by Lowry, Chris
But the Judge had popped me here for a reason.
A situation he had called it. But didn’t give me any info. Not even a location other than the part of the globe I happened to be standing in.
Somewhere on the Asian continent.
“I need to speak to the man in charge,” I called out.
“Take me to your leader.”
6
Their leader turned out to be a Colonel. He did not look like a kind hearted tv character. He actually looked like a real son of a bitch with frown lines etched on the corners of his mouth and between his eyebrows.
I’d heard that look called a permanent scowl before. It looked etched on his granite jaw. I thought if ever there was a man who needed to get drunk and get laid, here he was.
Probably not too many opportunities out here though.
“You want to tell me what you’re doing here?” he growled.
I bet he said everything in a growl.
“I was hoping you could tell me. Sir.”
I added the sir because a lifetime ago I was in the military. Or a version of it.
We called it the Sidhe War, but most history books referred to it as WW II. I was part of the wizard fighting force allied with the normals against the Nazis.
The Nazis were real bastards, tapping into dark wizards and witches, that we called Sorcerers to do some really evil shite.
I was trained to stop them. It’s how I met my wife and her twin sister. I was a lucky wizard. They were just good.
Better than good, they were great.
Judge level powerful. Or maybe just under, because you know, like I mentioned before I thought the Judge might be Merlin.
The Colonel growled again.
“How do you people know so much so fucking fast?”
He moved to the Spartan metal desk on the edge of a plywood wall and picked up a piece of yellow paper.
“I just composed the message to send to HQ.”
He showed it to me, but my luck does not extend to long distance eyesight.
I could see that there were letters on the paper, but couldn’t make them out.
“We lost two CTM’s today. I figured they would chopper in one of you to investigate.”
Damn it Judge.
“What’s a CTM?”
“Combat Team Mage.”
He screwed up his eyes and looked at me like I was stupid.
I screwed mine up back and looked at him like I could vaporize him on the spot and go get a beer after.
His eyes unscrewed quick.
“I thought you would know more.”
That made me shrug.
“Pretend I know nothing since I was a Battle Mage.”
The hand holding the paper shook a little.
I had a small thrill of satisfaction because you know, being a Marshal is kind of bad ass and all, but letting a big tough as nails Marine know you were just a different kind of nail was cool too.
“Battle Mage?”
“Germany. France. Netherlands.”
He swallowed. It wasn’t a gulp.
“And now?”
I just let the Colonel know I had some military training and history with it.
He wanted to know how long it had been. I bet so he could just skip what I knew and fill in the blanks on what I didn’t.
But I wasn’t sure how much he was in the know with.
“I know they phased out the Battle Mage program after Vietnam.”
The Demon crossover in Vietnam had not been pretty. A lot of normals died in that conflict. Mop up on Sorcerers and Witches had been a pain.
“We transitioned out the Battle Mage program,” the Colonel explained. “But we needed the skill set embedded in our units, especially since the enemy had them. So we created Combat Team Mages.”
“To fight?”
“To keep the fight fair,” he said. “Think of it like radar jamming. That’s what it’s supposed to be. They go to battle to keep the enemy magi from using magic on our boys.”
That made sense to me. We had used similar tactics in the Sidhe War.
“Got it,” I said. “What’s going on here?”
If he lost two of the Combat Mages, then some magic user had gone rogue.
That might be why the Judge sent in a Marshal.
“The Squads we lost had magic used against them.”
I nodded.
“We had a Special Operations Group embedded with us, working out of this base. We lost both today.”
The enemy had a wizard. A bad wizard that killed two Combat Mages.
That told me a couple of things.
First, he or she was powerful. Taking out a couple of newbies wasn’t all that impressive. Taking down two combat trained wizards meant they had some mojo to work with.
Second, they were pure evil pieces of walking crap.
I know what you’re thinking. Hey Marshal, you kill people, have killed people and a couple of dozen werewolves, so what gives you the right to hop up on a high horse and act all judgemental?
They were bad.
All bad.
I don’t necessarily like that part of the job. But it’s something I’m not so bad at. Finding the magical criminals and bringing to the Judge so he can do the whole judging part.
If he sentences them to death, like the hanging judge of Fort Smith once did, I string them up. Metaphorically speaking, since the Judge is the one who does the stringing. With magic. And it’s not like hanging at all. It’s really just more of a flick of the finger and there is confetti where once a person was.
Kinda creepy when you think about it.
I prefer the whole bringing them in, but on occasion a Marshal will have to use force in the field. Like when that same sorcerer is trying to kill you back.
They always try to kill you back. It’s in their nature. Their evil, just trying to be bad and lord it out over the normals nature.
This one had killed.
I suspected they would not come quietly. I was going to need all the luck I could get.
“Can I get a lift to the site?” I asked the Colonel.
“Can’t you just poof there?”
I sighed.
“Show me on a map.”
Sometimes the normals knew too much for their own good.
7
The Judge is great about popping me out where I’m needed, usually to the surprise of me and whoever happened to be around when I poofed out of thin air.
Show off.
I could do it too.
Transporting took a little concentration, a lot of will power and a strong urge not to utter, “Beam me up.”
I mean, you could if you wanted, since it was a focal point for the application of will, but come one, let’s not play with clichés about transporting matter across distance.
Concentration. Willpower. Map.
You had to have a map to know where you were going. And you had to try extra hard not to think about the Moon. Or Jupiter.
Basically any place where there isn’t oxygen.
Because so far as I’m aware, magic yourself into outer space and you become so much debris floating in orbit, or a statue standing next to the American flag that won’t ever decay.
Poof.
Do you know how hard it is not to think about anything while you’re transporting?
It’s why I preferred the train.
Or my beat up old truck.
They may be slow, but they get you there.
Still, it’s a nice spell to have under your belt when you need it.
I concentrated really hard on the map coordinates, the shape of the path, the topography. I added in what I thought about the dead bodies, spirits that may have been trapped in the rocks, and what cordite smells like in battle. Anything I could think of to create a space and shape, sight and feel in my mind.
Then I willed myself there.
And only there.
The battleground was empty.
The bodies had been moved aw
ay, carted off to some temporary morgue before being tagged, bagged and shipped back to the US.
I should have gone to search for traces on the bodies before I popped out here. Too late now, so I added that to a mental to do list, and shifted focus to the task at hand.
I cast out my senses and felt…nothing.
No magic.
No ghosts.
Not even the village the Colonel had indicated was less than half a mile away.
That told me something.
People leave signs. Normal people leave traces everywhere they go, and traumatic death leads to a sort of spiritual upheaval.
When a body is forced to give up the ghost in a violent manner, that ghost likes to hang around, lost and forlorn.
That’s how you get hauntings.
Ghosts are tied to places, structures.
This path should be littered with the spirits, and even though they were stronger at night, I should have been able to feel them.
Hear them.
But there was nothing.
No ghosts.
Nada.
That made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Ghosts are everywhere if you know how to look.
The fact that they were missing was a piece of the puzzle.
The village that was just over the ridge was missing signs too. Not like a street sign that kids stole because it matched their name, or a population sign someone scrawled on in an effort to be funny.
I couldn’t feel the signs of life. No people either. No goats, or sheep or children, or dogs.
The last time I felt this way-
“Shit,” I muttered and sent up a shield.
A spell bounced off and deflected into the rocks and sent up a geyser of dirt. It was followed by three others in quick succession.
The Sorcerer was good. Fast. The spells were pinpoint tight and designed to kill.
My pre-cog had saved me. Lucky.
I wiggled the fingers on my left hand and tried to remove the cloaking spell that covered the path.
It shimmered to sight as a pale fog attached to the area, and I could see harsh sunlight burning at the edges. I concentrated on the light, let my right hand hold the shield bubble as my left went to work on the cloak.
Counter spells had never been my strong suit.
My wife was a master as spell casting, but she was also a Nordic princess who along with her twin sister, might have been a Valkyrie.
I asked her all the time, and she laughed me off, until she went missing on a mission and I hadn’t seen her since.
I missed her every day.
Times like this, I missed her more. The three of us made a great team in the Sidhe War. Their precision was a compliment to my luck.
And dumb brute strength.
I’m a Battle Mage, remember? Pre-cog can only get you too far, but learning to fight with Magic means learning all styles. Like a Ninja and a Samurai had a little magic kung fu baby who could Spartan crap up like nobody’s business.
I called in a hurricane.
I guess in the desert, they would have referred to it as a sandstorm and the rocks around us looked like they had seen their fair share of wind torn days.
The clouds coalesced over our heads, started swirling and cracking off lightening like an out of control disco. The wind twirled around the path, the ridge, strong enough to pick up small boulders and dance them off each other.
Rockslides scattered around my shield, bouncing with the spells off the edge to careen down the path.
The sand soaked hurricane did the trick and lifted the cloak.
It flooded my senses with everything all at once. Ghosts howled louder than the wind. Panicked animals bleated, barked, and howled as the villagers fled from their homes to seek shelter in a giant cave carved from the ridge wall.
And then I saw her.
A witch standing in the cavern opening. She thrust out both hands and muttered an incantation.
Two arcs of electricity connected in my storm cloud, forming glistening eyeballs that glared down at me.
The witch moved her hands and shifted the hurricane back in my direction, and now it was glaring at me, something becoming alive.
“Did you just possess that with a Jinn?” I screamed.
It sounded like she said “Ha, ha!” back, but that was impossible. She was a wizened old crone, Pakistani by her features, and “ha ha” was way too Americanized of a taunt.
But it was a taunt. I was sure of that.
That old witch was playing with fire.
Literally because the ancient spirt possessed hurricane sandstorm began spitting fireballs down on me.
All I could think of was a Johnny Cash song about burning rings as I sent up a couple of spells to stop them.
Until one blasted the rock and sand beside me into glass and sent me sprawling. I slid backwards on my ass down the hill in a scree of rock, until my butt butted up against a boulder.
Ouch.
I heard the witch cackle again.
“I hate witches,” I muttered and crawled to my knees.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate all witches. In fact, wiccans were pretty awesome hippies in my book. All natural, environmentalists, peace love and understanding types.
It was the crazy witches I didn’t like.
The ones that got power hungry and turned into sorcerers.
They liked to double bubble to boil up some trouble and it pissed me off.
I crawled to the edge of the ridge and peeked over.
The crone was making motions with her fingers and the villagers were moving at her direction. Slaves or thralls. I couldn’t tell from here.
But I could see the spirits trapped in circles around the cavern. She was whipping up a nasty spell, and if she was strong enough to call up a Jinn, then using spirits to summon meant she was going after bigger fish.
Not literal fish, because you know, we were in the desert. But big large demon size fish. Or whale sized demons.
Witches had released demons in the jungles of Vietnam.
The news reported that napalm was used to sever supply lines and suppress the enemy. That was only partially right.
It wasn’t napalm, it was the Judge and a few other Battle Mages, and they were using fire to destroy a demon incursion and infestation.
The same thing happened at the end of the Sidhe War in Japan. Twice.
You don’t mess with demons. And on witches ever seemed to learn.
The thing was, she was powerful, and like most strong people, she probably figured she could handle it.
But if she turned a demon loose, it would destroy the village, take out all the FOB’s and invite it’s buddies to human eating contest.
Not on my watch.
This wasn’t my beat, so I spent all of three seconds trying to decide if I should call in back up.
But the crone below was making a motion, the trapped ghosts were whirling like miniature tornadoes in their circles, and the villagers lifted up a little girl and carried her to an alter.
Because big witch spells called for human sacrifice.
I had a problem with that.
The witch ran her wart covered hands over the struggling little girl as the villagers stretched her out over something carved in the rock.
I couldn’t make out the shapes or symbols from here, but it had to be a summoning glyph.
As soon as blood hit it, all hell would break loose.
No, I mean literally, a door to hell would open, let in a demon or three and everyone except the witch would die.
And the ghosts, since they were already dead, but I suspected her spell would zap them to nothing.
I felt like a sniper as I lined up my finger, summoned my will and sent a shot at the gathering below.
The spell missed the witch and hit the rock.
She screeched and shot a spell back at me.
I was okay with missing because I aimed at the glyph and took a chunk of rock out of it, rendering it useless.<
br />
At least she couldn’t summon a demon.
“Get him!” she screamed. Or close to it.
I don’t speak Pashu so for all I know, she was ordering Chinese food. But the villagers dropped the little girl, picked up AK-47 assault rifles and peppered my position with a hail of soft points.
The wind picked up and the Jinn was stalking my way too.
I kept my shield up as bullets chewed up the earth around me. Sand scoured the ground in front of and beside where I stood, but nothing touched me.
I watched the witch grin an evil hag grin and point at me.
I wasn’t worried. She wasn’t strong enough to break my spell.
Turns out the crone was smarter than I gave her credit for.
She scooped the earth out of the ridge in a rumbling landslide of rock and grit. My footing cascaded down the side of the ridge and carried me with it.
