“What are you?” he spat.
Shaine straightened and smiled. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
“Whatever you are, you won’t have a chance in a real fight against me.”
“How sure of that are you? Sure enough to bet your life on it?” He reached upwards into the few clouds he could sense above, coaxing them together, summoning more. He was going to be exhausted for days after this. Still, if he could stand off this elvenmage…
The elf gestured, and light formed into a long fiery whip. He swung it menacingly back and forth a few times, as though testing its balance.
Though not at all sure he could counter that, and very sure that he didn’t want even brief contact with it, Shaine simply waited, still with that smile calculated to irritate.
The elvenmage swung at him, with the full force of his anger behind it. If that thing wrapped around him as intended, the damage it did would not be at all pretty…
Please let this work!
The bright lash whipped through where Shaine was standing without slowing. The elvenmage, off-balance, spun in a full circle and dropped to one knee. The whip disappeared.
Shaine laughed mockingly. “You wanted to try.” No way was he going to let the elf see what phasing had taken out of him, or how frighteningly close he’d come to not being able to reverse it, but he resolved not to do that again. Ever.
The elvenmage got to his feet, expression dangerous. He flung out a hand, and a beam of cold white light shot from his palm towards Shaine.
With no time to think, old training took over. A mirror of clear ice spun out of the air’s moisture, caught the light-beam, and bounced it back. At an angle: it hit a nearby building instead, and lanced straight through the brick.
Just over the head of another, much younger, elvenmage who had just stepped through a gate of light; he ducked, reflexively.
The first mage frowned. “You again.”
The newcomer placed himself between the first mage, and Shaine and Jesse. “Leave them alone. I’m not scared to fight to protect my friends. You know that already. Are we really going to have to go through this a second time?”
The second mage had to be Kevin. Shaine remembered Jesse’s vivid descriptions of him, and who else would show up from nowhere to protect him? Shaine decided to let him handle it; he retreated to crouch beside Jesse, ready to defend them both if necessary with whatever he had left. He glanced up at the sky, at the ominous clouds darkening the stars. The air was getting heavy with static; that should mess up magic of any kind a little.
“I warned you I’d be ready for you next time,” the other mage said coldly. “You won’t be pulling dirty tricks again.” Light swirled and thickened around him; Shaine looked away, but Kevin didn’t appear to have any trouble with it. Light gathered around Kevin, too, but the shield before him was visibly more fragile, and only a semi-circle, not a full ring.
Wait a minute. There’s not very much light in this alley. Where the hell is that mage getting the power to do this stuff?
A closer look at the other mage’s shields answered that question, but he didn’t like it at all. The shields were dark heavy crimson and syrupy saffron, with threads twining through it of no colour meant for the mortal plane: demon-power laced into his own, tainting even his birthright gifts. Kevin’s held only the pure gold of the sun at dawn, the white of noon, the red of sunset.
Shit. This is not good.
Just as well for Kevin he has an ally, too, even if he doesn’t know it.
And so help me, nobody who deals with demons is getting anywhere near Jess while I’m alive!
The other mage gestured, and sent a cascade of… fireballs? No, these weren’t balls, they were flat disks, and they were coming edge-on, which struck Shaine as a bad sign.
Kevin muttered something that sounded a lot like, “Oh bloody hell,” and raised both hands, palm out. Most of the cascade shattered against his shields; the rest spun out of control and flung themselves uselessly at the walls around them. Kevin’s shields trembled; Shaine couldn’t see his expression, but he could see the tension in his posture—and the other mage had followed the attack, closing the distance between them. Before Kevin had time to strengthen his shields, the other mage shaped a sword made all of fire and swung it in an arc that, by rights, should have removed Kevin’s head from his shoulders; Kevin’s shields winked out, reappeared much smaller and much more condensed, and deflected the sword away even as Kevin ducked. He flung back a handful of blue-white fire that wrapped itself around the fire-sword and ate into it; the other mage slashed at him again, kept battering away at the weakening shield with the sword, and was coming alarmingly close when the sword finally disintegrated in his hands. Shaine saw Kevin release a breath he’d been holding.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Kevin said, frustrated and confused. “There’s nowhere you can be getting that kind of power from! You certainly didn’t have it last time!”
Some mage: he couldn’t even recognize what was right in front of him. “Demons,” Shaine said. “He doesn’t need a light source anymore. You must’ve caught him by surprise before.”
The other mage glanced at Shaine, clearly surprised that a mere human knew that, but shrugged. “And?”
“Oh, wonderful,” Kevin sighed. “Bane’s going to kill me.”
“Give me the wolf and the human who challenged me and there will be no fight.” Somehow, Shaine didn’t believe him.
Kevin spread his feet for balance, took a deep breath, and raised both hands again. “Right, like I’m going to let you near my friends so you can give them to a demon, or something. Hardly.” Shaine wasn’t sure whether to call it determination, stubbornness, or sheer bravado, but whichever it was, he had to give Kevin points for it, considering that he could have escaped easily to somewhere safe.
The demon-mage grinned. “I had a feeling you’d say that.” He threw another laser-like light-bolt at Kevin, who reflexively shielded against it, even though there was no chance it would hold. Hastily, Shaine cast a mirror just outside Kevin’s shield. The light-ray hit the mirror, deflected back. A second mirror turned it directly at its source.
It scored glancingly across the other mage’s chest, and vanished into another wall.
Kevin did a double-take, and shot Shaine a measuring glance, but had no time for more. His opponent let out a howl of pain and rage, and threw a flurry of ordinary fire-daggers at him in quick succession. The static in the air crackled, connecting with the mage-fire, making sparks dance around the daggers. Shaine frowned at them, calling together every trace of moisture he could reach from the air around them, from the garbage bins ten feet away, anything he could find, to wrap around the daggers before they could reach Kevin. Even had Kevin been paying attention, which he wasn’t since he was too busy doing something else, what remained of his shields couldn’t have stopped them. It wasn’t enough; he had to reach upwards, into the clouds, for more. It gave the static within them a path downwards too, which was at this point likely to hamper Kevin more than the other mage, but there was no help for that.
The ambient light of the city, intertwined with what Shaine was alarmingly certain was the last of Kevin’s personal reserves, gathered and grew brighter, some twenty feet above the ground. Brilliant wings spread wide, beat once, twice, and the phoenix dived at the other mage, the static striking even more sparks around each fiery feather, talons that glinted hard and cold as diamond extended as it stooped.
Even as the phoenix formed, the other mage gestured imperiously with both arms, frowning in concentration, and a kind of storm coalesced. Shaine had no name for it, but he doubted being touched by any of those intense streaks of coloured light would be healthy even had it not been created with demon-power.
And the channel Shaine had formed, directly from the clouds above to the battlefield below, remained in place.
Phoenix and storm met fifteen feet above, and joined with the improbably heavy static charge in the air.
Beams of light exploded in all directions, although they seemed to do little true damage; the air glowed with something strongly reminiscent of the aurora borealis, that certainly didn’t belong in a city alley; swirling shapes of coloured fire spun randomly in complete disregard for gravity; raw power made the very air shiver and shimmer. Shaine ducked, covering Jesse with his own body, shielding as strongly as he could with all the power he had left. As an afterthought, he rerouted some into a shield around Kevin, aware of Kevin also, somehow, finding enough reserves to shield all three of them.
It seemed to take forever for the storm to calm.
Shaine raised his head cautiously, surveying the alley.
Kevin was on his knees, head down, as small a target as possible.
The other elvenmage was gone without a trace.
“You okay?” Kevin asked hoarsely, stretching carefully. His eyes weren’t really tracking much, Shaine noticed, though he’d had no perceptible trouble during the fight. Must be something to do with being an elf.
Who’s asking who that? Shaine thought ironically, straightening. “Yeah, I’m all right. You?”
“I think so. Blessed gods, I’ve never seen anything like that happen before. Where’d the natural storm go?”
What natural storm? “Got me, you’re the mage. What brought you here?”
“A hunch that Jess was in danger.”
“Really. And what’s Jess doing here?”
“Uh, that’s kinda hard to explain…”
“Speaking of Jess…” Shaine turned around, and swore. “Where the hell did he disappear to now?”
Kevin echoed the curse, and went quite still—presumably attempting a search his own way. Shaine did likewise, and wasn’t surprised that he hit only a blank. Whatever Jess had been high on had to have left him briefly open to being tracked; since that had apparently worn off, natural defences were back in force.
“I’m dead,” Kevin groaned. “I lost him. And I haven’t even got the strength left to find him at close range.”
“We might still be able to track him,” Shaine said. He doubted it, but it was worth a try. “He’s only had like two minutes.”
“Where do we start? And now that I can concentrate, a friend of mine is going to be here as fast as my cousin can build him a gate, and he can probably help with that, which might distract him temporarily from ripping my hide off. And, before I go into shock and collapse into a useless heap, is there somewhere I can grab something to eat while we look?”
33
Jesse ran blindly, not caring what direction, certain only that anywhere was better than where Shaine and Kevin were. Not completely carelessly, though. It would be very easy for Kevin to get one of the other wolves here to follow his trail, and Shaine knew him much too well. He’d survived by being able to vanish effectively; having to break a scent trail was new, but he was sure he could do it. The scents of the city had been overwhelming to him when he’d come back fully wolf, and they were nonetheless familiar to him; to the Haven wolves, who were unfamiliar with them, that background would make it much harder to follow a single trail. He zigzagged across busy streets, cut through a gas station and scrambled over a fence at the back, went straight to the doors of a busy nightclub that never checked ID and then backed along the same path until he could use the hood of a car that was just pulling out as an alternate route.
He slowed down as he came to a busier street, and let himself blend in with the others in the area, mostly pleasure-seekers. When a park offered itself, he cut through that. He knew this park, this was the strange one, all hills and trees and rocks with a sundial and fountain in the middle, like no other park he knew of. Except the one in Haven, on the lake.
That didn’t bear thinking about.
He found a spot by the fountain, hidden by the curve of the hill, and settled there, hugging himself.
His thoughts were crystal-clear, now. The LSD he’d taken had worn off completely. It had been about six times the most he’d ever ventured, deliberately, and he didn’t think much time had passed between losing the real world and coming back to find both Shaine and Kevin there. Pure proof of wolf resilience; it hadn’t even been much of a trip.
He couldn’t, though, quite shake what he had seen, a thunderstorm, a black wolf howling in grief, but most vividly a silver dagger that had danced just out of his reach.
His mind flitted away, to a memory of another dream of a dagger, one that had left him restless and unable to get back to sleep. Prowling the silent house, he found Bane coiled into a corner of the couch reading; the alpha wolf looked up immediately.
“Can’t sleep?”
“Bad dreams.”
“Will telling someone help?” He turned over the book, and patted the couch. Jess sat beside him, described the dream. Bane, listening attentively, began to stroke one hand over Jesse’s hair; Jess winced reflexively from the touch, but Bane didn’t stop, and despite his resistance he found much of the tension easing away.
He woke the next morning curled up against Bane, and the alpha wolf was dozing leaning against the arm of the couch. It was the first time he’d truly recognized how much power Bane had to influence his emotional state; it had taken some time for him to come to accept that Bane was far more likely to use it to comfort and protect than to abuse and hurt.
It led irresistibly to another memory, coming across Kevin and Bane in the living room, Bane furform, Kevin brushing him. They’d coaxed Jess over and into furform—he’d been so shy about changing in front of anyone for a long time. Between the two, once Bane got the other brush from the kitchen, they’d put Jess in utter bliss for an hour or more.
The memories hurt; he pushed them away. He had to think about right now, instead of wandering around in the past.
What was he going to do now? He could probably avoid Kevin now, despite the soul-link and the nearness, and he had no idea what Shaine had been doing there. He could keep his eyes open and survive.
Was it really worth it?
He was too much of a coward to just kill himself. He’d have to just stumble through this however he could. Somehow he’d survive, just like he’d always survived.
*
Patrick, as soon as he was alone in his hotel room, spat, “Sikial, come!”
His primary demon materialized in its usual form, and cringed into a corner as the mage whirled to face it.
“You said he’d be alone and unprotected! I would hardly call that alone and unprotected!”
“Sorry, master, so sorry… others were not supposed to care now…”
“Obviously they do, if they were willing to stand up to me to protect him! If it hadn’t been for the storm-clouds and the static, I could have killed the mage and taken the other two. And they still stayed!” Dark visions formed behind his eyes, of sending one of the demons to take out all three of them… no. There’d be little satisfaction in that, compared to something more personal, and the power of their pain and deaths would be lost to him. Chance had played a part in this one, but still he’d lost, had been thwarted a second time. “That human is infuriating enough, but that Lioren mage… how dare he interfere with me again!”
“Yes, master. What gives him the right to tell you who you may or may not have?” Sikial raised its head, but kept its eyes low.
“Everyone is equal in the villages, they say, over and over,” Patrick snarled. “If everyone is equal, why are strong mages catered to and indulged, until they come to believe they can do anything they want, regardless of who they walk all over? He’ll have it easy his whole life, with everyone bowing down to him, like strength makes him superior to everyone else.”
“They care more for that than for anything else,” Sikial whispered. “Intelligence means nothing to them. Original thinking means nothing to them.”
“Oh, original thinking means something to them! It’s the ultimate crime! Right up there with daring to not kiss the ass of a strong mage!”
“This one expected you to, master.
He expected you to obey him, and surrender immediately. He would not have come here, at night with so little light, if he’d expected any challenge to his authority.”
“He hasn’t seen a fraction yet of how I intend to challenge his authority!”
“Yes, master, show him. Show him that being born strong doesn’t make him special, that being clever and inventive matter much more! We will help, master. We won’t be so careless again. No more mistakes.”
Patrick glowered at the demon coldly. “You’re right. There will be no more mistakes.”
He hadn’t escaped the battle unscathed; he’d been carelessly lightly shielded at the moment that storm of chaos was unleashed, and to gate himself out of there he’d had to open himself to it yet further. It would take time to heal, and time to plan something suitable. Especially for that interfering Lioren, the obvious product of a value system that gave special status to a strong mage.
The first time he’d seen the young wolf, he’d been intrigued by the psychic damage, the nature and extent of it; when Sikial had told him the wolf was back in the city—alone and undefended, ha!—his curiosity had won out. At least he could learn how well the damage had healed, and with a little effort, he was sure there was more research he could do. Wolf resistance didn’t apply to demon power.
Now? Fury overwhelmed anything else. All three were going to pay for this. They were going to die, and they were going to feed his power as they did.
The only remaining question was, what would be the most satisfying way to do it?
*
For the first time in an uncommonly long while, the entire group of three covens and their solitary friends gathered, in the living room of Sundark’s huge house.
“Well?” Bane prompted, gazing expectantly at his brother.
“That’s twice now that the same mage has shown an interest in Jess,” Bryan said. “At least, Kevin says it’s the same mage…”
“It is,” Kevin said firmly. “Change in power level aside, the signature was definitely the same.”
Black Wolf Page 27
