by A C Spahn
“Bet you a pizza,” said Kendall.
“What?”
“I’m hungry. If I crack your security inside ten minutes, you buy me a pizza after this. Deal?”
A bear that had just eaten a lemon had nothing on Axel’s grumpy expression. “Fine.”
Kendall did not break the security system in ten minutes.
It took her eleven and a half.
“Damn,” she muttered as she finished. “Two out of three? Don’t look so smug, big guy. A smile might break your jaw.”
Sam had returned while Kendall worked, and she stood beside me, looking ashen and clutching an autopsy knife. A black line ringed the handle, marking whatever enchantment she’d placed on the blade. She’d reported no problems disenchanting the boy’s body, but the strain seemed to have shaken her. We’d all congratulated her on a job well done. Hopefully that was the worst she’d have to go through today. Her bodyguards had followed the sounds of combat to join in the fighting, leaving her to return alone.
“Are you okay?” she asked after we’d stood over Kendall for several minutes as she poked around the Voids’ security system.
“Just a few bruises,” I answered. “Why?”
“You’re scratching at your tattoo.”
Frowning, I realized she was right. I lowered my hand to my side.
“It’s probably just all the magic I’ve been using,” I said quietly. “Sometimes throwing around a lot of power starts to influence the tattoo’s magic. It’s happened before. Not itching, but something similar.”
“Will you be okay?” Desmond asked, worry all over his face.
“I’ll be fine. It’s already fading.” That wasn’t strictly true, but none of my friends needed another thing to worry about right now. A faint itching continued in my chest, annoying but not truly distracting. It would settle down in a few minutes.
“Somebody else is in the system,” Kendall reported. “They’ve locked down the elevators and they’re going through files.”
“Lock them out,” Axel ordered.
“I can’t do two things at once.”
“First, let’s figure out what’s going on,” said Desmond. “Then worry about stopping their hackers.”
Axel glared at Desmond, but gave a grudging nod. “Smart.”
“Sometimes I surprise people.”
“Here’s the footage from the stairwell,” Kendall said. “This was fifteen minutes ago.” She played the recording. A wispy, translucent form drifted down the stairs, then visibly geared itself up and seized the handle of the first-floor door. I was reminded of the ghost that had thrown trees at Desmond. Apparently it took effort for the undead to interact with the physical world. As soon as the door opened, the security feed clouded as gas poured into the stairwell. The trap Harrow had set.
Eventually the gas pooled on the floor of the stairwell, clearing the camera’s view. The ghost had disappeared, no doubt coming up to fight us. And a moment later, a crowd of people keeping their faces covered poured up the stairs.
I let out a breath. “That’s them. The fleshwriters.”
Desmond leaned over Kendall. “Where are they now?”
“Pulling up current security feeds,” she said, fingers a blur on the keyboard.
Images flashed by, scenes of half-human monsters wandering the halls. The insane canine shifter was in his dog form, standing on hind legs and scrabbling at the buttons on a bank of elevators. The fish-woman drifted aimlessly in circles around an empty row of cubicles on a different floor. One of the wolf men under failed enchantment was frothing at the mouth in the middle of a hallway, battling a pair of harried-looking Voids. Elsewhere, more Voids fought other victims of failed magic, struggling to recapture and restrain the enchanted beings. Some went down easily, like the firebreather whose blasts simply hit the Voids and vanished, though half a dozen Voids still used extinguishers against the spot fires he’d started around the building. Others, like the wolf shifter, held off multiple Voids each.
Magic exploded on the feeds as well, cast by dozens of fleshwriters. They wore enchantments on their arms, their faces, their legs, on jewelry and clothes and weapons. Where they met the escaped patients, the patients died. Where they met Voids, magic and smoke made it impossible to make out who was winning. Muted gunfire and the clash of steel carried over the audio, in time with the muffled thuds and bangs we could hear from outside our floor. Concerns about police interference were gone. War raged in the Union.
I recognized faces, people I’d known in the cult. Vince was fighting a Void in the medical bay, shooting rounds from a handgun while the medic sheltered behind an overturned gurney. A woman named Harriet, clad in flowing skirts with her red hair hanging loose down her back, cast a furious wind that ripped the limbs from a terrified half-cat, half-bird creature. A young man named Kyle, who had been a kid with me in the cult, grappled with a vampire who seemed heedless of his surroundings as he fought to sink his teeth into the closest source of flesh. People I’d known then, fighting people I knew now, and both of them fighting people who’d simply had magic go wrong in their bodies.
My lungs wouldn’t work as I searched for the three faces I dreaded seeing most. No sign of my mom or my dad. Nor of Geralt.
“He’s here,” I muttered. “He has to be.”
“Go back,” Desmond said suddenly. “Two frames ago. I saw something.”
Kendall flicked back to a feed showing a flight of stairs. A small group of fleshwriters, faces obscured behind ski masks, ran up the steps two at a time. My eyes caught the glint of handguns anchored to waistbands.
And then the floor number they were on.
I clutched the back of Kendall’s chair against a sudden wave of nausea. “We were wrong,” I whispered. “They’re not here for me.”
Desmond was still as a stone. “They’re going for the top floor. They’re here to assassinate Bane Harrow.”
With a shout of rage, Axel bounded for the stairs. He made it to within three feet of the doorway. Then the door slammed open before him, and a trio of fleshwriters poured out.
I had no time to recognize them before magic erupted from all three, striking Axel with fire, lightning, and ice. His skin reddened and blistered, but it didn’t slow him down. He shoved through them and bounded up the stairs, quickly disappearing around the landing.
Kendall whimpered, hunching in her chair, and Desmond had drawn his sword without me seeing. “Go,” he told me. “I’ll deal with these three.”
“I’ll ... I’ll try to stop their hackers,” Kendall said, her voice thin, face ashen. “If I do that, the entire freaking Union owes me a pizza.”
I locked eyes with Desmond before he sprang out into the aisle, intercepting the three fleshwriters with blinding slashes of his sword.
A small voice in my mind whispered another possibility. Run. Escape. Live another day.
Rejection of the idea filled me with violent force. I’d made my choice. I’d chosen my battleground. They would not chase me out of another city. Never again.
Sam’s knuckles were white around the autopsy knife. I took her other hand and pulled her with me out of the cubicle, then through a narrow aisle into the adjoining row of desks. “Come on. Geralt will have his best enchanters with him against Harrow. I’ll need your help.”
“Adrienne ... I don’t know ...”
I peered around a corner toward the stairwell. Desmond had led the fleshwriters deeper onto the floor, leaving the exit clear. “I won’t make you fight. If you can’t, hide here, and stay out of sight.”
“It’s not that. I’m not scared.” That was an obvious lie, but Sam kept talking. “Those enchanted people being killed, the insane ones ... some of them are here because of me. I don’t want ... what if I mess up again and ...”
I looked back at her ashen face. “I trust you. You can do this right. There are no other enchanters I’d trust more to have my back.”
Sam inhaled a shaky breath. Determination set her mouth in a firm l
ine. She nodded.
We sprinted across the open floor and up the stairs to confront the face of my nightmares.
Chapter 27
UP THE STAIRS WE RAN, one flight after another. My muscles burned, but I pushed my body to move faster. We might already be too late. With each step we took, magic’s presence became more and more forceful. Either the Voids were dying, or so many enchanters present had overwhelmed the effect they had on an area’s ambient magic.
At the twelfth floor landing, I came to an abrupt stop. Sam crashed into my back, and caught the railing to steady herself. We stared up the stairs at a jumble of furniture blocking the way. Desks. Chairs. Computers. A haphazard pile that would almost certainly shift and crush us if we tried to climb over.
“Back down,” I ordered Sam. “We can cut across the floor below and use the other stairs.”
“What if they’ve blocked those too?”
“Fleshwriters can’t fly, Sam. They’ll have left themselves a way out. This is just to slow down anyone following them.” And it was working too well.
We rushed back to the previous landing and through a metal door into a hallway carpeted industrial grey. The bank of elevators beside the stairwell was dark, the hall lit only by the green emergency exit sign above the door. No windows interrupted the monotonous cream walls marching ahead, though plain wooden doors stood at irregular intervals. Filing cabinets and overturned office chairs dotted the floor. Past all the doors, at the opposite end of the floor, another green sign pointed the way to the second set of stairs.
“Come on,” I said, and started running.
Near the end of the hallway, a door stood open on the left side of the hall, propped by a two-drawer filing cabinet. No light spilled out, so I didn’t slow my pace. What reason could anyone have to be up here in an abandoned, dark room so far from any fighting? But as we approached, something crawled through the door, blocking the hallway and backed by an eerie green glow from the exit sign. Eyes the size of lemons glowed in the dim light, and massive furred shoulders hunched in a wary crouch. A low growl echoed through the silent corridor.
I went completely still, save a slow, steady movement to raise my hands. “Maribel,” I said softly. “Can you hear me?”
The mountain lion jerked her head side to side, as if swatting invisible flies. Her eyes flicked from us, to the ceiling, to the floor, and back, never lingering in the same place more than a second. She kept growling.
“Maribel, we’re not your enemies. We won’t hurt you. But people are on their way to kill Bane Harrow. Your boss. The man who hired you even though you weren’t a Void. We have to protect him, Maribel. Please, let us pass.”
Feline pupils dilated from slits to half-dollars. Maribel’s growl grew louder, until it vibrated the hair on my skin. Her gaze lingered on us now. Her claws gouged holes in the cheap carpet.
Slowly I lowered my hand to my pocket. My fingers fished inside, until they closed around the slender shape of my sensory ring. A plain gold band, studded with alternating green and white rhinestones.
I slipped it on my finger, and instantly the world expanded.
Maribel’s growl echoed in my enhanced hearing. I could make out four different undertones in the sound. The spots where she’d torn the carpet stood out like potholes despite the dim light. Everything was brighter, louder, magnified. I smelled Sam’s sweat and Maribel’s matted fur and my own fear. Even the air seemed colder, my clothes rougher on my skin. Most importantly, time slowed. I saw every nuance of Maribel’s movement, the subtle shift of balance to her hind legs, the coiling of tension in her hips, the twitches of her tail as she prepared to spring.
My own body felt painfully slow as I reached behind myself to grab Sam. In aching detail my hand closed on her sleeve, even as I threw myself sideways, each second of my fall seeming to take minutes. Maribel launched into the air, aiming for where we were standing before I started to move. In slow motion we passed each other, Maribel’s leap carrying her over our falling forms.
I struggled to pry the sensory ring from my finger with one hand. If I hit the ground wearing it, the magnified pain might paralyze me for time I couldn’t spare. The metal band was stuck to my skin, resisting each attempt I made to wiggle it free. I cursed, the word taking ages to cross my teeth, and scraped at the ring with all my strength.
Just inches before my body struck the floor, the ring slid free. Time sped back up. Instantly I smacked to the ground. Sam thudded down beside me with a grunt. Maribel landed a few feet past us and staggered. My sensory ring slipped from my grasp and rolled somewhere down the dark hallway. Instinct forced me back to my feet, preparing to access the magic in my other jewelry.
Already Maribel was turning around, angling to attack again. But more shadows were moving behind her, more figures emerging into the pitiful green light of the exit sign. Four of them. Five. Six. All powerfully-built men and women, all carrying weapons. No firearms that I could see, but one man had the broken leg of a chair. Three more had various pieces of debris turned into clubs, and one held a broken soda bottle, jagged ends up. The leader carried a long hunting knife, its serrated edge glinting with a dark liquid. Her long brown braid swung as she glanced back into the shadows at her followers. “Told you I saw them running upstairs.”
“Janette,” I breathed the Void’s name. “We need your help. Fleshwriters are attacking Harrow upstairs. They’re here to kill him.” I kept one eye on Maribel, who backed toward the wall, head swiveling as if trying to keep both groups in view at once. A couple Voids broke off to menace her with their weapons.
Janette cast a hate-filled glance at her one-time mentor, then refocused on me. Her grip tightened on the knife. “Harrow can defend himself, but not if you go up there. I’ve heard the rumors. Unions destroyed, everyone dead, buildings burned. Plus the talk about that dead boy we found, the one with the tattoo like yours. I’ve put it all together. They fleshwriters are only here because of you. Because of the magic in you. We can’t let that fall into their hands. If it does, they’ll kill us all.”
My heart galloped in my chest. Precious seconds were ticking away. “Then help stop them.”
“I will.” Janette’s expression grew grim. “I always believed enchanters were corrupt. I still do. But you at least seem to mean well. It changes nothing. For that, I’m sorry.”
That was all the warning I had before she lunged forward with battle-trained speed, swinging the serrated knife at my face.
I stumbled back, instinctively raising my hands to protect myself. Jagged metal slashed my forearm. I tapped the magic of my shield ring, but only a pitiful spurt of purple flared out before dying. Not that it would have helped much against a Void. Janette pressed me against the wall as her compatriots darted forward, forming the claws of a pincer that meant to close around me.
Desperate, I tapped the rest of the magic in my teleportation anklet, and stomped. I reappeared outside the ring of Voids, back beside Sam, who had finally managed to stand up. “Run,” I told her, backing toward the open office door.
“Who do you think I am, Kendall?”
Janette pushed through her cronies, rotating her wrist so the knife spun. “This’ll be faster if you don’t fight.” She lunged forward.
Sam grabbed the handle of the two-drawer filing cabinet propping the door, and flung it toward Janette.
It shouldn’t have done much. Sam was a skinny teenager, and the cabinet had to weigh at least fifty pounds. But the metal furniture shot through the air and slammed Janette back into the opposite wall.
Make that through the opposite wall.
Drywall crumbled and plaster snowed down. Janette landed halfway into the paper-filled office on the other side, her feet sticking through the gaping hole. Coughing, she rolled to a crouch, one hand cradling her ribs. “What ...?”
Sam sprang back to her feet in the hallway. She cracked her neck, a menacing smile on her face. “Magic, bitch.”
One of Janette’s friends began backing a
way. “Come on, Janette. This was a bad idea.”
Janette stumbled back through the hole, pain tightening her face with each step. She glared at me, but didn’t attack. “If you want to do the right thing,” she wheezed, “you should kill yourself.”
“That’s not happening.”
“Then run.”
“I’ve tried running. It doesn’t last.”
Janette took a step toward me, and leaned against the wall with a sudden hiss of pain. She glared over her shoulder at her allies. “Get her!”
But the other Voids were backing away, apparently not sure enough of their own Voidness to face two powerful enchantresses.
Janette spat at them. “Cowards.”
“We don’t have to fight. Come with me,” I urged. “There are six of you. Half a dozen Voids could make a difference against the fleshwriters. Harrow needs you.”
Janette’s hatred for me burned in her gaze. “If Harrow’s still alive up there, he can handle it. He’s the one who allowed you here, and he can clean up after you himself. I’m not sticking around to see what happens when the fleshwriters get hold of you.” She turned and headed down the hallway as fast as her injuries would allow. Her remaining friends hurried ahead of her.
Sam took a step as if to pursue them, but I held up a hand. “Show me,” I ordered.
She gave me a sulky frown, but rolled up her sleeve to expose her right biceps. An enchantment tattoo marked her skin, as wide as a half dollar, the line the thickness of thread.
“Sam ...”
“I know. No fleshwriting. I’m sorry.”
I wanted to lecture her more. But there just wasn’t time. “Please don’t kill yourself before we even reach the battle.”
Glancing around, I saw no sign of Maribel. The mountain lion must have fled when Janette and her friends started fighting us. Our path was clear.
“You’re scratching your tattoo again,” said Sam.
I clenched my fist and dropped my hand. “It’s all the magic flying around. Come on. Let’s end this.”
As we ran up the stairs, magic pounded a distant drumbeat, growing closer with each step we climbed.
