by James Hunter
I exhaled, letting the gun barrel drop to a natural rest, then squeezed the trigger a trio of times, clack, clack, clack. Since I didn’t know how tough these rotten sons of bitches were, I opted for the Mozambique Drill: a double tap to the chest, followed by one to the ol’ noggin. There was a burst of gore the color of liquid mercury as the rounds tore into the first target, and, before I could stop, think, and assess, I shifted my aim just a hair, targeting the second beast: clack, clack, clack.
The pair of Fomorians staggered back, metallic blood splashing through the air as they died. One pitched over, colliding with a second onrushing creature—they went down in a tangle of lanky limbs, silver-gray blood, and squeals of outrage. My other victim leaned drunkenly against the pitted wall, one side of his head missing, though the dickbag was still, somehow, upright. Wasn’t gonna let that shit stand.
I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a speedloader—a circular metal plate with six rounds preloaded in position. With practiced ease, I flipped out my revolver’s cylinder, slammed down on the ejector rod—letting the spent brass rain to the floor—slid home the fresh rounds, and pushed the cylinder shut, locking it in place with my thumb. Then, I hefted my pistol and fired once, another round to the head, which removed the other side of his face. He toppled, a faceless pile of meat. I pumped three rounds into a thrashing baddy on the floor, then pivoted at the hips and blasted another encroaching creature in its ugly-ass grill. One shot punched through his face, while the other tore out the side of his neck, leaving a huge channel wound behind.
That creature staggered, clamped hands to his ruined throat—blood spurting around his thick fingers—then tumbled to his knees. He reached his other hand toward me, pleading, silver goo frothing from his ruined mouth as the spark of life drained from his black eyes. Almost sad, that.
But I had no time for mourning or reflection. I put the dead from mind as I stowed my gun, sliding it into my shoulder rig, then turned and unleashed a javelin of flame, thick as my wrist, into the wall of gray flesh still lumbering toward me.
Orange tongues of fire burst from my left palm and licked over another of the creatures. For a time, the beast fought on, throwing himself into the blaze as waves of flame swirled around him. Then he caught like a pile of dry tinder. He threw up claw-tipped hands and howled, an agonized shriek, as flickering fire ran over his clothes and clawed at his skin. He fell, thrashing, rolling, arms and legs flailing as the scent of rotten, smoldering salmon, left over-long on the grill, wafted through the hallway with its cloying stink.
A terrible stink that overwhelmed my nostrils and turned my stomach.
I took several long, deep breaths through the mouth, trying to ignore the stench as I looked for James. After a moment, I caught a glimpse of his flashing sword—blade glowing white-hot like a piece of steel fresh from the forge, superheated by flows of flame—as he fought off a trio of creatures that’d managed to box him in. He was doing fine, considering the circumstances: lashing out with fists and feet while he sheared off hands and arms with frightening ease, his blazing sword cauterizing wounds in its wake. But the Fomorians were tough sons of bitches, made to take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’.
I threw out my left arm, hand flying open, and with an effort of will, conjured up a gout of silver force—equal parts air, spirit, and willpower—which rolled along the ground like fast-moving fog. The cloud of primal destruction enveloped a pair of James’s opponents. Silver tentacles, almost alive, slithered around arms and legs and torsos. With a snarl splitting my face, I clenched my fist, exerting my will. The silver mist reacted in an instant, tentacles flexing and contracting, ripping the creatures apart in a violent spasm of force. Body pieces cartwheeled through the air in a truly sickening display of carnage.
They were fish-faced monsters, sure, but that would still be one helluva memory to shake.
Watching those limbs fly apart at the seams reminded me of Corporal Martin, who accidentally stepped on a rigged 105 round in the Vietnam bush—back in ’69 that was. We’d been on patrol and he’d stumbled a little, stepping into the gloomy shade of a squat palm tree, then boom. Terrible sound as light washed over him, through him, made his face and arms shine with a heavenly radiance before he blew apart—his remains hung from the trees. Made me sick to think about.
Sudden motion in my peripheries drew my attention and banished the grisly thought—I glanced back just in time to see a lanky body cannonballing toward me.
ELEVEN:
Here Comes the Boom
The demonic assclown hit me broadside, arms wrapping around me, one blocky shoulder driving into my chest, and then we were both headed for the floor. I crashed into the stone like a car smashing head-on into a brick wall, and I felt every moment of the impact. My hip screamed in anguish. My ribs—still black and blue from that friggin’ minotaur—protested unfair work conditions. And my head … Pain exploded inside my skull and stars erupted in my vision as my head bounced against the ground.
It didn’t help one bit that the Fomorian landed on top of me—and he was one heavy S.O.B. believe you me—shoulder driving deeper into my gut, forcing the air from my lungs. Head reeling, vision blurry, I weakly gasped for breath, which is when an armor-plated elbow smashed into my face, knocking my head to one side and opening a shallow gash along my forehead. My body went into survival mode: chin tucking down to protect my throat, forearms and fists flashing up into a high guard, which mostly covered my face.
Still, more blows rained down, a hail of bony knuckles and pointy elbows, which slammed into my forearms, biceps, and shoulders—though a few glancing blows did slip past my hasty defense and smacked into my face and scalp.
Holy shit, things had escalated quickly.
My vision narrowed at the edges, black creeping in and intermingling with the white stars still loitering in my eyes. Even with my head reeling and my ribs aching, I knew what needed to be done. I drew more deeply from the Vis, calling on the steady power of the earth below me: pulling in bedrock strength and wrapping my senses in a cloak of unshakable rock, which deadened my senses to the hurt and filled me with the fortitude to survive.
The pain, capering through my body like a parade of drunk college kids at Mardi Gras, faded to a dull roar, now just ambient background noise. Understand, that doesn’t actually mean I’d healed my wounds. Nope, not even close. I’d just woven a construct that allowed me to ignore all the gibbering wails of misery my body was shouting at the top of its metaphorical lungs. Temporarily, it was a fantastic idea, since it’d let me keep on keeping on. Long term, though, that kind of ploy is dangerous—pain is your body’s way of saying STOP, moron, and ignoring that pain is a great way to end up with irrevocable, long-term damage.
Unfortunately, Present me was getting my ass beaten into meat-slurry, so Future me would just have to suck it up and deal with the consequences like a big boy.
The Fomorian leaned back, just for a moment, and, with the renewed strength of earth flowing in my limbs, I bucked my hips upward. The move wasn’t pretty to look at, but it did buy me the space I needed to slip one hand underneath me and pull the Baby Glock from its holster. Unfortunately, I had to lower my guard in the process; naturally, the douchehole Fomorian exploited the shit outta that opening by lobbing a ferocious haymaker into the side of my temple, which left me momentarily seeing double.
Whatever. I’d still have the last laugh.
I tucked the petite Glock into the creature’s exposed belly and pulled the trigger, emptying all ten rounds into gray flesh. The Fomorian bucked and convulsed as the rounds sank home, but instead of dying—which really would’ve been the respectful thing to do—he just groped at his stomach and bled on me. Inconsiderate jerk. Since he didn’t have the good grace to keel over, though, I needed to do something. Anything really.
On instinct I tossed the Glock, reached up and grabbed hold of his leather armor and pulled his weight into me while I brought my head up with a jerk. My forehead slammed into a
bony ridge with a couple of nostril slits right above his fish-maw. Though the freak didn’t have a traditional nose—there’s a sentence you should pray you never have to say—my head still landed with a crunch of fragile bone and a spray of sudden, silver blood.
He tried to pull away, but before he could, I hooked my arm around his neck and pulled his bulk down onto me so he wouldn’t be able to pummel me in the face with his fists anymore. With one hand, I fumbled my Vis-imbued K-Bar from the sheath at my hip and promptly drove the blade into the Fomorian’s side, sliding it in just beneath the ribs, prison-style. A gout of warm liquid sputtered out and washed over my fist, though I tried to ignore that particular detail, because gross. Even with the grossness of the situation, however, I still found stabbing the asshole to be extremely cathartic.
The horn-clad prick writhing around on top of me shrieked in agony, his body momentarily going rigid as I ripped the blade free. Then the son of a bitch did something I wasn’t expecting: he bit me. Jagged yellow teeth sunk down into the meat of my trapezius—that often overlooked muscle between the neck and shoulder—and powerful jaws dug in like a dog sinking its teeth into a thick-cut steak. My jacket, equal parts leather, Kevlar, and slash-resistant fabric, prevented the teeth from breaking the skin, but that didn’t deaden the crushing force of his jaws.
Pro tip for you: though, on a day-to-day basis, you may not think much about your trapezius muscle, don’t let someone, or something, bite it, ’cause that sucks a bag full of smelly shit.
The teeth bored deeper into my muscle while the Fomorian whipped his head left and right, working his serrated piranha fangs deeper into the fabric every second. Even if he didn’t penetrate the meat of my shoulder, the guy was damn close to snapping my collarbone. Couldn’t let that happen, not if I wanted to live through this—which was quite high on my priorities list. With gritted teeth, I thrust my K-Bar home again, this time jabbing the blade into his lower back, near the spine, hoping to slice something important and paralyze him.
And then—almost as suddenly as it’d come—the crushing pressure was gone. Poof. Just like magic.
But it wasn’t my slipshod bladework that’d done the trick—instead, Snappy McGee had simply let go, his eyes glassy and oddly vacant. He pulled his body from mine and stood over me, covered in his own gore, jagged chunks of intestine drooping from his belly, swaying like a lightweight sailor after a long night of heavy drinking.
The hell was going on here?
Not wanting to waste such an excellent opportunity to not be torn limb from limb and cobbled into a tacky wall display for some ancient, dusty demon, I hastily crawled back, pushing with my heels and pulling with my hands. My shoulder bumped into Ailia’s leg. I glanced up at her and saw the same vacant, thousand-year stare in her eyes that I’d seen in the Fomorian’s eyes a heartbeat before. But there was something else there too. Anger—a metric shit-ton of it. And control.
She was in his head.
Compelling him.
Compulsion—slipping inside of someone’s thoughts and stripping them of their free will—is an ugly, nasty business, and one that’s sort of illegalish, at least if done against a human. And it’s illegal for a damned-good reason. Monkeying around in a human brain can break a person’s mind, erase their personality, even twist them into something contrary to their nature, and let’s face it, folks, that shit’s about as evil as things come. It’s basically rape of the mind. It’s also easy to do if you have the right inclination, but holy shit does it leave you feeling dirty and gross on the inside.
I know from a lot of personal experience.
I’m a fair hand when it comes to glamours and compulsions, maybe even better than fair. But Ailia was better. Maybe the best. That was partly due to her being an empath. Being able to connect with people so easily also allowed her to slip past even the most fortified mental barriers like smoke wafting under a locked door. Usually Ailia avoided wandering down that dark and perilous road, but not always. Like now, for example. Nope, right now she was elbow deep in the Fomorian’s gray matter and she wasn’t playing nice.
The Fomorian, responding to some unheard command, calmly walked over to the nearest wall and, with no muss or fuss, rammed his face into the weathered black rock with every ounce of strength remaining in him. Over and over again—thunk, thunk, thunk—throwing his whole body into each blow while his teeth broke away and his face caved in: eye sockets shattering, eyeballs rupturing, mouth full of bloody pulp. After five or six brutal rounds of self-inflicted bludgeoning, the Fomorian keeled over, limbs twitching, body convulsing, bloody foam bubbling from his deformed maw.
Finally, mercifully, he fell still. Dead.
I love Ailia, but it’s easy to forget just how friggin’ scary she can be. When it came to offensive, hard-hitting battle constructs, she didn’t have much going for her, but that didn’t mean shit. I’ve got a crap-load of battlefield training and that Fomorian had been half a bite away from gnawing off my arm, and Ailia had gruesomely murdered him without lifting a finger. And she wouldn’t regret it, not for a second. She’d rejected a lot of her Spetsnaz training, but when she decided it was time to kill, she worked as coldly and efficiently as a buzz saw.
I shivered involuntarily as I clumsily gained my feet.
She was by my side in an instant, slipping in under one arm, taking some of my weight onto her. She said nothing, though. And what could she say? We both knew exactly how unforgivably vile what she had just done was. Making a creature do something against its survival instinct would’ve required her to fry his mind, to wipe his identity away on the neural level.
Still. She’d saved my life. And who was I to judge her anyhow? Not like I hadn’t done some morally ambiguous things in my days. Love overlooks a multitude of sins, they say, and I guess that’s true.
I surveyed the scene through a blurry haze.
James was standing behind a wall of razor-tipped spikes jutting from the floor, a hasty defensive barrier of conjured stone, temporarily holding the remaining Fomorians at bay. It wouldn’t last long, and that was bad news bears: though the Morrigan was nowhere to be seen, she’d called in backup. We’d started the little throw down against ten of the Fomorian bastards and had whittled their numbers down significantly. Now, a whole friggin’ platoon, twenty-five strong, was dashing through the dusty badlands, kicking up a cloud of debris and grit as they moved, snarls plastered on malformed fish-faces, weapons raised and ready to kill.
They would descend on us in a handful of seconds, and we’d be hard-pressed to stop ’em.
“The way is open!” Lugh hollered, his voice booming and frantic. “But I can’t hold it open for long.”
James was hurling molten balls of gold from one hand and waves of freezing ice from the other, scorching enemies here, and spearing ’em there. It was a damn good bit of battle-crafting, but not good enough against a small army. Not indefinitely.
“Thirteen-Alpha!” I hollered even as I prepared the weaves we would need for the joint working.
James faltered, casting a sidelong look at me over one shoulder. “Don’t screw it up or we’re all dead,” he shouted before turning back to the fray. A halo of white—invisible to all save me, or any other mage—enveloped him a moment later, clothing him in brilliant light as he prepared to bind.
Any mage, by themselves, can dish out a world of face-melting, bone-breaking, soul-crushing hurt, which is the reason why supernatural baddies of most persuasions tread warily around our kind. But the most powerful constructs take more than one mage to pull off. They take a team working in concert: sharing flows of energy, weaving different braids together to construct a single mega-construct far more powerful than the sum of its parts.
Binding.
Since James and I had worked countless ops together, we had a whole playbook of joint workings good for just about any situation imaginable. Including: outnumbered-outgunned-and-pinned-down-in-a-narrow-hallway. In our line of work, that scenario happens quite a bit mor
e often than you might imagine.
Since I could draw far more Vis than James, my job was to gather in all the power we’d need, in just the right quantities, then open myself to James so he could siphon that energy from me, providing the force and willpower, shaping the massive flows of Vis into something useful and deadly. The only problem? Thirteen-Alpha was a delicate working, and one misstep on either side of the equation could create a feedback loop that would certainly kill the approaching Fomorians, but would also smoke our asses good and final.
But hey, it still wasn’t as risky as letting a bunch of demonic Irish dipshits turn us all into a savory deli platter. Sometimes you just gotta roll the dice and hope they don’t come up snake eyes.
First, I summoned a huge reserve of air, then drew on earthen-power from the strange stone surrounding us. A delicate lacework of magnetic force and ever-shifting water, wicked from the air, joined the mix, twining around the other elemental forces, binding them in place with a vise grip of willpower and force.
In a heartbeat, the construct I wanted took a rough shape: a hazy cloud, invisible to most eyes, which pulsed with a fierce purple light, shot through with thin strands of gold. The weight of the primal power was intense and the individual weaves slick—holding the damned thing together was like trying to juggle a quartet of hungry, ill-tempered mountain lions.
And the construct was only half done. The other half was entirely on James’s shoulders.
Last, I conjured a column of energy, this one a twisting pillar of raw, unshaped Vis and will—the weaves nearly identical to those used for heavy-duty glamours—and pushed the column out like a battering ram. The working collided against James like a gale force wind, rocking him forward as the nimbus of light surrounding him exploded in intensity from a pale white to a blinding gold. As the binding took hold, temporarily giving James access to all the power flowing through me, the pressure of maintaining the complex working vanished.
