by Scott Duff
Billy came to our rescue on some of it. “There are thirty-eight students this term, eighteen teachers and another thirteen on permanent staff. Rest of the teachers are on sabbatical, either traveling or teaching at other schools. With this being the last break ‘fore winter, most of ‘em ‘prolly hightailed it outta here yesterday. The school’s never left without at least six staff and three teachers, y’know, for security.”
Gordon looked at him in awed appreciation. “How do you know all that?”
He shrugged and said, “It’s my job to know my boys are safe.”
“Do you know anything about their wards?” Peter asked, swallowing the last of his fried fish.
“Only that it’s strong,” he said. “And there’s more than one.”
“Okay, worst case scenario,” I said, trying to draw all the strings of this together, “they were trying to kill everyone there, drop a bomb on the place, and walk away. Whoever is doing this doesn’t care about other people, that’s obvious. I don’t think that happened.” I got muttered agreement and head nods.
“Next option is they’re after someone,” I went on. “The attack on us and the castle point to Martin as the victim here. I really don’t think the attack on us was to kill us, at least initially. Seems to me, there are easier ways to kill from a distance when we aren’t expecting it and they were herding us somewhere. It felt more like a snatch to me.”
“What about the castle? What do we know there?” asked Gordon.
“Nothing really,” said Peter, grimacing. “Just that we need to get there as soon as Martin is safe. Kieran said that was our top priority. Your father and Kieran can handle the castle. Neither one is a lightweight.”
“If they were taking hostages,” I asked, “where would they put them?”
“Practice fields?” offered Gordon.
“No,” said Billy.
“Too easy to get out,” agreed Peter. “They’d want them someplace small and tight. Pack’em in like sardines where they’d be afraid to try anything for fear of hurting everybody else. Or the sinks. Where are the sinks?”
“The sinks?” I asked while Gordon pointed to a building dead center of the campus. “What’s a sink?”
“The room you found Ethan and me in was a sink,” answered Peter. “Siphons loose magic down into the ground so it doesn’t hurt anybody, especially outside of the sink. Usually you can tune them to how high or low you want them to siphon the power off. The school’s sinks have to be capable of some strong siphons considering who they’ve trained in the past.” He waved idly at Gordon when he said that, grinning. He was picking at Gordon’s heavy handed use of the lines and complimenting him at the same time. I was thankful that Gordon only caught the latter there.
“That seems reasonable,” I agreed, sighing and leaning back. “Gordon, have you ever done anything like this?”
“No,” he said, swallowing hard. He was shaking slightly. “And I’ve never killed a man before today either. But my family’s at stake. Before today I would have said I could do it, now I know I can. And I’ll do as much as I have to do.”
That reminded me of the words Felix had said to my mother just a few days before: “You can stop seeing him as your little boy, Olivia. See Seth for the man he’s become.” It saddened me that Gordon had to go through this, but I was proud to see him make his stand so valiantly. His father would be proud, too.
“We need to do this,” I said, gathering the trash up. “Can anybody think of anything we might want before we go kill some people? Cookies, cake?”
It was going to be a hard day.
Chapter 40
Ultimately we turned around and went back a short distance into town. A change of clothes was necessary for all of us, so we hit a sporting goods store while Billy gassed up the van. Again, this is where Gordon shined. We stepped in the door and he instantly grabbed the attention of two salesmen. Within fifteen minutes, he had all three of us in camouflage outerwear with shorts and T-shirts that we hoped would pass as a student’s clothes. He also grabbed four massive first aid kits. We held no hope for weapons since guns were illegal in this country, but we each picked up a pocketknife, mostly for utility purposes.
At the counter while the salesman was scanning all the cut-off tags from the clothes we wore, Peter was busy leaning over the counter reading something. “Wait, add four of those in, too,” he said, pointing. Gordon looked at the headset walkie-talkies he was pointing to, confused, but didn’t deny him. We shoved our clothes and the walkie-talkies with batteries in a bag and left. Everything else we were wearing. Billy was waiting on the curb when we came out.
“What are the radios for?” Gordon asked, once Billy pulled into traffic. “We’ll burn ’em out in minutes.”
“Seth and I won’t,” Peter said. “And as long as Billy doesn’t throw any major magic around, he won’t. The third and fourth are for him anyway and he’s staying with the van. He’s our way out.” He’d started stripping away the plastic on each, loading them with batteries.
“I take it you have a plan?” I said hopeful.
“Not really,” Peter said. “But if we have to run, we’ll need somewhere to run and with that much ground to cover we’ll probably have to split up. Of the three of us, you’re the best suited to go it alone. Gordon and I may need each other. Hell, we may need you.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to share a sword or two while we’re about here, would you now?” Gordon asked, opening the first aid kits and removing the packaging, prepping them for use.
“I’m willing,” I said, stressing the ‘I.’ “Unfortunately, they don’t play well with others. It takes some effort for me to get them to not eat others when they’re being held. I’d be afraid I’d lose my concentration then you’d be chopped meat in about a second and a half.”
“Is there any way that we can hide Gordon from sight? Anything the Stone can do?” Peter asked, testing the third radio’s earpiece, “Try this on. You should still be able to hear even with it in.”
“I don’t think so. It hasn’t really been an issue,” I said, as he handed me a radio and earpiece to check.
Jumping down in to my cavern to check my own battery levels, I saw the solid line of energy was still feeding into the anchor. I hadn’t realized that was still happening. I centered on the three remaining batteries in my cavern. One was newly created and was filling, a little over halfway by now. I hadn’t realized I was doing that still, either. The second was full. The third, the one filtered to feed to Ethan, was less than a third gone. Here I’d thought I was pumping a ton of energy at him, too. Kieran said it was enough. I hoped he was right.
The road was getting more winding and Billy was slowing down more. We were getting closer.
“We need to make a decision before we get out of the van,” Peter said, sighing heavily. “Do we want information from the attackers? Do we take prisoners or just go in guns ablaze?”
“No,” answered Billy, gruff and emphatic. “No prisoners. Let Felix take care of that. There’s too few of you and one too many of them.” I thought that well said. Gordon agreed with him. Peter and I just nodded, accepting the grim pronouncement.
We picked a point on the road map a mile away from the last turn and had Billy park the van in a safe turning point. We put his radio on one channel, Peter’s and mine on another, and set the two modules on either end of the van exterior so Billy could hear them. Billy leaned against a nearby tree so he could see the road from both directions, his handgun reappearing without a comment from anyone.
Stepping to the road, we turned back to Billy and the van and I worked the Stone’s magic on them. It was a simple and subtle magic. Just looking at the results, it appeared as though the landscape behind the van just shifted forward a little and touched the road before it should have, leaving the van forgotten. Unlike Gordon’s prismatic spell though, there wasn’t any residue left behind. Nothing to say a spell had been worked here. As long as Billy wasn’t too active, t
he spell would last a while on its own.
“Four hours, Billy,” Gordon said, forcefully. “If you haven’t heard something from us in four hours, head home. No longer than that.” Not waiting for a reply, he turned on his heel and we started up the road.
I called the weapons to ready but that was unnecessary of me—they were bristling already. The Crossbow and Quiver were nestled between my shoulder blades and each sword was sitting on my forearms, ready to jump into my hands. It was comforting to feel their weight. The Stone was shielding all three of us and obscuring our physical forms at the same time using one of the chameleon spells Kieran taught us. We weren’t completely invisible, just really hard to see. I started working a spell to dim Gordon’s aura. It wasn’t so much a spell as a continuing process of tucking and hiding colors among other colors. I was hopeful I could relegate this to the back of my mind, like I had feeding Ethan.
We came to the last turn for the school and stopped. Peter pushed his senses out to the left of the road, so I went right. I had a clear image of a hundred feet in then butted against the school’s ward. Roughly eighty feet down there was something that looked like an attempted break in the ward but it felt old.
“Nothing on this side,” Peter said, quietly.
“Here either,” I said and started us up the road slowly. If we could hide so could someone else, but no one showed as we approached to main gate. It was a large and impressive gate and it was wide open and inviting. There was a small booth to the left of the road with glass on all four sides, containing only an old telephone.
“The gate should be closed,” Gordon said, quietly.
“So they’ve left or are inviting someone in for a trap,” Peter offered.
“Or both,” was Gordon’s thought.
I was busy examining the ward in place across the road. It was lodged thoroughly into the ground, so no hope of going under. The only experience I had with wards I was either keyed into them or I was destroying them. Destroying this would alert whoever was inside to our presence, if there was anyone there. It did look similar to one of the wards on Cahill’s property.
“I don’t suppose you have a key, do you, Gordon?” I asked him.
He looked confused. “A key? To the ward? Why would I have a key?”
“Because this gate is remarkably similar to the one we drove through on the way from the airport,” I said. “It’s a lot bigger and it’s tied into a whole lot more power structures, but the gate itself seems the same.”
Peter and he stepped closer to me and looked in the same direction I was. Peter saw it almost immediately, but Gordon took a moment longer.
“It is virtually the same,” he agreed. “Why, though? That interferes with the sanctity of the castle.” He was getting testy over this.
“Don’t take it so personally, Gordon,” said Peter, calmly. “A lot of compact and powerful spells are reused and modified for years, centuries even. No one has noticed the similarities in the past. You haven’t and you’ve been through this ward hundreds of time. Your father has, too, and I’d bet he doesn’t know. Try the key.”
Gordon nodded, calmed slightly by Peter, and stepped closer. He pushed out with his power because the key was magical, what else would it be? If I hadn’t been manipulating his aura as I had I probably wouldn’t have seen it. The key was wrong, similar but wrong.
“Stop!” I called harshly. Peter was a half-second behind me in yelling. He saw it, too. That was good. “Wait, the key isn’t right. Hold on.”
Looking at Gordon’s key and back to the lock, I pushed gently on the structure Gordon was presenting, bending it back and forth until it missed all of the hot spots I saw in the locking mechanism, the ones that would fry Gordon on contact. Once I was satisfied Gordon wasn’t going to be a black smear on the road, I turned to Peter for approval. He just shrugged.
“Okay, try it,” I said, stepping back.
The gate just shimmered out of existence. All three of us exhaled heavily and walked through. My perceptions were still pushed out as far as I could get them and with the ward open my awareness rushed in.
“Get down!” I whispered harshly. We hunkered down behind the little booth. We may have been hard to see, but it wasn’t impossible and there were people close by. “Regular people, military by their looks. I only see two right now. The first is fifty feet up on the right, watching the road. The second is about seventy, eighty feet up on the left.”
“How much farther can you see past them?” Peter asked.
I shook my head. “Not much. Too much interference.”
“Can you get a clear shot?” he asked.
“Not from here,” I said. “But…” Looking up to make sure I had the clearance, I had the Stone shoot me straight up, fifty feet in the air. At the apex of the short flight, I took aim and fired the Crossbow twice, hitting the first, a woman, in the temple, and the second, a man, directly between the eyes. The Stone caught my fall, slowing my descent by gently squeezing me until I touched down lightly. The Crossbow and the two Bolts were already back between my shoulder blades, hidden.
“Where can we get more of him?” Gordon asked Peter seriously.
“I’m working on it,” he answered with a grin.
We scurried up the road as quietly as our rubber-soled shoes would carry us, stopping even with the first sentry’s position. Peter stayed close to the road to watch while Gordon and I went back the ten feet to the body. I rolled her over and looked carefully. There was absolutely nothing on her magical, not even a rabbit’s foot. She had been slumped over a rifle of some kind, mean looking thing, with a scope. Her uniform carried no markings; it was as plain as ours, but hers had a more military bearing, especially the boots. The holstered sidearm helped, too. Gordon found nothing of interest in her pockets then he ripped open her shirt and yanked free some dog tags, shoving them in his pocket. He looked up at me, questioning.
“Let’s go,” I said. We scurried back to the road as quietly as possible.
We trotted quickly down the road another hundred or so feet, ignoring the second body, before I could see further onto the property. A personal ward was blocking me before, on a groundskeeper’s house, according to Gordon’s map. It was a privacy ward, not a protective one. The groundskeeper wouldn’t need it anymore. Neither would his wife. They didn’t have any privacy to protect, being so dead and all. Gordon took the sight of them hard, both anger and anguish slamming through his mind. I had to fight to keep his aura from lighting up like a Christmas tree. Lucky for me, Peter was there to hold him back physically because if he had made it into the ward, I would have lost that battle. The emotional imprint on the ward from the couple was horrifying from this side. The imprint I got was grotesque and not in the carnival freak show way. This was in a how-you-imaged-Mengele-grotesque way. We skirted the outside of the ward.
The grounds were about to open up, so Gordon nudged us into the woods, moving us uphill until we could overlook most of the campus when we came out of the treeline. From there, we could only see five men, two atop the taller buildings and three more milling around between two of them.
“Why haven’t we seen any power pushers?” Peter whispered. “Everybody we’ve seen is mundane.”
“Yeah, but there’s a lot of them,” whispered Gordon. “Bet they’re throw-aways.”
“How do we find out exactly how many?” I asked.
“What’s that?” Peter asked, calling our attention back down the hill.
As Peter asked, the door to the closest dormitory to us was thrown open and a body thrown out onto the lawn. All three of us gasped at the sight of the boy. He was a bloody mess. His arms were tied behind him and he had been beaten severely. A troop of ten men followed the boy out, laughing as his body was wracked in a fit of coughing. I couldn’t take the cruelty anymore.
I stood up in full armor. “Quiet time is over, boys.” I didn’t feel the slightest remorse as the Crossbow hummed for three seconds. That’s how long it took, three seconds. Mos
tly because I wasn’t in any hurry. Two on the roof, three moving around the buildings and ten in front of the dormitory. It took them slightly longer to all fall over, and still I felt no remorse.
“I’ll see if I can draw them off while y’all look for Martin and any hostages. If you need me, call. Okay?” I asked.
“Be careful, little brother,” warned Peter. “You aren’t unbreakable.”
“And you be careful, too, Seth’Dur’an o’an,” I said. Then I took off at a run for the dormitory, leaving Peter to decide how to proceed. I trusted him. Me, I’d just started a killing spree, but I had a boy to help first. He could have died in the time it took me to get to him. He was coughing up blood again when I finally did get there. His arms were bleeding around the plastic zip cord they’d tied him with. I cut them off with my new pocketknife, thankful for small favors, then stretched him out hurriedly, looking at his wounds.
I looked around quickly to make sure I wasn’t going to be jumped in the next ten seconds, then concentrated on him. This wasn’t Martin. Head trauma was mostly cuts and bruises and a probable concussion. I should be able to relieve some of that pressure. Farther down though, he had several broken ribs, one had punctured a lung, and he was bleeding profusely internally. Several internal organs were bruised to the point of almost rupturing. This was going to be close.
I stopped his heart. Quickly I pushed the bleeding artery closed, fusing it together by pure force of will. His body seized with blue energy as I poured more and more power into him as I worked through his circulatory system, repairing what I could. Then I restarted his heart. It felt like only five seconds to me. Hoping that was right, I worked on his lung next, pushing the shards of bone back towards their original places. The tissue was so fibrous in the tear. Too much of the tissue was beyond repair for me right then. I felt really ghoulish doing this, but I reached back and touched the nearest dead man on the chest. Shoving energy down into his lungs, I searched for still living tissue, searched for the type of cells I needed, shifting the cells along the energy conduits until I had enough to seal the tear.
