by Karen Chance
John’s fist closed around it.
He looked up to find Zheng watching him.
“Is this it?” John demanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“There were several hundred mages back there! Is this all you took?”
Kong, who had shown up with the other vamps in response to his friend’s screams, suddenly lunged for John, but the others held him back.
“Yeah,” Zheng said heavily. “Don’t know why we couldn’t have managed a leisurely shopping trip. You’re lucky we got anything at all.”
Not that lucky, John thought, feeling naked without his equipment, not to mention vulnerable. Which is what he damned well was! War mages carried an arsenal of magic with them to compensate in a fight if theirs ran out.
So much for that idea.
“You said you’re on the North American Senate?” he asked Zheng, to make sure he’d heard right.
“Yeah?”
“Then where the hell’s the Chinese?”
“China?”
John was beginning to wonder if he’d hit his head one too many times. “Then call them?”
Zheng rolled his eyes. “Already tried. You need special phones to call out from here, unless you’re near a portal. And now that those are closed, too—”
“What do you mean, closed? There are five major portals out of here, and that’s just the authorized ones!”
“And they’re all shut down,” Zheng said patiently. “And no, I don’t know why. Nobody seems to know what the hell’s going on. We were trying to get you out so you could vouch for what happened here, but we ran into a mass of confused people trying to do the same thing. Only to be told that the gates are out of commission and nobody knows when they’re going back up.”
John stared at him some more. “Are you trying to tell me that we’re trapped?”
“With a bunch of murderous war mages on a rampage, yeah. And if we can’t get out, nobody can get in to help us. Which means a whole lot of people are going to die unless you figure out a way to stop this.”
I’ll get right on that, John thought, looking down at his blood splattered sweats, filthy trainers and nonexistent weapons. But then he looked back up at the vampire, who was waiting with a strange expression on his face, half jaded cynicism, half hopeful expectancy. It didn’t look like he thought any more of mages than the tong did, but John was all he had.
And vice versa, John thought, facing up to reality.
“All right,” he told Zheng harshly. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Chapter Fourteen
T he whole neighborhood was burning, John realized, gazing around the city from the roof of a house just off the main road. Overhead, the boiling green and black clouds were laced with lighting. On John’s level, it looked like some of the surrounding houses had been on fire for a while, because the roofs were starting to collapse and erupt in flames that spewed toward the heavens. And below were what looked like leather rivers, flowing through the streets and lighting up the night with their own type of fire.
Because he’d been wrong: there weren’t hundreds of mages down there.
There were thousands.
How the hell was he supposed to stop this?
The answer, of course, was that he wasn’t. Not by targeting corpsmen, at least. That would get him killed in his current state, and even if he could somehow break through the enthrallment on a few of them, what difference would it make?
No, he needed to find out who was behind this and target them. A spell did not long survive the death of the caster, including enthrallment spells. And if there was one thing John was good at, it was killing things.
But for that he needed to know who to kill!
The current plan was for him to apply a Return to Sender hex and a tracking charm to one of the war mages. The hex should cause him to break off whatever he was doing and head back to the originator of the enthrallment, while the charm should ensure that they didn’t lose him in the chaos of the city. It was a common tactic for dealing with enchanted suspects, which is one reason such charms were standard war mage equipment.
Unfortunately, John didn’t have his equipment.
That was a problem for more than one reason, because the enthralled mage had to remain functional in order to lead them back to the source of all this. That deprived the vamps of their favorite way of dealing with wayward humans, and neither the spell nor the tracker could be applied through shields. Meaning that his little group had to trap a war mage, get his shields down, hope he had the right charms in his equipment, and apply one to his body, all while leaving him in decent shape and not getting killed themselves.
Which was a little hard to imagine without weapons!
“We have weapons,” Zheng said, in reply to John’s muttering. They were lying side by side against the roofline of the house in order to peer over without drawing attention. The big vampire seemed to have decided that this made the perfect opportunity to continue their argument.
It had moved from ordering John to fix this, to trying to micromanage how he did it, including offering advice about human weapons, most of which they didn’t have and none of which would have helped anyway!
“There’s some shops around here we could raid,” Zheng added when John didn’t answer, because ignoring a master vamp was apparently not allowed. “Although what me and the boys are carrying is really—”
“Useless,” John said shortly.
“I beg to differ,” The vamp pulled a .357 magnum out from under his arm. It was obviously a custom job, with intricate engraving on the frame, a slide polished to a mirror shine, and an ironwood grip. It came complete with a monogrammed snake skin holster. John tried not to sneer.
He must not have done a very good job.
“What?” Zheng demanded.
“It’s very . . . pretty.”
The big vampire blinked. “You did not just diss my gun.”
“That’s not a gun, unless you’re going up against non-magical humans, in which case I have to wonder why you’d bother.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“Jewelry.”
Zheng glared at him. “I had this special made!”
“To impress your friends and to look good. A single spell would melt it back into a lump of steel—oh, forgive me, titanium.”
The sneer became more pronounced.
Zheng glared some more but he put his toy away.
“Can’t you just throw a spell on one of these bastards and call it a day?” he demanded.
“War mages in the field vary their shield’s resonance constantly. Spells slough off in seconds. Not to mention that we have to touch skin in order to place the charm—”
“You can’t do a spell for that, too?” It was Zheng’s turn to sneer. “Some of my mages can.”
John didn’t bother to comment on the skill set of his mages, which probably matched his gun—flashy but ineffective. But he did answer the question because he wanted the creature to shut up. “Layering spells is tricky, especially with this much magic floating around. The Return to Sender has to be strong, to override the strength of the compulsion. Putting a tracker on top of that risks it fritzing out, meaning that if we lose him—”
“My boys aren’t gonna lose him.”
“—then we’re out of luck. Not to mention that we still need his shields down for the hex!”
Zheng scowled, but didn’t say anything else. Maybe because, like John, he wanted to get this over with. John stared down at the little alley again and tried to concentrate.
It wasn’t easy. The street behind him looked like a Leni Riefenstahl film, all rain slick leather, eerie lighting, and tramping boots. While in front of him was a bare stretch of cobblestones that seemed to be mocking him, and in his fist was a twig that wasn’t doing a damned thing because this was Earth, not Faerie, and fey magic didn’t sing here!
But the covens’ did, he reminded himself. The bastardized version of fey mag
ic they used was dangerous, glomming onto the wild magic of Earth and bending it—hopefully—to their will. The plus side was that it didn’t require much of your own power, just enough to serve as a lure, which was perfect since that was all he had left. The down side was that, unlike in real fishing, if the lure was taken by too big of a fish, you didn’t just lose your equipment, you lost the hand that was holding it.
And possibly more, John thought, glancing up at the angry sky.
Zheng sighed. “Are you sure—”
“Shut up!” John hissed, and waggled the damned twig about some more, a little more forcefully this time.
And felt something tug back.
“What?” Zheng said, glancing around, as all of the hair on John’s arms stood at attention.
All right, he thought, concentrating. All right. You caught something. Now just . . . reel it in.
How? The more logical part of his brain asked, and he felt the tug lessen.
Stop it! Stop it! Don’t think. Feel.
Coven magic was intuitive, riding emotion more than logic, and instinct more than reason. It was why most of the Circle didn’t use it, and couldn’t learn it. They wanted rules, guidelines, bullet points. But coven magic didn’t work that way. John couldn’t have said exactly how it did work, because then he’d have to think about it and he couldn’t think about it. He just knew . . . that if you opened up . . . and invited it . . . seduced it . . . enticed it . . . in, that sometimes . . .
It came.
“What is that?” Zheng said, jerking, when what looked for all the world like a tiny white fairy appeared on the end of John’s twig.
It wasn’t, of course. But the electric sprite that jumped and danced and flickered sometimes gave that appearance. He stared at, mesmerized, turning it slowly around and splashing the vampire’s face with leaping shadows. He could almost see it, the miniscule face, the fluttering wings, the—
The way it was growing bigger.
“—do something, you crazy bastard!” Zheng said, his voice a little high, and John realized that half the wand was now engulfed in pale flames. Not hot, and not consuming the wood, because it wasn’t fire. But John didn’t think it would be a good idea to let it touch his skin.
He flicked it instead, using the springiness of the wood to send the fiery mass flying down into the alley, where it hit the ground and spidered across the stones—but not for long. Because with it had gone the tiny seed of his own magic he’d used as bait. The latter being imprinted with an idea but no substance.
It quickly found substance.
The little alley was slightly lower than the surrounding streets, and had therefore gathered not only its own share of rain, but the runoff from both directions. It had gone from damp to flooded, with the picturesque cobblestones completely submerged at this point. Giving his spell plenty of his favorite element to work with as the wild magic fell into line.
And brought a new creature into existence.
A moment later, John was watching a colorless body slowly emerge onto the road, feet first. It looked like a glass vase filling up with water, if the vase was the size and shape of a man. And was able to flex its feet and move the hand-like protrusions that had now materialized at waist height even before the rest of it filled in.
The rainstorm had given John the idea, but he hadn’t been sure it would work. It seemed to be working. Because, within minutes, five more manlikans shuffled and shifted below, the rain drops plinking onto their almost transparent bodies like ripples in a pond.
That shouldn’t have been the case; a proper manlikan’s “skin”—the magical ward containing its element—was tough and resilient, to the point that water would bead and run off.
These were not proper manlikans.
The first ones looked better, but by the end of the half dozen John had made, his spell had weakened and its precision had gone to hell. The later versions were considerably less Adonis-like as a result, with comically overlarge feet and alien-looking heads with only slits for eyes. But they still packed a punch.
More importantly, they could absorb one.
John had left them somewhat permeable, so they could heal damage by absorbing more water. They would continue to do so until the rain let up—which according to Zheng wasn’t likely since a typhoon was headed for Hong Kong—or until the magic wore off. And hopefully, by then, he would have a solution to this mess.
“That . . . is some fucked up shit,” Zheng said, staring at the nearest of John’s creations. It was the last, and John should probably have quit while he was ahead.
It was short, stout and stubby limbed, looking vaguely like the Pillsbury Dough Boy if the advertising icon was made out of water. It turned its round, mostly featureless face up to John, awaiting instructions, and he felt the big vampire beside him shudder. Zheng seemed to find the creatures disturbing, John didn’t know why.
They were running with the red and yellow neon of some signs down the road, as if an artist had dragged a glowing paintbrush over them, and they occasionally flashed with reflected bursts of lightning from overhead. Other than that, they mostly showed a distorted version of the bricks behind them, or the vaguely horrified faces of the vampires at either end of the alley awaiting the signal to begin. John found it odd that creatures who didn’t so much as flinch at seeing a man literally ripped in two had a problem with his little helpers.
“They’re just water in a warded skin,” he told Zheng. “Like water balloons with legs.”
“Uh huh.” The big vampire didn’t look convinced.
Maybe because the features on the doughboy—a gaping cavern for a mouth, a couple of vague indentations for eyes and a blob for a nose—had not fixed into position properly, causing them to drift about the face. The “mouth” was currently on the forehead, with the eyes roughly where the chin should be, giving it a strange, upside down effect. Meanwhile, there were no ears in evidence at all, until one came floating around the side of the head and bumped gently into the “nose”.
“Fucked up shit,” Zheng whispered again, and John decided that the creature would do.
He jumped down into what was fast becoming a river and splashed over to his little army.
“Protect,” he instructed, pointing at himself, because manlikans were not exactly genius level.
They were used primarily as beasts of burden in Faerie, to carry a warrior’s tent or extra weapons, or for target practice. They could also be used like puppets, allowing a warrior to see through their eyes, and to go places his body couldn’t reach. But John had no way to control six at once, so they were on autopilot, which limited them to very basic commands.
Hopefully that would be enough.
He gave the signal.
And, to their credit, Zheng’s boys didn’t waste any time. They sprang into action, using vampire swiftness to grab a war mage off the street at each end of the alley. It was done in the blink of an eye, so quickly that the men probably didn’t realize what had happened, leaving the two of them confused and slightly disoriented when John’s twin spells hit.
He slammed back into a recessed doorway, his protectors piled in front of him, as soon as the magic left his fingertips. The alley was dark, the recess even more so, and the transparent manlikans didn’t draw the eye. Unlike a couple of pissed off war mages.
Who immediately targeted each other instead of John.
What followed was a furious battle that John couldn’t see very well, since the mages weren’t close enough and he was looking at it through his watery protection. All he saw were smears of color and explosions of brick, but he could feel it. And so could his protectors.
The amount of magic being thrown around was enough to cause the water in the outermost manlikan to begin to boil, making it look like a ghost wreathed in the veils of steam escaping through its pores. A progressively smaller ghost, since it was losing water faster than it could replace it. John couldn’t help it, however, not without drawing attention to himself, not even when
a second manlikan was taken out by a ricochet, exploding in a wash of hot liquid, some of which hit him over the heads of his defenders.
Shit! Trust him to get one of the maybe five percent of mages with fey blood. Manlikans were resistant to human magic, but their own would take them out fast enough. He pulled the rest back as far he could, further out of the line of fire, which was not a fun sensation.
Wobbles, he thought darkly.
And then the mages came into view.
Mage number one was a sandy haired blond with a battle-scarred golem close behind him. Its clay surface was pitted with what looked like acid burns, there was an ugly slash mark across its chest, and its nose was missing entirely. Its master could have repaired the damage or built it a new body altogether, but he hadn’t bothered, perhaps because he hadn’t even bothered to help himself.
His long, leather coat was tattered along the bottom, which since they were self-healing, meant that the spell was fraying, too. His boots were scuffed and old, bandoliers of ancient potion bottles crisscrossed his chest, and a ratty old bandanna hung around his throat, which looked like it hadn’t been washed years. He reminded John of an old west gunslinger. Not a Hollywood pretty boy with a perfect smile and hand tooled accessories, but the real deal: middle aged, cynical, and battle worn, the sort of man who didn’t bother to repair his coat’s spell because nothing was ever going to touch it anyway.
Because his shields were like solid steel.
No, John thought grimly. Not that one, especially not with the damned golem acting as back up. For his plan to work, he needed those shields down but with the mage still functional. That man’s shields would only fall when his heart stopped beating.
The other one, he decided, even before turning around. No matter who it was, he had to be better than Wyatt Earp over there. Preferably some fresh-faced kid with crap shields that were already buckling under the—
The other mage was Caleb.
Chapter Fifteen
F or a moment, John wondered if the distortion effect of all that water was playing tricks on his eyes. But no. There was the same powerful build, the same guarded expression, and the same clothes—black jeans and a maroon button up—that Caleb had had on back in Vegas.
