She lined up her next shot and nodded, shouting, “Ready!”
The shield dropped and she fired twice in quick succession, dropping both ghouls. Cass scanned in front of her for more targets, picking out another one that was close enough for her to score a head shot. It took her two tries, but the ghoul dropped and didn’t get back up.
Another ghoul charged, and they did the same maneuver as before, the User holding back the ghoul with a shield, dropping the defense once Cass had lined up a head shot. The ghoul fell and the User flashed a grin at Cass.
“We got this!” he said. “We got…”
His eyes suddenly went wide and his face went pale. Cass watched him try to gasp for a breath that wouldn’t come; his hands clutched at his chest, and then his whole body seemed to go limp all at once. Cass’s new ally was dead before he hit the ground.
She turned to face the death mage. The dark woman had her hand clenched in front of her, staring at the dead User, the wisp of a smile on her face.
A glance around the room told Cass that the other inmates were all now either dead or dying, leaving her alone in the cell block to face down the death mage and her ghouls. She backpedaled a few steps, fighting hard against a surge of panic that rose up in her, looking around desperately for someplace she could retreat to before she became the next victim of whatever death Trick had just killed the man next to her.
Mickey, she thought, as the last of the ghouls charged her, and she bolted over to the cell where the little Mentalist cowered with her hands over her ears. Cass couldn’t blame her; panic from witnessing the death mage’s capabilities up close threatened to swamp her own faculties, and she had to take a second to fire herself back up so she could get back into the fight.
The ghouls came on quickly. She shot one from the doorway of the cell, and then slipped back into the cell itself, pulling the door shut with one hand.
She couldn’t lock it, but as the ghouls forced it open, she fired through the crack that opened up and killed the first one in line. Almost instantly, the door was torn open by another ghoul, but in the time it took to pull the door open, she had enough time to line up another shot and kill it.
The last one came through the door and was on her in a flash, tackling her to the ground, but Cass had trained in close combat for so many countless hours that having an enemy right on top of her didn’t throw her off her game. She got her knee up and in between herself and her enemy as they fell, giving her enough space to jam her pistol underneath the ghoul’s chin and blow the top of its head off before it could tear into her with its talons.
Cass shoved the body off her and to the side and caught her breath. She’d had the wind knocked out of her a bit from the fall onto her back, but she snapped out of it, dragging herself to her feet and checking her pistol.
The slide was locked back, indicating that it was empty. Cass pinched her eyes shut. Fantastic, she thought. Still a heavy hitter death mage out there, and no more ammunition.
She stared down at the gun, as if more bullets could appear in it through sheer force of will. Cass’s shoulders drooped. She was cornered. There was nowhere else to go.
It was the end of the line.
She didn’t want to admit it, but there it was. She couldn’t hope to stand against the power of the death mage with nothing in her hands but an empty gun.
“Come out,” the death mage said, her voice echoing through the empty cell block.
Cass gripped the empty pistol hard, grinding her teeth in frustration. Not like this. Not like this, trapped like a helpless rabbit in a cage.
“Come out,” the death mage said again. “There is no hiding from me. I can sense your life in that cell. Both of you. Come out and it will be over quickly.”
Something in her words grated up against Cass’s soul. Come out and it will be over quickly. The arrogance. The sheer arrogance, for the death mage to command her victims to lift their necks so she could slit their throats more easily.
Fuck her, Cass said to herself. Fuck… her.
She still didn’t know what she could do. All she had to work with, was a terrified Mentalist and an empty gun.
An empty gun. Of course, the death mage didn’t need to know that her gun was empty.
A glimmer of hope crept into Cass, the start of a plan. It was a long shot, but a long shot was still a shot, and far better than no shot at all.
Cass pulled Mickey to her feet. “Get ready.”
“Get ready for what?”
Cass hit the slide release on her pistol and the slide slid back into place. Now, it would look like a loaded pistol to the death mage.
“Get ready to look tough,” she said, and stepped out of the cell.
The death mage still had a small, smug grin on her face when Cass turned to face her. That overconfident grin filled Cass with a sudden urge to smash the butt of her pistol into the death mage’s face. It was exactly what she needed; the last insult to get her mean streak to drown out any fear that threatened to derail her resolve.
“You again,” the death mage said from behind the shimmer of her force field. “I should have known.”
She began to raise her hand toward Cass. The fear threatened to come back, but Cass shoved it down and snapped her weapon up, lining up the sights right between the death mage’s eyes.
“Don’t,” Cass said. “You drop that shield and you’re history.”
The death mage sneered at her. “That little gun can’t get through my defenses. And I can kill you before you can get off a shot.”
“Maybe,” Cass said, pulling Mickey out of the cell with her free hand so that the death mage could see her, “but then you’ll have to deal with her.”
The death mage’s eyes narrowed momentarily. It lasted only a moment, and her confident sneer returned.
“Deal with her? Really? I’m supposed to be afraid of this little kitten?”
“This little kitten is a Mentalist,” Cass said. “A serious one. She fried out the brains of a couple of your yahoos a little earlier today. Wasn’t pretty. Left them drooling on the floor in some kind of a coma. She could do the same thing to you.”
The death mage stiffened, barely perceptibly, but Cass saw it and knew her words were having at least some effect. It was time to pour it on.
“You aren’t ready for that, are you?” Cass said. “You didn’t factor that into your plans. I’m guessing you don’t have much of a Defense array against that.”
“I could still kill you. Or her.”
“And the second you drop your shield to work some death magic Trick, she’ll fry out your mind. Or, if you try something on her, or try to turn these bodies around us into ghouls, as soon as your shield drops, I’ll blow off half of your skull with this pistol.”
Cass, Mickey’s voice pushed into her mind, I can’t do any of that!
Shut the hell up and look tough, kid, Cass thought back.
The death mage looked back and forth between the two of them, hatred twisting her face into a snarl. Then, she seemed to regain control of herself and said, “Why? Why are you doing this? Why are you fighting me?”
“Gee, I don’t know… maybe because you’re a psychotic death mage who wants to kill us all?”
“I don’t care about you. I don’t care about either of you. You’re nothing to me. You could stay out of my way.”
“Not my style.”
“Is it your style to fight for the very same people who put you in here? After all they’ve done to you? I know who you are. They did their experiments on you and your lover, which led you to your cell in this place, and still… still you’re willing to fight for them? To die for them? You’re nothing but an obedient dog, serving your master even after he’s beaten you.”
Cass frowned, turning her enemy’s words over in her head. I know who you are.
How could the death mage know who she was? And this talk about experiments…
She shook that off, straightening up a little as she realized what her ene
my was doing. “You’re stalling.”
“Am I?”
“You’re hoping that some of your little undead buddies show up and do your dirty work for you, break this stalemate.”
“It’s only a matter of time. My golem has finished with the inmates in the yard, and more of my ghouls are coming.”
“That cuts both ways,” Cass said, gesturing toward a camera mounted on a nearby wall. “See that? The hub is watching all the cameras. We talked to them before we came here. They’re watching, which means they know where you are, and they’re already on the way with reinforcements.”
The death mage looked at the camera briefly, then returned her dark eyes to Cass. “Bluffing. You’re bluffing.”
Cass shrugged. “Let’s wait and see who shows up first…. your team or mine.”
Cass, Mickey’s voice pushed into her head again. Cass, seriously, what are we going to do? I can’t fight her, I can’t…
Cass gritted her teeth. I said, shut up and look tough. If she calls our bluff, we’re dead, so look as mean as a snake on the outside even if you’re scared to death on the inside.
Cass could feel sweat starting to make the grip on her pistol slick. She set her jaw hard, looking for any sign in the death mage’s face to indicate that her bluff was about to fail. She didn’t have any illusions. It was unlikely that there were any guards coming to their rescue.
Then, salvation came, in the strangest form.
“Cass? Cass?”
It was Jolly’s voice, calling from the doorway to the cell block. Cass didn’t exactly think of him as heavy reinforcements, but the death mage didn’t need to know that. She gave the necromancer a little grin and a shrug.
“Looks like my people showed up first.”
The death mage drew her lips back into another snarl, narrowing her eyes at Cass. Her hands began to clench in impotent fury, but she stopped, clearly not wanting to give Cass the satisfaction of seeing her lose her cool.
“Have it your way, then, dog,” she said. “Run back to your master. It doesn’t matter. No one is leaving this prison alive.”
She closed her eyes then and disappeared, leaving Cass to breathe out the biggest sigh of relief in her life.
“Where did… wait, did she just teleport?” Mickey asked.
“Yeah. This cell block isn’t warded, so she could teleport out of this block. She’s still got to be somewhere in the prison, though.”
“How did you… I almost had a heart attack!” Mickey said. “You are like, amazing! You shot all those ghouls, like, bang bang bang, and then, I mean, you totally bluffed her with what you said I could do while you stared her down with that gun.”
“I wasn’t just bluffing her with your skills. I was out of bullets.”
“Oh. Wait, what? What? Are you serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack.”
“How do you do that?” Mickey asked. “Bluff someone like her? She made me so scared I couldn’t even think straight.”
Cass nodded. “And did you like that? Being scared?”
“No, of course not.”
“There’s your answer. How did I do it? Fuck her, that’s how. She scared me too. Scared the actual shit out of me, and I hate being scared. How dare she do that to me. So fuck her for scaring me. You stare right back at that fear and you tell it to go to hell. That’s how you do it.”
Mickey shook her head. “That makes absolutely no sense.”
“Get mad, kid. Get mad. Use that fear and turn it into hate. Into rage. Into defiance. Then you’re pissed off and ready to fight, which beats being scared any day of the week.”
Mickey was still trying to process that when Jolly finally came up on them, breathing heavily, pushing Fly in front of him. Fly had blood running down his face from a laceration on his forehead, and his hands were restrained behind him.
“Who’s this?” Cass asked.
“This? Oh, this is Fly. I kicked his ass,” Jolly said, beaming. “Seriously, you should’ve seen it. He dropped Lysette with some death magic stuff, and then I… oh, don’t worry, she’s fine, I got her back… anyway, he couldn’t use that nonsense on me, ‘cause I got skills, you know? And then I beat his ass. Beat him like he stole something.”
“This guy’s a death mage, too?” Mickey asked.
“Yeah, but don’t worry. Those handcuffs are mage restraints.”
“They’re what?”
“Mage restraints,” Cass said. “See how they’re painted blue? They color code them. If you look closely, those handcuffs have got glyphs etched into them. They prevent a User from being able to pull any Tricks while they’re wearing those restraints.”
Jolly nodded. “They were in one of the pockets of this vest that you gave me. Anyway, so like I was saying, I totally beat his ass…”
“You got lucky, motherfucker,” Fly said. “Take these stupid blue cuffs off, see what happens next.”
“Oh, you want a re-match? You want a re-match, right now?”
“Hey!” Cass said. “Both of you, shut it! Jolly, where’s Lysette? Where’s Dread?”
Jolly shrugged. “I thought they might be with you. Lysette wandered off after I brought her back, which I thought was kind of rude, like, she didn’t even say thank you, not that I…”
“Jolly,” Cass said, holding up a hand to shut him up. Between Jolly and Mickey, she couldn’t decide who was the bigger chatterbox. “Give it a rest. I need to think for a second.”
“Think all you want,” Fly said, shifting to try to take some of the pressure off his wrists from the tight restraints. “Gonna be your last thoughts once Kel comes down here and finishes your simple ass.”
Cass looked at him. “Kel? Is that her name? Kel?”
Fly shut his eyes tight, cursing his loose lips. “Fuck.”
Cass nodded. “Well, at least now we have a name for the monster. All right. Let’s go find Lys and Dread.”
“Do you think he’s okay?” Mickey asked. “Dread?”
“Believe me, if there’s one man who could survive that insanity,” Cass said, “it’s Dread.”
Dread
When I got knocked to my hands and knees, it was like getting trampled by a stampede of horses. My body was pummeled from every angle by legs desperate to flee from the horrifying creature the death mage had unleashed in our midst; I hunched my shoulders and tried to protect my head with my hands as best I could from the knees and shins that battered me from all angles.
All the while, a part of me realized that if this was happening to me, it could be happening to Cass. She’s got none of my size, none of my bulk to protect her from all this chaos… hell, even with my size, if I didn’t get up and get to my feet soon, I was going to be history.
Thinking about her, fearing for her, needing to get to her, along with the pain and claustrophobia of being trampled by the mob, started to wake the sleeping temper in me. I could feel the rage welling up; the frustration of not being able to get up and fight back added in to the fears I had for both myself and Cass and it all started to turn into fury.
A random knee cracked me across the jaw, painfully, and that was it. I saw red and exploded upwards with everything I had, somehow pushing through the mass of bodies enough to regain my feet. Then, I was striking left and right with my baton, not caring who I was hitting, carving out some space through sheer willpower and violence.
An arc of lightning passed close by with the sound of thunder, splitting my ears in its intensity, and something red and wet sprayed against the side of my face. I suddenly had a little room to move and sort myself out, and right in front of me was the guy with the shotgun that Cass had spotted earlier for me.
I grabbed the weapon by the barrel and pulled the inmate close. There wasn’t any time to argue, and I was still pretty lost to the violence of it all, so I smashed the bridge of his nose with my baton. I don’t know if you’ve ever had your nose broken, but it will mess your day up in a hurry. All of a sudden, holding on to that shotgun wasn’
t so important for that guy, and I was able to yank it out of his grasp.
I dropped the baton to the ground so that I could keep both hands on the shotgun, swinging the stock around in wide arcs to keep the fleeing inmates from being able to knock me off of my feet again. It gave me a second or two to get my bearings and try to sort out what was what.
What was what, was that I was stuck smack dab in the middle of a kill zone. All those years as a Raider in The Corps and then operating with the Wreck Squads hammers a lot of instincts into a man, and I knew like I knew my own name that this whole fiasco was a planned slaughter. Get everybody into a tight group, get them panicked and running all over each other, and trap them between an inhuman killing monster on one end and a couple of dozen ghouls on the other. In the middle, nothing but chaos and death.
Any normal, rational human being would’ve been terrified. I should’ve been terrified. But like I said, the rage had woken up in me, the streak of violence that I called the Demon which I’ve always had to keep locked deep down inside… and man, now I just wanted to fight.
Sometimes, when you’re used to violence… when you’ve been in so many fights that you’ve lost count… getting into a scrap almost feels like going home. It’s familiar. You know what to do. When you’re stuck in the anticipation of something possibly happening, during the waiting, your own thoughts can trip you up and spin you around and make you crazy.
But once the fight kicks off… there’s a sudden clarity. A purity of thought. A Zen flow state in which you no longer wonder why or wonder what might be. There’s only what to do. And you can come to miss that clarity when it’s gone.
It was like taking on that ghoul back in the room with Mickey at the start of this whole mess. This place, this prison, had kept me locked up and tied down and suffocating in my own misery, lost in my own head, and once I could break free, I wanted to swing for the fences with everything I had. Just now, I’d been trapped underneath that tidal wave of stampeding humanity, and now that I was up… and even better, armed… all I wanted out of life was to beat the shit out of something.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 33
