Magic for Hire: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Found Magic Book 3)

by J. A. Cipriano

  So what were they up to? And why did Chuck seem so pissed? I was pretty sure something beyond being doused with a bucket of cold water was bothering him. Was it because of what I’d done? I hoped not… As much as I hated to admit it, I actually sort of liked Chuck in the really annoying, older brother sort of way. Pissing him off wasn’t what I’d intended at all.

  I sprinted after him, catching up to him and glancing at his face. It was set in a stony mask, but the very corners of his lips were tilted into a slight frown.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked as he reached out and placed his palm on the big red scanner by the elevator. The machine whooped and glowed bright scarlet before turning green. The door opened and Chuck stepped inside, not saying anything.

  I sighed and stepped in beside him, and as I did, he hit the door close button with one massive thumb.

  “The problem is you just screwed up, big time,” Chuck replied as the doors slammed shut with an air of finality. “You don’t even realize what you’ve done.”

  “It’s just a little water,” I said, suddenly worried it was the water he was angry at. “I was just playing a prank. I’ve had that bucket up there for over a week.”

  “That’s exactly the problem,” he replied before turning pointedly away from me and staring at the elevator’s blank silver wall. He stood like that for a long time, his hands clenching and unclenching into fists. A bad feeling started to settle over me. What was going on?

  I was about to ask when the doors whooshed open and purple light spilled into our elevator. The director’s office was so small, it barely qualified as a closet let alone an office for one of the most powerful men in the agency. The walls were stark and painted suicidal smiley face yellow. Aside from three threadbare black office chairs and a worn Formica desk, nothing else was ever in the room. Not even a potted plant. I’d asked him about it once, but he’d just shrugged and told me to mind my own budget.

  The director glanced up from the hologram he was looking at and waved his hand casually through the map of a silver domed shape structure in the middle of a jungle. As he did so, the image vanished into the ether.

  “I see you’re all wet,” the director said, staring at Chuck with his white, opaque eyes. I wasn’t quite sure why, but even though the guy was as blind as a bat, he always made sight jokes. It was a little unnerving, then again, even though I didn’t know him very well, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn he did it just to make people uncomfortable. He struck me as that sort of guy.

  He stepped around his desk, one gnarled ebony hand trailing along the edge and smiled at me. “Seems you finally got him, Abby.”

  “Yeah,” I replied and before I could say more, Chuck stepped in between us and shook his head.

  “She got lucky,” Chuck said, turning to point at me like I was exhibit A.

  “Maybe,” the director replied, reaching up and rubbing his chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Either way, this proves she’s ready.” Chuck opened his mouth, and the director narrowed his eyes. “Your objections are noted, General. We are moving ahead with Project Valkyrie.”

  Chuck let out a breath through his teeth, and I realized he’d been holding his breath. That was probably a bad sign since I was pretty sure Chuck wasn’t afraid of anything. At all.

  “What’s Project Valkyrie?” I asked, swallowing the sudden fear swimming up from my gut. No doubt it would be something horrible if the agency was involved. They had sent a psychotic demon after me before. To say I didn’t trust them to have my best intentions at heart was an understatement. Still, I was pretty sure they had wanted me to do this all along. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to recruit and train me. The only problem was, I still didn’t know why.

  “Basically, you’re going to do a little job for us.” I wasn’t sure what the look on my face was exactly, but even though he was blind, the director raised his hands in a palms out gesture. “It’s nothing bad, per se. In fact, it will help us cure Roberto. See, there’s this lab—”

  An alarm exploded through the room, shattering my hearing as the lights overhead lit up so brightly it made me think of an antiseptic hospital. Chuck whirled as the room shook, the sound of far-off explosions filling our ears.

  “Already?” Chuck asked, eyes darting from the director to the doors and back again.

  “It would seem so,” the director replied, moving behind his desk. He must have pressed something because the next thing I knew, a passage opened up in the ceiling and a spiral staircase descended down in an instant.

  Chuck leapt in front of me, pushing me behind his body as the elevator doors began to open. “Get the director out of here, Abby.”

  I didn’t have time to argue as the doors stopped after opening only an inch. A bare copper wire edged through near the bottom. It was barely noticeable, but I was reasonably sure it was not a friendly wire.

  “Look out!” I screamed, throwing myself behind the desk as white light exploded from the wire, nearly blinding me even though I had my face buried in the crook of my arm. I heard two heavy thumps, like bodies hitting the ground.

  My eyes shot open as the elevator doors disintegrated into yellow powder and crumbled to the ground like the big bad wolf had given them both a huff and a puff.

  A woman with one metallic arm dressed all in navy blue stepped inside. She had close-cropped blonde hair, skin the color of dark chocolate, and while one eye was normal enough looking, the other blazed with golden electricity. She glanced around, swinging a big two-handed gun around the room that looked like it was straight out of a video game before gesturing for someone to follow.

  A man wearing Bermuda shorts and a tacky yellow Hawaiian shirt stepped inside. He had a silver pirate pistol in one hand that looked like something Jack Sparrow would use and a camera around his neck so he looked like a lost tourist. They stepped forward, ignoring Chuck’s body on the floor. The man knelt next to the director and tipped his straw hat at the man.

  “Ready to come with us?” he asked, voice a sort of lazy drawl, and call me crazy, but something about the way he said the words made me think I should stop him from abducting the director. I wasn’t sure why exactly because the director wasn’t a nice guy by any stretch of the imagination, but for some reason, I felt I should protect him from the people trying to kidnap him.

  The girl stepped into range. This was my chance to turn the tables. Even though everything inside me told me to hunker down and hide, I popped to my feet and drove my entire body into her side. She took the blow with a grunt, stumbling as my fist lashed out, catching her on the side of the head and dropping her to the floor. The sound of a gun cocking was so loud in the tiny room, it seemed to drown out all sound. I turned toward it to see the tourist pointing his blunderbuss at me.

  “How about you don’t move, miss, and I don’t turn you into a smear,” the guy said, voice calm and if anything, excited. The sound of it was enough to make me want to shiver because in my experience people who sounded like that tended to enjoy hurting people.

  “Okay,” I replied as the woman slowly got up and shot me a look that could have melted steel.

  “I’m not sure what they have on you, girl, but just let us take the director out of here.” The guy never took his eyes off me until his compatriot has leveled her weapon at me. “We don’t have to be enemies.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. He had a point, but then again, the agency was keeping Roberto alive with their tech. If the director got abducted, maybe someone else would decide Roberto or I had outlived our usefulness. After all, what good was I if I couldn’t save the director from these guys?

  “Look, I don’t want to defend the director or anything, but something tells me bad stuff will happen if I let you kidnap him,” I replied, and as the words left my mouth, a bullet burst through the space beside my left ear and hit the wall behind me. Only I didn’t hear it ricochet like it should have.

  “No moves. At all,” the woman said, gun trained on m
e. I hadn’t even seen her pull the trigger. That scared me a little.

  “Okay,” I replied as the man scooped up the director and threw him over one shoulder. I thought about doing something else, but honestly, why? It wasn’t like I wanted to help the agency, and I was pretty sure they would keep Roberto alive with or without him. “I won’t stop you.”

  The woman nodded at me and backed toward the elevator as the man turned his back and stepped inside. I saw him rigging something up before he shot upward out of sight like Batman in one of those movies.

  The woman smirked at me before pointing her weapon at me. “When you wake up, tell them Flash and Bang send their regards.” Then she blasted me in the face.

  My last thought as I fell backward, untold amounts of agony shattering everything I knew into darkness and sending me hurtling into unconsciousness, was that I should have hit her harder. Way harder.

  3

  The taste of rusty nails made me gag as I rolled over onto my hands and knees, struggling to keep my dinner from lurching out of my stomach and onto the floor. I shut my eyes, rested my forehead on the cool metal floor, and counted to ten in my head. Then I counted to twenty. I kept counting until the room stopped spinning, but I’ll be honest I lost track of the numbers I was counting a couple of times and had to start over.

  After what felt like ever, I pulled myself to my feet and looked around. I was still in the director’s office. Chuck lay unconscious in a pool of blood just beyond the threshold of the room. It looked like he hadn’t moved since he’d gone down in the explosion, but I hadn’t remembered seeing him covered in blood.

  I took a wobbling step toward him, and my eyes went wide in shock. He had two bullet holes in the center of his chest. I screamed and dropped to my knees, hands reaching out to try and staunch the blood flow. I wasn’t sure if he could even be saved, but since his chest was rising and falling, albeit barely, I knew there had to be some kind of chance to save him. Especially here in the agency.

  His blood flowed through my fingers as panic seized me. “Please don’t die, Chuck,” I murmured. Then, I got angry with myself. This wasn’t the time to freak out and panic. This was the time to fix the problem. I could have a breakdown later.

  My body went into autopilot as I focused on letting my downloaded superspy skills do their thing. It was always a little disconcerting when I did things like this because I was never quite sure what I could or couldn’t do until I tried. Thankfully, there had been a med kit in the director’s desk, otherwise, I was reasonably sure Chuck would have died, expert field medic or not.

  Even now, it would be a near thing. If he didn’t get proper help soon… well, I didn’t want to think about that.

  Once I was sure he wasn’t going to bleed out, I scrambled to my feet and made my way toward the elevator shaft. One quick glance revealed what I thought. The elevator car had been torn free of the cabling, and while I couldn’t see it in the darkness below, the torn cables at eye level didn’t exactly make me think it would be coming back up anytime soon. Damn, I’d have to climb up if I wanted to exit this way.

  I made my way back into the room, shielding my eyes from the red emergency strobe lights going off inside. I wasn’t sure if the sirens had stopped or if I was just tuning them out, and as I thought about it, I realized I couldn’t hear anything at all. I swallowed, that wasn’t good.

  My heart hammered in my chest as I tried to push down the fear swimming up in me. What had Flash and Bang shot me with? Why had they used that weapon when they’d decided to pump Chuck full of lead? Or were they just keeping their word? Would they have shot me the same way if I’d resisted?

  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then again, how was I to know the inner workings of a couple of psychopaths who thought they could infiltrate an agency facility. I mean I’d done it before too, but I was sort of a special case…

  Chuck gurgled, and I tossed one last look at him before making my way to the spiral staircase. It looked like the only way out of the room, and as my feet touched the first metal steps, I had the feeling something was very wrong, only I just didn’t know what.

  About three flights of stairs later, I dead-ended into a hatch in the ceiling. I pressed on it, but it didn’t move. I grumbled, slapping my keycard over the card reader by the door, but it didn’t even react. Was the power dead? If it was… what was keeping Roberto alive?

  I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself and nearly succeeding as I thought about what to do. Usually, safety hatches had manual overrides somewhere… I ran my hands over the lip until I found a weird indentation in the metal. As soon as I touched the spot, I knew it was what I was looking for though I wasn’t sure why. Then again, I did a lot of things I couldn’t explain.

  The hatch popped open with a sound like a champagne cork. When no gunfire filled the hole with lead, I steeled myself as best I could and threw myself out of the hatch with all the force my legs could muster. I wasn’t the strongest girl on the planet, but a few months of training with a guy like Chuck will give you more muscle than sitting behind a school desk ever will, let me tell you.

  I cleared the hole in a leap that took me into a roll along the steel floor. Sticky warm fluid covered my body as I came to my feet, glancing around in the nearly dark room. The only light came from a cracked computer screen in the corner, spilling staticy white light across the floor.

  Even still, it was more than enough to illuminate the corpses shredded across the floor. I wasn’t quite sure what had happened, but from the look of it, the scientists and guards had been torn limb from limb. A shudder ran through me as I shut my eyes, forcing myself to go into my empty place. The one where seeing things like this didn’t bother me. It was a trick Chuck had taught me, and honestly, it didn’t work very often, which I think may have been a good thing. I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to be able to stare at a room full of dismembered corpses and feel nothing. Something told me the day when that happened would be a dark one indeed. I shuddered, turning away from the three scientists pushed into a haphazard pile against the far wall and made my way toward the computer console.

  One thing was certain, if the computer screen was flickering, there had to be power. If there was power, not only could I call for help, but Roberto would be okay because the life support systems would be the last things to lose power. Besides, what kind of monster would intentionally kill machines designed to keep invalids alive?

  I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding as my fingers danced across the blood-spattered keyboard. Nothing seemed to react for a moment. Then the lights overhead flickered to life, and the dark screen to my left came on. Red flashed across it along with a whole mess of symbols that basically meant we were operating on the fourth backup power system.

  Damn, whoever Flash and Bang were, they were a little too good for my liking. I gritted my teeth, fighting the urge to punch them in the face because of what they’d done. For all I knew, they had knocked out the systems keeping Roberto alive. A cold sweat broke out on the back of my neck as I tried to push away the vision of Roberto flatlining in his hospital bed and leaving me an orphan.

  It was sort of funny. Just a few months ago, people like Flash and Bang would have had me hiding under my bed, and now? Now, I wanted to find them and gut them with a rusty anchor just because their actions might have hurt my father. The crazy thing was? I could probably do it… both mentally and physically.

  I glared at the screen as my humanity disappeared along with the emergency symbols, revealing a screen that told me the medical bay was still fully operational. I pressed a button next to the intercom on the wall and smiled as it crackled to life. I wasn’t sure why they had such a low tech system in place when they had technology that could implant itself in your brain, but it was what it was.

  “Hello,” I told the intercom. “I need assistance in the director’s office. Chuck is badly hurt.”

  There was no response for so long I nearly asked the intercom for help a secon
d time, but just as I was depressing the call button, the intercom spoke up.

  “Abby, is that you?” Doctor Amarang asked, his nasally, high-pitched voice strangely comforting due to its familiarity even though it was high strung and worried. He was the one in charge of Roberto’s care, and I’d gotten to like him well enough because of it.

  “Yes,” I replied, thanking my lucky stars someone had responded. If he hadn’t, I wasn’t sure what I’d have done. “How is my father?”

  “He’s okay. Those systems have been left alone, thank God.” At Amarang’s words, some of the tension filling me flew the coop, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Roberto was okay. If he hadn’t been… I shoved that thought away. It was time to focus on Chuck.

  I took a deep breath to calm myself. “Chuck is hurt. He needs immediate medical attention,” I said, hoping the good doctor had a way to help me.

  “I don’t think we can get to him,” Amarang replied, and I heard the weariness in his voice plain as day. “Most of the elevators are down and a lot of hallways are blocked. Not to mention, we’re up to our elbows in injured…”

  “I’ll get him to you,” I said even though I had no idea how I was going to go about doing that. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be easier said than done.

  “Can he be safely moved?” Amarang’s voice rang from the intercom.

  “It doesn’t matter because option two is to leave him there to die.” With those words, I released the intercom button and dropped back into the hatch. I sprinted back down the stairs, taking them two and three at a time.

  Thankfully, Chuck was still alive when I reached him, but his breathing was even shallower than before, impossible as it seemed. I looked around for something to hoist the massive man around and sighed when I realized I wasn’t going to easily be able to move him.

  “Okay, Chuck. Here’s the deal.” I gritted my teeth as tears filled my eyes. “I know I said before I was going to go get help, but it turns out, I’m going to have to clear a path to you.” I knelt by him and rubbed his cheek with my hand. He was so cold, it nearly made me shiver.