among those who were drawn into law enforcement. Once
you got past the high ideals and the twaddle about ‘justice
for all’ it was quite easy to explain how the world really
worked.
“I’ll go over this and give you my decisions later on
which candidates to invite to next month’s orientation session.”
The Facilitator glanced at the clock and back at the
class room monitor. “Anything else before we begin the
next phase of the training session?”
“Yes, there is one thing. A gentleman has come to my
attention. He’s been subtle about it, but he’s made it clear
he’s more than interested in joining our ranks.”
“That’s rather impertinent. This is, after all, a secret
society.”
The Deputy straightened a fraction taller, shifting his
weight from foot to foot. “If you’ll forgive me sir, it’s an
open secret if one knows how to look. And the gentleman
in question is quite astute. He’s also quite resourceful,”

continued the Deputy, “quite determined and quite rich.”
The Facilitator pursed his lips and nodded, satisfied
both with the reply and the adjustments he’d made to
the conditioning stimuli. “All right, we’ll keep an eye on
him. No need to rush things however. Just because he’s
rich and bright, doesn’t mean he’s necessarily Illuminati
material.”
“No, of course not.” The Deputy shook his head as
he abruptly cut the audio feed. Even after years of counterconditioning
he still had difficulty fighting the effects of
the deep induction training.
The Facilitator noted his assistant’s reaction automatically.
He was useless as a testing proctor, but he did his
other tasks admirably. “What are his other interests, this
young Turk of yours? I mean, aside from making money?”
Fully recovered, the Deputy promptly replied, “He
has a rather intense interest in antiquities. As you may recall,
three weeks ago Acquisitions sent me to the auction at the
Gunderson Gallery. We entered into a bidding war over a
rather significant piece of Phoenician parchment. I won,
barely. We had a rematch last night at the Broadmoor.
That’s when he made his intentions known.”
The Facilitator made a thoughtful noise. However, his
attention was now fully engaged on the group currently
under evaluation. “Very good, Mr. Bluestone has caught
up with the rest of the class. Have the proctors escort the
group to the target range if you please.”
The Deputy murmured into the phone. On the classroom
display, four neatly dressed men entered the room.
With a prompt from the instructor, the group rose in unison
from their chairs. The display shifted as cameras followed
the progress of the group down a series of hallways,
to a service elevator and finally to a shooting range.
The agents fell into position one per alley and at a prompting
from their handlers applied shooting glasses and ear
muffs. They stood quietly in parade rest.
The Facilitator donned a headset and cued the microphone.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid we have a problem.
Enemy agents have entered the building. You are in
grave danger. You must shoot to kill. Do not hesitate. You
must neutralize the threat without hesitation.”
“Illuminate targets.” At the end of each alley, lifelike
waxworks figures appeared. “Shooters, acquire targets and
fire at will.”
The agents picked up their guns. The harsh sound of
the slides being pulled and retracting echoed overhead from
the speakers and the shooters fell into regulation stance.
The ping of ejecting cartridges filled the room as the agents
emptied their guns.
20
All except for the shooter in the second lane; he stood
frozen, his gun pointed, arms locked in a rigid ‘V’. Finally,
he lowered his gun and whined, “I can’t do it. I won’t
shoot Elvis, even if he is singing Viva Las Vegas.”
The shooters in the lanes to either side shifted uneasily.
The Facilitator’s assistant muttered a curse as he moved to
the monitoring station, selected the correct channel and
punched up hard copy. The Facilitator opened a line to
the proctors who were already moving into position.
“Remove Shooter 2.” The Facilitator’s voice was curt,
his hand already reaching for the EEG and other biometric
results. “Take him to Surveillance B and hold him there.”
Two proctors flanked Bluestone. One put a comforting
arm around the young man’s shoulders as the other
disarmed him, and together they led him from the room.
The other agents continued to fire methodically at life
size replicas of jolly cartoon figures. The remnants of the
Rat Pack and other noted entertainers lay in macabre disarray
at their feet.
The Facilitator toggled a switch and a second display
flickered to life. In the hallway outside the range, one of
the proctors produced a syringe from his pocket. At that
moment Bluestone staggered, turned his head and noticed
the syringe. He twisted out of the proctor’s grasp
and bolted down the hallway. The proctors lunged after
him.
“Well, well. Subject Bluestone is turning into an interesting
problem.”
Despite the complications this would inevitably make
in the scheduling, the Deputy thought that the Facilitator
sounded mildly amused. “Shall I subdue him, sir?”
The Facilitator brought up the infrared tracking system
and watched a series of dots move rapidly through a
schematic of the hotel. “Not just yet. He can’t get out of
the building and we may as well test his resourcefulness.
Tell the proctors to continue the pursuit.”
* * *
Matt ran blindly down the hallway, fueled by primal
survival instinct. His legs were heavy and uncooperative.
He felt like he was lumbering rather than sprinting. His
mind was a whirl of panic and confusion. He didn’t know
where he was, why he was there or who that guy with the
needle was. All he did know was he was in trouble and he
needed to get out of there quick.
He was disoriented, hungry, and from the muddy taste
in his mouth and the raging headache, he suspected he’d
already been drugged.

“But why?”
The monologue was forced back inside his skull as he
no longer had the breath to speculate and run at the same
time.
He passed doorway after doorway, his hopes dwindling
as the end of the corridor loomed closer. An exit
sign hung crookedly over a stairwell access and he hurtled
himself against it, counting himself lucky it wasn’t locked.
He tripped and stumbled his way down the stairs, the
darkness a welcome relief to his pounding head though it
increased the risk of falling. The others, whoever they were,
were half a flight behind him and closing fast.
“Think, Bluestone, think!”
At the next landing he opened the service door as
quietly as he could and found himself in another stairwell.
He grimaced and climbed upwards this time; up and away
from his pursuers. He paused in the darkness, listening.
One set of footsteps faded. The goons had decided to
split up. Good. In darkness the odds were evened. He
crouched, making himself even smaller. When his opponent
came within range he lashed out with as savage a kick
as he could muster, given his wobbling and off-balance
state. It wouldn’t have won him any prizes at the Academy,
but it was good enough. The thug went down with a
cry and Matt took to his feet and ran.
He dead-ended at another doorway, yanked it open
and plunged through without looking. Gravity reversed.
Matt cried out in panic as he fell up through the shaft,
propelled on a column of air. The roof was growing
closer by the second. He was going to die without a clue
as to why, he thought morosely.
A ledge appeared, perhaps another doorway. Short
of options, Matt flung himself off the invisible support
and grabbed hold. His hands protested and his arms
shrieked in agony as he hung suspended. He threw his leg
up and over the ledge and clung to the doorknob as he
inched himself erect. The knob turned in his hand and
picking a direction at random, he ran.
* * *
“Impressive,” remarked the Facilitator as he watched
Bluestone clear the threshold of the freefall column. He
turned to his assistant. “Do you know what we have here?”
The Deputy glowered at the clock. “A scheduling nightmare,
sir?”
“No, no,” he scolded. “It’s an opportunity. Instruct
the proctors we have a new exercise for the trainees. Have
the armory issue stun guns. Instruct the agents Agent Blue-
21
stone has been co-opted and is under enemy control. They
are to find him and shoot to kill.”
* * *
Matt held his breath as the elevator at the end of the
latest in a series of endless hallways opened.
Relief flooded through him as five members of his
training class emerged, the guy from Fish and Wildlife at
point. The other agents were armed and wearing headsets.
Something was up, he told himself. He moved to break
cover, then froze as the leader said, “Find Bluestone.”
Matt ducked, barely in time, into a narrow recess and
cowered behind a large Egyptian urn. Fish and Wildlife
pumped his hand in a move out signal and the group
trotted swiftly down the corridor and disappeared around
a bend.
“Why is everybody chasing me? What have I done?”
Matt muttered. “And why did they want me to shoot
Elvis?”
He took a deep breath, and tried to force a calm he
didn’t feel as he analyzed his situation. He wasn’t Alice,
and this certainly wasn’t Wonderland, but he felt like he’d
fallen down the rabbit hole just the same.
Everything that had happened up to his coming-to in
that hallway had been off, he realized. Individually, the
alarm and evacuation, the lousy transport, the bad donuts,
the overheated lecture room with its weird wallpaper, were
just minor annoyances, but together they started adding
up to something a lot more sinister.
Whatever was going on, he couldn’t sit here any longer
and worry about it. People were after him. He had to get
out. Matt rose slowly, considering his options. The elevator
call chimed. He collapsed behind the urn once more.
A second group of trainees spilled out of the lift.
They fanned out down the corridor blocking his escape
route. If he didn’t move now he was screwed and
he knew it. He looked upward and smiled. Above his
head was a fire alarm, the old-fashioned type tied straight
to the sprinkler system. With a prayer to anyone who would
listen, he reached up and pulled the lever.
A claxon rang out. Stale water poured from the overhead
sprinkler heads. The agents fell into close ranks blocking
the stairwell. Matt bent his head and ran as hard and
fast as his exhausted legs would carry him, bowling his
classmates over like ninepins. He shouldered his way
through the doorway, missed the first three steps and
wondered if he’d ever see daylight again as the thunder of

footsteps bore down on him.
* * *
“That was unexpected.” The Deputy killed the fire
suppression system and frowned as he contemplated the
cleaning expense.
He looked at the clock and despaired for the day’s
itinerary. Two rather delicate and rather pressing appointments
that required the Facilitator’s personal attention
would have to be rescheduled. He dialed the numbers
and gave instructions to scrub the replacement of the Finance
Director’s driver and moved the meeting with the
gentleman from the U.N to the following evening.
The monitor showed Bluestone’s heat signature moving
rapidly through the sector of the facility nicknamed
the ‘Funhouse’. A squad of his fellow trainees still followed
in hot pursuit.
* * *
Matt backtracked and climbed two more floors, then
ducked through another service door. He emerged in a
window-lined hallway. He paused long enough to look
out and saw his own reflection staring back.
“Who would put a mirror in a window?”
He filed the puzzle away for later and ran, as he felt,
rather than heard his fellow agents. He tried the third door
he came to, trusting to luck that it’d be open, and grinned
like a maniac when he was proved right. His elation evaporated
as the others appeared, fanned out and began testing
the doorknobs. They were all unlocked on this level, and
the squad began a room to room search.
Matt pushed the door shut and bolted it behind him.
He turned and surveyed the room for options and found
he was in an old-fashioned hotel single, deserted and empty
except for the equally old-fashioned bedroom furnishings.
He ran across to the window and saw nothing. He
stood back on his heels, reached out a hand and touched
glass. He pressed his nose against the pane. It was cool. It
was real. It was opaque. It wasn’t doing him any good. He
looked around for something heavy and found it. He
hefted a solid mahogany chair and swung it at the window.
He staggered back under the impact, took a deep
breath and tried again. The chair splintered in his hands.
Behind him the door rattled and there was a triumphant
shout. He glanced frantically around and ran to the
bed. He dropped to his knees and swore as he found that
it sat on a heavy frame that was flush to the ground. He
22
ran to the closet as the door frame rattled and splintered.
There was a grunt of effort and a sickening rending sound
as the door frame gave way completely.
Two burly CIA agents took up positions on either
side of the doorway blocking his escape. Bates, the cute
blonde agent Matt had invited to lunch several lifetimes
ago, pulled a pistol from her hip and drew down on him.
She looked at him dispassionately, her eyes vacant as she
fired.
Pain blossomed in his chest. Even as he lost consciousness
he wondered, ‘Why?’
* * *
“What do you see?”
Matt cringed as the disembodied voice renewed its
relentless questioning. His eyes were bleary and bloodshot
and he fought to focus at the photograph in front of him.
“It’s an orange. A naval orange. Just like it was the last time
you showed it to me.”
“Look again,” the voice commanded. “Are you quite
certain it isn’t a globe?”
It was a very reasonable sort of voice, Matt thought,
and he wanted to agree with it, but even if he squinted
when he stared at the picture on the wall all he saw was
fruit. “Look, it’s round, but that’s not a globe. Sorry.”
“Look again.”
Matt did his best, but no matter how hard he squinted
or cocked his head all he saw was an orange. “No, sorry,
it’s still an orange. But if it’ll make you happy and I can get
some sleep, we’ll agree that in your world it’s a globe. Will
that work for you?”
It must have, because the room went black and Matt
lost consciousness again.
* * *
He woke up in a hospital bed. His chest felt bruised
and his head felt like he’d had his brains beaten against a
large rock.
Cautiously, he opened his eyes. A female face swam
into view. He blinked hard and opened his eyes again.
Brenda Bates smiled down on him.
“Get away from me!” he yelled as he rolled painfully
out of the bed and crouched in a defensive pose.
“Whoa, there tiger, take it easy,” she said, backing away.
She picked up a thin cotton robe and tossed it at him.
“If you’re going for a walk you might want to put
something on.”

Matt glanced down at himself and blushed as he realized
he was wearing an open backed hospital gown. He
rammed his arms into the robe and cinched the belt. At
least he’d have his dignity intact if he could manage another
escape.
At the sound of the disturbance, a male nurse hustled
in followed closely by the attending physician. The doctor
wasn’t much older than Matt and he looked harried and
tired.
“Mr. Bluestone, you’re safe,” said the doctor.
At a glance from the nurse, Agent Bates withdrew
and closed the door behind her.
“Why should I believe you?” Matt’s gaze flitted to the
nurse.
The doctor, realizing the perceived threat of his more
muscular companion, dismissed him with another curt nod.
“It’s okay, Jenkins. I can take it from here.”
The nurse also withdrew, and Matt relaxed a fraction.
The sudden surge of adrenaline was already starting to
dissipate, and his knees wobbled unsteadily.
“Please, Mr. Bluestone. I promise you’ll come to no
harm. I’m Doctor Perkins and you’re currently at Columbia
Pres recovering from injuries sustained during a street
altercation.”
Matt leaned against the bed, kaleidoscope fragments
of memory tormenting him. “Uh uh, pal, you’re not going
to try that on me. I was in a fight all right but it wasn’t
on any street. Who are you people?”
Perkins unclipped his hospital identification badge
from the pocket of his lab coat, thought about it for a
second, and dug into his hip pocket, producing a wallet.
He tossed both of them onto the bed.
Matt scooped up the identification, and with a shove
propelled himself the short distance across the room to
look out the window; a real window. Granted, the glass
was the security kind with wires in it, but he could see
through, down onto the street and a broad expanse of
green grass and trees beyond. When he looked up, he could
see the hospital sign white with red letters and the symbol
of a caduceus.
He glanced at the badge. It looked real enough, but
anybody with a camera and a laminating machine could
fake identification. He tossed it back onto the bed and
opened the wallet. Inside he found a drivers license, a couple
of credit cards, photos of a woman and a cocker spaniel
and a week’s worth of receipts for gasoline and hospital
cafeteria lunches.
“Just for arguments sake, let’s say I believe you. Why
don’t you give me your version of what allegedly hap-
23
pened to me?”
Perkins pulled up the blue plastic chair abandoned by
Agent Bates and sat down, careful to keep his distance
from his patient. Matt propped himself against the window
realizing that although the doctor probably was who
he said he was, he still wasn’t ready to completely drop his
guard.
“I’m afraid, Mr. Bluestone, that you’ve had a very
rough couple of days and we’re partly to blame for that,”
Perkins said.
Matt crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m listening.”
“You were admitted three days ago after you participated
in the foot pursuit of a mugger. Agent Bates was
with you, but she dropped out of the chase to flag down
a beat cop. By the time they’d caught up, they found you in
an alley some blocks away. The mugger was nowhere to
be seen and you were out cold. You’d sustained injuries to
your head, shoulder and chest.”
Matt’s vision alternately faded and sharpened in and
out of focus as he listened to the litany of injuries he’d
sustained at the hands of his assailant. Fragments of
memory continued to play on the edges of his mind, a
hotel corridor melding into a city street and back again.
“You were stabilized on the scene by paramedics and
transported here. You were initially seen by the Emergency
Department, but you sustained a concussion and
were drifting in and out of consciousness. You were then
moved upstairs for observation and further treatment.”
Dr Perkins looked down at his shoes and Matt noticed
the leather was scuffed and worn. He seemed embarrassed
and took a deep breath before continuing.
“Unfortunately, there was a pharmacy error and you
were given the medication for another patient. I’m afraid,
coupled with the head injuries you sustained it caused you
to hallucinate.”
“Hallucinate,” Matt said skeptically. “Are you trying to
tell me I’ve been out of my head? That I’ve imagined
everything that happened to me since I came-to in that
hotel hallway?”
Perkins sighed, as if thinking how patients with head
injuries could be so stubborn at times. “Unless you fell
asleep in class, Mr. Bluestone, the only time you lost consciousness
was in that alleyway. Your colleague in the corridor
can confirm the circumstances of your injuries. You
were on your way to lunch after a seminar. Shall I get
her?”
Matt shook his head “She shot me!” As he tapped his
sternum the illogic of the situation crept over him. He
loosened the robe and felt gingerly under the thin fabric

of the hospital gown. His chest was tender and his muscles
were sore, but according to the doctor, he’d been in a
fight.
“You were kicked in the chest with a heavy boot. I’m
afraid the police confiscated your shirt as evidence.” Doctor
Perkins felt about in his lab coat pockets and then
produced a business card. “The detective wants your statement
when you’re feeling up to it.”
Matt suddenly felt very, very tired. Touching his chest
had brought back a tactile memory of being struck, hard.
His knees sagged out from under him. The doctor caught
him, not very gracefully, and helped him back into bed.
* * *
At the Hotel Cabal, the Facilitator worked at his desk,
writing reports and composing his summary of the sleeper
indoctrination.
He was happy to note that fourteen candidates could
be added to the program. One washout had his memory
modified. The failure’s file, he appended to his report to
the Selection Committee.
He set the paperwork aside and picked up an orange,
examining it. It was round, but it was not a globe. Mr.
Bluestone bore watching, he decided, even if the Selection
committee disagreed with his initial assessment.
It was possible the Illuminati could use another industrialist.
It was certain they needed a man who insisted on
seeing the world exactly for what it was.
* * *
24

December 2 nd , 1930
Mace Malone swore under his breath as he
fiddled with the controls for the monitor, trying to
bring back the image he’d just been looking at; the
damn thing had gone on the fritz again.
Those inventors Charles Jenkins and John Baird
might be crowing to the world that this new ‘television’
would be all the rage someday, but he doubted
that the general public would ever be interested in it.
Why would people pay huge sums of money for a
device that required constant fiddling to stay operational,
and when it was working it gave you a picture
hardly bigger than the palm of your hand, images of
such poor quality that they made the worst daguerreotype
photo look good in comparison? No,
television was an interesting novelty, but as entertainment,
it would never beat an evening at the theater.
Still, it was proving to be a useful device indeed,
inside the Illuminati’s new facility, the Hotel Cabal.
The others had been right, though Mace was loath to
admit it. Isolating and thoroughly disorienting a man
for prolonged periods was proving to be just as effective
at breaking his will as good old-fashioned
physical torture.
The Hotel Cabal had been designed with disorientation
in mind, with all its halls and rooms designed
to fool the senses and lead men on paths to nowhere,
frequently dangling the illusion of escape in front of
them but never delivering them from evil. But key to
the isolation part of the equation was being able to
see and hear the interrogation subject at all times
without letting him see or hear you, which is where
all the television cameras installed in all the rooms
came into play.
He thumped the side of the monitor again, and
finally the picture came back, to show him what he’d
been looking at earlier: the reporter Christopher
Mansfield, a man who’d presented quite a dapper
image to the world three days ago. Today he was
looking far different; the scruffy look of his unshaven
cheeks and rumpled clothing wasn’t nearly as unsettling
as the hollow stare in his eyes, as he rocked end-
25
lessly back and forth in the corner he’d wedged himself
into.
Mansfield had brought himself to the attention
of the Illuminati with the questions he’d been asking,
and the people he’d been asking questions of. He had
learned of the Illuminati somehow, and had been trying
to find out more about them and how they ran
the world’s affairs. Over the centuries, other people
had also discovered the organization’s existence. And
if they weren’t people that the Illuminati found useful
for their own purposes, those people were always
eliminated, by various means that couldn’t be
traced back to them.
As Mansfield was a cub reporter for the Newark
Evening News, who was already known among his
peers at the newspaper for his dedication to the truth
and the public’s right to know about affairs that affected
their well-being, there was no question that he
would be put to death as soon as convenient. But for
the last hundred years or so, the policy had been to
interrogate people quite thoroughly before killing
them.
Having broken the wills of dozens of people,
back when he’d been good buddies with Dominic
Dracon and helping to run New York’s underworld,
Mace judged by what he was seeing that Mansfield
had cracked like an egg, and was now ripe for
questioning.
He flipped a toggle switch to activate the microphone
for that room, and said pleasantly, “Mr.
Mansfield?”
On the grainy monitor, Christopher Mansfield
jerked. “Wh-who’s there?”
“Oh, I might be a friend to you, Mr. Mansfield.
Or I might not be a friend at all; it rather depends on
what you have to say to me.”
“S-say about what? What do you want to talk
about? I-I’ll say anything, just keep talking to me!
Don’t leave me here alone!”
Mace shook his head and grinned; this really was
too easy. In the past, he’d sometimes had to work
men over for hours, with brass knuckles and various
other tools, to get them sounding so cooperative.

This way might take longer, but it was much less tiring for
him, and he didn’t have to worry about blood spatters on
his clothing either.
“My dear Mr. Mansfield, of course I’ll keep talking to
you. But you’ll have to carry your half of the conversation,
you know. Why don’t you start by telling me what
you know about the Illuminati? Starting with how you’d
heard of them in the first place . . .”
Twelve hours later, after coming back from disposing
of the body, Mace began writing up his report for the
Grandmaster.
He wondered idly about this fellow named Herbert
Whitmore, who had told Mansfield about the Illuminati
as a child. Mansfield had said that Whitmore disappeared
soon after telling young Christopher his tales and suspicions,
and Mace wondered if his predecessor in the Illuminati
had had something to do with that.
Well, so long as both men were dead now, and the file
of information that had been in Mansfield’s desk at the
newspaper had been neatly tidied away, there was no reason
to worry about exposure anymore.
August 3 rd , 1949
* * *
Humming, Thomas Snow flicked a switch on the control
board, and the hydraulics and gears under room #417
of the Hotel Cabal came to life. The door had already
been sealed, preventing their guest’s escape; now the room
began rotating. At first slowly; so slowly that the man
trapped inside, one Evan Summers by name, might not
even realize what was going on and why his balance was
suddenly off.
“Here we go ’round the mulberry bush, the mulberry
bush, the mulberry bush,” Thomas sang under his breath
as he increased the speed of rotation.
Not enough for the centrifugal force to throw Mr.
Summers against the wall, but enough to make him quite
dizzy, until he was begging for mercy. Thomas grinned as
he heard the cries coming through the speaker; he enjoyed
his work for the Illuminati, but he so rarely got a chance to
really play with people . . .
Three days later, while waiting for pickup of the
corpse, Thomas phoned in his report; reading out all the
notes he’d taken during the interrogation. He could almost
hear Mace Malone frowning on the other end of the line.
“You said the original source’s name was Christopher
Mansfield?” Malone demanded.
26
“Yes, but according to Summers, the man disappeared
nearly two decades ago; not long after first telling him
about the Illuminati.”
“Of course he did; I ‘disappeared’ him myself.” Malone
snorted. “But that’s twice now that this has happened; we
eliminate one threat to our privacy, but his neighbor’s kid
has already heard too much, and starts investigating himself
years later. That has to stop . . .”
Thomas smiled. “Say no more, sir. I’ll take care of it.”
Five days later, the newspaper headlines for Mr. Summers’
hometown spoke of the worst apartment building
fire in decades. Nearly fifty men, women and children had
died in the tragedy. Arson was suspected, but could not
be proven at that time.
May 9 th , 1976
* * *
In his assumed identity of Gilford Gamesherd, Mace
sighed and bowed his head as he visited Flo’s resting place,
and paid his respects to the only woman who had ever
captured his heart.
He was a man of few regrets, but not being able to
take Flo with him into his forced retirement from New
York’s underworld was one of them. She’d been so full
of life, a regular firecracker; he’d never had a dull day with
her. But that vibrancy had been why he had to leave her
behind; no one who met her could ever forget her cheerily
beautiful face, that brassy laugh of hers, and the way
she sashayed down the sidewalk, brightening even the dreariest
rainy day . . . she could never just fade away into the
faceless crowds, the way he had. So he’d faked his death
and left her behind, but he could never forget her.
After leaving the cemetery behind, he got his mind
back on business. Malloy Davidson had called from the
Hotel Cabal, saying their latest ‘guest’ had said something
that Mace might be interested in . . .
Ten hours later, Mace scowled as he grabbed the microphone
away from Malloy and spoke into it, while glaring
at the man on the monitor screen. “Tell us again: how
did you learn of Evan Summers? When did you meet
him?”
“I’m telling you, I never met the guy!” Zach Yarbrough
babbled, twitching in time with the flashing strobe lights.
“The first time I ever heard of him was the package that
came to my house, addressed to ‘Current Occupant’!”
“And what was in that package?”
“Papers! A stack of papers about the Illuminati, in-

formation about signs of the organization, people who
had been in it and what they’d done over the centuries!”
“Is that all?”
“And a letter! A letter from Summers saying that he’d
prepared the package as a failsafe! His lawyer had instructions
to mail it out ten years after he either died, or went
missing for more than a year. I wish I’d never opened it,
just thrown it into the fireplace and burned everything!
Please!”
Mace’s scowl grew deeper as he covered the microphone
for a moment. “That Summers was an even more
clever bastard than we thought.” Then he uncovered the
microphone again. “And have you prepared any such
failsafes, Mr. Yarbrough?”
The next few days were tense. But finally Mace was
able to report to his superiors.
“We took care of Mr. Yarbrough, his fiancée and his
attorney, and recovered all four of the packages of potentially
damaging information about us. There should be
nothing more to worry about.”
February 17 th , 1988
* * *
“This time, we won’t miss anything,” Mace muttered
as he meticulously gave all the rooms of the Hotel Cabal
an operational check.
It had been a few years since they’d had reason to use
the hotel, and he wanted to be sure that everything was in
working order; preparing for their next ‘guest.’ Who would
this time be an agent of the FBI, one who’d been asking
too many questions of too many people in his spare time.
Usually, it was bad policy to disappear an agent of
law enforcement; their brethren tended to take it personally,
and draw even more attention the Illuminati did not
want. But Mace had been assured that a plausible story
had already been created to cover the man’s disappearance;
something about Colombian drug lords, if he recalled
correctly. At the time, he’d been far more preoccupied
with the information that had already been learned:
This man had gotten his start in investigating the Illuminati
from evidence given to him by the grandmother
of a former ‘guest,’ Zach Yarbrough. The old witch had
somehow gotten her hands on one of those packages of
damaging information that her grandson had created, without
Yarbrough even knowing of her plans, and made a
copy of it! Years later, after one of her neighbors in the
retirement home had bragged about her grandson the FBI
27
agent, the old hag had slipped the agent the package, begging
him to bring her own grandson’s killers to justice.
Well, this time Mace would personally make sure every
last possible leak was plugged. He’d crack that agent
like an eggshell, then keep him babbling until he’d given
them a long list of everyone he’d ever known, and everything
he’d ever done. Once he had the list of names, he’d
let others worry about how to carry out the finer details
of staging all the ‘accidents’ and ‘suicides’ that might be
required.
The dozen or so most likely people to have received
information about the Illuminati, those who might be able
to act on that information, Mace would submit to the
Grandmaster as the Hotel’s next guest list. Quietly capturing
and then interrogating all of them would take a long
time, perhaps even months. But this time, Mace would
make certain that the chain of investigation started nearly a
century ago, came to an abrupt and painful end.
The phone rang just as he finished checking over the
eighth floor, and he answered it while making a note to
service the wall-moving mechanisms in room 813.
“Yes? . . . Good evening, sir; I was just making sure
everything’s ready for our next ‘guest.’ . . . What, sir? Cancelled?
. . . Don’t tell me some common criminal shot him
before we could interrogate him . . .”
On the other end of the line, the Grandmaster said,
“No, not at all. He’s in good health . . . and I prefer him to
stay that way for the foreseeable future.”
“. . . May I ask why, sir?”
“Causing any of this particular line of investigators to
disappear has not eliminated the threat they pose to the
organization. So instead of ‘disappearing’ this one . . . we’re
going to discredit him. The one who’s been watching him is
going to start actively handling him; becoming good friends,
a confidant. He’ll learn of every possible lead the agent
uncovers, anything that might lead to the Illuminati, then
make sure it doesn’t.” The Grandmaster paused, and Mace
could sense him smiling. He added, “Perhaps this man will
be useful to us after all, in helping us cover our tracks
better.”
“And if he gets too close, sir? Not everything we do
can be hidden, from those who know how and where to
look for patterns . . .”
“If he gets too close, as I already said, we discredit
him. Make him out to be a raving loony, who sees conspiracy
theories under every bush, and aliens in the trees.
The groundwork for that will be laid over the next few
months; once it’s in place, we’ll be able to have him fired
from the FBI at a moment’s notice if he ever gets too

close. If he disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances,
someone might take his investigations seriously.
But if he’s shown to all the world as a raving loony, no
one will take him seriously at all; a far more effective end
to the threat.”
“Yes, sir.” Mace sighed, and after he hung up, he began
shutting down the facility.
* * *
Hundreds of miles away in Washington DC, Matt
Bluestone walked into the office to find his partner frowning.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing really, just a minor detail; our reservations
in New York got cancelled.” Martin Hacker replaced his
frown with a smile. “But hey, this gives me a good excuse
to upgrade to better quality rooms at another hotel; I can
tell the bean-counters they’re all that’s available. In the meantime,
why don’t we go out to dinner? There’s a new Thai
restaurant just started up, not six blocks away from here.
C’mon, I’ll even let you tell me more about those ‘Imaginati’
guys.”
“That’s Illuminati, and they’re not imaginary! They exist,
as real as you and me, and one of these days I’m going to
prove it!”
“Suuure you are. Tell you what, Matt, you keep
telling me about them, and one of these days I might
believe you . . .”
* * *
28

The knob turned, and with it came the promise
of freedom. A promise that was dashed as he swung
open the elaborate oak door to reveal a wall of
cinderblocks.
With a growl to rival those of the demons pursuing
him, Jon Canmore flung himself forward, bare
fists beating against the rough stone. He succeeded
only in scraping his hands, leaving small red streaks
of blood against the slate gray of the barrier.
They’re getting closer . . .
In the few moments remaining before the creatures
on his heels picked up his scent once again, Jon
Canmore tried to recall how he’d gotten here in the
first place.
24 Hours Ago
* * *
It started the night before, at Saint Damien’s. The
night he’d finally accepted what gargoyles truly were.
It was a truth he’d been unwilling to accept sixteen
years ago as he’d stared in numb horror at the shattered
corpse of his father, with the Demon’s mocking
laughter ringing in his ears. Though the laughter
had plagued his dreams for many nights as he grew
into adulthood, he still had not been able to see what
his elder brother had known all along.
No, it took nearly losing Jason for Jon to understand
that not just the Demon, but the entire gargoyle
race was a threat. And even when it seemed like he’d
gotten Jason back, the elder Canmore was then seriously
wounded. All because of the monster called
Goliath.
Murdered father, crippled brother. Even his sister
had refused to come with Jon, instead staying
behind to help those unholy creatures. So for the first
time in his life, he was alone. Adrift. Cast away.
He’d been in the process of rooting through one
of the safe houses that he and his siblings had set up,
somewhere on the docks in Queens, when he’d found
the card in the pocket of Jason’s jacket. Briefly, he’d
remembered a conversation with Jason shortly after
29
the Hunters had arrived in Manhattan. Jason had gone
alone to meet with someone. Someone who claimed
to have friends that they said could offer assistance
and resources far beyond what the Hunters already
had.
Naturally, his brother turned down the offer.
“Don’t forget what father told us, Jon,” Jason had
explained when he returned from the meeting. “It’s
our destiny. Our birthright as Canmores. To accept
the kind of help that they’re offering would mean
making the hunt a public crusade. To do that would
disgrace not only father’s memory, but all who came
before him, whether they fell at the Demon’s hands,
or merely spent their lives in search of her.”
Our birthright. Jon had taken a moment to reflect
on those words. It was no longer about family anymore.
Both of his immediate family, all he’d had since
their father’s murder, had forsaken the hunt. He was
alone now.
It was not a feeling he’d wanted to hold onto. So
he’d dialed the number on the card. He recalled how
there had been a few moments of silence on the other
end of the phone, after Jon had given his name. Then,
a voice: “Ummm, yes, Mr. Canmore. We’d heard what
happened to your siblings. It was most . . . unfortunate.
Both myself and the people I work for extend
our deepest . . .”
“I didn’t call for pity,” Jon had cut them off.
“Just tell me one thing: the offer you made Jason the
other day. Does it still stand?”
Another pause. Then, he thought, a whispered
conversation, or maybe it was just the static on the
line. Finally: “I think we can come to an arrangement.
But not over the phone. Write down the following
address and meet me there tonight, just after dusk.”
Jon checked the address after hanging up the
phone. Hotel Cabal. It was not a place he’d ever heard
of. But then, he’d spent most of his life in Europe.
And it was a hotel. So it sounded public enough.
* * *

Dusk, an indeterminate amount of time ago
He’d come to this address at the appointed time. But
did not get the meeting he’d hoped for. The lobby was
elegant, but deserted. Buttery leather sofas without occupants
and polished metal baggage caddies empty of cargo
stretched out before him. Jon had made his way across
the immaculate marble floor to the front desk, and rang
the gleaming silver bell.
The sound seemed to echo through the cavernous
lobby, shaking the crystal chandeliers overhead. Jon
Canmore stared thoughtfully up at them for a moment,
and then the lights within them went dead. Jon glanced
hurriedly around, though it was wasted effort. He couldn’t
see more than a foot in front of him. He wondered why
no lights from the city were filtering in through the windows.
Then he remembered, when he’d first come through
the revolving door, that he hadn’t noticed any windows.
He should have taken that as a bad sign. He cursed
himself for it as he looked through his jacket pocket for a
lighter. As he was searching, he became aware of a faint
glow behind him . . . no, more than one . . . which bathed
his surroundings in bland white and harsh crimson.
He turned, momentarily relieved. Then cursed himself
for the second time in as many minutes as he brought
his head round. Even before he looked towards the lights,
he should have been able to recognize their source.
Two sets of gargoyle eyes, one male and one female,
regarded him. By the light of their cold glare, Jon was
able to identify them. One was the Demon who had taken
his father. The other was the monster responsible for Jason’s
current state.
Fortunately, Jon had come prepared. Still with his hand
in his jacket, he quickly found Jason’s old gun, closed his
fingers around the handle. Though his own eyes could not
glow, they still burned with an intense hatred as Jon brought
the weapon out. He took aim at his enemies, at those two
most loathsome members of an unholy race, and fired.
The gunshots reverberating through the lobby
drowned out his snarl of rage. The bullets, however,
seemed to have no effect. The monsters did not flinch,
their muscular bodies absorbing the hot slugs without even
drawing blood. It was only when the trigger began to
click that Jon realized his foes were still standing.
Panic took him as he let the gun slip from his fingers.
More sorcery? His throat dried as both creatures began to
laugh, louder than the Demon ever had in his nightmares,
mocking peals of laughter that echoed through the darkened
lobby.
30
He turned on his heels, trying to flee his enemies, though
he knew that would be useless. The books his father had
made them read, passed down from their ancestors, said
that these monsters could see in the dark with clarity to
rival a cat’s vision. What chance did he have? Bereft of
weapons, armor, his family, he was adrift. Alone. Once
more, he couldn’t help but recall the warmth, the sense of
belonging, he’d been cast away from . . .
Now
* * *
How long have I been running? Jon Canmore wondered.
Like a blind rat through a maze, he’d been hunted by
these beasts. They’d blocked the way he’d come in through
the lobby, so Jon had frantically scrambled through the
darkness in search of an elevator or another exit, losing
track of how many times he’d stumbled over furniture or
stairs.
It may have just been his imagination, but it felt almost
like the very structure of the hotel was working against
him. It was not just the way the sealed doors tantalized
him with the hope of escape, but it almost felt like someone
or thing kept throwing up furniture or other obstacles
for him to trip over whenever it felt like he was gaining
ground from the monsters.
Still, he’d kept running. Though he’d lost all sense of
time, he fled as if the legions of Hell pursued. As far as he
was concerned, they did.
Now, as he put his back to the concrete wall and
slumped down, drawing his knees up towards his shoulders,
he started to wonder why.
They’ll catch me sooner or later, he thought. And why should
he try to stop them? They’d taken everything from him.
His father was dead, and the two other people that had
comprised his world for much of his life had thrown in
their lot with the beasts responsible He’d finally seen what
Jason had always known, but it was knowledge gained
too late . . .
The footfalls of talons against the plush carpeting could
faintly be heard up the corridor, to his right.
For some reason, the sound ignited a spark within
him. No! He wasn’t alone! He couldn’t be. As long as he
still possessed a desire to stand up against these creatures,
to stop them from doing to others what they’d inflicted
on him, he was never alone.
As long as there’s breath in me, I can make them pay for their
crimes against me! Justice for Dad! Justice for Jason!

He raised his head, in time to see the demons round
the corner. They paused in their approach, regarding him
by the light of their eyes. Then they both began to laugh
again, the deep maniacal bass rumble of the lavender
gargoyle’s laughter mixing with the sultry blood-honey of
the Demon’s.
This time, Jon would not let himself be afraid. Instead,
their laughing only stoked the fires of his hatred, his
desire for justice. Emitting a scream that seemed to mirror
a gargoyle’s roar with its intensity, Jon lunged at his
foes.
He was never sure if he made contact. The last thing
he remembered was slamming into a seemingly invisible
force, and then spinning into the void of blackness.
* * *
What Jon Canmore believed to be his final stand had
not gone unnoticed. In another room within the same
building, the event was broadcast through a bank of monitors
to a person who’d been watching Jon since his arrival.
“Hm.” The watcher was a slender, dark-haired girl
garbed in a black, midriff-bearing top and torn jeans, and
though she’d been in the chair for some time, she remained
as alert as when she’d first sat down.
The monitors bathed the otherwise darkened chamber
in a crisp, sterile light. Aside from the control panel
and chair, the room was featureless save for an emblem
etched into various spots on the wall, that of a pyramid
with a wide, lidless eye set into the apex, an eye surrounded
by flames.
The stack of monitors showed images from all over
the hotel’s labyrinth of rooms and hallways. The girl leaned
forward, all of her focus on one screen in particular: that
of Canmore’s unconscious form, crumpled before the
two gargoyles, who now stood there with blank looks on
their faces. The girl flipped a switch, and the gargoyles
vanished from the screen.
She heard a faint beeping behind her, then a hiss as a
panel on the wall slid open. A thin, balding man who
moved like someone in his thirties, but whose careworn
face suggested he was far beyond that age, entered. With
another hiss the panel slid shut, blending back into the
wall.
The girl in the chair turned towards the older-looking
gentleman, who was dressed in the uniform of a bellhop.
The glare of the monitors glinted off a pin on the bellhop‘s
lapel, highlighting the image carved there, which was identical
to the one on the control room’s wall.
31
The girl in black nodded, rose from the seat. “Nine.”
“Five,” the bellhop responded. “How long has our
guest been at it, Shari?”
“Six hours, sir,” said the woman called Shari. “I’d like
to add that the trial run for the Cabal’s new holographic
projection system has been a successful one. I’ve been recording
the data from Mr Canmore’s stay, as ordered. But
the big surprise is Mr. Canmore himself. Apparently, he’s
tougher than we gave him credit for.”
The man crossed the room, surveyed the monitors.
“Yes, we needed to be sure of that. To be honest, we
weren’t expecting to get that call from Jason’s brother. He
was the last Canmore we were considering for the position
anyway. Our initial profile showed that he was deficient
in all areas of leadership, the complete opposite of
Jason. Something happened to him in that church. Which
is fortunate for us, since we were afraid we’d have to push
the project back.”
Shari smirked as she pressed another button on the
panel, ejecting a black floppy with no label. “But first you
just needed a test?” she asked as she handed it over.
He accepted the disk, slipped it into his pocket. “We’ve
invested a lot in this project. It’s been in the works ever
since we learned about the renovations David Xanatos
was making to his corporate headquarters. Now is definitely
the most opportune time to put the plan into motion,
but first we need to make sure we have the right man
in charge.”
“My report is on that disk as well, sir. Having watched
Mr. Canmore since his arrival, I can definitely vouch for
his conviction as far as gargoyles are concerned. And he’ll
probably be easier to influence than his brother.”
“Excellent.” The man nodded with satisfaction as he
produced a manila folder from within the scarlet jacket
of his uniform and handed it to Shari. One side was embossed
with a red-and-yellow emblem: a circle and hammer
combining to form a stylized letter Q. “Well, I think
our guest been through enough, my dear. He’ll be of no
use if his mind is completely broken. Take him to the
infirmary, and make him the offer when he awakens.”
Shari nodded curtly, and flashed a calculating smile.
* * *
Am I dead?
Jon Canmore quickly dismissed the thought. If he were
dead, why did he have such a headache?
Then what?
Good question. Last thing he knew, he was making a

final stand against his sworn enemies. He had no idea where
the blow that felled him had come from.
So if I’m still alive, am I a prisoner?
His eyes came open, a searing pain rattling him to the
back of his skull as white light assaulted his vision. When
the brightness faded, he saw that he was lying on a plain,
olive-green cot, in the corner of a room with few other
features in it.
His gaze took in a desk and chair that rested against
the far wall, then flicked up to the ceiling, and saw nothing
but a row of bright fluorescents bathing the room in a
cold, sterile glow.
Jon sat up, hand running slowly down the side of his
jacket, which he was still wearing. He frowned when he
did not feel the familiar shape of Jason’s old gun, then
remembered what had become of it. Something else he’d
lost because of these monsters.
Am I their prisoner now?
He shuddered at the thought, and immediately began
searching for one of the other weapons he’d entered the
Cabal with. He forgotten about them in his flight from
those monsters. But maybe now, he could use them to
find a way out.
His search was interrupted by a knock at the door.
Jon brought his gaze around to it, and realized for the first
time that it was a regular door with a dull brass knob.
Hardly what one would expect from a prison cell.
“May I come in?” A muffled voice from the other
side. Female.
A brief pause, during which Jon sat up a bit straighter
on the bed. Then he answered. “If you wish.”
The knob turned and the door swung open. Jon expected
to see one of the humans he knew had ties to the
gargoyle menace.
Instead, he saw a girl he’d never seen before: slim and
olive-skinned, with tawdry black attire more normally associated
with street trash, and eyes that seemed to reflect a
timeless quality beneath their surfaces. A manila folder was
tucked under one arm, and she nodded politely she entered.
“Good to see you awake again, Mr. Canmore,” she
said, her tone both jovial and relaxing. The tone of someone
who’d spent most of her life serving rather than being
served. “A relief, actually. You’ll have to forgive me, I
feel partially responsible for what happened.”
“What . . . ?”
“I still don’t know how, but the gargoyles managed to
find out about our meeting.”
“How . . . ?”
33
“A tap on your phone, probably. Remember that the
police have your siblings in custody. Also, don’t forget that
those monsters have a friend on the force.”
The girl’s tone seemed to change when she said the
word ‘monsters.’ For some reason, it reminded Jon of
dull razorblades.
“But, our men got there just in time to stop them,”
she went on. “The beasts got away from us, but at least
they left you mostly unscathed. After all, we wouldn’t want
anything to happen to you, Mr. Canmore. There’s a lot we
can do for each other.” She set herself in the beside chair,
offered her free hand to Jon. “Name’s Shari, by the way.”
Jon eyed the hand warily, and did not shake it. His
mind was still trying to process the events of the last few
hours. What Shari was saying made some sense, but . . . it
was troubling to know that whoever she worked for could
have their security so easily compromised if the gargoyles
were able to operate under their noses like that.
Shari seemed to be reading his eyes. “Like I said, Mr.
Canmore, there’s a lot we can do for each other. The people
I work for feel the same way as you do about these gargoyles.
They represent a threat to everyone and everything.
We have some men, but not enough to really combat
them. This is why we approached your brother, and why
we invited you here.”
Jon’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand.”
“Think about it, Mr. Canmore. The people that I work
for aren’t the real victims of these monsters. The ones
directly affected by their actions are the people out there.”
Shari waved a free hand in the direction of the open door.
“The ones who have families, pets, work, school, mortgage
payments The ordinary people. The gargoyles are
eating into their way of life, making them feel powerless.
We need someone to show them that they aren’t powerless,
and the best way to do that is to unite them with a
common goal. Which is why we need you.”
Jon had to admit, Shari’s words had had an effect.
But he was still skeptical. “To do what?”
Shari held the manila folder out to him, and Jon’s eyes
were immediately drawn to the red and yellow Q insignia
stamped on one side. “We’d like you to lead the cause,”
she said. “Now, you should be warned that it is part of a
much larger organization. Although this larger one needs
to remain anonymous, the people who run it still have the
same goals as you: the extermination of the gargoyle race.
But we need a public face, which is why we want you to
lead the Quarrymen.”
“Are you insane? I can’t be seen in public right now.
Every policeman in the city probably knows my face.”

“We can take care of that,” Shari answered calmly.
“We’ll set up a completely new identity for you, along
with a new appearance. You already have some experience
hiding in plain sight from the law, we’ll take it a step
further. You’ll be a legitimate citizen again by the time we’re
through with you.”
Though he showed no outward signs, Jon Canmore
was impressed. Impressed, but wary. If these people Shari
spoke of could do everything she claimed, what sort of
power did they wield?
The answer seemed to almost give itself: The power to
help humanity rid the world of these monsters.
After all, there was truth to her words. This was no
longer simply his hunt. It belonged to the entire human
race now. Their peaceful, ordered existence had been invaded
by these demons, and it was time to take it back.
Jason had been too obstinate to see this. Now it was Jon’s
turn to be strong, and finish the hunt once and for all.
Jon gave a determined nod, accepted the folder from
the girl’s outstretched hand. “All right,” he said. “I’m interested.
Tell me more about the Quarrymen.”
A slow smile worked its way across Shari’s dark lips.
“In a moment, Mr. Canmore. There’s something I need to
give you first.”
She reached into the pocket of her jeans, pulled out
something small that gleamed golden beneath the dull
fluorescents. As she held it out, Jon noticed a symbol etched
on it, a symbol identical to that on one of the many necklaces
adorning her neck.
“A gift from the Illuminati, Mr. Canmore,” she said.
“The first of many . . .”
* * *
34

An hour after sunset, the office of “Bluestone
and Broadway: Private Investigations” was occupied,
and the air inside was thick with tension. Broadway
and Matt Bluestone studied the materials in front of
them, then grimly eyed each other, as if their lives
depended on their next decisions.
Last year the governor of New York had declared
the gargoyles honorary citizens and protected
under the law, in recognition for their heroism when
they’d saved all of New York City from what the
media had dubbed the Blue Death. But the backlash
had been immediate and severe; the Quarrymen above
all had flat-out refused to accept the governor’s decree.
They’d shouted that the gargoyles had actually
been behind the Blue Death, hysterically insisting that
it was all part of their plot to take over the world.
The backlash had culminated in an all-out assault
by the Quarrymen on the gargoyles during the day.
The assault had been forcibly repelled by the NYPD
working with Xanatos’ own security forces, but at a
horrific cost; twenty-seven people dead, most of them
Quarrymen. Criminal trials, and wrongful-death lawsuits
from the families of the four innocent civilians
killed in the assault, had finished off what was left of
the organization.
Matt Bluestone had been one of the casualties
of that last battle; taken away in an ambulance after
several of his bones had been broken by a
Quarryhammer-swinging madman, including a shattered
pelvis. It had taken several surgeries and months
of physical therapy before he could even walk again,
with the use of a cane.
Medically retired from the police force, Matt had
decided to become a private investigator after he’d
recovered as much as he ever would. Investigating
and uncovering secrets was what he loved best, and
as a decorated veteran of the NYPD, getting the required
licenses had been a snap. All his friends and
family had wished him success. And when Broadway
had asked him if he needed a partner, Matt had smiled
and said “Sure could use one! But you’d have to be
licensed for it too.”
They’d both been only partly serious . . . and so
35
they’d both been surprised when, two weeks later,
Xanatos had presented Broadway with a stack of
papers that only needed his signature in order to make
him a private investigator too, officially licensed by
the state of New York. Four nights after that, they
had a lease on an office and Broadway had painted
their names on the door.
‘Bluestone & Broadway, Private Investigations’
had been in business for three months, and in that
time they’d solved and closed twelve cases, ranging
from the mundane (cheating husbands, missing pets)
to the criminal (solving a murder, recovering stolen
property) to the bizarre (don’t ask. Please, don’t ask.)
Tonight, after finishing and closing the files on
their twelfth case, they were intently considering their
strategies and options:
“. . . Raise you two.”
“Call!”
Broadway looked at his hand, then laid his cards
out with a smile. “Pair of fives!”
Matt flourished his cards with an even bigger
grin. “Three nines!”
“Aw, man . . .” Broadway grimaced. “How’d you
know you had me? I know it wasn’t my wing-talons;
I was holding them perfectly still this time!”
“It’s just a talent of mine, pal,” Matt responded
with a grin as he gathered in the chocolate-chip cookies
they’d been using for betting chips. He thought to
himself that he wouldn’t tell Broadway just yet about
another ‘tell’ the gargoyle had; those fan-shaped
ears of his drooped slightly when Broadway had
a weak hand.
Then Matt relented and nudged two of the cookies
back across the table to his partner; Broadway
had been the one to bake them, after all.
While they were munching cookies, the phone
on Matt’s desk rang, and he answered after hurriedly
swallowing and brushing crumbs off his lips. “Bluestone
and Broadway, Private Investigations. Matt Bluestone
speaking; may I help you?”
“Mr. Bluestone, this is the Grandmaster of the
Illuminati,” he heard through the phone.
Matt rolled his eyes. “Uh-huh. Right. Well, who-

ever this is, you can tell everyone else in the 23 rd precinct
that this joke wasn’t funny the last dozen times they pulled
it.” It ticked him off that the guys on the force were still
pulling that lame joke, one that had started the first time
he’d told them his theories about the Illuminati.
But deep down, he was also pleased by it; it meant
that the guys were still thinking of him, even after he’d
been medically retired from the NYPD. Maybe Elisa had
put one of the new rookies up to it, as a prelude to inviting
him in to officially meet the newest members of the
GLU, the Gargoyles Liaison Unit . . .
“I can assure you, this is not a joke, Mr. Bluestone,”
the voice said with annoyance. “And to prove my authenticity
. . .”
* * *
Broadway smirked around his mouthful of cookies,
as Matt complained into the phone about a joke not being
funny anymore. He could guess what that joke was!
The whole clan knew about the 23 rd Precinct’s longrunning
joke of calling Matt and pretending to be either
someone highly placed in the Illuminati, or someone with
a really hot tip on the organization. Elisa had told them
about the prank calls and how much they’d irritated her
partner, making him difficult to work with on some nights,
several months before she’d actually introduced Matt to
the clan.
But at the same time that Matt had found out about
the gargoyles, he and the clan had also found out the Illuminati
really did exist. The joke was actually on all those
prank callers, if only they knew . . .
Then Matt went utterly pale, all the blood drained
from his face. “S-sir! I’m sorry, I thought . . . N-no sir,
absolutely not! It’s a joke that the police force started
almost a year before I found Mace Malone and . . . Yes
sir. . . . No, sir,” as all the blood rushed back with a
vengeance, till Matt’s face was almost as red as his hair.
“. . . Yes, sir. Sir, Broadway is in the room with me; may I
put this on speakerphone for him to hear as well?” Then
he covered the receiver just long enough to hiss “Illuminati
– Grandmaster! ” at Broadway, before pressing the
speaker button.
A cultured voice came out of the speaker, a voice
with an accent Broadway couldn’t quite place. A voice
that wasted no time on pleasantries with the gargoyle, instead
launching right into their mission:
A member of the Illuminati was inside the Hotel Cabal,
a ‘hotel’ that was actually a high-tech deathtrap/inter-
36
rogation facility run by the Illuminati. And the facility was
malfunctioning. The Grandmaster’s secretary had received
a brief call from the member on his cell phone, saying
frantically that his key wasn’t working to deactivate any of
the rooms – and then the call had been abruptly cut off.
Efforts to call him back were fruitless; it was likely that the
cell phone had been destroyed.
The Grandmaster had established – he didn’t say how,
but Broadway didn’t doubt him – that the problem wasn’t
with the member’s key, or any existing keys to the hotel.
So the problem was with the failsafe program built into
the facility’s central computer; the program that monitored
the key-ports beside each door.
If the failsafe program was malfunctioning, there was
only one semi-safe way to reach the central computer and
manually deactivate all the rooms:
“The same way Goliath got out, right?” Broadway
cut in. “From the roof, through the elevator shaft.”
“Correct,” the Grandmaster confirmed, though his
voice was annoyed now; probably at being interrupted.
Well, too bad for him; the gargoyle clans may have achieved
a truce with the Illuminati organization after that nightmare
in London, but that didn’t mean they liked each
other much.
“Your mission tonight is to get to the central computer
on the 12 th floor and deactivate all the rooms, then
find the member trapped in the facility and get him out
safely,” the Grandmaster concluded. “After this call I’ll fax
to you a diagram of the 12 th floor, showing the central
computer room’s location relative to the elevator shaft,
and instructions for once you’re in the computer room.
Time is of the essence.”
Broadway didn’t have to ask why it was so urgent; he
knew. He remembered that conversation, a few nights after
Matt and Goliath had escaped from the Hotel Cabal
together . . .
Years before . . .
* * *
Matt met the clan at sunset, looking pale and sick. “Hi,
guys. Um . . . Elisa’s been delayed.”
“Delayed how and why? What’s happened to her?!”
Goliath demanded, flaring his wings; everyone was
alarmed at Matt’s expression while talking about Elisa.
“Hey, calm down, it’s nothing serious . . . well, not
life-threatening, anyway.” Matt explained, “The plumbing
for her sink has sprung a big leak, dripping so fast she has

to empty the bucket under the sink every hour or so before
it floods the kitchen. She said she’ll be in to work as
soon as the plumber comes and fixes it.”
“Then why are you looking like that?” Broadway asked
him. “Like you’re about to barf or something . . . What’s
wrong?”
Matt sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Well . . . I
suppose I should be thinking of it as good news, actually.
I just found out why I’m still alive.”
“Huh? Why wouldn’t you be alive right now?”
“Because I betrayed the Illuminati, that’s why. And Mace
Malone knew it, too. After I kept him from shooting
Goliath, he’d guessed that I’d deliberately given Goliath
my hotel key instead of losing it accidentally. You should
have heard him screaming about the betrayal, and what
he’d do to me, while we escaped up the elevator shaft!
“I’d seen Mace lose his key down that shaft, so I’d
figured that he would be stuck inside the hotel for a few
hours, trying to find a way out, but eventually another
member with a working key would go in and fetch him.
And when Mace told them what I’d done, it would be all
over for one Matthew J. Bluestone; the NYPD would be
fishing my remains out of the river, if a body was ever
found at all.”
“If you were expecting them to come after you, why
didn’t you stay up here with us that dawn?” Goliath asked,
giving Matt the same stern look he gave gargoyle warriors
who’d confused bravery with foolhardiness. “The very fact
that they needed to bring you in to get one of us, means
that they don’t know where we perch. Elisa would have
kept you hidden here in the clock tower, just as she secretly
protects our existence.”
Matt shook his head. “And live in hiding both day and
night, forever? That’s not who I am, Goliath. And besides,
I’ve been half-expecting to be killed by the Illuminati for
the last several years, just for learning too much about
them. I’ve had my will written out and my lawyer briefed on
what to do if I die or just disappear, since 1989 at least.”
“A wise warrior knows death will come for him
someday,” Hudson said with an approving nod.
“Right. But instead . . . they made me a member. Martin
Hacker gave me a membership pin, instead of a bullet or
a contact poison. Martin said I’d done my part in getting
you to the Hotel Cabal, and basically that it was Mace’s
own fault that he couldn’t keep hold of you. Understand,
I was glad to be accepted instead of executed, but . . . it
hadn’t made sense, and I just had to find out why. So
today just before sunset, I paid a visit to another member
of the Illuminati. Someone you already know: David
37
Xanatos.”
“So Xanatos is a member of a secret organization
that tries to rule the entire human world, and capture us as
well, through various deceptions and other treacherous
means,” Goliath rumbled. “I’m not at all surprised.”
“Yeah, didn’t figure you would be, from what Elisa
said . . . Anyway, I went to see Xanatos, and asked him a
few questions that I figured an eager rookie to the Illuminati
would ask; meeting times, secret signs, stuff like that.
And I slipped in a question about Mace Malone; pretending
I was concerned about his health, since a guy that’s a
hundred years old doesn’t normally tangle with gargoyles.
I was hoping that the answer to that question would give
me a hint as to why Mace hadn’t told them just how Goliath
had escaped.”
“And . . . ?” Brooklyn prompted.
“And I found out what had happened to him. The
Illuminati hadn’t gotten a report from Mace since he’d
sent them a brief message saying that a gargoyle had just
entered the building. The message didn’t say anything about
me; I guess I wasn’t important enough to be worth noting
just then. But after they didn’t hear anything more from
him, about an hour before dawn, someone went into the
hotel to get a status report in person. When they got to the
computer room, they found it empty, so they checked the
computer records for the various rooms.
“The records showed Goliath arriving, getting
bounced around from room to room for a while, then
escaping. The records also showed that other doors had
been opened, after you clawed your way to the elevator
shaft. According to the records, without his passkey Mace
had wandered from room to room for some time, opening
doors . . . until he’d opened the door to one particular
room. A room that David Xanatos said is called ‘The Ant
Farm’. And for some reason, maybe because he was disoriented
from wandering for so long, he didn’t recognize
the room and what’s inside it; he just stepped inside and let
the door close behind him.
“. . . By the time they found him, there was nothing
left but bones . . .”
* * *
Remembering that conversation, Broadway swallowed
hard again. Even without someone in the central computer
room sending signals to trigger the deadliest traps,
several of the rooms in the Hotel Cabal could be lethal.
And the rest of the hotel was designed to disorient and
confuse a prisoner, break his will and ultimately drive him

insane.
If the missing Illuminati member was smart, he’d just
sat down in the first non-lethal room he’d found, and was
now simply waiting for someone to rescue him. But if
he’d panicked . . .
But even knowing the case was urgent, Broadway still
wanted to get one more dig in, and he spoke up. “Matt’s
usually the one to ask this, but now I’m asking. Mr. Client,
are you expecting us to do this out of the kindness of our
hearts, or are you going to pay us?”
After a brief pause, the Grandmaster replied curtly,
“One thousand dollars, plus expenses.”
“It’s a deal,” Matt said hurriedly. “Send us the fax, sir,
and we’ll be on our way.” After the phone call ended and
Matt switched the line to the fax, which immediately began
chattering and pushing a document out, he said accusingly
to Broadway, “Why were you mouthing off like that?”
“Why weren’t you?” Broadway shot back. “Everyone
knows what you think about the Illuminati, but with
that guy you were all ‘yes sir’, ‘no sir’ and ‘right away sir’!”
Matt looked both shamefaced and grim. “I know,
but it’s really bad policy to get the Grandmaster angry.
‘Illuminati membership is for life’ also means that nobody
leaves the organization and lives to tell about it . . . and
neither do their nearest and dearest. And I’ve got a lot
more to lose now than I did when I was in the FBI . . .”
* * *
Broadway glided with Matt across town, to the rooftop
of the Hotel Cabal. They had stuffed some supplies
into their trenchcoats before leaving the office; the faxed
diagram, powerful flashlights and a pair of walkie-talkies
in case they got separated.
On the roof of the hotel, it took only seconds for
Broadway to rip open the service hatch for the elevator
cable housing. From there, they could reach the maintenance
ladder that ran along one side of the elevator shaft.
“You okay for climbing down?” Broadway asked,
eyeing Matt and his cane with concern.
“It’ll be easier than climbing up,” Matt said with a
shrug and a grimace. He took his cane and tucked it down
the back of his trenchcoat, with the curved handle hooking
over his back collar. “But if you want to go down
first, to catch me in case I slip or something, I won’t object.”
They cautiously descended, periodically stopping to
whip out their flashlights and look around the nearly-pitchblack
shaft. “No signs of any of the damage Goliath and
38
I did while we were in here; pretty thorough repair job,”
Matt mused.
Broadway would have responded, but instead had to
expel all his breath to flatten himself against the ladder as
an elevator car rumbled past only inches away. Both cars
in the shaft were continually ascending and descending,
even with no one inside them or controlling them from
the computer room; it was probably another sign that the
facility’s controls were on the fritz.
“Twelfth floor,” Broadway announced after a while,
flicking on his flashlight and pointing with it across the
shaft to a set of currently closed elevator doors, as featureless
as all the other doors they’d seen in the shaft.
“Then, since that way is north, the computer room
should be . . . right there,” Matt said from where he was
on the ladder just above Broadway, as he used his own
flashlight to consult the diagram, then aimed it at a spot on
the wall ten feet from the elevator doors.
Broadway glanced up, at where the elevator car was
rumbling back down the shaft towards them, then down
at the car on the other cable that was swiftly ascending.
“I’ve figured out the rhythm for the elevator cars. As soon
as this car passes us, let go and get down on my back.
Then I’ll jump across and get a grip on the wall, until I can
punch through into the room. Shouldn’t take more than a
few seconds.”
The elevator rumbled past them, and as soon as they
were clear Broadway braced himself and growled “Now!”
Matt kicked his legs out and loosened his grip on the
ladder, sliding down it until he landed on Broadway’s back
with a whumph! The impact knocked the air out of both
of them, but Broadway recovered quickly. He made sure
Matt had a firm grip on him before he turned and pushed
off hard, leaping across the elevator shaft just after the
other elevator car went past.
Metal shrieked in protest as Broadway sunk his talons
into the wall of the shaft; once he had a secure purchase,
he began pounding and clawing through the wall.
“Incoming!” Matt called out warningly, as the rumble
of the returning elevator car came closer and closer.
“Almost through!” Broadway grunted, and pulled
back enough to deliver one more massive blow. The wall
finally gave way, and he frantically shoved at the hole’s
edges until it was just big enough to fit through. He
scrambled through with Matt on his back, clearing the
hole a bare second before the elevator car would have
scraped them off the wall and turned them into blood
pudding at the bottom of the shaft.
Inside the room, they got to their feet and began

looking around. “So where’s the computer?” Broadway
asked.
But before Matt could respond, the room – lurched.
Startled, they both went off their feet again, feeling
the unbelievable but unmistakable sideways movement of
the room they were in.
The hole punched through to the elevator shaft abruptly
vanished, replaced by steel plates showing through the
wrecked paneling. And no computers anywhere in sight . . .
“You read the diagram wrong!” Broadway accused,
glaring up at his partner from where he was crouched on
all fours.
“You picked the wrong floor!” Matt shot back, as he
got to his feet while the room was still rushing somewhere
with them. “This isn’t your average hotel, where they skip
straight from 12 to 14 in their numbering because – ” and
then he was thrown off his feet again, smacking into the
nearest wall as the room jolted to a stop.
After waiting in silence for a few moments to see if
the room would move again, they gingerly got to their
feet. Matt took his cane out to lean on. “Well, now what?”
Broadway asked resignedly.
“Now . . . we try to find the computer room. It’s
either just a few rooms away, or one floor level and a few
rooms away.” Matt pointed at the floor. “Carve a big X in
that, will you? And leave an X on either side of every door
we go through, and on the floor of every room we set
foot inside. At least we’ll be able to keep track of where
we’ve been.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, Broadway had carved fifty-seven
X’s. And been annoyed in several different ways, by the
features in some of the rooms they’d checked:
Strobe lights.
Fans blowing ice-cold air on them.
Water slowly dripping down from hundreds of points
in the ceiling, droplets spaced too close together to dodge.
Constant murmuring coming from hidden speakers,
just low enough that they couldn’t quite make out the words.
More strobe lights, on a different frequency.
A room with all the furniture bolted to the ceiling.
A room that was stifling hot and lit by a hellish red
glare.
Rooms that had been cleverly painted to look bigger
than they really were; Broadway had run smack into a wall
that he’d thought had been ten feet further away.
A room that started screeching like fingernails on chalk-
39
board as soon as the door was opened, the sound drilling
into their skulls.
And many, many doors that opened onto solid brick
walls instead of rooms.
All that was added to their general aggravation over
not being able to find the computer room; Matt was becoming
more and more sure, after repeatedly consulting
the diagram, that they were on the wrong floor. They
started searching instead for a room next to the central
elevator shaft, so they could try clawing and punching
through to the shaft again and finding the right floor.
Broadway cautiously listened at each wall that seemed
like a possibility, but never heard the rumbling of the elevator
cars going past. The sideways-moving room had
shifted them a long ways off . . . unless the walls were so
thick and well-insulated that all the noise had been muffled.
They could only hope that wasn’t the case.
“You said that there’s a room with sharks in it, somewhere
in this not-so-funhouse?” Broadway said, just to
make conversation, as they checked yet another door and
found yet another solid wall behind it. He rapped on it
and pushed hard against it, in case it was a fake wall, but
the brick sounded just like brick and didn’t yield in the
slightest.
“That’s what I saw on the monitor, when Mace was
checking all the rooms to find out where Goliath had
gone,” Matt said with a shrug, as they marked the door
with an X and moved on. “It was on the screen for just a
second, but it looked like two Great White sharks, swimming
past a chandelier.”
“Huh. So how would they get a prisoner into the room
with the sharks, without all the water and sharks flooding
out into the hall?” as Broadway opened another door,
looked inside – and used one of the phrases Elisa used
when she was really ticked off, as he clenched his fist and
dug talon-grooves into the doorjamb.
“What?”
“Look!”
Matt poked his head in and looked at where
Broadway’s accusing finger was pointing . . . at a large X
that had been carved in the linoleum in the middle of the
room. “You sure that’s yours?”
“You think I don’t know my own X’s?” Broadway
asked indignantly. Then he looked again, just to be sure,
while also looking around to see if the room had any
other doors . . . which it didn’t.
Matt uttered a few choice words too. “This must be
another of the moving rooms on this floor. Which are not
marked on the diagram! Sure would’ve been nice if the

Grandmaster had just sent us the floor plans for every
floor in the building, but noooo, with the Illuminati every
last little thing is on a ‘need to know’ basis . . .”
With no other recourse, they went back to opening
more doors and carving more X’s. Four doors later,
Broadway opened another door and noticed, “Hey, there’s
a door on the other side of this room.”
So they stepped into the room to check out the other
door – and that’s when the floor gave way.
“Shit! ” they screamed together as they spun and
scrambled up the rapidly-sloping floor to try to get back
to the door, but they were too late; first Broadway, then
Matt dropped into the yawning black abyss below them.
Broadway flailed with all six limbs, trying to catch air
in his wings to slow his fall while reaching for a wall to
sink his talons into. And he touched a wall, sinking his
talons into it, grabbing hold to stop his fall – just as Matt,
also flailing frantically in midair, grabbed one of his wings.
Broadway roared in pain as Matt swung down and
desperately hung off his right wingtip; the sudden great
weight at that angle had dislocated his wingjoint! But he
kept his grip on the wall, grimly sinking all his talons in
despite the agony radiating from his wing through his
whole body. Then Broadway slowly, painfully climbed up
the pit walls to the open door, pulling himself and Matt to
safety.
Matt’s profuse thanks and apologies tumbled over one
another. He said he’d re-set dislocated shoulders a few
times while in the FBI and NYPD, so Broadway let him
try to set his dislocated wing-joint. He crouched in the
hallway, panting harshly from the pain, while Matt carefully
moved the wing, found the right angle and shoved
the wing back into its socket.
Broadway roared again from the fresh burst of agony
and collapsed onto the floor, but several moments later
was able to get back on all fours and move his wing slightly.
“Yeah, it’s back in place; thanks.”
“Least I could do, partner,” Matt said as he slowly sat
down to rest against the nearest wall. “Will you be able to
glide again?”
Broadway shook his head emphatically. “Not till after
a day’s stone sleep.”
“S’alright; once we get out of here, I’ve got enough
for cab fare for us both.”
* * *
After helping Broadway with his wing, Matt was more
than happy to just sit against the wall and rest for a few
40
minutes. Now that the adrenaline rush from almost dying
had faded, he felt utterly wrung out and the small pains
that had become a constant in his life since that last battle
with the Quarrymen, were now much larger pains.
Climbing down the ladder and aggravating his hip,
falling down twice while in the moving room, and then
swinging and banging into the side of the pit while hanging
for dear life onto Broadway’s wing . . . about the only
part of him that didn’t ache was his hair.
But they still had a job to do, and a man to save. After
a few minutes of rest Matt reached for his cane, lying next
to the door to the pit. He’d been lucky that, when he’d
tossed it away from him while flailing for a handhold to
keep from falling, the cane had sailed right through the
open door.
Once Matt was on his feet again, he pulled out the
diagram the Grandmaster had given them as he said, “In a
way, finding that pit is a good thing. It’s a room that can’t
be moved on tracks, and what’s more, that pit’s going to
show up on every floor below this one too. We can orient
on it, and figure out where we are. Look, here it is on the
diagram!”
With diagram in hand, they retraced their steps thirty
feet, then stepped into one of the rooms that had strobe
lights flashing. Trying hard to ignore the flashing lights,
Broadway got down on his knees and dug his talons into
the carpet, to start ripping away chunks of flooring. In
two minutes, he had created a hole into the room below;
he dropped down through it, then helped Matt
down as well.
The room below was filled with a large bank of computers
and monitors. They said together, “Jackpot!”
The monitor controls weren’t hard to figure out. After
a little experimenting, Matt began a room-by-room
search, starting with the first floor of the facility. And on
the second floor, they found a man sitting in a corner of
one of the strobe-lit rooms; hunched over and facing away
from the lights, his face hidden from their view.
“Room 217,” Matt said with satisfaction. “Okay, now
let’s deactivate the rooms. The Grandmaster wrote instructions
on the bottom of the diagram.”
But following the instructions didn’t give them the
results they wanted. The strobes in Room 217 kept flashing.
They double-checked the controls, then tried again . .
. and the strobes still flashed, which meant none of the
rooms had been deactivated.
Broadway finally got fed up and growled, “I know
how to shut them all down!” Then he reached behind the
bank of computers and yanked out all the power cords.

With electronic moans of protest, the computers all
shut down . . . and so did the lights in the room. The Hotel
Cabal went dark and utterly silent; the ever-present hum
of machinery that they’d been hearing died away.
“Oh, great.”
“Sorry. Should I plug them in again? . . . Uh oh. This
plug got kind-of mangled . . .”
“And with our luck, if we did plug them all back in,
the bug would still be in the system and all the rooms
would be activated again.” Matt sighed as he pulled out
his flashlight and turned it on. “Looks like we’ll have
to go down and get him the hard way, through the
elevator shaft . . .”
* * *
The climb down the elevator shaft was safer this time,
since the elevators had stopped running. But Matt’s hands
were trembling with fatigue by the time they had descended
to the second floor.
After Broadway punched through the doors into the
second floor, they stopped to rest for a bit before looking
for the missing Illuminati member, hallooing up and down
the halls while shining their flashlights into the rooms.
After a few minutes, they heard a voice in the dark,
coming towards them while complaining, “It’s about time
you got here! Do you know what I’ve been going through
these last few hours?!”
The voice sounded familiar to Matt . . . and so did the
features of the man he swept his flashlight over, following
the sound of the voice. Matt knew this Illuminati member,
and with recognition came instant rage. Rage born of
betrayal, a scar several years old now but still as vivid and
ugly as the day it was carved in his soul.
“Martin Hacker,” Matt spat as he trained his flashlight
right in the man’s face, making him flinch back and cover
his eyes. “If I’d known it was you, I’d have waited a day or
two longer before coming in.”
Broadway looked at Martin Hacker, then back at Matt.
“Your ex-partner in the FBI, right?”
“That’s right. The man who pretended to be my partner
– my friend – while stymieing all my efforts to uncover
the Illuminati. The man who finally got me fired from the
Bureau; isn’t that right, Hacker? I got too close to the truth
when I started digging into the Hanover Norton Trust,
didn’t I? So you submitted that evaluation with all the lies about
how unstable I had become, and got me booted out!”
“Well, yes, but that’s old news; you’re not still mad
about it, are you?” Martin said with a shrug. “You’re a
42
member now, so you should understand; I was protecting
the organization. It was nothing personal.”
“Nothing personal?!” Matt echoed incredulously. It
had been pretty damn personal to him; after he’d been
fired from the FBI, he’d been rejected by four other cities’
police departments before being hired by the NYPD, after
suffering through a far more rigorous examination than
most applicants ever got. Did Martin actually think that
saying ‘nothing personal’ somehow made it hurt less?
“Well, look at it this way, Matt,” Broadway said as he
took a step forward, then turned to face Matt – as Martin
Hacker shouted and fell backwards. Matt heard the thud
of Martin hitting the floor hard, as Broadway continued,
“If he hadn’t gotten you booted out of the FBI, then you
would never have met the clan, and we wouldn’t be partners
now. So some good came out of it after all, I’d say.”
Then Broadway looked back over his shoulder.
“Whoops. If you hung around gargoyles more, Mr.
Hacker, you’d know to be careful of our tails when we
turn around; we need room to maneuver. But hey, it was
nothing personal.”
Martin got back on his feet, rubbing the back of his
head and glaring daggers at Broadway but saying nothing.
Stifling his vindictive glee, Matt told Martin, “Follow us
down the elevator shaft to the first floor. And after we get
out, you’re paying our cab fare.”
* * *
Once they were outside the Hotel Cabal, Martin
Hacker did indeed pay their cab fare, handing a twenty to
the cabbie while waiting for another cab for himself. They
took the taxi back to their office; after calling the Grandmaster
and giving their report, they’d call the clan to come
give Broadway a lift home.
His wing still hurt like hell, but Broadway was less
concerned about that than about the way Matt’s hand
trembled with exhaustion as he leaned on his cane, while
they rode the elevator up to their office. Matt wasn’t safe
to drive his car; the clan would need to give him a lift
home as well.
As they opened the door to their office, Broadway
muttered, “The Illuminati can officially go suck gravel. I
don’t care how much they pay us; I’m never setting foot
inside that screwball ‘hotel’ again!”
Matt fervently agreed. “But we finished the case . . .
and I am going to double the Grandmaster’s fee!”
* * *

T.J. Knightly “Charisma82”
T.J. (Charisma82) lives in California, where she
has deemed to call the town “Cow Country” (due to
obvious reasons). She is 21 and has been a Gargoyles
fan since the age of 7. She never strayed away from
her love of the show and will gladly tell anyone that it
is her favorite show of all time. It wasn’t until 2003
that she found out that a Gargoyles fandom existed,
and has enjoyed the fandom with other fans online
ever since. She is currently a college student majoring
in English with only one semester to go before getting
her BA. Her favorite thing to do is write and
hopes to make a profession of it, while at the same
time get credentialed to teach high school English.
Kythera of Anevern
Drawing since she could hold a crayon, Kythera of
Anevern is primarily a self-taught artist. She has been
a fan of Gargoyles since the show’s debut, and credits
it as one of the biggest influences on her art. Kythera
is a graduate from Arizona State University, and the
author of Drawing Made Easy: Dragons & Fantasy. She
currently resides in Los Angeles, California.
E-Mail: kythera@gmail.com
Website: http://anevern.artchicks.org
Christine Morgan
Christine Morgan divides her writing time among
a variety of projects and genres that include fantasy,
horror, erotica, role-playing games, and children’s fiction.
Her fanfiction empire spans more than 100
Gargoyles tales. When not writing or gaming, Christine
works the night shift as a counselor in a Seattle psychiatric
facility. She and her husband Tim are the
proud parents of promising young fangirl,
Rebecca. Christine’s other interests include British
comedy, robotic combat, pirates, dinosaurs, history,
crafts, and cooking. She can be reached via
e-mail at christine@sabledrake.com. Her website
is at http://www.christine-morgan.com/
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Tim Morgan
When I told my high school guidance counselor
that I wanted to start my own publishing company,
he looked blankly at me and then mumbled something
about college. Twenty years and twelve books
later, my publishing company, Sabledrake Enterprises,
has been printing the novels of Christine Morgan and
Naughty and Dice: An Adult Gamer’s Guide to Sexual
Situations. Next year, we’ll release a roleplaying game
of my own design, Ellis: Kingdom in Turmoil (really this
time). I’m happy to lend my expertise to the Hotel
Cabal Anthology. My other interests include roleplaying,
computer games, cooking, poker, and Tolkien. I divide
my time between my day job as manager of a
Seattle game store, my wife and daughter, and
Sabledrake Enterprises.
E-mail: tim@sabledrake.com
Website: http://sabledrake.com
Nikki Owens
Everything I needed to know in life, I learned
from Gargoyles! I had always doodled as a child, but
I didn’t decide to pursue art as a career until after I
first watched Gargoyles. The show, with its wonderful
characters, art, and story, hooked me with the first
episode, and sparked my first interest in the art of
animation and subjects such as Mythology and
Shakespeare. The Fandom is a huge influence in my
life as well. They’ve become my second family, been
a constant source of help and support, and introduced
me to some of my very best friends. I try to
remain an active part of the fandom whenever possible
by contributing fan art and attending or staffing
The Gathering conventions. I’m a recent college graduate
with a BFA in Studio Art, and am currently enjoying
freelance/commissioned illustration work.
E-mail: y2hecate@gmail.com
Mary C. “Stormy” Pletsch
Mary “Stormy” Pletsch lurks in the dark corners
of Ottawa, Ontario, working on various writing
projects and drawing a cartoon for The Northern Star
newspaper. Her cats don’t seem to mind the shadows,
but her partner, Dylan “Whitbourne” Blacquiere,
insisted on an apartment with windows. Richard S.
Wagner is delighted to have finally bullied his way into a
Gathering Anthology.

Kathy Pogge
Kathy Pogge writes what she’s told when she’s told to.
Lately that means dry as dirt technical documents, but she
looks forward to a future when she can go back to world
building and character motivation.
E-mail: kapogge@yahoo.com
Rob Van Schaick “Harvester of Eyes”
Harvester of Eyes lives and works in Virginia, at a
job with too many rules. When he’s not working, he does
his best to try and make the universe a more surreal place.
He discovered the Gargoyles fandom about five years
ago, not long after he and his brother re-discovered the
show on Toon Disney. From there, Google led him to the
TGS Ficverse, which led him to the forums, where he‘s
spread drunken anarchy ever since. He should not be stored
in extreme temperatures. Please do not immerse him in
water. Do not clean his connectors with benzine, paint
thinner, alcohol, or other such solvents.
Kimberly T.
Kimberly T. lives in Bellingham, WA with her husband,
young daughter, and a passel of plot-bunnies that
hide in the basement. She loves cats and reading, particularly
in the fantasy, science fiction and mystery genres, and
will walk miles to get her hands on a truly funny book.
After serving in the Navy for 20 years, she is still adjusting
to civilian life.
E-mail: kimbertow@yahoo.com.
Christi Smith Hayden
Christi Smith Hayden wears many hats – she is a writer,
an artist, a wife, a boy-wrangler, a volunteer and an occasional
art teacher. One of her first discoveries on the Internet
was fanfiction and the realization that “Hey, I can write
better than this!” She started with her Gargoyles story
“Daddy Girl” and hasn’t stopped since. Once she got up
the nerve, she started to post her artwork online and was
surprised to find that people liked it. She soon began illustrating
RPG books (in spite of having never role-played
in her life) and started showing her artwork in multi-genre
conventions nationwide. When she can manage to wedge
in the time, she likes to write in the wee hours of the
morning when only she and the cat are up.
Website: http://mommyspike.deviantart.com
45