Monster Mansion 2 by Dante King (best way to read ebooks .txt) 📗

her palm, and closed her eyes. The generator was surrounded by a wavering blue light, and then it came apart. For a moment, all the delicate pieces of the little machine hung in the air above her hand, and then a swirling vortex of black powder was all that was left of it.

“Now,” muttered Kyrine, and the black swirl vanished into her hand as if it had been sucked in by a jet of air.

“Is that it?” I asked, and the dungeon avatar nodded distractedly.

“And now I just need to… ah, yes, here it is.”

On the table beside her, light glowed and two of the little gray boxes appeared, then two more.

“One set for the Blackwood mountain connection, and one for the connection to Trevor’s shop,” she said, looking pleased.

“That’s fantastic,” said Amanda. Her green, sharp-cut Drow elf face was a picture of amazement.

Since she’d been with us, Amanda’s health and mood had seemed to improve a lot. When she’d first arrived, she was stressed, scowling a lot and being prickly whenever anyone spoke to her. She was drinking, too, more than was good for anyone.

Now that she’d been with us a few days, she seemed to have chilled out a lot. She laughed more, drank less, and smiled a lot. She seemed to have struck up a genuine friendship with Belinda, and the other two agents seemed a lot less scared of her than they had been to begin with. I wondered what Amanda’s superiors at the agency would have thought of her spending so much time here at the mansion—from what she’d said about them I guessed they probably wouldn’t approve—but Amanda seemed happy enough, and she was a good help around the mansion. That was good enough for me.

Selena had brought her laptop, and she was able to use a magically enhanced Bluetooth connection to log into the portal devices. Once she was in, she connected them up so that they were two pairs. Each pair would only respond to its other half, meaning that we could set up two portals leading between wherever we wanted.

“We’re in business!” I said happily.

“We’ll need someone to go to the Blackwood mountains and set one of these up,” said Belinda.

“You volunteering?” I asked.

She nodded slowly. “Sure. I know those mountains. I grew up not far from there and I used to go hunting for cores there when I was a kid.”

Belinda was younger than the other agents, though in her attitude she was less ditsy and fun-loving than Astrid and Selena.

I looked at her. “How long will it take you to get there?”

She shrugged. “On my motorcycle, no more than a day. I’ll drive to the foothills, leave the bike, then hike in until I find a good spot. I’ll call when I get there.”

Kyrine had created a phone for me that would work inside the mansion, and we had set up the agents’ phones so that they could call in at any time.

Amanda talked Belinda through how to set up the portal device, and we went ahead and gave it a test run.

Putting one generator at one end of the room and the other at the other side, we activated them both. The portals were less scary looking than the summoning portals I created to make monsters. They were more like tall, angular doorways, gleaming gently with clear light. As a test, I stepped through one of them.

There was a sharp sensation of heat, and I found myself stepping out of the other one as if I’d been teleported.

“Genius!” exclaimed Belinda, grinning. She stepped through as well, appearing over on the opposite side of the room. “Is there any limit on the distance they cover?” she asked.

Amanda shrugged. “We’ve never found a distance limit. These pieces of kit are pretty expensive, and the EDI doesn’t use many of them, but we’ve had them set up on opposite coasts of the US before and they worked fine.”

“No wonder they’re kept secret,” I joked. “Too many of these things and you’d be putting international airline services out of business!”

The Blackwood mountains were a wild region upstate from us. The long mountain range was covered in a deep, ancient forest of magical Blackwood trees, giving the range its name. It was a protected national park, and the only things that lived there permanently were the magical creatures and monstrous beings that roamed freely there.

Creatures like that had powerful crystalline cores that could be harvested and sold or used to improve the cultivation powers of magic users. People were allowed to hunt there with a permit, but the population of creatures was vast. In the higher reaches of the mountains there were monsters, too, giant spiders, dragonlings, and other things, but in the lower reaches the population was mostly Frostbreath Cougars, Flameclaw Grizzlies, and Howling Wind Wolves.

My plan was to set up a portal connection between the grounds of the mansion and the mountains, and then lure creatures through to populate the grounds with creatures. How we would actually lure them through was another question, but I would cross that bridge when I got to it.

“I’d better get going,” said Belinda when we’d all had a go at stepping through the portal and back again. She deactivated the portals and picked up one of the generating units, then said her goodbyes and headed out.

Shortly afterward, we heard her big Harley-Davidson growling to life and roaring off down the drive.

“We’ll pair the other two, and then I guess it’ll be time to go see Trevor at the enchantment shop,” I said. Originally, I’d planned to send Astrid to Trevor with a supply of high-level potions and magical goods, but now that we had the portal, I’d decided that I would go with her. The grumpy old enchantment shop owner might have some questions about her