by Rob Cornell
Not much. Except watch their mortal victims suffer.
“Damn it,” I shouted. My voice echoed back to me. I didn’t know its angry edge. It sounded nothing like me.
“You meant well,” Mom said.
Cold comfort. Cold as a damn corpse.
I ran my hands through my hair. “We’ve got to get Odi, before they chew him up. This was pointless. The whole fucking thing. Pointless. I’m not going to let the kid suffer for my stupidity.”
I had no sooner said it when a boom erupted above us. Grenade? Missile launcher? Gods, I couldn’t fathom. But I had the sick feeling I had seen the last of Odi.
The silence that followed hurt. It was so complete. Not even the hanging victims made a sound. Nothing made a sound except my angry breathing.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.
I heard the click of Mom swallowing. “Sebastian?”
I looked at her. I kept the beam aimed at her feet to keep from shining it in her eyes. The light cast shadows across her face that deepened her tense expression.
“Quiet,” I whispered.
“Too quiet.”
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and pivoted toward the entrance to the nest. They had overwhelmed Odi. Probably killed him. Any moment, they would come rushing down the stairwell to finish us off. We could take on six vamps, assuming the six we knew about were the only ones coming. By this point, they could have called in reinforcements. They had a hundred vamps to choose from.
Part of me felt I deserved what was coming. I would fight. I didn’t give in to vamps, no matter how pathetic I felt. But Mom didn’t deserve to die because of my crappy planning. I would fight ten times as hard to see her out of this.
I dropped the flashlight to the floor and positioned it with my foot to aim it at the door. Then I raised my gun in my right hand and drew flame into my left. I channeled my fear, my anger, my jagged guilt over what I had brought onto my family and my apprentice…my friend. I injected those emotions into my magical energy.
My flame turned from orange to the clean blue of a gas fire’s core.
Let. Them. Come.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I held my breath as I listened for their footsteps in the stairwell. I held it to the point where I had to inhale or risk my lungs bursting. My head swam as I sucked at the air. The mixed smell of sweaty socks forgotten in the back of a gym locker and the gangrenous stink of pus-filled wounds ran straight up my nose and turned my stomach inside out.
I clenched my teeth to keep from throwing up. When I had control of my swimming guts, I glanced at Mom. She had the stock of the shotgun pressed firmly against her shoulder, the barrel pointed at the entrance.
“Where are they?” I asked.
She opened her mouth, but a sound on the other side of the door stopped her.
The tension from both of us coalesced into a magical buzz that rattled my teeth. We were both charged and ready to unleash. But holding that kind of power in check for too long could wear us out faster than if we threw every ounce of that energy at an attack.
The door handle clicked. In the indirect light from the flashlight on the floor, I could see the knob turn. I readjusted my hold on my pistol. The sweat between my hand and the grip made me feel like the gun might slip from my grasp the first time I pulled the trigger.
The growing heat from my blue flame drew more sweat across my brow. The salt from that sweat mixed with the gash above my eyebrow that I had forgotten about until I felt the sting.
The door slowly opened.
My finger tightened on the trigger. My flame glowed even brighter.
Then I saw the red nest of hair as Odi peered around the door.
He froze, eyes wide. “Whoa! Don’t shoot.”
I let my flame die and lowered my gun.
Mom released a long, shaky breath and lowered her weapon, too.
Odi came all the way through the entryway and let the door quietly swing shut behind him. His face was covered in soot. His clothes were ravaged with tears. His jeans had more holes than usual. Blood stained nearly every shred of fabric still hanging on him. I counted at least a dozen gunshot wounds in his torso and down one leg. A flap of skin hung loose along his hairline, and blood rolled down in a curve down the side of his face and along his jaw.
I gaped at him.
He waved a hand weakly. “Hi.”
“What the hell happened?”
“I…uh…” He wiped his fingers through the soot on one cheek, making clean streaks across his skin. He rubbed his fingers together as if testing the soot’s consistency. “I blew up.”
“You what?”
He smiled. “I trusted my gut, like you said. You should have seen the fire. It was like I stood in the middle of a blast, only I was the bomb. It went out in all directions. I vaporized them in a single go. It was glorious.” Then he frowned. “But your car is pretty much fucked, if it wasn’t already.”
The boom I’d heard right before the silence. That had been him?
“Holy shit,” I said.
Odi beamed. “I know, right?”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
One by one, we cut the victims down and carried them outside.
Odi had been right. My car was nothing but a burnt out shell of blackened steel. Oh, well. I hadn’t expected it to survive the attack anyway. But my car wasn’t the only thing that had suffered Odi’s wrath. The place smelled like an overwhelming amount of charcoal. He had painted the walls black with his fire. Barely an inch of the drywall had escaped the blast. And while some pieces of the walls and the studs within had broken or crumbled, the lobby didn’t look like the site of an explosion. Because there hadn’t been an explosion. Just a huge outpouring of magical flame.
Sly should have felt blessed that Odi’s uncontrolled magic hadn’t done more than scorch his basement wall. It frightened me a little to see what the kid was capable of. If only he could control it. We were lucky he hadn’t brought the ceiling down on top of him.
We carried out six victims in all and let them rest on the weedy patch of lawn in front of the building until we could figure out a way to get them, in their condition, all out of there. (Another damn flaw in my plan.)
But once we had them out, I noticed all six starting to quickly heal. For a gut spinning moment, I had the irrational thought that they were vampires, too. This had all been an elaborate trap.
Which didn’t make any sense at all.
Especially when I noticed the collective hum of magical energy emanating from them.
It took a lot of power to heal like that, even for a sorcerer—unless they specialized in the healing arts. We could heal our wounds over time and with a good amount of rest. These folks made it look almost easy.
Mom, Odi, and I watched over them as they slowly roused themselves out of an anemic stupor. Three men. Three women. All of them with a hellacious amount of juice. These weren’t ordinary practitioners. Their power could have made even Mom look like a newborn sorcerer.
The first to recover fully enough to stand was a man about six feet tall with a barrel chest. He had a bald head, but a thick beard. He could have passed for a lumberjack. He even wore a plaid flannel shirt, bright red. Not like the faded ones Odi typically wore.
“Thank you,” he said with a reedy voice. “They kept us drained enough to be too weak to fully heal, which worked for them as they could continue to feed on us indefinitely. We faced an eternity of suffering.”
“It’s all good,” Odi said.
The man’s gaze snapped to him. His lips peeled back. “You undead motherfucker. I’ll send you to Hades.” He raised a fist, and I could feel his magic gathering.
My instincts made me do a foolish thing.
I moved in front of Odi and stood between the sorcerer and the vampire.
The sorcerer’s eyes grew wide and incredulous. “What are you doing?”
I pointed behind me at Odi. “This vampire saved your lives. We would have n
ever gotten you out of there without him.”
The sorcerer’s brow furrowed. “This demon?”
“Yes,” I said. “And he’s not just a demon. Feel him out.”
“That sounds gross, dude.”
Sheesh. Even facing certain death, the kid acted like he didn’t have a clue.
“Shut up,” I snapped. Then I nodded at the angry sorcerer. “Go ahead. Feel the power in him.”
He lowered his fist.
I stepped aside, and the sorcerer approached Odi.
Odi drew back, but kept his footing. His nostrils flared from his quick (though pointless) breathing. The sorcerer loomed a good foot taller than Odi. And Odi must have sensed the sorcerer’s strength, because the frightened look in the kid’s eyes told me he had caught that missing clue.
The sorcerer narrowed his eyes and stared down at Odi. It took him a mere second, then he straightened and spun toward me. “A sorcerer?”
“Untrained, but yes. He was abandoned by his parents, and a vampire took advantage of his situation.”
“You sound like you have sympathy for him?”
“I do.”
The sorcerer turned back to Odi, held out his hand. “My name is Able,” he said. “And the Ministry thanks you for this good deed.”
Hold the flippin’ phone.
The Ministry. He was speaking on behalf of the Ministry? Only a very high ranking member could speak for them as a whole. Anyone else who dared would get their asshole relocated.
I swallowed. “You’re an officer of the Ministry?”
He gestured toward the others who, all but one, had gotten to their feet by now. The last one, a thick guy with mangy gray hair, was on his hands and knees.
“We all are,” Able said.
Six Ministry officers captured by vampires and fed on for who knows how long? If I hadn’t seen and felt how powerful they were, I would have never believed it. Actually, I still didn’t believe it. How could this have happened?
Mom came up beside me and took my hand. A subtle sign that she had the same questions. Which meant she didn’t recognize any of them—not that all members of the Ministry hung out together. But as a former Ministry member herself, it made sense that she might at least know one of them in passing, if only as a familiar face.
Able inclined his head. “May I ask your names?”
I gestured toward Odi and introduced him. Then I nodded at Mom. “This is my mother, Judith. And I’m Sebastian. Sebastian Light.”
The man on his hands and knees growled from deep in his throat. Then he changed form, shifting from a man to a black panther.
For the second time in as many days, I had an exotic cat pounce on me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Despite all the déjà vu, I still didn’t know how to deal with a giant attack cat. But if I lived through this, I promised myself to start carrying cans of tuna as a matter of course. Surely even the biggest kitties could be bribed with some yummy fish.
The cat took me low, barreling into my stomach, striking with a furry shoulder. I went down hard. My head bounced off the firm sod and turned my vision to stars.
This time, I didn’t hesitate with my magic. I conjured up a massive gust of wind, using my panic to fuel it, almost losing control like Odi had, but I had the experience to catch the edge and keep it from (literally) blowing away from me.
The cat nipped at my throat, but my wind carried him away before his teeth sank in. He sailed straight up, and I watched him whirl his paws uselessly as if he thought he could run on air. Yet still, his movements carried a dance-like grace that held me mesmerized.
Until he started falling back down.
I rolled out of the way.
He hit the ground a second later with a quick yip. One of his legs twisted under his belly on impact. The sound of crunching bone rang out like a shot. The panther flipped onto his side and writhed, broken paw hanging loose like a sock full of marbles.
The sight of the cat’s struggle made me cringe. I don’t know why seeing an animal suffer often hurts more than seeing a person in pain. Then I reminded myself this wasn’t a damn kitty. This was a shifter of some kind, and he wanted to kill me for some reason.
A snapping sound, like breaking sticks, came from him, and I watched as his broken leg righted itself. The second the limb was healed, the panther leapt to his feet and reared on me.
For an instant, I remembered the pain of Markus Hope’s cougar claws tearing through me. The sensation triggered a cold fear that stirred my magic barely above the surface of my consciousness. My hands went out to my sides without thought. Blue fire bloomed from my palms.
The flames reflected in the panther’s glassy eyes.
But that didn’t stop him from pouncing at me again.
I swung both hands forward and out in front of me as if pushing through something in my way. Gouts of blue fire poured from my palms and caught the panther in mid-air.
The force of the fire halted his forward movement. The flames engulfed him completely.
The panther threw back its head and roared at the sky as the fire burned away its pelt. The flesh around its teeth melted away, revealing its fangs and the jawbone that held them in place. More spots across his entire body sizzled and ripped open, the fire chewing the beast down to the bone.
Everyone there stood in a rough circle around the living torch thrashing and crying on the ground. It took less than a minute for him to finally die. The flames eased, going from blue to orange, but continued to smolder like a campfire, feeding on blackened bones and clumps of burnt meat. The smoke rising away from the mess carried an overdone pork-like stink. The flames cast flickering shadows across our faces.
One of the men pressed a fist against his mouth and turned away.
One of the women placed a hand against her belly while the color drained from her face.
Able crossed his arms and shook his head at the sight.
My stomach turned as well, but not only because of the nasty smell. Able had said they were all officers of the Ministry. Which meant I had killed a Ministry officer—a crime that would win me my own death. It didn’t matter that he had attacked first. The Ministry protected its own, no matter what.
I doubted my recent deputization would matter much, either.
I staggered backward, glancing back and forth among the other officers. None of them looked at me, their attention still captured by the mound of ex-panther.
Should I run?
I bumped up against Mom. The worried look she gave me told me she was wondering the same thing. But if I ran, I would end up with a contract on my head. I’d already been through that once. I wouldn’t survive a second go. The local hunters would make sure of it.
Before I moved much further, Able uncrossed his arms and looked at me, expression stoic, eyes unreadable. The others followed suit until all five of the remaining officers stared at me like a Greek chorus about to announce my fate in this fucked up tragedy.
I couldn’t run. I wouldn’t stand a chance getting more than a few paces away. These were sorcerers who had healed themselves in thirty minutes at most. If they could heal that quickly, they could kill even faster.
Instead of bolting, I stepped forward, making sure I stood between them and Odi and Mom. I held my arms out like a basketball player on defense. “This was my doing,” I said. “Please don’t blame them for my mistake.”
Able frowned. “It was a mistake to fight for your life?”
“I’ve been a bounty hunter for the Ministry long enough to know the Ministry laws when it comes to assaulting an officer.”
“Someone would have to report you,” he said, then turned to his fellows. “I doubt anyone here would accuse you based on the circumstances.”
The others didn’t say anything, but a few of them nodded. The woman holding her stomach and the guy still holding back a spew-fest had other concerns, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. But this was the second time I was promised I wouldn’t face con
sequences for throwing down with a Ministry bigwig. I felt extremely uncomfortable accepting those promises. There was no statute of limitations on any Ministry laws as far as I knew. I would have to go the rest of my life wondering if someone might decide to break that promise. The only way I could put my paranoia to rest would be to get something official from the Ministry courts in writing.
Of course, to get such a document, I would have to admit the transgressions in the first place.
My head started aching.
“The question remains,” Able said, “why did he attack you in the first place?”
A great question. One I hadn’t yet asked myself because I was too busy expecting to die. I thought through what had led up to his attack. The last thing I’d said before he pounced was my name.
Why would a Ministry officer I had rescued from eternity as a vamp extra value meal try to murder me once he knew who I was?
“I don’t have a clue.” I looked down at the smoldering lump. “How well did you know him?”
“His name was Ira Glass.”
Odi snickered. “Like the guy from public radio?”
Able didn’t smile, but he didn’t obliterate Odi either. “Yes. Like that. But obviously not him.”
“Obviously,” I said and threw Odi a dirty look.
He drew his shoulders up toward his ears and mouthed, “Sorry.”
“He was a scholar,” Able said. “Though he was due for a transition to guardian.”
“A scholar going guardian? Not very typical.”
Mom cleared her throat. “Not all scholars are merely bookish.”
She had me there. Like Odi had said, Mom was one badass lady. “Okay,” I admitted. “What was with the shift to panther? Was he a were?”
Able shrugged. “Not that I knew of. If so, he kept it to himself.”
I thought about Marcus and his cougar form. “He have any druid in him?”
“Again, I don’t know.”
I looked down at the man I had killed. I could still smell his cooked insides, but my stomach must have gotten used to it, because I wasn’t feeling so much sick as empty. Cold. And more than a little confused.
