Spell Caster

by Clara Coulson

  Only problem is that his fireball pops free from its spot above his hand and shoots across the room like a meteorite. It rams into the wall and explodes into a roiling wave of flame that races up to the ceiling and down to the floor and catches everything in its path on fire. Including the cardboard boxes, the ceiling joists, and a whole host of pipes that could very well be carrying something flammable.

  I make a hurried attempt to collect all the moisture in the room and douse the rapidly spreading fire with a targeted blast of water. But I only manage to draw in enough water to fill a small plastic bottle before Nottaway clambers back to his feet despite two broken legs and uses a telekinesis spell to hurl half a dozen heavy bins toward me.

  I dive out of the way and roll to a stop on the floor as the bins smack the wall and explode. Turns out the bins are full of glass and ceramic dinnerware, all of which shatters into a thousand pieces. Sharp-edged debris slices through the air, biting into my neck and face and hands, pelting the floor, piercing the cardboard boxes. Somewhere in the storage stacks, Ramirez shouts in pain and then rapidly curses in Spanish, as the blizzard of shrapnel invades every nook and cranny of the basement.

  The only one who escapes without injury is Nottaway, who raised a transparent shield after he threw the bins. He uses the distraction of the shrapnel to prepare his next attack. Instead of another fireball, coiled whips made of flame flicker to life around both his hands, the heat so intense that sweat breaks out across my skin even though I’m standing over ten feet away.

  With nary a word, Nottaway lashes out with one of the whips and strikes at the storage stacks. His whip is cuts through the boxes and bins as if they’re made of air, instantly melting everything in its path. I let out a strangled cry for the trio in the stacks to “Duck!” But I have no idea if they hear me in time.

  Until Naomi Sing slides out from underneath a collapsing stack of boxes, propelled by a continuous blast of wind, leaps four feet into the air, flies toward Nottaway in a graceful arc, shoots three back-to-back force blasts at the man’s shield, knocking it askew, lands without so much as a wobble, and finally brings her sword down on Nottaway’s outstretched arm. The blade cuts through the man’s upper arm like a hot knife through butter, and it detaches at the bicep with a spray of blood and the slick squelch of splitting muscle. The fire whip around the arm dissipates as the severed limb thumps to the floor.

  Nottaway howls in pain and tries to backpedal away from Naomi, but she follows him and delivers an assortment of rapid-fire force punches, to his busted legs and bruised torso and battered face. She hits him again and again, relentless, until the furious wizard stumbles into the wall and slides to the floor, a pitiful wail welling up in his throat.

  Now that he’s standing still, the light from the fire whip still sizzling around his remaining arm illuminates his contorted face enough for me to finally evaluate his state of mind. The conclusion isn’t good: Manic eyes, pupils blown. Lips raw like he’s been chewing on them. Scratches down his temples and cheeks, as if he’s been clawing at his skull, trying to dig something out.

  All the signs of degrading mind magic, as I learned shortly after the Delos fiasco.

  Targus’ mind magic isn’t nearly as flawless as Delos’ variety. Nottaway’s brainwashing is unraveling, and with it, his mental stability, revealing just how badly he’s been damaged. Pity wells up in my chest. Nottaway might very well have murdered someone in the past, but that doesn’t mean he deserves this kind of torment. God, if I ever get the chance to beat the shit out of that Rook—

  Nottaway screams like a man possessed, and his second fire whip, which had been lying on the floor and slowly fizzling out, suddenly rebounds toward his body and strikes him in the chest. As I watch, transfixed, horror growing cold in my gut, the entire length of the whip burrows deep inside Nottaway’s ribcage, and his torso begins to glow orange from the raging fire within.

  His stomach expands like a balloon, skin splitting as its stretched beyond its boundary. His mouth opens so far his jaw joints loudly snap out of place, and tongues of flame belch up his throat and lick his bloody lips. His eyes burst a moment later, two wet pops followed by a gush of fluid down the blistering skin of his face. His hair catches fire, burning black in seconds. And all the time, his torso grows larger and larger, bones cracking, organs bursting, the glow under his skin brightening. It’s almost like he’s about to…

  Explode.

  It’s a berserker spell. A self-destruct.

  I reflexively lunge forward, grab Naomi by the arm, and heave her back into a pile of toppled boxes. She yelps in pain as she crashes headlong into the mound of crumpled cardboard, but I don’t have time to apologize for any bumps or bruises. I set my sights on the narrow basement window that lets out into the back yard, and siphon more energy than I’ve ever used for a single spell up from the depth of my soul and into my arms.

  My entire body vibrates like a rocket taking off for orbit, and every muscle in my arms and hands constricts into painful cramps. But I ignore the pain. Ignore the panicked shouts from my colleagues behind me. Ignore everything except the intent of my spell, and the colossal amount of pressurized willpower building up behind it.

  With an extreme amount of effort, I managed to smack my com with my spasming hand. “Everyone on the Nottaway property, retreat to the wide perimeter. I repeat, retreat to the wide perimeter immediately. We have an…active bomb threat in the house.”

  Confused voices shout at me across the feed, but my focus is stuck to the window, and to the husk of the extremely dead Nottaway still swelling up into a lumpy mass of charring flesh and boiling blood, hardly enough left to mark him human, his face nothing but a wilted pouch leaking brain matter from every orifice.

  Somewhere within that horrible sight, Nottaway’s soul is still thrashing in misery, because it can’t detach from his body, no matter how damaged it is, until the spell finally goes off. A primary feature of berserker spells, I now know, so that you can’t just kill a practitioner and disperse their magic to circumvent the self-destruct. No matter what, the bomb that is Nottaway’s tortured corpse is going to explode. And judging by the revolting, bloated appearance of that corpse, he’s going to detonate in a matter of seconds.

  You can do this. Kinsey, I desperately think in a vain attempt to reassure myself. You can!

  “Uh, Kinsey?” says an alarmed Ramirez somewhere behind me.

  I don’t respond. I can’t respond. I can barely stand, much less speak.

  The fire inside the Nottaway bomb suddenly shifts hues from red to blue. The final warning.

  Every bone in my body on the verge of collapse, tiny blood vessels bursting under my skin, muscles and tendons threatening to tear themselves free from my frame and flap in the wind, the intense magic building up to the point of critical overload, I hold out my hands, point them up at an angle, toward the high window, toward the sliver of morning sky I can see through that window.

  And, without further ado, I scream at the top of my lungs as I unleash a vortex of force more powerful than a bullet train, more powerful than a missile, more powerful than even the lightning blast that rendered Lizzie Banks a pile of blackened ash.

  The wall of the basement is there one second and gone the next.

  The Nottaway bomb is there one second and gone the next.

  The yard outside the basement is there one second and gone the next.

  All that remains in the wake of their departure is a curved funnel of concrete and dirt.

  For an indeterminate amount of time, there is nothing around me but absolute silence and absolute stillness. Then the Nottaway bomb explodes with the force of ten tons of TNT, high enough in the sky to be seen by every person in the city. An enormous fireball so bright that it overwhelms the light of the sun and sends even the darkest shadows skittering into cracks and crevices.

  Naomi barely has enough time to demand we take cover before the shockwave slams into the ground, and the entire house shudders like the palm
of a god violently smacks the roof. The force of the wave rips me off my feet and flings me across the basement. I collide with a tall stack of bins that feel like they’re filled with bricks, rebound off the dented plastic, and tumble to the floor.

  Dazed, I lie motionless on the concrete until the intense ringing in my ears fades out. It takes two tries for me to roll over onto my knees, some of the muscles in my back torn, at least one vertebrae badly cracked. When my shaking arms finally manage to push my torso into a vaguely upright position, I survey the basement and discover the shockwave knocked over nearly all the storage stacks, and every knickknack imaginable is scattered in pieces across the floor.

  Sitting atop the rubble of home décor are Naomi, Ramirez, and Newman. Ramirez’s face is weeping blood from where the shrapnel caught him earlier, Newman has a nasty burn on one arm from Nottaway’s fire whip attack, and Naomi is clutching her left shoulder, which I may have accidentally dislocated when I threw her to safety. But besides those relatively minor injuries, they’re all intact. Which is more than I can say for Nottaway, whose remains are nothing but vapor and dust floating hundreds of feet in the air.

  The acrid stench of smoke fills my nose and draws my attention to the ceiling. Where the blaze started by the errant fireball is picking up strength, devouring the thick wood of the support joists at an alarming rate. It’s already eaten through the thin ceiling materials in several places, and the holes burned up into the ground floor reveal a house condemned to die, the rooms filled with churning smoke highlighted by an orange glow. Even if the house weathered the shockwave with minimal damage, it won’t remain stable much longer.

  “Shit,” yells Ramirez, after he follows my eyes to the fire, “we need to get out of here.”

  “But the stairs…” Newman points at them. They’re also on fire and shrouded in smoke.

  “Let’s take the new exit.” I gesture to the giant hole in the basement wall that leads up to the wrecked yard. “The incline should be shallow enough for us to climb out even with a few dents and dings.”

  “What about that though?” Naomi asks as staggers to her feet. She indicates an object faintly glowing violet near the base of the stairs, which I belatedly remember is the binding circle I used to trap the polong.

  My stomach twists into a knot as I realize I can’t leave the polong in the basement. The fire won’t destroy the creature, but it will destroy my binding circle. So to keep the polong contained, we’ll have to take the circle with us. And that means I have to cut it out of the concrete.

  “Aw, hell.” I scramble over to the circle on my hands and knees and slam my palms against the floor, tugging as much energy as I dare out of my beleaguered soul. A wave of dizziness immediately washes over me, followed by the extremely disconcerting sensation of my soul sliding out of alignment inside my body. I nearly cry out in terror and abandon the spellcasting, but my soul rebounds into the right spot a moment later, and the cry comes out as a deep sigh instead.

  You overdid it with that force vortex, idiot. You’ve only got scraps of magic energy left outside the life seal, and most of it is sustaining the binding circle. You push yourself any harder today, you’ll start eating into your life force. And you know what happens if you drain too much of that, don’t you?

  Since death is not on my to-do list, I proceed with this last spell very carefully.

  I push a thin, curved “plate” of energy underneath the binding circle, and with a pantomimed rocking motion, slice cleanly through the concrete, separating the circle from the floor. Next, I tug the plate until the detached section of concrete slides out of place and comes to a stop on a section of the floor clear enough for everyone to bend down and get a solid grip under the lip of the slab.

  Dismissing the magic, much to my soul’s relief, I look over my shoulder and beckon my colleagues to come help me. “We need to take the binding circle with us. Or the polong will get loose.”

  Ramirez hobbles over, giving the circle a skeptical look. “Is it even still in there?”

  The polong has gone totally invisible again, but I can feel its presence in the circle. “It’s in there. And we need to keep it that way. Unless we want this thing roaming around town and picking off whoever it chooses. Without a summoner controlling it, it’s liable to kill anyone it thinks deserves to die. It’s a literal vengeance spirit.”

  Ramirez makes to sigh dramatically, but it turns into a cough as he chokes on smoke. “All right. Let’s hurry this up. Scoot over.”

  I make room for him on my side of the slab, and after Naomi and Newman take hold of the other side, the four of us lift with all our might. The slab isn’t the heaviest thing we’ve ever dealt with, but none of us are in the best shape right now, so our progress up the slope of the funnel I dug into the earth is slow and halting.

  By the time we manage to heave the slab over our heads and onto the yard, thick smoke is pouring out of the basement, and the entire first floor of the house has been consumed by a hot, undulating blaze. Newman and I scramble out of the hole first, then help Naomi and Ramirez out. Once free of the choking smoke cloud, we all grab the slab again, lift it with an assortment of strained grunts, and hustle across the yard as fast as we can toward one of the neighboring properties, whose fence was helpfully knocked over by the explosion.

  In fact, a lot of things were knocked over by the explosion. Trees lie on their sides, splintered bark strewn about, leaves flung hundreds of feet in every direction. Parked cars sit tilted on the sidewalks, windows shattered, alarms blaring on high. Fallen light poles block the roads, live wires sparking in places, threatening to electrocute anyone who steps too close. Even a few of the buildings were knocked off on their foundations. Two blocks down the street, a double-wide trailer tore free from its skirting and fell over onto its side. I desperately hope nobody was home when that happened.

  Huffing and puffing as we haul the concrete slab along, the four of us carefully navigate the disaster zone until we reach a neglected asphalt lot between an old gas station and a car wash scheduled for demolition. On the far end of the lot is one of the auxiliary team SUVs that mark the wide perimeter. The SUV has a few dents and dings, and a couple of the windows are cracked, but our vehicles are built like tanks, and the newest models were fortified even more in the wake of my team being T-boned by a group of angry werewolves in a pickup truck last year. So it’s not surprise that the auxiliary team crawls out of the SUV when they spot us coming, none of them looking particularly worse for wear.

  What is a surprise is that all the people we left guarding the main floor of the Nottaway house pour out of the trunk in a tangled pile. It’s clear from the looks of them that they didn’t quite make it to the SUV in time to take cover before the berserker spell went off.

  The Adelman twins both have badly scraped faces from where they were blown headfirst into what I suspect was the asphalt we’re now trudging across. Li, on the other hand, must’ve been thrown sideways, his left arm now pinned to his chest with a black sling pilfered from the SUV’s large medical kit, the fabric saturated red from a nasty compound fracture. Ramirez’s three teammates fared somewhere between the twins and Li, each of them sporting a variety of cuts and bruises, plus a few cracked ribs and an assortment of broken fingers.

  Everyone jogs toward us as we near the SUV, concern awash on their battered faces. We set down the slab to take a breather and wait for them to come close enough for everyone to speak without being drowned out by the lingering tinnitus still ringing in our ears.

  Naomi preempts any questions and says to the auxiliary captain, “My com’s dead. Have you been able to contact the other teams?”

  Captain Argent shakes her head. “The blast knocked out the whole system. There must’ve been an EMP.”

  Naomi bristles. “That wasn’t a nuclear blast, was it?”

  Li lowers the bloody wad of gauze from his broken nose. “No, we checked for that already.” He juts his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the trunk of the SUV
, which stores an impressive array of equipment, including a set of Geiger counters. Just in case. “The pulse must’ve been a quirk of the particular spell that caused the explosion.” He pauses. “That was a spell, wasn’t it, and not some actual bomb?”

  “It was a berserker spell.” I swing my arm around to work out the muscles in my injured shoulder. Most of the deep tissue damage has already healed, but it’s still extremely sore. I’m pretty sure I wrenched something the wrong way during one of the slab lifts. “Nottaway blew himself up.”

  “That was Nottaway?” the Adelman twins say in unison.

  “Why was he so high up in the air when he exploded?” Argent asks, perplexed.

  “Because Kinsey saved our asses. Blasted Nottaway out of the basement just before he blew.” Ramirez grins at me. “Guess you get the ‘big damn hero’ badge today, huh?”

  I wave him off. “It was less of a heroic act and more of a freak-out.”

  “No, Alejandro is right.” Naomi claps me softly on the arm. “If Nottaway had exploded in that basement, it would’ve killed everyone within a two-block radius. Throwing him high into the air minimized ground damage and saved lives. That was quick thinking on your part, Kinsey. You did good work. You should be proud.”

  “Thanks.” I draw my lips into a weak smile, hoping I look tired and not guilty.

  Last thing I want to be called when I’m lying to everyone is a hero.

  “All right,” Naomi says, “let’s wrap this up before the first responders swarm the area.”

  She proceeds to split everyone into groups, and sends each group off to complete a different task. One group is sent to find Delarosa’s team, provide them with medical assistance if necessary, and relay instructions to return to headquarters as soon as possible. The second group is sent to track down Harmony Burgess, who may or may not have been high up in a tree when the explosion flattened half the trees in the area, and who may or may not be in critical condition (or dead) as a result.