by John Conroe
I, or rather Grim, was hacking our sixth centipede when I heard Stacia’s cry. She had shifted to wolf-woman form and had been pounding on a centipede with a white and black Vespa. It looked like maybe a second centipede had caught her off guard. Now she was standing back ten feet, holding one massive white furred arm that was rapidly reddening with her blood. The bot that had sliced her with a silver-bladed leg scuttled forward to complete its attack. I was too far away, but Grim readied a newly chopped DU blade as a spear. Before Grim could launch it, Declan, who stood nearby, shook himself as if he had been dazed or distracted and stepped between us and the robot. He looked at Stacia, bleeding and backing away from the robot. Then—well, then I think the kid lost his temper.
One hand made a grasping motion at the robot and despite the eight-foot distance that separated him from the metal monster and regardless of the fact that it outweighed the boy by three hundred pounds, it flew through the air, away from Stacia.
Then it stopped, hovering in mid-air, writhing and twisting to get free from the invisible hand that held it. Declan made a short, stabbing motion with his right hand, a blinding bolt of light flashing out and blasting the centipede into molten metal that sprayed the metallic army arrayed against us.
The spray of plasma-hot metal melted right into the armor of the approaching centipedes, steam instantly rising in foggy clouds as rain attempted to cool it.
Declan looked up at the sky, and his face held nothing but rage. He raised his right arm to the storm and jerked it down to point at the forward line of fast-scuttling centipedes, his fingers spread apart.
Eye-searing bolts slammed into the earth all around us, shaking the ground, blasting superheated air and water, and sound—air-being-slammed-out-of-your-lungs sound. The lightning branched, three tmes, four times for each bolt, and then branching again, pounding the fabric of existence.
Our entire team was crouched in place, instinctively presenting low profiles to the storm’s electric fury, except Declan, who stood, still pointing at the enemy. Bits of metal spattered around us, most steaming in the puddles, some hitting hard enough to bruise a normal human.
Nine bolts in all, as best Grim could count, each bolt branching multiple times, rolling concussions running into each other. Then it stopped, the brutal, eye-searing blasts and thunder fading into the still-sheeting rain.
The parking lot was World War Three, blasted cars, cratered asphalt, and shattered broken centipedes everywhere. In the distance, my sensitive ears could hear the few surviving mechanical centipedes scuttling away.
Kneeling in front of it all was a rain-soaked Declan. He looked exhausted, arms hanging down, head bowed. I was shocked he was still alive. Even Grim was thoroughly impressed with the mayhem, destruction, and carnage the eighteen-year-old had just wrought in mere seconds.
Lydia looked my way with eyes wide and mouthed the word “Wow.” Stacia, now human and unabashedly naked, still clutched her left forearm, but her eyes were locked on Declan.
“Arkady, give the wolf girl your jacket, please. Nika, Lydia, come with me and look for any active robots,” Tanya said, then looked from me to Declan in a meaningful way. I put my Sword away as I approach the young warlock who had just reduced an army of the most advanced robots I’d ever heard of to melted metal and broken circuits.
“You alright?” I asked him.
He looked up at me and I almost flinched from the loathing I saw there. His eyes flicked away and I realized the anger was directed at himself.
“Is she alive?” he asked, body rigid, not turning to look behind him.
“I don’t know. Are you alive?” I asked Stacia who, now covered in a voluminous jacket, was approaching carefully through the debris-strewn puddles.
“Yeah, thanks to Kid Wonder here. Still bleeding like a stuck pig, though. You think maybe you could dribble some magic blood on it or something?” she asked, holding out her bloody arm.
Declan turned, slowly, as if afraid of what he might find. Stacia watched him, even as she held her arm out in my direction. It was sliced deep, the white of bone briefly visible when rain washed enough blood out of the way, and he flinched when he looked at it. I held up my right palm to her and she took the hint, shifting her right index finger enough to form a three-inch, razor-sharp claw. The resulting slice was so clean and quick that I didn’t even feel it.
Quickly, I dripped my own blood into the wound on her left arm, smearing it in before my wound stopped bleeding and sealed itself shut.
Declan watched the silver-burned wound on her arm stop bleeding and then heal into a faint red line. When her unbroken skin was washed clean by the still-pouring rain, he took a deep breath and turned to help the others. I started to follow but Stacia grabbed my arm, shaking her head.
Tanya and the others were poking among the wreckage, and Nika raised her head to watch Declan, her expression one of concentration. She beckoned me over.
“He thinks he froze up. He’s blaming himself for Stacia’s injury. That’s why his response was so… explosive.”
“Did he? Freeze up?” Tanya asked.
“I don’t know, but my impression is that he was distracted by the program running these robots… and maybe a bit by the storm itself.”
“The storm?” Tanya asked.
“He feels energy and power all around. He told me the city itself was distracting because of the raw energy of movement that millions of people generate. He also kept mentioning the storm even in the car ride over here. He could feel it from miles away,” Stacia said.
“Regardless, he is intensely angry with himself. Particularly for failing you, Stacia,” Nika said, her expression and tone conveying something to the wolf girl that I was missing.
“What aren’t you saying?” I asked.
“That Stacia’s opinion is of singular importance to him,” Nika said.
“Oh. He’s got a crush on you,” I said, turning to Stacia. She didn’t grimace or flinch, just took the words along with a deep breath. Then she gave a short, sharp nod and turned to walk to Declan, who was helping Lydia shift through the rubble.
“Is he a danger?” Tanya asked Nika.
“He hasn’t shut me out, he’s functioning well, and he’s exhausted,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s questioning his value to the team, though.”
Arkady snorted. “We were losing,” he said, looking at his left hand. It only had three fingers. His left index finger was gone, sliced clean off his hand. “I haven’t lost a limb or finger in two hundred years,” he muttered.
Grim felt that was correct—the part about the team losing. Tanya and I were effective against the robots, Arkady slightly less so, but the guns that Nika and Lydia sported weren’t, and Stacia’s improvised weapon wasn’t fluid enough to deal with multiple threats.
“Shit!” Lydia yelled, jumping back twelve feet in a sudden blur. A long, segmented body stirred in the debris, immediately followed by a second. Declan stumbled forward and fell against them. Grim expected him to be bisected instantly.
Instead, the movement stopped while the boy leaned on hands and knees, head down, unmoving. Stacia, a length of pipe in her hands, approached him but stopped short of touching him. A few long seconds later, he sighed and sat back on his heels, rain streaming down his face.
“It’s okay. They’re safe,” he said.
“What do you mean safe? They’re frigging buzzsaws,” Lydia said.
“I drove Anvil’s program out of them,” Declan said, tiredly pulling a Sharpie from his pocket. Two black gleaming metallic heads, each sporting long, deadly mandibles, rose from the bricks, but they were pointed away from Declan, who was basically kneeling on the backs of both centipedes. The heads froze in place and my intern calmly leaned forward and started to draw on them.
“We can study them,” he said, answering Stacia’s unspoken question when she kneeled down across from him, modestly holding Arkady’s jacket closed.
“Will they remain under your control, or will
Anvil get them back?” Stacia asked, keeping her eyes locked on him. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“I’m not going to lie. It was a real fight to get them free, but the runes have been effective against it so far,” he said. “At least I can do this much right.”
“Other than save my life and destroy the better part of an army we were ill-equipped to handle?” she asked him.
He shrugged and went on with his rune work.
“We need to leave—now,” Tanya said and there were no dissenting responses, especially in light of the sirens approaching in the distance.
Chapter 12- Declan
I was having trouble keeping my eyes open in the back of the big SUV on the way back to the tower. Thing One and Thing Two were rolled into big black metallic beach ball-sized orbs in the luggage area behind me. I could feel them in the back of my mind, sitting quiescent, waiting for orders. Like I should be the one to give them.
“What was it like?” Nika suddenly asked me, turning in her seat in the middle row to look back at me.
“What?” I asked.
“The program, Anvil. What was it like? I could feel when you interacted with it,” she said.
“Well—massive. Powerful. Really fast. And those were just leftover copies that were still in the pedes when the rest left,” I said.
“No, I mean at the beginning. When we first stepped outside?” Nika pressed.
“Oh. You mean when I froze up,” I said, spotlighting the elephant in the car.
“Really? You feel you froze up?” she asked, her voice politely disbelieving.
“What you would you call a complete lack of response to an overwhelming attack?” I asked back.
“In this case? When I sensed you communicating with the program while monitoring the storm? I’d call it tactical observation and perhaps even an attempt at negotiation.”
I snorted. “Lipstick on a pig, Nika. I froze up. You all know it.”
Tanya spun around to look at me from the far front. “Have you frozen before? When you fought the revenants at Rowan West? When you fought the witch in the parking lot? When you fought a giant werewolf bully? Or did you sense information from two different sources that none of the rest of us could? Information important enough to distract you from the fight? Because distraction isn’t good Declan, but it’s not at all the same thing as freezing in fear. And did you snap out of it when your teammate was in dire straits? Because that’s what good team member does.”
“What was that spell? The one with the laser beam?” Stacia asked before I could respond to Tanya.
“Ignis Solis. Sunfire,” I said.
“Effective,” Arkady commented.
“It’s dangerous. I have to be careful with it,” I said.
“No shit. You just about vaporized that thing,” Lydia said.
“He means it is dangerous to himself as well,” Nika said. I sometimes forget she can literally hear my thoughts.
“Explain,” Tanya demanded, frowning at me.
“I almost always try to use power I find around me in my spells. Save my own reservoir for emergencies. Ingis Solis can only use a witch’s personal power, and it’s a huge draw on that well of energy. A giant vacu-suck of power that could get away from you and leave you a magical husk. So I have to use just little blasts of it. It’s tricky,” I said.
“Why did you use it, then?” Tanya asked.
“It’s also very powerful. I needed to make sure that centipede was down and out,” I said.
“You know what I think? I think you got really mad that something hurt your friend and you obliterated the thing that did it,” Chris said from the shotgun spot in the front.
I wanted to come up with a counter argument, something about appropriate forceful responses to an attack or some such bullshit, but ultimately he was right. “Point,” I said.
“Ahh. So you maybe got angry and fought angry?” Tanya asked.
I already knew that you weren’t supposed to fight from anger, but I nodded.
“Anger is good—if it is harnessed and controlled. Chris fights from rage, yet it is precise and focused. Your response was overwhelming and decisive, but it exposed you to exhaustion, depletion of your abilities, and the potential to lose your weapon of choice—your magic. Later today, we begin training.”
“Good. I obviously need it,” I said, meaning it.
“Declan, your use of the storm and its power ended what might have been a bad battle for us. You did well. But if you are unhappy with your own responses, then we will train and train until your reactions are instinctive and reliable, as well as controlled. Hard, focused anger can be a decisive weapon in battle,” Tanya said.
My thoughts were definitely angry, mostly at myself. Behind me, both pedes shifted slightly, still in ball form. I checked them and found them responding to my emotion. I took a breath and stilled myself, and then them. Beside me, Stacia had tensed up when the pedes shifted and I had a flash of insight. They scared her. Quick, somebody mark a calendar… the teenager had a moment of empathy.
“Hey, I’ve already reprogrammed them. They won’t ever attack anyone on the team. In fact, they will take your commands and will fight for you,” I said to her.
“Maybe I want to fight for myself,” she said, and I had some more insight. Go me.
“Oh. Well, they were literally created to fight werewolves and vampires. Designed from the ground up. These two are versions nine-point-five. Refined. They have detailed attack programs for fighting beast form werewolves. Not sure how they got those, but they’re there. You, on the other hand, have never fought a giant robot centipede before and you pretty much mashed the first one with that scooter.”
“I should have done better,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “But if it helps, we can train against these two. You can work out your own methods for combating them.”
“I want a piece of that, too,” Lydia piped up. “My gun didn’t do squat.”
“I might be able to modify your ammo—rune up your bullets a bit,” I said.
“Is good use of robot bugs,” Arkady rumbled from the driver’s seat.
“You did well against them,” Stacia commented to me. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one butt hurt about this.
“Yeah. Because they were designed to fight vampires and weres… not witches. Anvil will likely seek to change that,” I said.
“How?” Tanya asked.
“Find someone to put counter spells on them. Like magical armor,” I said.
“You think this program will allow for the existence of witches?” Chris asked.
“It allows for anything it has information on. Since it can go almost anywhere in computers, especially government computers, it has all the info it needs to decide witches are a threat,” I said, Demidova Tower suddenly appearing before us as we came around a turn.
Arkady pulled us onto the down ramp to the underground parking, the guard rushing to activate the metal gate at the sight of us.
“You are likely correct, Declan. This thing—this program—will adapt and change as it has before. We must adapt and change to beat it. We will all meet at seven tonight, in the gym. Declan, bring your pets. We have much work to do,” Tanya said.
It was a little past two in the morning. I, for one, was going to try and get some sleep, after a hot shower. Tanya sounded… motivated. I needed her training… that was obvious, but it promised to be painful.
I slept the sleep of the dead for ten hours, getting up a little after noon. I got a sub and soda to go from the dining room staff and marched out of the building into the sunlight, leaving Things One and Two in the lobby near the reception/guard desk. The two guards on duty eyed my two rolling fun balls of death uncertainly but ultimately just made notes in their rune-covered computers and gave me a nod.
Outside, I found the city in full hustle mode, people streaming across busy streets and sidewalks. The building next to the Tower had a series of benches in front of it, so I sat my ass down
and started in on the cheese steak sub, watching people rush about in the warm sun.
A few guys with cameras seemed to hover near the entrance to the tower, most likely paparazzi looking for a quick shot of Chris or Stacia, as the vampires were no doubt asleep. I was looking them all over when I realized someone was staring at me.
A familiar-looking Indian girl stood next to a disheveled photographer who was fumbling with his camera and tripod. His attention was on his equipment, but hers was on me. I made eye contact and then looked away quickly. Aunt Ash said not to make eye contact with New Yorkers. Too late. She was now headed my way.
