Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  "Yeah, well," Cass said, "that doesn't mean shit now."

  Stephen seemed to settle a bit. "I guess not."

  "Why are you doing this? Whatever he's promised you..."

  "It's not... like that," Stephen said, his entire body seeming to sigh. "If you could see the things he's shown me..."

  "Oh, for God's sake, Stephen, don't you see what's happening?" Cass said. "He's got into your head!"

  "No, you don't understand, I don't have a choice..."

  Once again, a semblance of regret seemed to trickle through him, and he looked away from her to avoid her eyes. It was all the opportunity she needed.

  Now it was Cass’s turn to move quickly. She darted forward and slightly to the side, stepping off the line of the pistol pointing at her and grabbing it by the barrel, twisting it away from her in an attempt to wrench it out of Stephen’s grip.

  Stephen had been trained in weapon retention as much as she’d been trained in disarms, however, and her attempt to take the pistol away from him turned into a brief tug of war for the weapon instead.

  A second or two of struggle, and Cass gave up on the idea of taking the gun away from him and launched a knee strike up into his guts instead. His body armor vest took most of the brunt of the impact, but it did have the effect of pushing him away from her and knocking him off balance.

  Cass used the moment’s advantage to stomp kick him away from her, leaning everything she had into that kick. Once again, Stephen’s vest took the worst of it, but the force of the kick sent him backpedaling out of control and over the steps of the stairwell.

  As he tumbled end over end down the steps, Cass nearly chased after him in the hopes of finishing him off, but she saw that he was hanging on to his pistol even as he fell. Instead of risking a fight with Stephen while he had the advantage of being armed, she turned on her heel and sprinted through the nearby door and down the twenty-first floor hallway as fast as her skyrocketing adrenaline and gasping breaths would take her.

  She took the first right turn she saw, and the first left, careening off the walls in desperate haste. There wasn’t any plan at this point; she was in completely unknown territory, surrounded by enemies, alone, unarmed…

  Wait. Not quite unarmed. As she ran, her pumping elbows bumped against the handle of the kukri knife on her side. When Stephen had disarmed her, he must’ve either forgotten about her knife or maybe he simply hadn’t been able to think of a good enough bullshit excuse to give her as to why it would be missing.

  Okay. She had her knife. Not good, but not nothing. The heavy, machete-like blade was out and in her grip almost as fast as she realized it was still in her possession.

  Another turn down an empty hallway, and she let herself slow a bit to let her thoughts catch up to her feverish pace.

  Now what? The big knife in her hand made her feel a little less helpless, but the reality was, it wasn’t going to do her much good against the collective madness gathered against her in this building.

  She flirted with the idea of heading back toward the stairwell, and up one floor, to fall back to the site of the ambush. There might be weapons there that she could salvage from her lost teammates.

  No. No good. They’d lost that fight; there was no way to know if the hostiles that had hit them were still there, or were between her and the bodies of her comrades. Not to mention Stephen was back in that direction, in that stairwell or coming towards her from it.

  The roof. That would have to be the answer. Stephen knew about the explosives now, but it was still her best bet to re-arm and have a fighting chance at survival.

  She stopped for a second and tried to orient herself. She couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t coming. How exactly was she going to make her way up to the roof when she couldn’t back-track to the stairwell? Now that she had time to think about it, she realized she should’ve run right up the stairwell rather than onto the twenty-first floor…

  No, no. No time to think about what should have been. That road led nowhere. She had done what she had to do in the moment, had acted reflexively, and had ended up with an imperfect solution. Fine. Nobody’s perfect. No use beating herself up about it.

  So the stairwell was out, and crossing the entire twenty-first floor to get to the far stairwell with nothing but a big knife for company wasn’t exactly appealing.

  The elevator shaft. Perfect. There weren’t always ladders in elevator shafts, but if worse came to worse, and she couldn’t climb up, she could slide down the cable, maybe even to the ground floor, and make her way outside to figure out her next move.

  She started moving again, a slow run this time, trying to keep the impact of her footfalls at a minimum to stay as quiet as she could. If her memory of the building’s blueprints was correct, the elevators were close up ahead; she hated the idea of leaving her people behind, dead or not, but she had to play the shitty hand she’d been dealt.

  She turned the corner and there was someone there, a dark blue shape the size of a man, and she didn’t even stop to see who it was, she swung the kukri knife at it with everything she had. The man… it was a man, her mind had the split second to realize that… blocked her swing with his rifle. He was trained; he immediately stabbed the barrel at her face, trying to muzzle-stamp her. Cass ducked underneath the attack, chopping with the kukri as she moved, hacking down into the top of the man’s foot. The blade went all the way through to the sole of his boot; the man screamed and Cass felt a thrill of satisfaction at finally being able to strike back at her enemies.

  That thrill died once she realized her weapon was stuck in the man’s boot. In the split second it took to try to free it, Cass felt a heavy blow on the side of her jaw… the rifle butt or a fist, she wasn’t sure which… and she fell stunned to the floor.

  The world swirled around once and then returned into focus, in time for Cass to see the man in the dark blue uniform step over her and point the rifle in her face. Looks like time’s up, her dazed mind thought grimly, and then she recognized the face looking down at her.

  “Kerry?” she said.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted.

  It was Stephen, having finally caught up with her. Kerry snapped his rifle up and toward him, and for a split second, Cass could hardly believe what she was seeing.

  “Back off, Kerry,” Stephen said.

  “Fuck you,” Kerry said. “You see what she did to my foot?”

  Stephen glanced down. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

  “Kerry?” Cass said again, now that the world had stopped spinning and she was able to pull herself to a seat on the floor. “They said you were dead.”

  "They were wr-wr-wr..." Kerry's face seemed to stutter a step, for only a moment, and then Cass saw it… pink flesh, pinker than normal, covering his face and neck in crazed, swirled patterns. "They were wrong."

  "Doesn't look like it. Looks like they were right on target, Vive Job."

  "Cass," Stephen said.

  "Watch yourself, Cass," Kerry said, glaring down at her.

  Cass's face was a tiger's snarl. "I’ll tell you what, asshole. Why don’t you put down that pop gun and let’s see if I can chop off another piece of your carcass?"

  Kerry made a move to hit her with the butt of his rifle, but Stephen stepped in close and stopped him.

  “I said, back off,” he said. “The Maestro wants her intact.”

  Kerry sneered at him. “And aren’t you his favorite pet.”

  “Hey, thanks, Stephen, that’s awfully sweet of you,” Cass said. “Lying piece of shit.”

  Stephen ignored her and locked eyes with Kerry. “You want me to fix that foot or not? Or maybe you’d like to kill her and then explain to the Maestro yourself how you failed the one order that he was most clear on? Take one alive, he said.”

  “Fine,” Kerry said, his weapon finally lowering. “You’re lucky the Maestro wants you intact, Cass. You have no idea how lucky.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Cass said. �
�I feel super lucky.”

  “Come on, Cass,” Stephen said, pulling her up to her feet. “There’s no need to make this hard.”

  “It’s already hard, dead man,” Cass said. “Tell me something. When you said everybody on the team had been killed, was that more of your Vive Job bullshit, or were you actually telling the truth?"

  Stephen shrugged. "Close enough to the truth. Anybody who survived won't be around for long; the Maestro will take care of that. But I can't imagine anybody could've lived through that ambush."

  Dread

  When the ambush hit, I let the Demon loose.

  That's how I think of it. Normally, this job demands an infinite amount of patience; you lose your temper or your nerve, and disaster is bound to strike.

  Some tight-ass administrator gets in your face? Keep your cool.

  It's dark, and everything is far too quiet, and you've only got your lonely flashlight beams for company? Keep your cool.

  You're backed into a corner by things that aren't human, and you don't know where to go or what to do next? Keep your cool.

  But once the fight is on… it's time to get hot.

  I worry sometimes that I'm in this business for all the wrong reasons… that for all my pretensions about protecting the innocent, the real reason I'm on a Wreck Squad is for the moments where I can let my aggressions free to crush, kill, and destroy anything that opposes me. Everybody thinks I'm this endless storehouse of patience and calm, but the truth is, I've always had a problem with my temper.

  I call it the Demon, and ever since my teens, I've had to keep the Demon sealed in a deep, deep vault. I keep myself cool, because I have to… at my size, a reckless punch thrown in a moment's anger could do some serious damage, maybe even irreparable damage.

  So, I keep cool, until it's time to get it on, and only then do I let the Demon loose. Afterword, I always feel strangely satisfied and also guilty at the same time, as if I'd just had sex with the wrong woman.

  I'm not sure I like who I am at that moment. I'm not sure I like what those feelings imply.

  Once it gets hot, though, there's no use debating. I'd stopped in the hallway because something didn't feel right; I couldn't put my finger on it, but it was there. Then, they hit us.

  I was shooting before I knew what had happened; some part of me registered Peter's head getting blown apart, and that's when I let the Demon loose. The shotgun was rattling in my fists; I was shooting into what seemed to be a solid wall, but I've dealt with enough mage’s Tricks over the years to know that you can't always trust your eyes.

  Something flew out of the wall and hit me; something big and covered with fur. It was vaguely humanoid, probably seven feet tall, and almost as a reflex, I shoved the shotgun up and cold-cocked it across its dripping jaws. It was stunned long enough for me to stomp-kick it back a meter or two, and then the Demon really kicked in, as somebody started shouting "Illusion! Illusion!"

  My mind left me, and I fell into a red haze. I drew my kukri knife from my belt, and chopped the creature across the side of the head, skinning off its left ear and a chunk of its scalp. It turned and snarled, and that's when I realized what it looked like: a hyena. Broad neck, dog-like ears, and jaws that could break soup bones.

  It jumped me. I let the kukri’s heavy blade slip into its stomach… it had impaled itself in its leap. Blood ran over my wrist, but the hyena-man kept coming.

  Its breath reeked, a dog's breath when it's been at its own feces. The dripping jaws snapped close enough to my face that the creature's fur slid along my cheek; it had me pinned down and was trying for leverage. The whole time, I was digging into its guts with my small machete of a knife, ripping upwards, snarling much like my enemy.

  At last, the strength went out of the creature and its eyes began to dim. I bench-pressed the bastard up and off me, recovered my shotgun, and laid on the trigger in the direction of the illusory wall.

  Strange thing about illusions. Once you see enough evidence to disbelieve in them… such as creatures leaping through an illusory wall… poof, they're gone. No fading out, no on-again off-again, just pop, as if your mind reaches a critical mass of disbelief all at once.

  The illusion disappeared for me when a hand grenade came out of the wall. Luckily, Shifty had one of his shields up, and the grenade bounced back into the illusion, and poof. I could see our enemy. Eight or nine of those big hairy bastards, the hyena-men. Couple of bodies on the ground… and Ed Wycheck and Sonny Carlisle from Squad Two, blazing away at us with their guns.

  "I can't hold it!" Shifty shouted, and we all rolled away from the now-visible hallway entrance, as the grenade exploded.

  I was up and my weapon was in my hands in a flash. The Demon was loose inside me, and was not yet satisfied. Most of the enemy were dead, dying, or dazed from fragmentation wounds by the time I rounded the corner, but I laid into them anyway, laid into them with a vengeance, kept firing and firing until my fingers went numb with the vibration of the weapon's recoil. Gunsmoke was practically blinding me; my weapon clicked on empty, and I charged them, smashing the butt into one of the hyena-men's heads again and again, until Shifty finally grabbed my arm.

  "Enough, Dread! They're dead!"

  The Demon left, with reluctance. It was time to see how badly we'd been hurt.

  "Are you hit?" I asked.

  Shifty shook his head. "Peter took the brunt of it, and then when that thing..." he pointed at the first hyena-men, "...jumped on top of you, you both knocked me down and out of the line of fire."

  “You always were lucky.”

  “I don’t know about lucky,” he said. “I’ve got this fucking job.”

  I looked around, saw some were dead, some were hurt, but the center went out of my soul when I saw two were missing.

  "Where's Cass?"

  Shifty shook his head. "She got hit, and Stephen started dragging her away. I thought, you know, it was to get her clear, but..."

  "He would've come back by now."

  Shifty nodded.

  I wanted to run off after her, damn the mission, damn the others, find her and get her out of the hands of that fucking traitor.

  You see, I'd had an epiphany. It hit me in an instant, a flash of realization. Like the illusory wall… poof, gone… my epiphany was the opposite… poof, there.

  Wreck Squads do encounter gunfire, on occasion. Street mages will sometimes have a pistol or a shotgun that they will reach for in a pinch, but rarely anything heavy-duty, and frankly, they rarely know how to use them worth a damn.

  It takes focus to get good at something. All those hours, all those years that mages focus on getting the laws of physics to bend, are hours that they can’t spend getting good with a gun. Yeah, the guys on our Squad could shoot, but that’s pretty much all they did all day, every day… practice tactical magic, and shooting. Your typical street mage has got other things to think about.

  But in this ambush, we’d been hit hard, with serious firepower directed with coordination and purpose, and the answer was right there when the illusion disappeared. Amongst the dead hyena-men, Sonny and Ed’s bodies lay next to two more human bodies, all four of them still decked out in SWAT gear and armed with M4 carbines.

  Polonius had Vived Squad Two somehow and sent them against us. And if he could control those Vive Jobs, he could control Stephen.

  And now, Stephen had Cass.

  Running recklessly after her would've been gratifying, momentarily; a way to fight off that feeling of helplessness, a way to assure myself I was doing something, taking action, rushing to the rescue. But the truth was, it would've been rash, stupid, and counter-productive. Who knew what other traps Polonius had set, or if Stephen had met up with friends? I counted four Squad Two bodies… which left Kerry and one other still at large.

  We had to re-group, work out the best move, and play it smart.

  Peter was gone… there was no doubting that. Even without the headshot, he'd taken a dozen rounds to the body. Mike was history, too…
magefire had nearly torn him apart and his throat had been ripped out by one of the hyena-men. Shifty was okay… despite what he believed, he was always lucky… but Tara had bullet wounds in her thigh and abdomen, and would have to be carried.

  Still, it could've been worse… if Shifty hadn't gotten that shield up so fast, we all would've been Wrecked.

  ***

  "Your ear," Shifty said, pointing at Dread's left ear.

  Dread's hand touched the side of his head and came back bloody. "Is it bad?"

  "No. Your scalp's a little torn up on that side, but it's not ripped off or anything."

  Dread shifted his attention to the bullet wounds scattered across Tara's body. "How you holding up, troop?"

  Her face was pale, and she looked like she was about to start shivering again. "This ain't... my day, Dread."

  “I hear you on that.”

  He made sure to keep his voice calm, even as his eyes told him the bad news. Her wounds were bleeding, badly, and long experience told him that pressure dressings and morphine weren’t going to do the trick for very long. She needed a hospital or a Healer, and fast.

  “Where’s Mike?” she asked.

  He couldn’t lie to her. “He didn’t make it. He’s gone. Peter, too.”

  “God. God.,” she said, burying her face in bloody hands. “What am I going to tell his wife? Christ, I talk to her practically every day…”

  “Hey, hey, hey. Don’t think about that. Focus on the now.”

  Her hands came away from her face and she struggled to sit up. “Help me up.”

  “Tara.”

  “Help me up. I can fight. I can fight.”

  Dread traded a look with Shifty. Tara’s face was a mask of pain; a cold sweat poured down her face from the effort she was exerting to keep from crying out.

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “But you’re pretty torn up, and we don’t have a Healer if you get any worse. Shifty and I have got this. Save it for later. When we need you, we’ll really need you.”

  He caught Shifty’s eye and nodded to the side, to indicate that they needed to talk privately. “Wait here a second, Tara. We’ll be right back.”