Dimensional Summoner: Infinite Growth in a Leveling Apocalypse

Chapter 15: My Summon Went Home. The Pervert Didn’t

Three voices. Two sets of boots and one set of something heavier.

"—blood everywhere, that’s not a rat, Garrick, that’s a lot of blood—"

"Then he’s hurt." That voice was low and unhurried, and I felt it in my back teeth. "Good."

Garrick Voss. Level 9. I had seen him lift a fire door off its hinges four days ago while explaining to a woman that he only wanted to keep her safe.

I was already moving.

I had one advantage: I had been inside the store long enough to learn its broken doors, blind corners, and service passages. They had just arrived.

My hand brushed the wrist Liora’s tail had circled minutes earlier. There was nothing there now—no warmth, no voice, no borrowed instinct. Her preserved signature was a record, not company.

I had Level 4 stats, a kitchen knife, and a pack heavy enough to slow me. Against a Level 9 enforcer, a Level 6 tracker, and Kell, that was not a fighting chance. It was an inventory.

So I stopped looking for a way to win and started looking for a way to make them search the wrong store.

The bandage came off my palm—soaked, mine, unmistakable to anything tracking blood. I dragged it down the stockroom floor in a long uneven stripe running left toward the far service stairs, smeared the handle of the door at the end, then opened that door wide and propped a mop against it so it would sit there being obvious.

Then I went the other way and balanced six tins of peaches on the edge of a pallet against a broom handle, with a length of nylon strap running back to the aisle I actually wanted to be in.

I pulled.

The tins came down forty feet away with a crash that filled the entire building.

"That way—"

"No." A new voice. Older, flatter, careful. Silas Rook. "Noise is over there. Blood’s over here. He’s dragged something." A pause. "Recently. Edges are still wet."

Damn.

"Then he’s close," Garrick said.

"Or he wants us to think that." Boots, unhurried, testing. "Garrick. There’s a dead Lurker in aisle seven. Level six, maybe. Something killed it, and it wasn’t the rats."

"He had help."

"He had something."

"He’s Level three, Silas. He can barely lift a bag."

"Mm," said Silas, in the voice of a man being paid too little to argue.

I heard Garrick move, and then his voice again, closer, pitched to carry through the building in that warm reasonable way that made my skin crawl.

"Adrian. You’ve made your point. You’re bleeding, and there are things in here worse than me." Footsteps. "Kell. Take the west stairs. He’s laid a trail, and I want to know which end of it he’s standing at."

"Why me—"

"Because I said so."

Which was exactly what I needed, and I still felt something like pity about it.

Kell Marr came up the west corridor eighty seconds later, moving the way nervous people move when they’ve been sent somewhere alone: too fast, too loud, checking behind himself more often than in front. Level 4. Same as me now, which was a thought I turned over with some interest.

The walk-in freezer stood open at the end, dark and dead. I’d left my backpack just inside it where he’d see it.

He saw it. He went in.

I came off the top of the shelving stack beside the door, hit the ground badly, put my whole new Strength 5 into the freezer door and the steel handle, and dropped the locking lever.

The door boomed. Kell hit the inside of it a half second later.

"Hey—HEY—" Muffled, rising, cracking apart. "You can’t— it’s dark, it’s dark in here—"

"The seals are gone, it’s not airtight," I said. "You’ve got hours. Answer me, and I’ll tell Garrick where you are."

A pause with a lot of breathing in it. Then, thickly: "You know what he’s going to do?"

"That’s the question, yes."

"He wants you alive." Kell’s voice went shrill. "That’s the only rule. Silas can hurt you, I can hurt you, nobody kills you. He talks about you like you’re already his. Like you’re something he left somewhere. Do you know what that’s like to listen to?"

"And Silas?"

"Silas is paid. Silas doesn’t care about you; he’ll walk when the money stops." Something hit the door. "And you don’t get away by leaving, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’ll follow you out of the complex. He told us he’d follow you out of the city—"

Down the corridor, a door opened.

I didn’t stay. I took my pack and went.

The mistake I made was assuming Garrick would come to the noise.

He didn’t. He went to the exit.

He was waiting at the last checkout lane with his back to the half-lowered security shutter—the only route to the loading ramp that didn’t involve going back through the store—and when I came around the end of the returns counter he simply put out one arm and took me by the collar and lifted.

My feet came off the floor. He walked me two steps and put me into the shelving, and the impact went up my spine and out the top of my skull, and cans came down around us in a bright ridiculous rain.

"There," Garrick said.

He wasn’t even breathing hard. Up close his face was almost gentle, which was the worst part; he had the expression of a man who had finally found a lost dog on a cold night.

"Look at you," he said. "You’ve been eating rats."

I got my hands on his wrist. I might as well have got my hands on a bollard. Strength 5 against Level 9 wasn’t a contest; it was a category error, and both of us knew it.

Pulling harder would only prove how completely he controlled the distance between us. Every useless struggle fed the story he wanted: that I was helpless, exhausted, and finally ready to be handled.

So I stopped fighting.