The news reports later were slightly confused. The official report said that rumors of a gun battle were wrong, and it was just the bomb and the bodyguards of the Minister of Information shooting. What were they shooting at? The news had no clue.
Before the obliviators got to work, the situation was far more dire than what eventually got reported.
Even from a couple blocks away, the explosion was loud. Humans aren't designed to respond to something like that. In nature, that kind of noise is a volcano, a stampede, or an avalanche. Your lizard brain doesn't make the logical assumption that there's probably one bomb, and it's over. It says that the rocks are about to fall and you need to run.
In this case, the human reaction was probably smarter than the wizard reaction. The vast majority of the uninjured were clearing out, an onrushing tide of humanity that I had to fight through. I'd been near (and caused) enough explosions that the noise barely registered. Maybe it was too late, but maybe I could also do something to help.
And then the shooting started.
Ahead, the motorcade had actually stopped short, as suspicious of the unscheduled road construction as I'd been. Only the first few cars were damaged, and I could make out injured but living men in dark suits crawling out. Though it hadn't taken out the central car, it had effectively dead-ended the street, and the fleeing pedestrians made backing up impossible. Men with handguns drawn were surrounding the central car, looking for threats. And those threats materialized. Literally.
The crack of apparition is distinctive, even after a bomb going off, especially when each wizard is side-alonging two armed men, displacing a huge volume of air. Militants probably couldn't have loitered usefully in downtown Cairo for long with assault rifles, but magic could bring the fighters directly to the front line in an instant.
If the Egyptian magical government wouldn't have been that concerned about supplying terrorists with potions, they almost certainly would think differently about teleporting into a firefight in broad daylight.
Well, if they were going to break the rules first…
Just to cover my butt, I glanced to my right and was pleased to see that Alice Longbottom, British auror, wasn't too far behind me. "They have wizards!" I shouted at her.
The poor witch who'd signed up for a day of learning about muggle government and maybe hanging out with teen girls at a department store visibly slid all the way into auror mode and yelled back, "Damnit, Dresden. Just try to be as discreet as possible!" Clearly, nobody else in the Order of the Phoenix was surprised by my methodology at this point.
I nodded, and drew my blasting rod from its space-expanded sheathe that looked like maybe a flashlight holster on my belt. Annoyingly, that little development had taken months, and making one for my staff was proving extremely difficult. It was hard to make a wizard space seven feet deep in a small form factor in the first place, and all the enchantments on my staff made it even more unstable and difficult to get right. I realized Michael didn't have his sword, either. It was hard to be a guy with a giant weapon who sometimes needed to have a fight in public. Elaine had always mocked me about overcompensating.
But I was at least one focus up over my fight a couple months earlier with the basilisk when I'd had to leave both staff and rod at home. Unfortunately, most of my nonlethal options were on the on the staff. Dangerous times, though, required desperate measures. I slowed to a stop, lined up on the nearest man with a rifle, shook out my shield bracelet in case this drew attention, and yelled, "Reducto!"
The reductor curse is hard on objects, but won't trigger if it hits a person, so I wasn't being nearly as negligent as I could have been. I doubt the guy appreciated that much as rifle shrapnel crunched into his chest and arms. At least it mostly blew away from his body and not into his face?
Behind him, the wizard that had brought the guy in had been lining up his own attempts to use magic to tear open the central car, but turned when he recognized the incantation and started firing spells at me. And I was glad I was putting a lot into my shield because the second gunman he'd brought also turned his rifle on me. Curses and bullets hit my shield, and I was sweating a little with the strain of keeping it large enough that anything that missed me wouldn't go flying into the crowds behind.
I didn't have to hold it for long, though. All my friends with shorter legs weren't that far behind me.
Mr. Weasley and Oliver were first, and started rocketing stunners at the opponents, taking out the second gunman and forcing the wizard to shield and start worrying about being outnumbered. Across the street, Michael finally caught up and simply dive-tackled one of the other gunmen from behind. That might not have been a great idea, with the other gunmen around, but at that point Mrs. Longbottom appeared right next to him with a quieter crack of displaced air and started firing.
I really needed to practice combat apparition more, because running is exhausting.
Fortunately, the bodyguards seemed to recognize that we were reinforcements for them and not for the attackers, and we started driving the wizards back and taking out gunmen. Michael gave a distasteful look at the rifle he'd wrestled away from the guy he tackled, but couldn't seem to justify tossing it away and being unarmed. He notably didn't start shooting with it, though, instead using it as a club. Then, suddenly, as if getting a radio broadcast from a higher power, his head snapped back the way he'd come and he growled, "This is a distraction!"
"Hell of a distraction," I told him, having reached his position on the other side of the street. "Protego!" I incanted, shielding us against potshots while he tried to focus on whatever sixth sense he was using.
"What's that way?" he asked, pointing at an angle basically due northwest.
I tried to visualize the things we'd looked at that day and listed, "The university campus, Tahrir square, bunch of hotels, the river, big bridge over the river… wait, the Egyptian Museum?" His eyes lit up in some kind of recognition at the last and I groaned. "This is cover!" I yelled to my friends, "They're going after something at the museum!"
I took a moment to get a bigger picture. The gunmen were mostly all accounted for and the enemy wizards were getting pushed back. Penny had stopped at the first bystander that had been caught in the explosion, and was furiously casting healing charms while Percy covered her. Oliver, Alexis, and Mathilda were spread out at my flanks, shielding and firing stunners when they saw an opportunity. And our chaperones were moving through the fray like the war veterans they both were.
Do not take your eyes off Arthur Weasley: mild-mannered bureaucrat by day, extremely brutal counter-terrorist fighter by night. I wasn't even sure what he cast at one of the wizards, but the guy went down hard after it managed to power through the guy's shield.
Michael seemed equally impressed. "I thought I said not to be here today," he chided, half-heartedly.
"You're welcome," I grinned. "Glacius!" I managed to get a distracted wizard to walk onto the patch of ice and slip, Mrs. Longbottom quickly finishing him off.
"I have to admit, this isn't the behavior I've come to expect from wizards," he nodded, starting to head off toward the museum.
"Yeah. We're pretty awesome," I told him. "Also, a taxi service!"
"Nope!" Mathilda said, welding herself to my side in a fierce hug. She hadn't quite figured out apparating herself, but I'd been practicing my side-along with her. "Lexi! Take Michael!"
Mrs. Longbottom yelled back, "No! Merlin's hairy balls! You're going to make me go gray by the end of the day. I'll take him. Arthur! Can you handle the Egyptian Ministry when they show up? Okay," as she hustled over, she looked for a second like she was going to try to order Mathilda to stay behind, saw her affixed like a limpet to me, and sighed. "Fine. Oliver or Alexis. The other stays here to help."
"I'm the better healer," Oliver admitted. He'd had to figure out several of the charms to deal with quidditch injuries from how hard he made people train.
"Right. Museum. With me, Mr. Carpenter?" Warily, Michael took the small woman's proffered arm. Maybe he would have argued, but he probably didn't feel up to trying to run the half mile back to the museum.
"Exit through the gift shop," I suggested. Everyone nodded. I took a breath, called to mind what I needed to do to not splinch me and my girlfriend. I usually used my staff for the boost, but a thousand yards shouldn't be a problem. Deliberation, destination, and determination firmly fixed, I turned in place and dragged us along the Veil between the world and the Nevernever, skating instantly through the intervening space.
And I only knocked over one display of Horus-eye necklaces when I landed!
"Fingers, check! Ears, check! Shoes, check!" Mathilda announced, after detaching herself and making sure she hadn't been splinched.
"Sorry about the back of your hair, though," I winced, then stuck my tongue out and winked when she frantically felt the back of her head and realized I'd been messing with her. I looked around and confirmed that we'd gotten lucky: the gift shop was momentarily empty of shoppers, just one cashier giving us a thousand-yard stare like a couple of teens teleporting into the building wasn't the weirdest thing she'd seen in her time there.
A moment later, two more small explosions heralded the arrival of Alexis, Mrs. Longbottom, and Michael. They didn't knock over anything. The poor, beleaguered retail worker just rubbed her eyes, and wandered off to rearrange a display somewhere else.
"Your show, where do we–" Mrs. Longbottom started to tell Michael, before the sound of screams from the museum became apparent. "Nevermind."
We rushed out of the shop toward the noise, and wound up in the large, central atrium, where the early-afternoon crowd was thin, presumably because lunch was still happening. Those that were there were being menaced by a dozen spindly little men with pointed ears, clubs, and red hats, who'd already smashed several security guards unconscious. "You called it," Mathilda told me. "Remember that they're extremely dangerous. Class triple-X. Not spell resistant. Beasts, not beings."
Right, similar to goblins, red caps had survived wizards by being ornery rather than immune to magic. Unlike goblins, they didn't have any legal protections. I really needed to figure out whether all intelligent creatures that didn't get classified as "beings" were safe to kill with magic without risking your own soul. This probably wasn't exactly the time to find out. "These might be from the Nevernever," I warned instead, "so they might be even worse." There was one way to find out. "Glacius!" I incanted.
That was the cue for the other three wizards to start blasting. Saving the rather-more-exhausting stunners for the moment, everyone was mostly making due with lower-energy spells. "Petrificus Totalus!" Mathilda tried, while Alexis used "Immobulus," and Mrs. Longbottom incanted "Incarcerous."
After flinging out the ropes, the short auror also tried combat apparition again to bottleneck the creatures, and Michael charged off deeper into the atrium, flipping out a large pocket knife. The iron content of the steel blade would probably be a very effective deterrent for true fae.
While they were far faster and scrappier than they looked, they'd obviously been expecting nothing worse than muggle security guards and scared tourists. If your accuracy is decent and you start far enough away, ranged attacks beat melee pretty much every time. I guess I'm saying, they brought a club to a spell fight.
"I mean, class triple-X sounds scarier when you learn about them third-year?" Mathilda asked, while we made sure we had incapacitated all of them. They hadn't even gotten close, though one of them had nearly clipped Alexis with a thrown club, and Michael had kicked one out of his way as he ran past.
When we'd secured the room and caught up to Michael, he looked worse than he had when he left, but not by much. A couple lines of blood scored his arms, and his shirt was cut open revealing a tunic of fine-linked steel chainmail. His opponent was significantly more injured. The true sidhe in the red cap we'd seen at Necropolis was shoved up against a column, Michael's arm leveraged against his chest and his pocketknife at the fae's throat. The guy had a few nasty cuts of his own that look burned from the iron allergy, a pair of silvery hatchets were discarded on the floor nearby, and he'd lost the hat. It had left a bit of a red stain on the floor beneath where it had fallen during the fight.
"He was after that," Michael nodded at a display case without taking his eyes off his prisoner, whose arms hung in seeming surrender by his sides, but who had that typical mad fae gleam in his eye.
"Good afternoon, Lefayson," the sidhe told me with a feral grin. "Call off your church knight, let me finish my mission, and there will be favors owed. Continue impeding me and I shall have to take it as an affront."
"He's not mine," I shrugged. "I'm just tagging along here. But you certainly pissed his boss off." I mean, I figured, at least. Church knight? I'd still been thinking the guy was just a really specialized American auror.
"Lefayson?" Michael asked me, still not taking his eyes off but managing to quirk an eyebrow at me anyway.
"My mom apparently had enough dealings with the fae to get a nickname," I told him, slightly surprised that much information wasn't somehow caught up in the secrets I couldn't share.
"Not wise," he said. "These things will forever try to get you under their thumb." I just shrugged. He wasn't wrong.
Mrs. Longbottom and Alexis had been investigating the display case, which held hieroglyph-inscribed ceremonial golden shields from Tut's tomb, according to the note. I felt like I'd seen a couple of similar artifacts in the wizarding dig site: delicate gold in a curved shield (or maybe headstone) shape with lots of negative space: figures defined by sections cut out of the shield. "Why is this in a muggle museum?" Mrs. Longbottom asked, after running detection charms. "It's highly magical."
"And I bet it does something really cool. Cool enough that Mavra was looking for another one in Abu Simbel," I suggested. The sidhe that was now sporting hat-hair had a hell of a poker face, but I thought I saw a twitch. "Did you blow up a whole street just for a shot at that thing?" I asked the guy.
"Just? No. Why not a win-win?" he smirked. "Now. Are we trading answers for favors?"
"I… don't think we can hold him without killing him," I told Michael.
"I'm opposed to that outcome," the sidhe nodded.
Michael thought about it for a few moments, probably weighing whether he would prefer to just kill the guy. "Your freedom for your oath to stay out of Egypt and cease attempts to obtain any artifacts currently therein for at least a year and a day, as well as a truthful and full answer to one question."
"What's the question?" he asked.
The knight thought about it for a second, then clearly nodded my way, ceding me the phrasing. I considered, then asked, "What is the objective that requires you to patronize terrorists and try to claim that artifact?"
"Damn. A truthful and full answer, yes?" the captured fae asked, then elaborated, "The simple answer is that you already have guesses. We want to once again have the free access to this world that is currently denied us. That artifact is one of several possible shortcuts. The terrorism… well… involving ourselves in such concerns allows us to offer our help against it if we can come to an agreement with the temporal authorities."
"Shatter the Veil as a fait accompli, or convince the wizards to shatter it for you so you'll stop causing trouble," I summarized.
He merely gave me that mad grin, "I believe we had a bargain?"
Michael nodded, releasing him. He quickly scooped his hat back onto his head and disappeared his hatchets under his shirt. A quick, calculating look, memorizing faces and planning his payback. Just because we had a bargain didn't mean he couldn't be vindictive. I had a thought and mentioned, "You might hold off on spreading this story around, unless the queens were ready for the plan to be widely known and happy for you to be the messenger."
A flicker of worry. Great! Maybe that meant he wouldn't immediately call down Maeve and whatever other true fae had made it into the world to try to ruin our year. His mad, smug grin froze a little, and he simply nodded, "The family legacy continues. Until I see you again." With that, he blurred and there was a slight pop of air. It didn't feel exactly like apparition, but hopefully he was doing basically the same thing to leave the country in the quickest manner possible.
All business, Michael turned to Mrs. Longbottom and asked, "You can get that thing somewhere safer?"
Before she could answer I grinned and told him, "But it belongs in a museum!"
All three witches stared at me blankly. I'd only had time to make my friends watch Raiders. We hadn't gotten to Last Crusade, yet.
After a few seconds of dead silence, Michael sighed and told me, "So do you, Dr. Jones." I broke out in the biggest smile. Usually only Mathilda finished my pop culture references.
He wouldn't give me a high five though.