by R. L. King
She shook her head. “They’re too spread out for that.”
“I don’t know how well the shields will hold if they all open up at once,” Sharra said, scanning the group of soldiers. “Looks like more than one of ’em have those guns.”
They had all noticed the Man exploding, but they didn’t know why it had happened, so they couldn’t worry about it right now. They were all also painfully aware of how substantial both the portal and the spirit appeared.
“Are we sure there’s still time?” Jason asked.
“Nothing’s coming through yet,” Verity pointed out. “I think that’s a good sign. I just hope that spirit stays put and doesn’t eat anybody else.”
Jason studied the tent. “Could you knock that out?” he asked, pointing. “We need to stop them, and we need to hurry. That should at least break their concentration, yeah?”
Verity nodded. “Yeah. But if they’re armed, and they all come out at once—”
“Do it,” Sharra said. “We can hold the shields long enough to knock ’em out.”
Verity gathered her power and was about to let loose when a chunk of flaming fabric from a nearby tent, riding the light breeze, settled on top of the Evil’s own tent.
“Wait!” Jason snapped. “Look!”
In the time it had taken him to say that, the top of the Evil’s tent had already started to smoke, and in only a few seconds it had caught fire itself. Flame quickly began to consume it.
The soldiers noticed almost as quickly as Jason and the others had; they began hurrying to the front entrance and pulling aside the flap, yelling for those inside to evacuate. In a moment, a series of about twelve individuals, male and female, old and young, came pouring out of the tent to mingle with the soldiers.
“Now!” Jason yelled.
Verity and Sharra opened up into the throng with their concussion spells. Jason could tell that they were holding back on the power, trying to pummel the Evil into unconsciousness rather than kill them. The Evil leaders, for their part, seemed to have no idea what was hitting them. The soldiers opened fire, but again their rounds could not get through the mages’ shields. Some hurried toward them, jumping around and trying to form a visual distraction to break Sharra’s and Verity’s concentration so they couldn’t keep casting, but it didn’t work. Several of the Evil leaders dropped to the ground in heaps as the beams knocked them out.
“Don’t let any get away!” Verity yelled, plugging a blonde woman as she tried to skitter away past the burning tent.
“Look at the spirit!” Jason called. He’d been watching it out of the corner of his eye, and now noticed that it had turned slightly and seemed to be paying at least some attention to the scene at the tent. “What’s it doing?”
Verity fuzzed out for a moment, then came back, eyes wide. “It’s—eating them,” she said, breathless.
“What?”
“The spirit—it’s sucking out their—Evil,” she said. “It’s eating it.”
One of the Evil leaders, a balding man in expensive khakis, made a break for it, running not toward the crowd but away from it, keeping low and zigzagging as if he had practice avoiding gunfire.
“No you don’t,” Jason snarled, drawing the SMG and stepping away from Verity and Sharra to get a better shot.
“Jason, no!” Verity screamed, but it was too late. A bark of gunfire split the air and a round from a soldier behind cover tore into Jason’s arm and spun him around.
Verity lost it. “Jason!” she screamed again, and let the fleeing Evil have it with a full-bore lightning bolt as Sharra took out the covered soldier. Between the two of them, they made short work of the last of the Evil’s leaders and their guardians as, behind them, their tent went up in flames, adding its chemical odor to the smells of blood and burning and refuse from dozens of tipped-over portable toilets.
Keeping their shields up, the two of them ran over and dropped down next to Jason. He lay on the ground, writhing and clutching his arm. “Jason!” Verity yelled.
“Fuck,” he said through gritted teeth. “I’m a fucking idiot—sorry—”
“Don’t worry about that now,” she said. “We need to get you healed up, and—”
“Just wrap it up,” he growled. “No time. Gotta—find Al.”
Verity looked back over her shoulder. “I don’t see any more of them—”
“Come on,” Jason said, teeth still clenched. “Wrap it up and let’s go.”
Verity didn’t move, but Sharra did. She tore a section off the bottom of her shirt and, much as they had done for the wounded soldier, wrapped it tightly around Jason’s arm. “Could be worse,” she said. “I think it went clear through. Try not to move it too much, though.” She hauled him up to his feet, where he swayed, going pale.
“Yeah,” he said, looking around. Was the portal getting bigger? He couldn’t tell, and the pain in his arm was distracting as hell. “Come on. We don’t have much time.”
Stone reacted instantly to Pia Brandt’s shouted warning. As Trin spun around to incinerate the German researcher, Stone let loose with a blast of energy designed to punch through her formidable shield. He knew that if he didn’t take her down fast, his body would fail him and he wouldn’t get another chance. It had to be now.
The bolt hit Trin from behind, but she wasn’t entirely surprised by it. It knocked her over again, only a small portion of it getting through. She rolled forward, diving for cover behind a nearby tent on the periphery of the center section.
Stone, puffing, followed her. He couldn’t let her hide: he began to feel as well as see that the portal was almost finished. One way or another, whether the Evil had been able to calibrate it as they wished, it would be solid and permanent any moment now. Also, even with the extra energy from the ley lines, he couldn’t keep pumping out magic forever. He already felt the rising grayness threatening to overwhelm him again. He didn’t have time to mess around playing cat and mouse with Trin.
A stray and terrifying thought struck him as he scanned the area for her: what if the Evil hadn’t been able to calibrate the portal? What if Verity and Jason and Sharra had succeeded in their mission of taking out the Evil’s leaders before they were able to finish the job? That would leave the location of the portal’s other side up to the spirit—and Stone was sure that wherever that was, it could quite likely be even worse than what the Evil had planned.
And he was well aware that was possible.
Trin poked her head out from behind cover and unleashed a blast that blew Stone over backward, driving him back nearly twenty yards before he could stop himself. His shield held—barely—but his body screamed with protest from being slammed repeatedly around inside it. For a moment he only lay on the dusty ground, stunned, staring up at the sky. It was nearly full black now, between the spirit and the smoke from the fires. The only bright point was the portal, which dominated the scene so completely that looking at it burned itself into his vision and made it difficult to see anything else. Quickly he clamped his eyes closed and rolled over, trying to drag himself back to his feet.
“Give it up, Stone,” came Trin’s mocking voice. “Just like last time—you’re too weak to get the job done.” Another blast slammed into him, but he rolled away from most of it, taking his own cover behind the Man’s wooden structure.
Puffing, he knew he couldn’t keep reacting to Trin’s assaults. He had to go on the offensive if he was to have any hope of winning this. He dragged himself back up to his feet and peeked around the corner of the structure. Unless she had moved, she was still hiding behind the same tent. Near it, a battered VW Bus, similar to the ones at Raina and her group’s camp, sat near the edge of the frontmost campsite on blasted-out tires. He wondered—he’d once told his previous apprentice Ethan that, if the need arose, his magic was strong enough to allow him to lift a car. That was if he was in top shape—which he wasn’t—but it also hadn’t taken into account the ley lines’ assistance. Before he let the sane part of his brain talk him out
of it, he focused on the vehicle and concentrated.
Bright points of light sparked in his head along with shafts of pain, but when the van rose neatly up off the ground he nearly dropped it in his astonishment. He bobbled it a moment, then flung it toward the tent where Trin presumably hid. He hoped no one else was inside, but right now he didn’t have time to be concerned about that.
The VW smashed down onto the tent, flattening it. Stone listened for any cries to indicate that he’d hit Trin, but he couldn’t make anything out over the shouts and screams of the crowd. With another wrench of his power, he shoved the van over and off the tent. Keeping his shield up, he paused for several seconds and then cautiously approached it.
She lay there, eyes scrunched shut, writhing. Blood ran from her nostrils and her ears. Her shield was still up, but it flickered ominously, flaring pink and red and white in spaces.
Stone paused again, a few feet away from her, his own shield at full readiness. He didn’t trust Trin, even injured. It looked like he’d scored a direct hit. Could it have been that easy? Was she—
With a snarl, she lashed out with both hands toward him. Columns of flame shot from her fingers, dancing and licking with hungry eagerness around the perimeter of his shield.
He staggered back. None of the fire made it through, but the shield did little to mitigate the heat. He had to struggle to hold his concentration and keep the shield up his body felt like she’d plunged him into an oven.
He feared she would follow up that attack with another, but when he found her again she was stumbling off toward more substantial cover. He’d hurt her. However strong she was, she wasn’t invulnerable. And now she was injured too, so it wasn’t such a one-sided fight. He whirled his hand and whipped up a column of spinning dust around her, a tiny tornado of stinging projectiles. He knew it wouldn’t get through, but with any luck it would disorient her.
Risking another quick glance up at the portal, he was startled to see that it appeared to be almost completely opaque now, its reds and greens and purples and blues flowing together like an oil slick on a lake, only impossibly brighter and more intense. He only had maybe another minute before it was too late.
He moved forward, pressing his attack, sending wave after wave of punishing magical energy at Trin’s unsteady form. He knew he would regret this later, that he was pushing his body beyond what it was designed to take, but that didn’t matter. Either he did this or they were all dead. He thought her shield might be weakening.
She wasn’t giving up yet, though. With an enraged, inarticulate shriek, she spun and threw some kind of dark bolt at him. He dived, but didn’t get out of the way in time. The bolt hit his shield and crackled around it, dropping him to his knees. In horror, he realized that the crackling energy was somehow eating its way through his shield, like some kind of magical decay. He’d never seen a spell like that before.
However, the spell had not been without cost for Trin. As Stone struggled to keep his shield up and get back to his feet before she could throw something else at him, he saw that she too had dropped to her knees, her skin gone dead white. Whatever that kind of magic was, it looked like it took as much—or possibly more—from the caster as it did from the target.
Stone was breathing so hard now that he thought he would faint. The grayness rose again, and again he drove it back down. Whatever he was going to do, he had to do it now. His shield was failing, and if it went down and he hadn’t acted before Trin got herself together, she would destroy him.
He glared at her, his mind flooded with the images of what she had done to him, how many people she had killed trying to get to him. He let the rage add fuel to his magic as his own reserves failed. Reaching out with all his strength, he grabbed Trin and lifted her into the night air—higher and higher, until she had risen as high as the top of the portal. He felt her struggle to resist, but ignored it. For a second he thought about chucking her through the portal itself, but he wasn’t sure how that would play out. Instead, with a harsh scream that contained all of his anger and frustration, he flung her away, focusing on getting her as far from himself and the portal and the spirit as he could manage.
He didn’t wait to see where she landed. He didn’t care if he’d killed her, or he hadn’t. As long as she couldn’t bother him for the next few minutes, that was enough. He had other things to do now.
And he had no idea how he was going to do them.
CHAPTER FORTY
Jason struggled to keep up with Verity and Sharra as they pushed their way through the stragglers from the crowd and toward the center of the playa. He held his arm close at his side, but already blood stained the makeshift bandage Sharra had put on him. His breath sounded like a wheezy bellows in his ears.
Verity must have heard or noticed, because she stopped, eyeing him with concern. “You gonna make it?” she asked, with a glance over her shoulder at the portal.
“I have to,” he rasped. “We gotta find Al.”
“Let me take a minute and heal that. We—”
“We don’t have a minute,” Sharra said grimly. “Look at that thing. It’s starting to—pulse. Do you hear that?”
Both Jason and Verity paused, listening. Over the din of the crowd, a low-pitched hum began to rise. To Jason’s ears, it sounded like an impossibly potent version of the sound you get when you plug an electric guitar into an amp with the volume turned up. “Oh, shit…” he breathed. “Is it starting?”
“I don’t know,” Sharra said. “But that can’t be good.”
“We need to find Dr. Stone, fast,” Verity urged. “Jason, can you go a little further? We’ll help you.”
“I said I’m okay,” he growled, and his voice sounded harsher than he’d wanted it to. “You just worry about you. Do your magic thing. I’ll be fine.”
All around them, the playa lit up with small fires; apparently some subset of the multiple thousands of people in the crowd had either gotten scared enough, drunk enough, or angry enough to start a full-scale riot. Small groups of people ran past waving flaming torches, rebar tent pegs, wrenches, or any other sort of improvised weapons they could get their hands on. Vehicles, from small cars to full-sized RVs, tried in vain to fight their way out, paying little heed in their panic to people on foot. With a chill, Jason realized that some of the sounds he was hearing were the staccato roars of the small SMGs carried by the soldiers. If the soldiers were down and the guns were firing, that meant that the rioters had picked them up and were trying them on for size. If we live through this, the casualties are gonna be insane.
Other groups, unarmed and terrified, also ran past them, clearly trying to find places to get away from the roving mobs of rioters. Jason’s rage rose as two young women were set upon by a crowd of whooping men and taken down; he was an instant from flinging himself forward to try to help despite his injured arm—or letting loose with a volley from his SMG—when twin beams of force lanced out from Verity and Sharra and sent the men careening off, screaming in pain, in four different directions. He looked at his sister and her girlfriend, and the expressions in their eyes—hard and cold and deadly—told him as nothing else could have that he no longer had to worry about protecting Verity. He still would, of course—he was her big brother and that was his job—but he knew he didn’t have to. He clapped Verity on the back with his good hand and shot her a fierce grin, which she returned. Ahead of them, the two women scrambled away with frightened backward glances.
Verity grabbed his good arm. “Come on,” she urged.
He got himself going. “Head for the center. You know Al—he’s gonna be in the middle of things.”
She nodded, and the three of them moved. Jason kept his SMG handy and swept his gaze back and forth, looking for leftover Evil and anyone else who looked like they were paying too much attention to his group.
The steroidal carrier hum of the portal increased in volume again. The thing was so bright and huge and alive that it dominated the entire scene in the center of the playa, its
writhing, shifting depths pulsing in a slow rhythm that, as they watched, grew nearly imperceptibly faster with each beat. Even the gigantic black form of the spirit began to be dwarfed by it.
“It’s getting close,” Verity said, and her voice shook. “Where is he? If he can’t—”
“There!” Jason said, pointing with the SMG. “See? By the spirit.”
Verity and Sharra both turned to follow where he was pointing. “What’s he doing?” Verity demanded. “He’s just—standing there. He doesn’t even have his shield up!”
Jason squinted, trying to make out detail. She seemed to be right: Stone stood a couple of hundred yards away, a short distance away from the spirit. He appeared to be staring up at it; his only movement was a sway that told Jason that he barely remained on his feet. “He doesn’t know what to do,” he said in a monotone.
Verity stared at him. She took a deep breath, then started off again. “Come on—maybe we can help.”
Jason didn’t see how, but gritted his teeth against the pain and followed her.
At least they could all die together, if nothing else.
Stone didn’t know what to do.
He stared up at the spirit, at the portal, despair taking almost a physical hold of him. His body trembled, his mind spun with useless solutions, and for one of the first times in his life, he was forced to accept the possibility that he and his friends wouldn’t be able to pull this one out of the fire at the last minute.
The spirit was too big—he’d thrown his best shot at it and it hadn’t even flinched. It hadn’t even noticed. It was as if he were a mouse trying to get the attention of a skyscraper—he wasn’t even significant enough to rate getting squashed for his impertinence.
And the portal: where he stood, the hum was so loud that he could feel it as clearly as he could hear it. It thrummed through his body, providing a jangling counterpoint to the clean, pure beats of the ley lines. The combination made his head spin, his stomach clench. The thing was so wrong, but it was so beautiful, too: its colors were like nothing that occurred in mundane nature. Supernatural colors, in the literal sense of the word: above nature. He could stare at them for hours, if it weren’t for the inherent, persistent sense that this thing simply should not be. It didn’t belong here on Earth.
