Toxic Influence

by Voss Foster

  "Well apparently not everyone on your team is so accomplished." Gutt leveled a thick, gnarled finger into the distance.

  I had to squint before I saw the woman. The woman and her two god damn children stumbling down the street in one easy to attack cluster, coming ever closer to the sorcerer in question.

  "Carlson…" I slipped my Glock from the holster and held it at the ready. "Carlson, they're kids—"

  "I know what they are, Rourke. I'm not blind." He pulled his sidearm, too. "We've got a clear shot in there now. They're still far enough away. Can bullets touch this thing or not, Gutt?"

  "A sorcerer is no more or less naturally resilient to firearms than an average human. And at this range, I daresay even an orc's natural protections may be insufficient."

  "Good. He tries anything, take him down, Rourke."

  I nodded. With each breath, my heart slowed. Lots of training with a gun in my hand paid off apparently. I kept my eyes darting back and forth, tracking the sorcerer and the woman and her damn kids that should have been cleared.

  Carlson glanced to Gutt, only half a second before returning his gaze to the sorcerer. "You're lead now."

  Gutt nodded and moved between the two of us, a giant wedge of muscle. "I am N'Gutta of Droshheim."

  The sorcerer smiled at him. "I am…aware. You betrayed the Kingdoms for the sake of the Mundane." The sorcerer had a voice to equal Gutt's in depth and power, but it rasped, as though he'd smoked a pack a day for thirty-five years.

  "It's common courtesy to exchange names when you meet someone."

  "I am not common. Or particularly courteous." Slowly, the sorcerer's gaze traveled toward the woman and her kids. "You want to watch me kill them? It won't take much."

  Gutt stepped back. "If you try anything, these two agents here are going to shoot you, and I have the utmost faith in the training of the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

  As Gutt kept him talking, Carlson muttered commands to two agents I didn't dare turn to identify. "Go get them. Now."

  The family would be handled as fast as was safe. Then the shot would be clear as clear could be. I didn't pay any attention to what Gutt was saying, or the sorcerer standing there with too much damn control of the situation. It all faded into a rumble with my heartbeat. First sign of anything and—

  The sorcerer raised both hands and turned toward the approaching family. Plus the two agents who were trying to retrieve them. And his hands glowed bright white. I shot right as Carlson did.

  Pop.

  Pop.

  Pop.

  Three shots, tight grouping, center mass of the back. They burned the air, struck him dead even with Carlson's bullets.

  Ping ping ping ping ping. Five spent bullets tinkled useless against the pavement as the casings came out at our feet.

  "What the fuck is this?" Carlson fired again. "Stop him!"

  Gutt's voice was just as raspy and growly as the sorcerer's, now. "I'm not a scrubber, Agent Carlson. That is an exceptionally specialized skillset—"

  "I don't give a shit." Another bullet, another useless shot. "Those are my men and three civilians."

  "They are two trained FBI agents and three civilians who should have been cleared out well before this sorcerer ever made an appearance. Do not assume I've somehow forgotten the stakes." Gutt whipped his arm through the air, drawing crackling lightning around his fist. He tossed it forward, raising the hair on the back of my neck as it passed by.

  The sorcerer did turn his head for that one, waved a glowing white arm, and redirected the lightning down where it arced into the six spent bullets instead of down into his spine.

  Gutt cut off the flow of electricity. "His magic is strong. I underestimated the threat he poses."

  The sorcerer glowed bright white head to toe, now, and something crept up from the pavement in a two foot circle around him. Thick white smoke…but it wasn't smoke. It was mist. It was a fog. It was the damned poison. Every inch of me knew as much. I rattled off two more shots, right at his head. Both hit, one at the base of the skull and one dead center, and both bounced off. "Carlson—"

  "Not now, Rourke."

  "Permission to infiltrate the perimeter, sir."

  "Hell no, you idiot. Two dead agents is two too many."

  The gas crept ever closer to the woman and her children and the two agents. It accelerated. Even if they got to the family in time, they wouldn't be able to get away. It was a matter of seconds.

  "Permission to do something monumentally stupid."

  "Don't you dare."

  I bum rushed the perimeter, vaulted the barrier, and headed into the growing sea of milky white poison gas. Even though he had a two-foot radius of clear air around him, the sorcerer was pulling on a mask to cover his face. Maybe seeing him take precaution should have stopped me, but I pushed through it like I pushed through everything else.

  Carlson screamed from behind me. "Rourke! Stop! That's an order."

  I burned as soon as the gas touched me. I held my breath as long as I could, which wasn't long at all, as much effort as I was exerting to get there. Each breath was tainted with the acrid, chemical stink. I waved my arms high at the agents. "Get them out of here! Now! Move!"

  The sorcerer turned to look at me. Up close, he was twice as disgusting to behold. He looked not just sick, but dead. Maybe sorcerers actually were dead. I didn't fucking know how preet anatomy worked. His olive drab wasn't just olive drab, either. Rough embroidery festooned everything he wore with dark, jagged symbols I didn't recognize.

  I hauled back and clocked him right in the jaw with the butt of the pistol. A bullet may not have penetrated through whatever weirdness he had going for himself, but that punch damn sure connected. I felt it. His skin was slick and slid under the force of the hit, some of it sloughing off onto the pavement. He stumbled a step back and grabbed his jaw.

  I nodded, keeping my breaths as shallow as possible. The kids and the woman ran off with the other two agents. "Yeah. Not used to getting punched, are you?"

  He raised his hand high and the white vapor came with it, creeping closer to him…and to me. I'd be dead. Occupational hazard of being a brash idiot with a badge and a gun. Sometimes dangerous people wanted to kill you.

  Something sizzled through the air. Gold light. The sorcerer's eyes darted toward the light and he raised his other hand. Sparks fell to the street and the white mist began to recede. More light, more sparks, less mist. I glanced back to see Gutt tossing those glowing rings at him again. Whatever they were, this guy didn't want to get hit by one. He was distracted and I had one chance to do something useful. There was no capturing him; my legs felt like they'd been dipped in acid so I couldn't chase him down.

  I pulled out my pocket knife and sliced the strap on his gas mask. His eyes widened. He clamored for the mask as it fell, but Gutt's glowing rings kept on coming, and apparently he couldn't fend them off and grab for the mask and keep me from punching him in the face again. So the mask clattered to the street, and the sorcerer ran off. One step. Two steps.

  Gone. He vanished into thin air.

  I reached for the mask. More weird, angular symbols. As the adrenaline flushed out, the pain broke through. My legs. My chest. My head. Everything burned, and it was only getting worse with each passing second. I roughly slapped the mask over my nose and mouth as I stumbled my way back toward Gutt and Carlson, but stayed on my side of the barrier. We didn't know enough about this poison to know if it would spread from me to everyone else. "Hazmat on the way, Carlson?"

  "My team is on the way." Gutt nodded. "You punched him."

  I collapsed to the ground. "Hey, it worked." I'd only broken one bone in my life…this was worse. By about a hundred times. Every cell in my body throbbed as I clung to what little consciousness I could still grab for. "Agent Carlson, sir? I'm taking a nap." Black crept in slowly on the edge of my visions. I had to stop talking long enough to cough.

  And lucky me, I was awake and aware just long enough to see bright red
blood on my hand and to taste iron on my tongue before everything went away.

  Chapter Two

  You know when you wake up in a hotel room or on your girlfriend's couch and you don't fucking remember passing out in a weird place that's not your bed? Imagine that, but dazed out on some kind of weird poison and rushing down the road with a giant blue troll staring concernedly at you. At least I assume it was concern. The eyes said concern, the slightly open mouth said "I'm fucking hungry, look at my teeth."

  And my body said "Hey, you just fought a locomotive. And lost."

  Gutt sighed heavily and looked up at the ceiling. "Thank goodness. We took you back to the field office there, but they could only do so much. I wasn't certain how much poison you'd been exposed to. Besides that, we haven't gotten a chance to try and work out the nature of this poison yet. I have to say, all in all, this was a bit of a dice roll. So far, no snake eyes."

  I guess Gutt got even more loquacious when he was nervous. "How are the kids?" Jesus, my voice sounded like a wounded cat.

  "Everyone else is fine. You took the brunt of the poison, but compared to past victims, it seems to be relatively minor"

  No shit. So far, no one else we knew of had survived one of these poison attacks. They all died on the scene. "Other two agents?"

  "I said everyone is fine, Dash." He shook his head. "You're a fool, running at him like that. You know that, don't you?"

  "Damn straight." I looked at my surroundings as best I could without moving my neck, which felt as though it had steel rods holding it in place. Minor exposure or not, that poison was apparently still hard on me. Who'd've thunk?

  There was another human agent driving. I had to guess they were one of the agents OPA had sent out to clean up. I was stretched in the back, and Gutt had crammed himself into the passenger seat, but he was fully turned and clearly not wearing a seatbelt. Other than my blood and flakes of my skin, the whole vehicle was very clean. "Where are we heading?"

  "Back to DC. I trust our medic more than theirs."

  "Have I been out for four hours?"

  "You've been in and out of consciousness for about ninety minutes, though I suspect a large part of that is the sedatives they administered back at the field office."

  I sighed, doing my best to keep the panic out of my already ragged voice. "So I just have to survive until we actually get back to DC." Just the thought of that lanced a fresh wave of pain from my feet all the way up to the top of my head.

  Gutt chuckled at my misery. "You forget, I'm with the OPA. You think we actually drive places?" He waved his fingers through the air, and the scenery outside the windows turned to neons and pastels. Just for a second. Then we were in the dark. In a parking garage. "We take shortcuts whenever possible."

  "That's a hell of a shortcut." I didn't think too hard about what had just happened, mostly because I couldn't exactly focus on it. I just knew that we were presumably somewhere safe, since our driver turned the engine off. "Couldn't have done that while I was still out of it, so I don't have to try and work my poison addled brain around it?" Or talk without fighting newer and stronger waves of fire through my skin and bones. That would have been welcome too.

  "Couldn't risk it, I'm afraid. With magic we know, we can predict what will happen. With this poison…I wanted to wait until you were back with the living, as it were. That way you could at least tell me if something went wrong during the remote transport. And we would be able to limit exposure to others."

  "Oh. So you just needed to make sure I could feel any extra pain it caused. Cool."

  "That's simplifying a bit, but yes."

  "Well, I'm feeling plenty right now." I groaned as a knife sliced through my chest, but I suppressed the cough. I figured that would hurt twelve times as much. "Do I want to know what my legs look like?"

  "Probably not."

  "Great. Then as far as I'm concerned, I don't have legs." In spite of all the agony to the contrary. My voice was getting worse by the second, too, but if I stopped talking I'd have nothing to distract myself from everything else going on. And I needed distracting.

  The agent driving pulled up in front of a set of elevator doors. The parking garage was a tiny affair, but all full up with those Ford Edges, shiny and black and, looking at the difference between Gutt almost brushing the ceiling and our driver, whose head wasn't even visible over the top of the seat, chosen for their size. Maybe even customized. There were four in total, counting the one empty slot. After that, it was just a regular mishmash of employee vehicles, including an old school VW Bus, avocado green and white.

  Gutt jumped out, then my door opened. "Don't try to move, Dash."

  "That bad?" I forced myself to swallow my panic. "What's the plan?"

  "I'm going to lift you." He shimmied his shoulders around, staring at me, then at the whole backseat area. "This would be easier for both of us if they'd been able to keep you in your own clothes. They had to scrub you down, unfortunately."

  "Scrubbed down, huh? Did you make sure the nurse was cute? Do a poor man a favor before he dies?" In spite of Gutt's instructions, I tried to sit up. Figured that would be easier than Gutt trying to drag me out. The shock of lightning through my chest informed me I was a fucking idiot.

  "Don't try to move. I thought I'd made that clear." Gutt looked around the space one more time, then he worked the fingers of his right hand through a series of knots and twists. After a few seconds, pressure surrounded my body and I was floating. I didn't see anything, but I was definitely off the seat and moving out of the car. I moved right into Gutt's arms and he cradled me against his chest. Everywhere he touched me, I burned, but I held that all back. There was a nice, acidic pit of terror in my throat for me to focus on instead of that pain, anyway.

  It was terrifying that I was thirty years old and in such bad shape I needed a troll to cart me from place to place. I was only in that poison for…two minutes? Maybe? And this is what happened. I swallowed the fear back into my stomach as we walked through the doors into a service elevator. "You smell good. Old Spice?"

  "You're the first person here to notice. It's Old Spice Fiji, actually. I like the tropical smell."

  "Reminds you of home?" I was imagining Gutt sunbathing in front of a beach house…with a unicorn paddock, because what the fuck did I know about how the preets lived?

  "Reminds me of Cabo. Great vacation. Hooked up with a cute little undine. She only spoke Finnish, but we communicated well enough." He tilted his head down to look me in the eye and winked. "I may not look like much to you, but she disagreed."

  "You kidding? Big strong troll whisking me away for medical attention after I do something stupid? If I was a gay undine, I'd be all over you."

  We stepped from the elevator into a tiny, bland office space. It didn't look like the sort of building where magic would happen. It looked…well, it looked exactly like every other part of the FBI Offices I'd seen since I got the job, except a lot more cramped. Like it wasn't designed to be a working office space, and they just had to fit themselves in where space allowed. Considering how relatively new the Office of Preternatural Affairs was…not entirely beyond the realm of possibility.

  But I didn't get to check things out very long. Gutt took off down the hallway, turned left, then pushed through a set of double doors, then a right into a very generic looking medical room.

  "Casey!" He set me on the exam table and I finally took a look at my legs. Bad decision on my part. Red and black and blistered, but at least no bone peeking through. Just a lot of tissue damage. I'd seen some of the bodies that came out of the previous poison gas attacks. I wasn't in great shape, but even as I sat there in agony, I knew objectively I'd gotten lucky.

  But I still had to bite bake a new wave of panic and nausea, because subjectively? Fuck.

  And they weren't poison gas attacks either. I had to remind myself. Not like we thought at least. There were no victims of chlorine or sarin gas in this situation. They were fucking magic. Was magical terrori
sm even a thing? Had we made anything worse by doing our investigation? Why the hell didn't the spooks jump on this faster and save everyone some trouble and heartache? Was this even still a terrorist cell, or just that lone and very unpleasant sorcerer?

  Gutt shouted again. "Casey, this is important!"

  "I'm washing my hands." A slender young man stepped out a of a small side room. He flicked the light switch down with his elbow, then grabbed a paper towel and dried his hands. He looked me up and down and frowned. "Oh. This is important."

  "Poison. From the New York attacks."

  Casey sighed and brushed some hair out of his eyes. When the light hit him just right, I swear I saw some glitter catch and sparkle on his cheekbones. "Such is the nature of our glorious profession, I suppose. What'd they do to treat him so far?"

  "High dose blood scrubbers, body scrub, contamination shower, and a change of clothes, plus pain meds, antibiotics, and some sedatives."

  "Just what we need. Here we are fighting demons and sorcerers, they're out there creating a new breed of superbugs to kill us all anyway." He rolled his eyes and started pulling stuff out of the cabinets and drawers. "Go on, start your reports and everything. He's in competent hands."

  Gutt nodded. "He punched a sorcerer in the face to save five people. Two kids. Fix him up."

  Casey sucked in his lower lip and looked for just a second like a gay, fabulous chipmunk. Just a second. I apparently wasn't so far against the ropes I couldn't exercise my charming wit…in my own head, anyway.

  Casey nodded to Gutt and wheeled over the cart with everything he'd pulled out of cabinets and drawers. "I'll fix hero boy right up. Just go start your super fun paperwork."

  Gutt lumbered out of the room and Casey brought over a stool, too. "So, you're probably in agony, right?"

  "Not so bad," I lied. "But I think the drugs are wearing off."