Except Lysette.
That woman stood over the bodies like a goddamn Valkyrie. Her shiv was gone but she still had her baton, which was red and covered in gore. Blood streamed down her left arm and chest from lacerations in her shoulder.
Sweet baby Jesus, I was in love.
She glanced over at me, as I was still flopping around like a damn turtle on its back, and all I could do to try to salvage my ego was to wave to her feebly and say, “I got this one!”
She didn’t seem terribly impressed.
“You, uh… you got a whole mess of them,” I said, finally dragging myself to my feet.
“Took two out while they still had their hands full with these other inmates. The last two… that was a scrap. But they go down. They go down,” she said, nodding.
That’s when I realized, she was talking to herself. She had been scared too, going up against those ghouls… or at least, she had been whatever her apex predator version of scared was. She’d killed the one ghoul in the infirmary, but that had been more of an execution than a fight. I don’t think she ever had to go toe-to-toe with something built by death magic before, and so even when she went on the attack, she’d hadn’t known how it would go.
But still, she’d gone on the attack. I wouldn’t have. I would’ve just panicked and tried to figure out a way to hide or try to climb over the wall… neither one of which would’ve worked… and then the ghouls would’ve killed me once they were done with the other inmates.
“Your shoulder,” I said.
She glanced at the wound. “One of them bit me. It’s not bad.”
“Don’t worry, I got you,” I said.
I mean, I had to try to salvage the situation somehow, right? Hotness there had mopped the floor with those ghouls while I had mostly been a spas attack, and now I really needed to show off some skills or I’d look like a total chump to her.
She was right; the wound wasn’t too bad. It would’ve gotten all kinds of crazy infected if I hadn’t been there, but I was able to fix it up in seconds.
I was starting to get back my mojo and felt slick enough to try to lay a little game on Hotness when that asshole Fly had to show up and ruin it. I never did like him.
“Aw, you motherfuckers,” he said, standing there in the mouth of the alley, looking over the carnage.
He walked into the alleyway slowly, casually, apparently oblivious to the gunfire and chaos we could hear going on in the yard on the other side of the building. Our alleyway seemed to provide a temporary oasis from all of the excitement; no more ghouls came in with Fly, and no more inmates entered the alleyway either. The ghouls must’ve been off killing people elsewhere, and no more inmates seemed to notice the alleyway as a possible hiding spot as they ran for their lives from the yard.
Fly walked up close to us, as if he thought we couldn’t possibly be a threat. Lysette glanced at me as he approached.
“That’s Fly,” I said. “The one Charlie was talking about. He’s with her.”
Fly shook his head as he looked over the bodies. “God damn, God damn, God damn. All of this wasted material… do you have any idea how hard it is to make these things? Maybe not for her, but let me tell you something, you just ruined a lot of work for me.”
“Still,” he continued, gesturing towards the dead inmates, “I suppose I can use these motherfuckers over here. Or get her to. And then, of course, there’s the two of you.”
“You talk too much,” Lysette said, and stepped towards him, raising the baton to strike.
Fly reached out his hand in front of him like he was squeezing an apple, saying, “Oh, really?”
As his hand clenched, Lysette’s charge suddenly stopped. She went pale and a look of confusion spread across her face as she dropped her baton and slowly sank to one knee.
“That’s right, bitch, I don’t think so,” Fly said. “This is what it feels like when I stop your fucking heart.”
Lysette didn’t just sink to the ground, she fell inert as if she were a puppet that suddenly had its strings cut. I screamed “No!” and ran to her side, trying to pick her up, but she was nothing but a rag doll.
I could see what he’d done. I could sense it, like I sense any injuries or diseases that I’m about to fix. He’d somehow shut down her nervous system, snuffing her out like a candle. There was no electrical activity in her heart, her brain, or anywhere else in her body. She was just… gone.
“Oh, goodness gracious, Jolly… did I hurt your feelings?” Fly said with a smile.
He was bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing heavily with exertion from his Trick. “Did you like her? Sorry about that. Damn, I’ll tell you something; doing that Trick takes a hell of a lot out of me, but don’t you worry… I’ve still got enough left for you.”
I could feel him doing it to me, then; a sudden crushing weight squeezing my heart, pushing in on the sides of my consciousness. My vision started to narrow into a dark funnel and my legs went to water underneath me. I couldn’t breathe; it seemed like I was so far underwater that no light could reach me.
Death magic. Goddamn death magic. He’d snatched the life out of Lysette, my magnificent Hotness, and now he was doing it to me.
Here’s the thing. I may not be a trained killer, but I’m no pussy. I grew up hard. I learned how to fight back early on. So I didn’t just fade away. I got mad. That son of a bitch didn’t know who he was messing with.
His magic stomped down on my life, but I had something to fight back with. I poured everything I had into healing myself. The more he pushed down on me, the more I lifted myself back up. It turned into a tug of war; his death magic trying to put out my fire, my healing magic pouring gasoline onto that fire to keep it going.
And soon, soon, I started to win. I started to pump myself back up faster than he could drain me. The tunnel vision cleared. The strength came back into my legs. And then, finally, my breath came back into my lungs and I had won.
“No fucking way,” Fly said, gasping for breath from his efforts. “I don’t believe it.”
I spotted the baton Lysette had dropped. In a flash, I grabbed it and swung it at Fly’s head, shouting, “Believe this!”
It rebounded off the air just shy of his skull… he’d managed to get a small shield up in time. I could see the air shimmer where the baton had hit the shield. It was only maybe the size of a pie plate; Fly was weak from his death magic Trick and getting weaker fast.
I was on him, raining blows that he barely kept off him with that tiny, underpowered shield. “Death magic!” I shouted, getting unhinged in my rage. “I always knew you were a low life, but death magic? You vile shitbag! Trying to kill Lys? Nobody fucks with my people!”
“Get off me, motherfucker! Get the fuck…” he said, struggling to hold off my attack with whatever magic he had left, but his shield finally failed, he was out of juice, and I cracked him across the side of the head with the baton.
He went limp and dropped. I was so pissed, I almost jumped on him to smash his skull in while he was helpless, but the clock was ticking and I had to rush back to Lysette’s body.
Fly began to groan softly, but I ignored him. I was staring into Lysette… that’s how I think of it, when I’m concentrating on someone’s body and sorting out how I can fix them. She was flat-lined, clinically dead, but what Fly didn’t know when he pulled his Death Trick was that I’d brought people back before.
Not like Revival Technologies does; more like how they do it in the Emergency Room, with the electrical paddles and the adrenaline shots and the CPR moves. Death is a process, not an event, and if you catch it early enough, you can turn it around before it’s too late.
So I gave her a little jolt. Like those paddles from the Emergency Room that I just mentioned, I gave her a little jolt… not really of electricity, so to speak, but of life. That’s the best way I can describe it. The scholars who study the physics of magic… if there is such a damn thing as the physics of magic… probably would cringe at my descri
ption, but I’m a street mage and I play my music by ear.
Come on, baby, come on, I thought, fully focused on her, jolting her again and again. I got you, Hotness, come on back to me.
It started to take; I could feel the energy start to travel along her spinal cord and around into her brain and then down the vagus nerve into her heart and then, pow, it all kicked in like a car that had a dead battery and got jump-started. She sat bolt upright, gasping in deeply, eyes wide.
Then, her hand shot out reflexively and grabbed me by the neck. It felt like a vice, squeezing off my air, and I struggled at it uselessly, croaking out, “Lys! Lys! It’s Jolly!”
She blinked twice, looking at me blankly, and the vice grip on my throat eased up enough for me to breathe. Slowly, she looked around the alley; at the bodies, at Fly lying semi-conscious nearby, and then finally, back at me.
“I was dead?” she asked.
“Um, yeah,” I said. “Pretty much. I mean, mostly.”
“And you brought me back?”
“That’s right.”
She stared at me for another second.
“Hunh,” she said, and then climbed to her feet as though nothing had happened.
The building next to us… the one adjoining the yard… was two stories high, but there was an outcropping halfway up that Lysette was able to jump up and grab on to. I swear, that woman must have a six foot vertical leap, no joke. She pulled herself up like a gymnast, effortlessly getting her feet underneath her long enough to leap up, catch the edge of the roof, and pull herself up on top of the two-story building and out of sight.
“Is that… is that ‘thank you’?” I shouted in the direction in which she’d disappeared. “Is that how you say ‘thank you’?”
I looked around the alley, nodding to myself.
“Okay, um, you’re welcome, I guess,” I said to nobody in particular. “Happy to help.”
Fly began to groan and stir a little bit, and I kicked him in the ribs. Hard.
***
When the mob of inmates crashed into her, Cass instinctively doubled up her grip on Mickey to keep from losing her. Run, Dread had shouted, and everybody seemed to be taking his advice, turning the yard into an ocean of desperate humanity fleeing for their lives.
She had to holster her pistol so that she could hang on to Mickey with both hands, dragging her through the jostling, crushing bodies that constantly threatened to knock them down and trample them underfoot. Cass didn’t try to fight the crowd… she knew that would be useless… so she went with it, bending her knees a little to lower her center of gravity. Bodies still smashed into her from all angles, but she was able to keep her feet underneath her and keep moving with the group.
“Where’s Dread?” Mickey shouted to her. “Where’s… where’s…”
“Later!” Cass shouted back. “We’ll find them later! Keep moving with the crowd, don’t get knocked down or you’re dead!”
“What was… what’s happening?”
“Just get clear of the mob and then we’ll sort it out! Don’t let go of me!”
The crowd began to thin and Cass was able to collect her thoughts. She’d only caught a glimpse of the creature that had teleported into the midst of the mob. A mass of dead bodies fused together… it was called a golem, she remembered from one of the few files she’d read on death magic.
Before she had a chance to try to pull out more of those memories from long-forgotten briefings on the capabilities of necromancers, the crowd suddenly doubled back in front of her, pushing back the way they’d come. Shouts and screams of terror filled her ears as ghouls began to rush into the ranks of the inmates in front of her, tearing apart anyone within reach of their black talons.
Cass cursed and pulled Mickey off to her left, in the direction where there was a little gap in the crowd. Ahead of her was one of the cell blocks, a two story building adjoining the yard, and she pushed toward it. Anywhere was better than here, and in the cell block, she would at least be able to control from which direction she might be attacked.
She dragged Mickey behind her and shoved past the last inmate in her way. Then, she was through the door and into the cell block, and instantly, the crushing pressure of the crowd was off her and she could once again take a second to collect her thoughts.
A few inmates followed her example, crashing through the door behind her. For a second, Cass thought there might be trouble, but she and Mickey got nothing more than a quick look from each of the inmates before being passed by without so much as a second glance. Cass guessed that anybody who didn’t pose an immediate threat to them was going to get mostly ignored… at least for now.
One of the inmates who ran into the cell block wore the blue uniform of a User, and Cass took him by the arm. “What kind of an Array do you have? Can you hold that door shut?”
He looked her over for a second, and then nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, against that… yeah, I think so.”
“Do it,” Cass said, stepping back away from the door with her pistol held in the low ready position. “Mickey, back up away from the door.”
“No problem,” Mickey said, gripping her big purse in front of her like it was extra body armor.
The small group of inmates began to move away from the door, down the cell block. Cass called out to them, “Hey, wait! Don’t… we have to hold this door! The exits to the hub have been barricaded. There’s no place to go. We have to stick together and hold this door.”
They hesitated, looking at each other, but they stayed close by. Cass wasn’t sure what convinced them; the logic of her argument, or the fact that she was the only one with a gun.
Now that they had heavy walls and a steel door in between them and any immediate danger, everything seemed strangely quiet and still. The sounds of slaughter still came to them from the other side of the door, muffled through the steel, but inside the cell block, the air seemed to get heavy and thick with a silence that seemed almost artificial compared to the madness outside.
Cass noticed that she and Mickey were starting to draw stares from the other inmates that were more and more intent. They studied her face like they were trying to place where they knew her; Mickey in her civilian clothes got even more stares and sidelong glances.
This could go sideways really fast, she thought. The only inmates who know who I am know that I was a cop, and the only thing holding them back is the fact that I’m holding this gun. If they all decide to rush me, I won’t be able to stop them.
“What happened out there?” Mickey asked. “She was giving that weird speech, and then those things showed up…”
“She planned it, Mickey. She teleported the golem into the middle of the crowd, driving everyone straight into the ghouls that she’d pre-positioned on either side of the yard. That trapped the whole mob in the middle, all panicked and turned around and running into each other. Easy targets. She’s killing everyone.”
“But… why? Why would she do that? Aren’t they, I mean…” she said, looking around at the inmates who were now standing uncomfortably close to her, “…isn’t everyone… on her side?”
“Looks like she’s got other plans. Looks like we all need to be on the same side now,” Cass said, a little more loudly than she needed to, loudly enough for the other inmates to hear her.
There was a sudden crashing, thumping impact against the door. Cass jumped a little, startled by the loud sound shattering the relative quiet of the cell block, then settled back into her low ready stance in front of the door.
She gave the User by her side a look. “Are you sure you’ve got this?”
“Oh, I’ve got this,” he said, his hands open and wide and pointing at the door. “They’re not getting in through here!”
The pounding continued, the noise starting to work its way into the minds of the other inmates. They started backing away from the door, little by little, looking at each other, seeing who would break and run first, each secretly hoping the other would be the one to break and by breaking,
give the rest of them an excuse to break and run as well.
“Man, fuck this!” one of the inmates finally said, and ran off down the cell block. That was all that was needed; the rest of the inmates scattered and ran, leaving only Cass, Mickey, and the User who was holding the door shut with his magic.
“Don’t… damn it!” Cass said. “We can’t split up!”
“You can hold that door shut, right?” Mickey asked the User.
“I told you, there’s no way they’re getting in through here. This cell block isn’t warded, but what I’m putting into this door, they’d need a goddamn atomic bomb…”
He was interrupted by a loud popping noise. Cass spun in the direction of the sound, weapon raised, already dreading what she was about to see.
She was there. The dark death mage who was the mysterious architect behind it all had teleported into the center of the cell block, and she had not come alone. Ten ghouls stood around her, facing in all directions, talons held low and ready.
Everyone in the cell block froze. The scattered inmates stared at the ghouls, at each other, and the silence was finally broken by the death mage.
“Take them.”
The ghouls charged the inmates, dragging them down as they tried to flee. A few inmates held their ground and tried to fight back with whatever improvised weapons they had at hand, but their scattered efforts had little effect against the coordinated attack of the ghouls.
Four ghouls charged at Cass, and she shoved Mickey toward one of the nearby open cells, shouting, “Get in there!”
She didn’t wait to see if Mickey complied. Cass lined up her sights on the closest ghoul and dropped it with a head shot, and then the next closest as well, but the third and fourth closed the distance too quickly and leapt through the air at her.
They both slammed up against an invisible barrier inches away from her. She took a step back in surprise, but Cass had worked with Defense mages countless times over the years and knew a shield when she saw one. The User who had held the door shut moved up next to her, holding back the ghouls with his force field.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 32
