Ask and Answer

by Clara Coulson

  Racking his brain, Liam scoured the hall for something he could use to slow the man down. He came across a puddle of liquid on the floor, surrounded by glass shards. Sparkling water one of the caterers had spilled as they fled in a panic.

  Now there’s an idea.

  Activating another ring, Liam molded a small shield around his fist and punched through the wall. Then he grabbed the broken edge of the wall and pulled, ripping out a large section of the drywall and exposing the structures beneath. Including a water pipe that led to the kitchen.

  He wrapped his hand around the pipe and spit out an incantation that shot a small explosive charge down the length of the pipe. When it reached a position adjacent to the magician, Liam yelled one more word, and the charge detonated, blowing out a chunk of the wall and spraying high-pressure water across the hall.

  The magician, attention consumed by the fire spell he was preparing to chuck at Liam, simply allowed his shield to block the debris. But he failed to notice the water slicking up the hardwood until his foot slipped on it. With a gasp of surprise, he tumbled backward, smacking his head against the floor.

  His fire spell went off in the wrong direction and blasted out the ceiling directly above him. A good hundred pounds of wood and wiring and metal supports came crashing down on top of his shield, pinning him to the floor.

  Liam, throat choked by the cloud of smoky debris, coughed out a victorious, “Ha!”

  Then he hightailed it down the hall to catch up with Yun and Radigan.

  When he turned the corner into the kitchen, however, he stopped cold.

  The kitchen was a mess. Pots and pans littered the floor. Silverware was strewn everywhere. Puddles of steaming soup slinked across the countertop, streams running down the cabinets and the face of the stove.

  The gas-powered burners were still lit, hot flames threatening to set forgotten dishtowels ablaze. The sink had sprung a leak, water spraying across the room. And the ceiling was bowing in, cracks spider-webbing outward.

  Liam suddenly realized that the kitchen was almost directly beneath the burning study.

  The catering staff had paid for his failure to stop the magician upstairs.

  Guilt rising, he cut through the kitchen and entered the dining room. The caterers were huddled at the far end, just past the overturned dining table, nursing a variety of wounds. Patricia was running back and forth, handing out supplies from a first-aid kit, but there wasn’t enough to patch up everyone.

  Several people had sustained serious lacerations from fumbled knives. More than one had been dealt burns to their hands or faces by hot food flying through the air. And a few had broken their noses or banged their heads when they were knocked to the floor by the blast.

  Hunt was kneeling in front of one woman with a weeping head wound, testing her eye movements.

  Liam crossed the dining room. “Hunt, we need to get these people out of here. The rogue magician’s after our asses. Radigan’s not responsible for—”

  “I know,” Hunt interrupted. “Ms. Xing explained the situation when she and the senator came through a minute ago. I’ll be sending everyone off to safety momentarily.”

  He finished testing the injured woman’s responses and told her she had a concussion that required a trip to the emergency room. He then stuck a rubber band around her wrist. A rubber band imbued with his magic energy.

  Liam scanned the rest of the caterers. Everyone had a rubber band around their wrist.

  “You’re prepping a mass teleportation spell?” he asked Hunt.

  “Indeed.” Hunt stood up and doubled-checked to make sure he hadn’t missed anyone. “It’ll spit them out on the front sidewalk, where I suspect first responders will be arriving shortly. The mundane paramedics can handle all these injuries, so we’ll leave it to them.”

  Hunt drew a series of symbols in the air with two fingers, his violet energy leaving a transient trail of color. Then he spoke just three words, and all the rubber bands lit up, the energy within them linking each person together like a chain.

  A bright flash filled the dining room. When it faded, all the caterers were gone. The first-aid kit clattered to the floor where the startled Patricia had let go of it as the spell carried her off through interdimensional space.

  “Some of the staff are still in the courtyard,” Liam muttered, trying to hide how awed he was at Hunt’s skill.

  Even at his peak three years ago, Liam had never been able to teleport more than five people at a time, with himself acting as the anchor for the spell. Hunt had just sent twelve people away without breaking a sweat, and he hadn’t even needed to use an anchor. He had enough mental fortitude to hold the spell stable from a remote position, even though it required simultaneously tracking the dimensional trajectories of each individual traveler.

  Liam had never felt smaller.

  “The rest will have to find their own way to safety,” Hunt said. “Our friend the rogue magician is back on his feet, and we need to knock him down again.”

  A surge of energy wafted over Liam, and he dove toward Hunt just before a wall of force barreled through the dining room entryway. The force wall hit the dining table dead on and smashed it to pieces. Sharp wooden shrapnel flew every which way, threatening to pierce skin and gouge out eyes.

  Hunt conjured a shield around himself and Liam with a single snap of his fingers. The wooden splinters bounced off it harmlessly, leaving tiny violet ripples in their wakes.

  The rogue magician marched into the dining room, his face still obscured by the black mist. Pulsing red energy rings encircled his wrists, mirroring the silver bracelets he was using as his mediums. At the sight of Liam on one knee, recovering from his messy dive, the man raised one hand to blast his adversary to kingdom come.

  But he faltered when his gaze ticked up to Hunt, who hovered just behind Liam. The energy rings warbled slightly, as if a current of shock ran through his soul.

  He recognizes Hunt, Liam realized. Which means Hunt might know him.

  Hunt had the same interpretation. He grabbed Liam by the arm and hoisted him up, pointing him in the direction of the lounge that abutted the dining room. “Change of plans. I will knock the magician down again. You go catch up to Ms. Xing and the senator—they were heading for the garage to find a getaway vehicle. Glasya-Labolas is still unaccounted for, and depending on the terms of its contract, our magician friend here may be able to order it to kill the senator in his stead.”

  Liam looked from Hunt to the rogue magician, who’d gone rigid. “You sure you want to take this guy on alone?”

  “Quite sure.” A violet aura began to rise from Hunt’s skin like fog. “So run along now, Mr. Crown.”

  Liam took the hint and dashed out of the dining room.

  The lounge looped back into the main hallway, and Liam took a hard right toward the wing of the building that was connected to the large garage. He made it thirty steps down the hall before another explosion rocked the building, sending him stumbling into the wall.

  Dark smoke billowed out of the doorway to the kitchen, and a figure soared across the hall, crashed through the wall, and kept on going all the way across the courtyard, where it smashed through a window. The figure landed in a rough tumble in the back yard.

  A second smoke-clad figure, Hunt, flitted across the hall a moment later. He leaped through the huge hole in the wall, violet magic arcing between all the mediums he’d hidden on his person. Before he reached the end of the courtyard, a crimson-red fireball blasted out of the divot in the ground where the magician had come to rest. Hunt deftly dodged to the left, and the fireball sailed past him, threaded the hole in the wall perfectly, and slammed into something in the wrecked kitchen.

  The kitchen doorway belched bright fire, and Liam redoubled his pace.

  At this rate, the whole mansion’s going to burn down.

  Booms and quakes tailed Liam down the hall, the fight between
Hunt and the rogue magician heating up. Cracks formed in the ceiling, the floor, the walls, and Liam desperately hoped that everyone was well into the process of fleeing the building.

  The garage was where he remembered it. Its plain door hung open, the latch busted from a kick that had left a dent in the panel. A dent that roughly matched the shape of Yun’s shoe.

  Liam slid to a stop just inside the garage, searching the long, narrow space for any signs of Yun and Radigan. But there were none. Instead, the door that let out onto a stone walkway that rounded the side of the house had been left open, just like the interior door.

  They had left the garage on foot.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out why.

  The smell of burning plastic permeated the air, and wisps of smoke were rising from underneath the hoods of several vehicles.

  All of Radigan’s cars were newer models with complex computer systems, which were vulnerable to fluctuating magic surges. The intense pulses from the fight between Hunt and the rogue magician had damaged all the cars, frying a great deal of their internal circuitry.

  Judging by the driver’s doors that had been left open, Radigan had tried and failed to start four different vehicles. After that, he and Yun had given up and fled the old-fashioned way.

  Liam squeezed between two cars and cautiously approached the exterior door, wary of flying debris from the fight taking place in the back yard. He poked his head out and searched the ground in both directions. He found a few fresh footprints that led toward a trio of sheds that were offset from the garage by a tall hedgerow.

  Another tremor shook the mansion, spurring Liam into action.

  Halfway to the hedgerow, his phone started buzzing, and he halted for a second to free it from his pocket. The screen had been cracked by his fall from the study, but its charmed case had protected it from magic damage.

  As he continued through the gap in the hedgerow, he woke the screen to find he had received a text from an unknown number—Gabby’s new burner phone—that said an emergency call was imminent. And sure enough, a moment after Liam finished reading the text, a call came in from the same number.

  Liam swiped the green button to answer and held the phone to his ear as he searched the grounds inside the rectangular hedgerow for Yun and Radigan. “Gabby, please tell me you and Kat have left the building.”

  “I wish I could,” Gabby said, voice strained. “But we’ve got a situation down here. The demon found us. Kat’s out in the hall wrestling with it while trying not to critically injure Linda Cunningham’s body, but neither of us can exorcise the thing. We need Mr. Huntington.”

  “Hunt’s in the back yard fighting the rogue magician”—an explosion jolted the earth, accompanied by the earsplitting screech of tearing metal—“and it doesn’t sound like he’s going to be finished anytime soon.”

  “Well, what do we do then?” Gabby gasped, and in the background, Liam heard what sounded like a body hitting a floor, bones cracking. “Kat’s hardy, but she can’t keep this up forever. Eventually, she’s going to have to resort to killing the host body and sending the demon back to the summoning array.”

  “You know where the array is?” Liam’s eye caught movement through a window in one of the sheds, and he jogged toward it.

  “It’s here in the basement.”

  “Shit.” He rounded the corner of the shed to find the doors wide open. “Both the first and second floors are burning. If the fire destroys the summoning array, that demon’s going to be able to roam the plane freely once it leaves Linda Cunningham’s body.”

  “Yes, I know. That’s why I’m asking you to send help.”

  Liam peeked around one of the open doors, into the expansive interior of the shed. At the far end, Yun and Radigan were pulling a tarp off a blue ATV. “As soon as I send the senator off to safety, I’ll double back to Hunt and alert him to the problem. Maybe if the two of us tag-team the magician, we can take him down more quickly. In the meantime, see if you and Kat can get the demon to pursue you into the back yard—”

  “Liam, it’s not that simple. We’ve got two other people in tow.”

  “What? Who?”

  “Sally and Daphne Radigan,” Gabby said sourly. “I assume by the fact you’re helping Senator Radigan that you know he isn’t responsible for the murders?”

  “Yeah, the magician tried to kill him when he found out someone had been embezzling funds from his campaign, I assume to pay the magician.”

  “Your assumption is right.” Gabby huffed. “It was his wife.”

  Liam screwed his eyes shut. Of course. The “S.R.” in Maitland’s contact list meant “Sally Radigan,” not “Samuel Radigan.”

  “But why?” Liam said. “Why did she do this?”

  “Because she has shifter blood in her ancestry, which she passed on to her daughter. The exposure to Nordstrom’s blood when Daphne was a child caused her latent genes to activate after an accident she had a few weeks ago. Daphne’s been stuck in wolf form since then, and because her parents know fuck-all about shifter physiology, they reached out to some shady contacts to try and find a ‘permanent solution’ to their daughter’s predicament.

  “Samuel Radigan ultimately bowed out because the cost was literally too high, but…” Gabby swallowed hard. “Liam, Sally Radigan hired an Advent 9 magician to turn her daughter human.”

  Cold shock flooded Liam’s veins. “Oh Christ. If that man sees Kat…”

  “I know.” Gabby grunted as something near her shattered. “I’m going to call Casey and the other shifters. They’ll wind up making a huge scene as they come charging in, but I guess with all the magic bombs going off upstairs that any attempt at subtlety has been tossed out the window at this point.

  “Hopefully, they can help you and Hunt bring the magician down. I’m going to try to get Sally Radigan and her daughter out of the basement while Kat holds off Glasya-Labolas.”

  “I’m guessing Sally Radigan has realized the error of her ways?” Liam watched as Yun jumpstarted the ATV with her electricity powers, the engine roaring to life.

  “Too late for the shifters she placed on her sacrificial altar,” Gabby said. “But yes, she’s willing to admit to the authorities that her unforgivable stupidity, and her desperation to help her daughter, drove her to participate in a criminal conspiracy that resulted in a demon summoning and multiple murders.”

  “In that case, keep her as far away from the magician and the demon as you can,” Liam said. “A9 will not tolerate exposure. If the magician discovers Sally Radigan is planning to rat them out, he’ll kill her without a second thought.”

  “Understood.”

  A wooden object loudly splintered, and Kat’s muffled cry came across the line.

  Liam winced. Kat could take a lot of punishment and keep on swinging, but she did feel pain. “Tell Kat to hang on. I’ll send Hunt to exorcise the demon ASAP.”

  “I will. And Liam—”

  A burst of static came across the line, and the call cut out. Magic interference.

  Stomach roiling from everything he’d just learned, Liam lowered the phone and stepped onto the ramp leading into the shed.

  “Hey, you,” he shouted to Samuel Radigan over the growl of the ATV’s engine, startling the man and Yun. “We need to have a quick chat before you run away with your tail between your legs.”

  19

  Kat

  A kick to the hip sent the demon spinning out across the room. Before it could recover, Kat drove her shoe into its back and pushed it through the open door of the cage where Daphne Radigan had been kept. Slamming the cage door shut, she dashed out of the room, tugged the silver-laden door closed, clicked the padlock into place, and sprinted off in the same direction where Gabby had fled with Sally Radigan and her ailing wolf daughter.

  Even in Linda Cunningham’s petite body, Glasya-Labolas was immensely powerful. The cage and the door wouldn’t hold it
for long.

  As Kat neared a set of service stairs, she grabbed her dislocated left shoulder and wrenched it back into the socket, hissing at the fresh wave of pain. She had heightened her strength and senses to levels beyond that of even a vampire. But still, the demon had gotten the better of her multiple times during their brawl.

  Half her fingers were broken, along with one wrist, and an elbow to the face had cracked the same orbital wall that the demon had smashed the night before. Blood streamed down her face from a deep laceration on her forehead, where the demon had practically tried to scalp her. And there was something out of alignment in her spine, a vertebra grinding against its neighbors with every step she took.

  As if all that wasn’t bad enough, a punch to the gut had brought down her glamour, and she couldn’t restore it. Like usual, Kat’s magic energy had automatically re-tasked itself to healing all her wounds, and she couldn’t forcibly redirect it.

  Kat had also hit the limit of her bangle five separate times throughout the fight. The metal had cracked in three places from the strain of holding the anti-scrying spell together. I’m going to have to come up with an alternate anti-scrying solution, she thought. I can’t keep limiting my magic use during fights. It’s going to get me killed.

  But that was a problem for another day. Now, she had to catch up to Gabby.

  At the bottom of the stairs, like a breadcrumb trail, Kat found a rumpled pile of Gabby’s clothes. The weak wolf must have been unable to climb the stairs, so Gabby had shifted into jaguar form to carry her up.

  Assuming they were moving fairly fast now that the emaciated Daphne wasn’t holding them back, Kat hurried up to the ground floor. Only to be accosted by a cloud of noxious smoke when she opened the door that let out into the main hall.

  Coughing, Kat shut the door for a moment and dredged up what scraps of magic energy her body would allow her to use while she was healing. She formed a small bubble of clean air around her, then opened the door again and looked both ways down the hall. The smoke was so thick, it was hard to cut through, even with her enhanced eyes.