Spell Caster

by Clara Coulson

  Desmond lingers near the doorway as Ella moves farther inside. Her footfalls are soft and steady on what must be a concrete floor, and I hear no signs of distress or shock as she progresses through the full length of the shed. When she reaches the back wall, she spins around, the skidding of rubber on stone, a few pieces of debris plinking against the wall, and retraces her steps. She repeats this process three times, back and forth, back and forth, until she’s sure no dangerous enemies are lying in wait. Eventually, her penlight clicks on, and a blue glow carries out of the doorway.

  “All clear,” she says. “It definitely looks like our guy has been here. There are printouts of photos, Coble’s and Fletcher’s among them, names and addresses scribbled on notebook paper, a marked-up map of the city, and a bunch of other things I can’t immediately identify. Desmond, come help me collect and organize all this stuff. Amy and Cal, stay outside and stay alert, in case our perp comes home to find unwelcome guests.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” we all murmur in tandem.

  Nothing of note happens over the next ten minutes, but I remain tense. The mostly bare treetops shiver in the light breeze, and I track my gaze along their zigzagging lines, hunt for any shape out of place, any odd bend that could indicate extra weight sitting atop a branch. Finding no detail of concern, I work my way down to the trunks, hunt for cloaked figures trying to stand still in the shadows, or the telltale glint of a knife in the night, aimed at my face or at Amy’s. But yet again, there’s no sign of the man in the mask or the creature acting as his attack dog. So I drop my focus all the way to the ground and…

  A thump. Quiet but close. And another. And another. And three more after that.

  My ears pick out the direction after the third one, and I twist my head toward the area of the woods we hiked through to get here. The area where the Wolves should still be waiting. There’s a period of about five seconds where I’m convinced the dull thumps are the sounds of the Wolves leaving us behind to fend for ourselves because they’ve gotten bored of this tracking job or because Newsome has recalled them for some reason.

  But just when I’m about to let out an angry hiss to call them back, I spy movement in the blackness at the base of one of the trees. Even with my enhanced vision, it takes my brain an inordinate amount of time to work out what it is: a limp arm slumping toward the ground, the lifeless body it’s attached to hidden behind the tree.

  “Shit,” I spit out, “the Wolves are under—”

  Warmth. Coming straight at my head.

  I drop, evading the tentacle by a hairsbreadth, and claw at the ground to throw myself away from the shed as the leathery appendage whips into the sheet-metal siding. The siding implodes with a mighty screech, and a thousand bits of sharp-edged shrapnel careen outward from the impact point. The pieces pelt me, and though most are rebuffed by my coat, several slip around the arms shielding my face and swipe at my skin, leave behind deep cuts that sting hot and bleed heavy. When the last of the shrapnel soars past, I come to a stop and push myself to my feet with one hand.

  Gun in one hand, paint grenade in the other, I hunt for any sign of the creature’s general location. But there’s too little ambient light to reveal its outline even with the surrounding air choked by debris from the damaged sh…Oh crap.

  The shed has collapsed. With Ella and Desmond trapped inside. Neither of them are saying anything, and I have no idea if they’re injured or dead or just stunned and still taking stock of themselves. And I don’t have time to figure it out.

  The warmth of the creature’s tentacle appears to my left, coming in low. Pulling the pin with my thumb, I hurl my grenade at what I think is the tentacle’s original point. Only for the tiny canister to get batted away halfway across the clearing, by a second tentacle. It lands harmlessly in the underbrush twenty feet away and bursts into a cloud of yellow smoke.

  I fumble for my second grenade as I pull off a high jump to prevent the first tentacle from sweeping me off my feet. Before it can swing back around for another shot, I pull the pin on the second grenade and throw it like a frisbee. The grenade spins through the air and dips sharply halfway through its arc, skimming the ground as it nears the trees where the Wolves were loitering, where there bodies now lie.

  The canister plinks against a fallen branch, close to where the creature must be, and explodes into yet another glorious yellow burst. This time, the paint cloud engulfs part of the creature, but the creature isn’t stupid—or slow. The creature veers sharply to the right, away from the paint, and only a small portion of its underbelly is stained yellow. The creature quickly reorients its bulk to shield the painted part from view. With the way its able to bend light around its form, I can’t see the yellow through the rest of its body.

  Well, damn. That’s—

  Heat. Rushing toward me from the right.

  I try to jump the sweeping tentacle again, but it catches the rim of my boot and nearly sends me sprawling. A garbled swear lodged in my throat, I stumble into a run and make for the tree line. The creature can’t clothesline me if there are thick trees in the way, and if I’m lucky, I might be able to buy myself enough time to come up with an alternative to the paints grenades.

  Halfway to the trees, I spy Amy lying in the tall grass beside the shed. A large piece of wood from the shed’s broken frame caught her in the upper thigh. She’s clutching her leg and biting back a high-pitched cry, her entire face warped in pain. A worrying amount of blood is pooling around the wood and soaking into the grass, which tells me I need to end this fight quickly and get her medical attention. Unfortunately, I can’t end a fight if I can’t find my enemy’s location.

  Come on, Kinsey. Think! I huff out a frustrated breath, white on the cold air, as I near the tree line. The hairs on my neck prickle at the danger that must be mere steps behind me. There has to be another way to spot this thing. Something with the heat?

  Condensation.

  Humid heat plus cold air equals condensation.

  I drop into a slide as the tentacle tears through the air again and skid to a stop at the very edge of the brush. Water magic doesn’t come as easily to me as fire and lightning, but I’ve practiced it on a few occasions over the past few weeks, mostly in an attempt to stop myself from getting drenched every time I set off the sprinkler in the storage room. I smack my hands against the ground and send a pulse of magic through the earth, targeting the water trapped within. Then, with a tug of will, I drain the water up, up, up, through the topsoil and into the air, forming a small, rippling pond floating two feet high.

  My pond dips when my concentration is broken by the sight of Ella’s hand grasping for purchase as it reaches underneath the gap left between the collapsed wall of the shed and the crooked remnant of the doorway. But I force myself to ignore her plight—I have to save myself from the creature before I can save anyone else—and reassert my focus on my will-powered magic.

  First, I shape the pond into a large sphere of water. Then, using the field of warmth I sense as the tentacle pulls itself clear of the trees it almost chopped in half while trying to chop off my head, I approximate the general location of the creature’s bulk and aim the sphere in the right direction. And finally, I fire the sphere like a cannon ball.

  The water sphere collides with something hovering three feet past the tree line on the adjacent side of the clearing, and the air around the figure turns bright white. It makes the creature look far too much like the stereotypical image of a ghost, a gross, misshapen phantom with over half a dozen wriggling tentacles outstretched in various directions. Most of them are pointing away from the clearing, and though I can’t see their entire lengths, I know where they all end: in the bodies of the Wolves who never saw the damn creature coming.

  While my team was busy inspecting the shed, the creature snuck up behind us, and clearly, it didn’t give off any scent the Wolves could differentiate from the smells of the forest. It didn’t make any sounds either, not even the barest noise. It did not, in any way, reveal its p
resence to those poor people. Right up until the moment it struck them down. Those thumps I heard were the tentacles impaling each of the Wolves in the chest. In the heart. And it held those tentacles in those hearts too—per its orders. The creature’s master is smart enough to know the Wolves’ hearts might’ve healed if given the chance.

  Fury burns bright inside me. You complete bastard. When I get my hands on you…

  The creature realizes its been revealed and starts to move deeper into the woods. Jolted back into action, I raise my right fist and let out a medium-strength lightning blast, just below the limit point of my rings. It strikes the creature dead center, causing it to waver. I funnel more energy down my arm and shoot another bolt. And a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And a sixth. One for each of the fallen wolves.

  My rings grow hot from the strain of continual magic use, but the repeated blasts finally send the creature down. It thuds against the ground, its tentacles go limp, and its invisibility cloak falters. It’s not just a grotesque humanoid figure in shape. It’s also got mottled, rotten-looking skin and looks far too much like an actual corpse—

  The faint zing of metal slicing through the air.

  I whip around and fire a blast of force, redirecting the poison knife an inch from my head. It flies up into the sky, spinning end over end, and lands in the dirt blade first in the middle of the clearing. At the edge of the trees, the cloaked practitioner stands frozen, as if startled by my display. Like he’s unsure how I pulled off something as basic as a force wave, one of the most common beggar magic moves among DSI agents.

  I don’t have time to dwell on why he’s confused though, because the creature is already recovering from my onslaught. I need to take out the summoner before it regains its full strength and invisibility. Because I seriously doubt it’s going to fall for that condensation trick twice.

  I lift my gun and fire a full magazine at the practitioner. He predictably raises a shield that deflects them all, bullets eating dirt and bark. So I follow up the shots with the most powerful fire spell I can use with my suppression rings on. I hurl a huge, roaring funnel of flame at his body. It sears through the air, burning the tall grass to a crisp, so high, so low, and so wide that the man can’t doge the bulk of it with the fraction of a second that remains before impact. He reinforces his shield instead, dark-blue energy like a void in space encapsulating his body in a sphere of protection.

  The fire consumes the entire sphere—and slings it twenty feet through the woods. It crashes into a narrow tree, snapping the trunk in half, and rebounds off to the left as the tree falls forward and slams into the ground. The tiptop of the tree comes to rest less than a foot from my boots.

  Ignoring the pain in my fingers—my rings are so hot they’re burning my skin through my gloves—I sprint around the tree and fling myself into the woods, skidding to a stop just as the practitioner is unraveling his shield. The damn thing was so strong it didn’t even crack from the force of my fire vortex, but the practitioner was clearly not anticipating being thrown around like a ragdoll. He’s on his back, cloak tangled up around his legs, his porcelain mask cracked in two places. I toss my first gun aside and pull my fully loaded spare, close the gap between us, and make to kick the guy in the head as hard as I can, hoping to knock the mask off and reveal his face.

  My leg stops six inches from his head. And suddenly, I can’t move. At all. What the fuck?

  Then I spot them: thin lines of magic fanning out from beneath the practitioner’s back ten feet in every direction, a spider’s web of energy threaded through the ground. When I stepped onto the lines, they stuck to me and grew like vines, crawling up my body from boots to hair. It was so fast and subtle, I didn’t even feel it happening, and the energy threads are so faint, my magic sense failed to pick them out on my approach.

  This guy is good. Too good.

  The wizard casually brushes off his clothes as he stands up and turns to face me. I feel him analyzing every inch of me through the cloth-covered eyes of his mask, drinking in all the details of my person he missed during our first encounter. He doesn’t say anything—he’s too smart to compromise his identity like that—but he does strike a pose, arms loosely crossed, head tilted to the side, that tells me he makes some determination about me. Mild interest maybe? Certainly nothing more. Because once he’s finished “admiring” me, he yanks another knife from his belt, spins it around expertly in his fingers, and holds it in a way that insinuates he’s about to slit my neck.

  Crap.

  My hands are stuck pointing away from the man, so I can’t do anything resembling beggar magic that’ll negatively impact him or the magic web pinning me in place. Which means, in order to get out of this with my neck intact, I have to do something that doesn’t resemble beggar magic. Which will give me away as a magic practitioner to an ICM wizard, who likely still has an open channel of communication to the High Court, since he has not yet been identified as a homicidal maniac. And if that’s indeed the case, then I can kiss my job at DSI goodbye.

  Yet if I do nothing, I can kiss my life goodbye.

  Live to fight another day, Kinsey. You can work out the kinks later.

  The man steps toward me, knife poised to split my carotid in half. Dredging up more of my magic energy and trying desperately to ignore the awful burning sensation searing through my fingers as my suppression rings overload and fail one by one, I quickly feel out the web of threads, each one a light pressure against my skin. I draw jagged mental lines that roughly follow the patterns, like an artist doing a sketch, and will my own energy to map out those same lines underneath my skin.

  I take a quarter of a second to silently blurt out a prayer: Please work.

  Then, with a mighty push of intent, I shove my magic out of my body and into the world.

  The summoner’s magic web unravels. And I’m free.

  I drive a foot into the ground and use it to pivot as I bring up one hand to grab the wrist that holds the knife and yank the practitioner to the side, unbalancing him. Next, I raise my other hand, the one holding the gun, and indiscriminately fire every bullet I’ve got into the wizard’s center mass. All of them should hit home, but only two bite through the man’s flesh. The wizard is so fast to the magic draw that he manages to bring up yet another shield in the time between my second and third shots, and before I can dodge, he launches the shield at me. The rest of my bullets ping off it, and it smacks me like I run full speed into a brick wall. My feet leave the ground, and I tumble through the air until my back meets a tree nice enough to stop me.

  I rebound off the trunk, all the air leaving my lungs, and stumble to my knees. Scrambling up, wheezing, my gun lost in the dead leaf cover, I grasp at my belt until I locate one of my own knives and yank it out, ready to parry a blow or make a life-saving toss.

  Only to find the space in front of me totally empty.

  I back up until I hit the tree, scour every direction in search of the wizard.

  He’s nowhere to be found.

  I focus my magic sense, push it to the level where it can pierce a veil. But again, I find nothing in my immediate vicinity beyond a few dense streams of residual magic that have already started to dissipate into amorphous clouds. Farther on, near the place where the man landed after I threw him with my fire funnel, there’s an extremely complex array of navy-blue shapes and lines etched into the ground, the remnants of the immobilizing web spell.

  According to my beginner’s magic textbook, the more numerous those shapes and lines, whose groupings are called “innate structural arrays,” the more complicated a direct spell and the harder it is to cast. I’ve never cast a direct spell that resulted in an array with even a tenth of that many elements.

  This man is a thousand miles beyond me in magic. The only reason I’m not dead right now, I know for certain, is because he underestimated me.

  Knife clenched in my fist, I wait for a full two minutes, expecting the man to come back for another round. But the woods have gone silen
t again, except for the rapid beating of my own heart and the faint but unmistakable Japanese cursing of Amy Sugawara back in the clearing. The practitioner must’ve cast a speed spell, or maybe some sort of teleportation number, and fled into the night. And I’m guessing, by the conspicuous lack of invisible tentacles destroying everything in their path, that he also snagged the creature and stuffed it back into its magic bottle on his way out of the woods.

  I lost him. Again.

  “Goddammit.”

  Chapter Nine

  After I use the sample kit on my belt to swab up some of the practitioner’s blood from the spray staining the leaf-strewn ground—I really hope those bullet wounds leave him in serious pain—I hobble back into the clearing and take stock of the nasty scene around the shed. Amy is leaning up against the one intact wall, her impaled thigh now wrapped in a tourniquet created using the entire roll of gauze she had in her first-aid pouch. The offending chunk of wood sticks straight up out of the gauze, the entire length soaked red. Amy is breathing steadily, but her face is pale and her hands lie still in her lap. She’s trying to conserve her energy and fend off the shock from losing a great deal of blood.

  To her left, where the door of the shed used to be, is Ella. She’s managed to extricate herself from beneath the collapsed portions of the structure, but she didn’t escape unscathed. She’s lying on her back, gulping in air, one hand plastered to the side of her face, blood smeared across the skin beneath it. It looks like something slammed into her right temple, knocking her for a loop and splitting the skin wide open. The wound is less than an inch from her eye. A lucky miss. But even so, she probably has a concussion coming on.