“I’m all right.” I prove it by rising to my feet without support, and reloading my gun. “Just a bruised ego.”
“If you say so.” Ramirez stands too, eying me with uncertainty. “What’s the situation here?”
I survey the field. Lucian is still near the woods, trying to plow his way through the wall of wraiths blocking Feldman’s retreat. The vampire has killed over half the wraith horde already, dozens of mutilated bodies strewn across the grass, but there are enough combatants remaining to keep Lucian occupied for another five, maybe seven minutes. Enough time for us to sneak past him and chase down Feldman ourselves. If we play this right, we might win the day.
“The perp, Feldman,” I say to Ramirez, “fled into the woods. We need to pursue him immediately, because that vampire over there is trying to capture him under authority of the Federation, without regard to DSI’s jurisdiction. If we let him take Feldman, we’ll lose our opportunity to uncover the identities of Feldman’s co-conspirators in the convention center attack and publicly expose the breadth of the rogue practitioner conspiracy. We need to regroup, come up with a manhunt plan, and enact that plan in the next few minutes. Because if we waste too much time, that goddamn vampire is going to beat us to the punch.”
Ramirez runs a hand through his wet hair as he watches Lucian rip two more wraiths in half. “Christ,” he mumbles, “this case is a barrel of laughs, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, I know, and—”
A massive stream of fire erupts to my left. I jerk my head around, only to see the wraith Naomi was fighting get consumed by the inferno and disintegrate in a matter of seconds. I track the fire stream back to its origin, a contraption wielded by Jake Adelman that includes a backpack (filled with accelerant, I assume) and a gun-like release device with a small pilot flame flickering on the end. It takes me five seconds of staring incomprehensibly before I realize the weapon is a flamethrower. And another ten seconds before I realize that half the new arrivals are carrying them.
“Holy shit!” I say. “Where’d you guys get flamethrowers?”
Ramirez smirks. “Believe it or not, we had some in the armory. I figured since these wraith monsters are especially vulnerable to fire, it couldn’t hurt to bring more heat to the battle. Beggar rings give you a nice burst of fire and all, but flamethrowers pack a way bigger punch, and you can shoot a longer, more persistent stream.” He nods, impressed, as the dust of the burned wraith scatters across the ground. “They work even better than I anticipated.”
“I honestly don’t know how to respond to that.” I gesture to Jake Adelman, whose exchanging a high-five with his injured twin. “Except that you better damn well let me try one of those before this day is out.”
“When all is said and done, Kinsey.” Ramirez smacks my shoulder. “When all is said and done.”
Naomi’s team converges with Ramirez’s crew. I fill them in on the situation at hand, and Naomi, as expected of the lead captain, quickly delegates tasks to everyone. “Ramirez,” she says, “your team will stay on the field and monitor the situation with the wraiths and the vampire. If any of the wraiths try to escape, don’t hesitate to use the flamethrowers to their full capacity. I don’t want any more of those things running wild around town, threatening civilians.” She frowns. “And if that vampire tries to pursue our perp, do your best to stall him.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ramirez responds. He makes a hand motion to his team that must be move out, because they all break away from the huddle and jog off in the direction of the Lucian versus wraith battle. As they go, my old academy mate, Harmony Burgess, peeks over her shoulder and sticks out her tongue at me. The levity relaxes me a bit, and I mimic her silly face before returning my attention to Naomi’s instructions.
“Jake, Li,” she says, sheathing one of her swords, “since you two have flamethrowers as well, I want you to sweep the area for any wraiths that might be in hiding. But, if at any point, you feel Ramirez needs backup, abandon that task and return to the battlefield.”
The two agents nod, affirming her orders, then peel off from the rest of us and race away across the field.
“Newman, Joe, Kinsey”—the three of us perk up at Naomi’s sharp tone—“you’ll accompany me into the woods to search for our missing perp. Kinsey, you said he was badly injured?”
“Yeah,” I say, “he’s down a hand, and I’m pretty sure his fight with the vampire wore him out. He might have a few good tricks left up his sleeve though—he’s a powerful wizard—so injured or not, we shouldn’t underestimate him.”
“Understood.” She turns toward the woods and observes the dense underbrush. “When we get in there, we’ll spread out, ten or fifteen paces between each of us, so we can comb as wide an area as possible without leaving anyone vulnerable to attack. If you find this Feldman character, call out to the rest of the group. If you get attacked by a wraith, call out to the rest of the group. If anything else dangerous occurs, call out to the rest of the group. I don’t want to lose anyone on this mission. Clear?”
We nod in stoic comprehension like the agents dispatched before us, then Naomi Sing points her sword at the dreary, rain-drenched woods, and off we go to capture the mass murdering maniac known as Patrick Feldman—once and for all.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It’s the battles you expect to end in a bang that always end in a whimper.
Our first four minutes of the Feldman hunt turn up nothing, and by the time we’re halfway through the patch of woodland that lets out onto a residential neighborhood on Trumbo Lane, I can feel the clock ticking faster and faster, counting down to the moment where Lucian catches up to us. To my left, Naomi is hacking and slashing her way through the underbrush with her sword, each swipe a little stronger than the last, as the pressure to find our perp builds. Past Naomi, the other two agents, Newman and Joe Adelman, are tripping through the low bushes and soft, damp soil, their curses bouncing off the trees around us. It’s tough going, our progress slow and disorganized, but it’s all we can do in what few minutes remain before the game is up.
I’m kicking a line of thorny vines out of my path when the tree falls. A booming snap resounds ahead of us, and a forty-foot tree suddenly overturns in our direction. It crushes every branch in its way as it comes, an unstoppable force, and I’m reminded, with an electric zing of memory, of Erica slinging trees at Charun that night we fought him to recover Cooper Lee. Magic, screams my mind, this is magic at work!
“Everybody move!” Naomi shouts, and we scatter.
The upper branches pass within two feet of me as I break to the right and dash away, and as I hop a narrow hill and clamber up the opposite bank, the tree slams into the earth with enough force to crush a tractor-trailer. The ground quakes—I stumble and grab hold of a skinny trunk for support—and a hundred branches snap and crack and pop, wooden shrapnel shooting through the woods as far as the eye can see. A few sharp pieces bite into my back, but my coat rebuffs them.
When I turn my head to ascertain the damage, I find that my view is blocked by a new wall of pine needles that fan out over thirty feet. Since I can’t see past the tree, I call out, “Guys, is everybody okay?”
For a moment, no one answers.
Then Naomi, somewhere nearby, says, “My leg’s out! I’m pinned by a branch. It’s too heavy for me to lift. Can I get some help?”
Newman, from a greater distance away, replies, “Coming, Captain!”
The Adelman brother calls out shortly thereafter, “I see you! I’m almost there.”
I can’t see any of them—the foliage is too dense—so I start searching for the shortest path around the enormous tree. But as I prepare to jump the hill again, a twig snaps somewhere behind me.
I whip around, gun raised, peering into the shadowy woods. Nothing sticks out to me at first. No animals. No people. And certainly no Patrick Feldman, whose tendency for flashy attack spells would have given away his position by now, if he was making a move against me.
But somethin
g’s not right.
I can’t put my finger on it, but about twenty steps ahead, in what looks to be a small clearing, an atmosphere that isn’t quite natural permeates the air. On a hunch, I focus my magic sense on that spot.
Initially, nothing trips my radar, and I almost give up and turn around so I can assist Newman and Adelman. But the nagging itch in my mind refuses to drop the subject, and I find myself concentrating on my magic sense harder than ever before. Straining, almost. As if I’m lifting a weight that’s a tad too heavy for my class.
Tears gather in my eyes. Tension builds in my jaw. Blood pools in my cheeks. Breath sticks in my lungs. A sound of frustration works its way up my throat and presses through my clenched teeth. And just as my concentration is about to shatter under the weight, as my magic sense is about to retreat altogether in fear of being pushed to the breaking point…
…something appears in the clearing.
No.
Someone appears in the clearing.
I blink a few times, worried my eyes are playing tricks on me, but the figure doesn’t fade. It looks like the outline of a man, highlighted in magenta. The space inside the outline is totally transparent, no visible features whatsoever, and for about six inches outside the outline, the air appears to ripple, like what I’m witnessing is more a reflection in a funhouse mirror than a staple of reality. Seconds pass where I honestly can’t figure out what the hell I’m looking at—and then the answer smacks me upside the head. Because it’s obvious.
It’s a veil.
Feldman is standing twenty feet away from me, cloaked in a veil. And he’s been silently watching us for who knows how long. After he brought the tree down, he maneuvered around the fallout so he could see how effective his attack was. While doing that, he accidentally stepped on a twig, alerting me to his presence. But the man doesn’t know that I can partially see through the veil—hell, I didn’t know I could do that with my magic sense—which means I might have a chance to nail him with a sneak attack and spare this godforsaken fight of any more bloodshed.
Pretending I see nothing, I lower my gun and walk slowly toward the clearing, scanning the woods to my left and right as if I’m puzzled by the sound of the snapping twig. When I reach the clearing, I appear to search the soaked earth for any footprints, though there aren’t any to find. Feldman wouldn’t be careless enough to leave an obvious trail, but he doesn’t realize I’m smart enough to know that. He thinks I’m a stupid young Crow, in over his head.
I run a hand through my hair and sigh like I’m frustrated, then stop three feet away from Feldman’s dimly glowing outline, watching him out of the corner of my eye. But he makes no attempt to attack me, which is…actually, that’s odd. Because Feldman’s been trying to kill me since he walked into that locker room, and he hasn’t been patient about it. When he lost the locker room fight, he triggered his wards and blew up part of a school. When he lost a second time on the field, he summoned a whole army of wraiths.
What’s he waiting for now? He’s got me alone and (as far as he knows) caught unaware. Why would he hesitate? Why would he…?
A tiny little devil of a detail wriggles its way to the forefront of my mind.
Magenta. The aura surrounding the veil is magenta. But Feldman’s wards glowed more of a crimson red, and so did the lightning spell. The laser beam was yellow, but that could have been a product of “science,” how the beam affected the air, as opposed to the magic running behind it. So, by all indications, Feldman’s magic aura is crimson, and as I learned in my magic sensing class at the academy, magic auras don’t change color. Ever.
So if the wizard standing beside me has a magenta aura, then it can’t be Feldman.
It’s someone else.
I inhale, too sharply—and that’s what gives me away.
A powerful blast of magic bursts out of the unknown practitioner’s hand and collides with my chest. Then I’m soaring through the air, no breath in my lungs, no sense of direction, the world spinning around and around, blurs of trees and bushes and vines, until my trip abruptly ends. When my left shoulder rams into a tree trunk. My head snaps back, striking the dense bark, ripping my scalp wide open, bruising the skull beneath. And I rebound off the tree, unceremoniously falling to the ground.
Vision filled with static, balance shot, lungs empty, I make a desperate attempt to stand. But my legs won’t support me, and my fingers fumble against the uneven ground in a futile search for the gun I dropped somewhere on the pine-strewn earth.
My thoughts are broken and unintelligible. Confusion reigns supreme. All I know for sure is that I have a concussion budding beneath the tortured flesh on the back of my head; that and my left shoulder is down for the count.
Cheek pressed against the cool dirt, I try to get my basic functions working, try to breathe, try to see, try to hear, try to regain the sense of where all my limbs are. But despite my best efforts, only half of those things return in any capacity: my vision steadies slightly, and my hearing stabilizes.
So I can hear the veiled wizard approaching me, and see his glowing outline when he steps between two bushes and halts a few feet away. But I can’t lift my arms to put up a fight, and I can’t stand up to run away, and I can’t get enough air to scream for help, and I’m fresh out of weapons to defend myself with.
Unless Naomi, Adelman, and Newman are seconds away from me right now…I’m dead.
The veiled wizard steps closer, and I consider whether or not to shut my eyes. I mean, it’s not like I can see his face—I can’t glare at him defiantly before I die—and I’d rather not watch as some part of my body is punctured or burned or ripped apart. But at the same time, I’m curious. Even now, lying prostrate in front of a wizard who could end me at a moment’s notice, I’m curious:
Who is this guy? Why is he here? And how long has he been here?
So many possibilities, and so little time left on my clock to discover the truth.
The wizard examines me for a moment, and then crouches down and reaches for my belt. There’s a tug, something pops free, and he lifts to his face, of all things, my DSI badge. After reading the Detective 3rd Class declaration, he flips the badge over to the reverse side, which holds my ID card in a see-through plastic pouch. The wizard underlines something on the card with his invisible finger, as if marking particular words in his memory. Finally, he drops the badge on the ground in front of me and stands up again.
He loiters there, as if listening for any more pursuers, for ten seconds, fifteen, twenty. Then his magenta aura flares up around his veil, a sign he’s summoning more power to perform a spell. Hand outstretched toward my face, the wizard whispers a word too quietly for me to catch, and a sphere of energy sparks into existence in the center of his palm.
This is it.
Where I die.
I know it.
This wizard is going to kill me, and—
Powerful flapping fills the air, the sound of tremendous wings, and an owl drops from a high branch in the tree I’m lying beneath. As it falls, its form warps, and by the time it hits the ground in front of me, it’s no longer a bird but a black man, dressed in a pair of cargo pants and a simple white T-shirt. His feet softly press into the damp soil, like he jumped six inches and not thirty feet. And when he straightens his posture, he takes on a casual air, hands in pockets, shoulders lax, facing the invisible wizard with no concern whatsoever.
The wizard, on the other hand, recoils at the sight of owl man, his spell dissipating before it can fire. He doesn’t say anything (because that could reveal his identity, and he’s too smart to make that mistake). He merely drops his hand to his side, relinquishing his attempt to kill me, and rolls his shoulders back, silently communicating to owl man that he’s not afraid. Really, he’s not. He’s only backing off from his murder plot because he’d be inconvenienced by a drawn-out battle.
Coward, I would yell at him if I could.
Owl man makes no acknowledgement of the wizard’s silent declaration, or my
own. He simply stands, nonchalant, and blocks the wizard’s access to the injured Crow. For thirty seconds. A minute. A minute and a half.
The moment quick footsteps sound off in the distance, the tense moment cracks like an egg. The wizard retreats, backing away at first, believing owl man might attack him from behind. But when he’s far enough away, he turns tail and runs, utilizing that speed spell I’ve come to recognize. His invisible body, identifiable only by his aura, flies off through the woods, jumping bushes, evading vines, rounding trees. By the time I gather enough strength to sit up, the invisible man is gone, too far away for even my magic sense to follow.
I sit there on my sore ass and curse another failure.
The wizard was right beside me, unaware I’d caught him—and I let one piece of unexpected information make me flinch. Stupid, Cal. So stupid. You should be better at this by now.
Trying to shake off the disappointment, I look to owl man for answers, but he doesn’t seem to have any intention of sticking around. He bends down, retrieves my badge, and offers it to me. When I take it, he bows his head and says in a deep, accented voice, “You’ll find the criminal sorcerer you’ve been searching for about fifty meters to the east.” He nods in the indicated direction. “Alas, I did not arrive soon enough to preserve his usefulness to DSI, and for that, I apologize. But there will be other opportunities, Calvin Kinsey, I promise you that. Simply be diligent, and they will reveal themselves to you.”
Owl man takes two steps back and closes his haunting yellow eyes. “Until next time, Detective. Farewell.” Between one second and the next, the man becomes an owl. And I don’t even have a chance to say thank you, much less ask a question, before the owl takes flight and soars off into the woods, higher and higher. Until he, like the invisible wizard, vanishes into the murk of the rainy day.
City of Crows Books 1-3 Box Set Page 82
