Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  Shifty had his weapon shouldered and trained on her as soon as she started to move. “Dread!” he said, finger hovering over the trigger. “I thought you said she was cool!”

  “She is, she is! She hasn’t fired! Lysette!” Dread said, keeping his hands up and open. “Don’t do this!”

  “I’m going to find Cass, and you’re not stopping me,” she said. “None of you are.”

  “I’m not trying to. You want to find Cass. I want to find Cass. We all want the same thing. We all need to work together.”

  “I don’t,” she said.

  “You’re better off with us than without us,” Dread said. “They need Jolly’s help. And they can help us find Cass. I know how.”

  “Keep talking.”

  “Shifty can radio the hub. They’ve got cameras everywhere. They can spot where Cass is, and Shifty can teleport us all there, and then to the hub where it’s secure.”

  Lysette glanced at Shifty. “You can do that?”

  Shifty nodded. “I can do that. I’ve known Cass longer than you have, Miss. I want to find her as much as you do. But you need to get your foot off my man there, so we can get to her and this Healer of yours and I can get my people right.”

  Lysette considered that for a second, and then took her foot off of Ryan’s chest and let him climb to his feet. She gave Shifty a long look, studying him intently.

  “Miss? You called me ‘Miss’?”

  “Well,” Shifty said, “You’re too young to be a ‘Ma’am’, so yeah.”

  Lysette seemed to process that for a second, when her eyes suddenly narrowed at movement amongst the bodies in the yard. “Dread!”

  Dread turned to look. Bodies covered the yard; torn up and bloody, in both blue and khaki prison uniforms. Most lay still, but others… a lot of others… began to twitch and jerk as blue swirls of light moved just below their skin.

  “Shifty,” he said, quickly and evenly, “get on the radio to the hub and find Cass, fast. We need to get out of here. Ryan, police up any weapons or gear your people have dropped and get ready to fight.”

  “Boss?” Ryan asked.

  “Do what he says,” Shifty said, holding a hand over his throat mike so that the people in the hub could hear him more clearly over the radio. “Control, Control, this is Team One Actual. Need location….”

  Dread tuned him out and returned his attention to Ryan. “If they get up, kill the head. Just like the golem. Don’t rush your shots. Semi-automatic fire. Pick your targets one at a time, take them down one at a time.”

  Lysette came to his side. “How good of a shot are you?”

  “I was with the Raiders in the Corps.”

  “MARSOC?” she said, and handed her rifle to him. “Good. Take this.”

  He stared at her in confusion as she stooped over the dead body of one of the Wreck Squad, retrieving a pistol and a machete-like Kukri knife from their gear. She quickly fingered the edge of the knife, nodded in satisfaction, and pulled back the slide of the pistol slightly to brass-check the chamber.

  She caught his look. “I’m better up close. And if we have to set it off out here, you can’t be useless.”

  “Yes, well, I wouldn’t want to be useless,” Dread said with a grunt, catching an extra full magazine of ammo that Lysette tossed to him. “You know, after I went and killed that golem.”

  Lysette looked at the massive, inert creature lying blasted apart in the grass. “You did that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good for you, slugger. Want a cookie?”

  Dread couldn’t help a little grin, even in the midst of a bad situation… especially in the midst of a bad situation. “How we doing, Shifty?”

  “They’re looking. The hub’s looking.”

  Dread shouldered his rifle as one of the dead bodies in the yard suddenly jerked upwards to its feet. “Tell them to look faster!”

  He centered the red dot of his rifle sight over the head of the ghoul, squeezing the trigger. A short burst erupted out of his weapon and the ghoul dropped back down to the ground.

  Idiot, he thought to himself, fingers moving automatically to switch his weapon to single fire. You just told Ryan to go semi-auto, and here you are wasting ammo like you’ve got all the bullets in the world.

  “I take the far ones,” he shouted to Lysette over the gunfire. “You take the close ones.”

  He sensed rather than saw her nod of agreement and lined up his sights on another ghoul that jerked upwards to its feet. He fired once, cursing when the shot went wide, and fired again, this time dropping the ghoul.

  I guess I’m a little rusty, he thought. “Ryan! Two o’clock!”

  Gunfire answered him. Dread fought down the urge to look and check on what Ryan was doing. He couldn’t spread himself too thin and try to cover every direction at once; he had to trust in his allies to hold their sectors so that he could focus on his part of the fight and actually be effective with his shots.

  Again, as with fighting the golem, it came back easily, fitting into fighting with a team. He’d done it his whole life, until it was as natural to him as breathing; the aberration had been when he was stuck alone in a prison cell. Being a part of a team was his natural state; his mind became clear and his movements became fluid, his eyes picking out targets as they rose to their feet and his hands dropping the ghouls with shots that became more and more accurate as the old patterns and rhythms came back to him.

  One ghoul came to its feet close by, less than ten feet away, but Dread forced himself to hold his fire. Close ghouls were for Lysette, and the Adept waited until the ghoul actually took a step towards her before firing a shot from her pistol into its head.

  The ghouls kept rising up, one over here, two over there, scattered around the yard. The three of them held back the risen dead with constant gunfire; Dread and Ryan firing on the ghouls the furthest away, Lysette shooting the closest ones with her pistol.

  The tempo of bodies rising up began to increase, now two and three at a time. The number of bodies jerking to their feet began to outpace how quickly their gunfire could stop them; the ghouls kept getting closer and closer to them before they fell.

  Dread’s weapon clicked on empty just as the dead Wreck Squad member lying to their side rose up, hands spread wide with black talons. It leapt onto Ryan’s back, claws tearing at his chest, but Ryan’s body armor vest spared him any injury, at least for the moment. Dread’s hands moved of their own accord, smoothly running through a speed reload for his rifle, but he knew that he wouldn’t finish before the ghoul could tear open Ryan’s throat.

  “Lys!” Dread said, but before he even said it, her Kukri knife was flying through the air to embed into the ghoul’s head.

  The ghoul slid lifelessly off the rookie’s back. Ryan stared it at, wide-eyed, and Dread had to shake him to pull him out of his daze.

  “Keep fighting!” Dread shouted, finishing the reload for his rifle. “Shifty!”

  “Ten seconds!” Shifty said.

  I hope we have that long, Dread thought, forcing himself to stay cool, forcing himself to not rush his shots, but to take his time in a hurry, give himself enough time to steady his sights over the head of the nearest ghoul and then squeeze his trigger rather than jerk it and end up throwing off his aim in his haste.

  He got off a few more shots before the charging ghouls were on top of him. Dread cocked back his arm to smash the closest with his rifle stock, and then he blinked, and the yard was suddenly gone, and they were all inside of a cell block and safely away from the kill zone.

  Mickey

  I could’ve gone my entire life without ever experiencing teleportation and that would’ve been just fine.

  Oh, sure, I bet it sounds cool. Poof, there you are, suddenly anywhere you want to be, without any of that pesky walking or driving. Great for those rush hour traffic days where you really need to be at work on time, right?

  Except, it sucks. It really, really, really sucks.

  The word “disorientat
ion” doesn’t even come close to describing how it feels to be standing in one place, everything’s normal, and then you blink, and instantly, everything is different. Have you ever done the dizzy bat thing, where you put your head on a baseball bat and run around it in circles? Yeah, that’s nothing. Try teleporting if you really want to puke your guts out.

  Which is what happened to me. Cass and Jolly and I were all standing there talking about how we were going to get to the hub when that weird popping sound happened again. I figured we were super dead… that Kel or whatever her creepy name was had teleported back in to the cell block with more ghouls or something else awful that I couldn’t even dream up in a nightmare… but it wasn’t. It was Dread and Lysette.

  Oh, and four SWAT people, two of whom were all kinds of beat up. There was a nice Hallmark card moment where Dread gave Cass a big hug once he saw her, but it really didn’t last long with two people bleeding and moaning on the floor.

  “Shifty?” Cass said in disbelief to one of the SWAT guys.

  “How you doing, Cass?” the SWAT guy said back, so I figured “Shifty” was his name. I don’t know how they all got these weird names. Shifty, Dread… I mean, was I going to end up with some funky name, too, by the time this was all over?

  “Oh, hey, living the dream,” Cass said, gesturing around the cell block. “Jolly, can you help these guys out?”

  “On it,” Jolly said, and knelt down next to the two SWAT people who were all torn up.

  “They were out in the yard,” Dread said. “The death mage…”

  “Kel,” Cass said. “That’s her name. Kel.”

  “Kel?” Shifty said. “No last name, just Kel? Like Prince? Or Shakira?”

  “Shakira?” Cass said.

  Shifty shrugged. “I like her. She’s a good singer.”

  “Anyway,” Dread said, cutting back in, “That thing that Kel teleported into the crowd was a golem.”

  Cass raised an eyebrow. “You remembered what it was called?”

  “Yes, I remembered,” Dread replied impatiently. “Shifty and his Wreck Squad teleported in from the hub to fight it, and that’s how I met up with them.”

  “It’s dead. The golem,” Shifty said. “My man here didn’t mention that he saved our asses by figuring out how to kill the damn thing and directing our fire at the heads.”

  “Not so useless after all,” Lysette said. I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  Dread had a little smile on his face, though, so I figured it was a joke after all. “The bodies in the yard started rising up as ghouls, so Shifty had the hub find you on the cameras and then he teleported us here,” he said.

  I was feeling a little left out, what with all this tough guy banter floating around like we were in a locker room, but honestly, I was just happy there was lot of people with us now. Once Jolly had healed the wounded, there were nine of us in our little group, half of whom had really big guns, and that made me feel the safest I’d felt since this whole lousy situation started.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Shifty can teleport people? So he can teleport us all out of the prison!”

  Dread shook his head. “The shield. The one around the whole prison. Remember the guy we saw who tried to fly out?”

  Obviously, it couldn’t have been that easy. Not in my life.

  “I can get us to the hub, though. Not straight into it… it’s warded,” Shifty said, “but right next to one of the doors.”

  “Our guns,” Dread said. “We don’t want to spook the guards.”

  “You guys can keep them, as far as I’m concerned,” Ryan said, looking over at Lysette. “I can’t believe the throw you made with that knife. I heard it whistle past my head.”

  Dread handed him his rifle. “I appreciate the vote of confidence, but the guards don’t share your feelings, and if they see inmates with guns, they may shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “Mine’s empty anyway,” Cass said, handing her pistol over to Shifty.

  “And mine,” Lysette added, handing her weapon over as well.

  “We need to take this guy with us,” Cass said, gesturing toward Fly. “He helped set this riot up, along with this Kel person who seems to be pulling the strings behind it all. He’ll have a lot to tell us once we get to the hub.”

  “I ain’t telling you sh…” Fly began to say, but Jolly kicked him to shut him up.

  Jolly shrugged once he caught their looks. “What? Guy’s a real jerk.”

  “Kel?” Lysette said. “You’re sure her name is Kel?”

  “You’ve heard of her?” Cass asked.

  “Rumors,” Lysette said. “Ghost stories they would tell around the campfires back at SOCOM. There was barely any intel on her; no photos, no records, just that name. Kel. She would pop up on the radar every couple of years, usually in connection with some gruesome spectacle in some regional conflict in some dark corner of the world. She wiped out an entire Kurdish village a while back, and there were some death magic atrocities associated with her in the Ukraine during that time when the Russians were getting their hands dirty in Crimea.”

  “I heard about that on the news,” Cass said.

  “Depending on who you ask, she’s from Kazakhstan, or Egypt, or Turkey, or maybe one of the Balkan states, but nobody really knows. She seems to go from place to place, faction to faction, no clear or concrete loyalties, falling in with whoever will take her.”

  “Street mage,” Cass said.

  “Pretty high end for a simple street mage,” Lysette said.

  “Hey,” Jolly said. “Some of us street mages ain’t so simple.”

  “In any case, no one’s heard from her in years,” Lysette said. “At least, that was the last I’d heard before I got tossed in this place.”

  “Well, no need to speculate. Fly can fill us in. But we need to get to the hub before we can interrogate him,” Cass said.

  “Agreed. Who’s the civilian?” Shifty asked, and it took me a second to realize that he was talking about me.

  “Her name’s Mickey,” Cass said. “She’s a Mentalist.”

  “Mentalist, hunh?” Shifty said, looking me over. “Don’t…”

  “…read my mind, I know, I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, your perverted fantasies are safe with me.”

  His eyes narrowed for a second, and I bit my lip. People don’t always get my humor, and this was not a good time to be pissing people off. Then, his face relaxed and he gave me a big grin.

  “Not bad, Mickey. Not bad. Have you ever teleported before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing to worry about. It’s just a little disorienting.”

  A little disorienting, my ass. Getting sewn into a bag and thrown out of an airplane is a little disorienting. When he finally teleported us all to the hub… well, right next to the hub… the very first thing I did was toss my cookies like I’d spent the whole night chugging Jaegermeister.

  “Yeah, I remember my first time,” somebody said, and there was a lot of laughter at my expense. Somebody dragged me through a door… I think it was Dread… and by the time I had recovered, we were all in the safety of the hub.

  Well. “Safety” is maybe not the best word.

  Oh, there were a bunch of prison guards with guns, but as soon as they saw us and that there were prison uniforms mixed in with the Wreck Squad, all those guns then got pointed at us and there was a whole lot of shouting. Shifty tried to calm them down, but they couldn’t hear him over their own yelling, and I could see Lysette starting to crouch down a little like a tiger who was about to spring.

  I panicked. This was going to go crazy any second. Cass and Dread had their hands up but Lysette was like a cornered animal and was about to do something stupid.

  The guards would end up killing us all once she jumped at them, I knew it. The shouting and the guns and the madness all around me made me just plain freak out; I dropped down, curling up into a ball with my hands over my head, screaming, “STOP!”

  To my surp
rise, they all did. The shouting was over. The tension was gone from the air. Everybody in the hub sort of stood there for a second, their faces twisted in discomfort. A lot of them squeezed their eyes shut and pinched the bridge of their noses with their fingers, as if they’d had a sudden migraine.

  It only lasted a second. Cass shook her head, as if to clear it, and then looked down at me, while I was still squatting there in a curled up ball.

  “Ow,” she said. “What the hell was that? Was that you?”

  I looked around the room. Everyone was staring at me.

  “Was that me?” was all that I could think of to say.

  “Take them… take them under…” the warden tried to say, but he was still recovering from whatever it was I’d just done. “Get them into custody…”

  “Everybody be cool,” Shifty said, holding his hands up. “They’re disarmed. They’re here to surrender. They brought a prisoner with them who’s got some intel on the situation, so they’re here to help, got it? We’re going to put them all over here in this corner and out of the way.”

  “They… need to be restrained,” the warden said. He seemed pretty much back to normal now.

  “Get f…” Lysette began to say.

  “Lys,” Cass said, laying a hand on her arm. “Please. We knew this was going to happen.”

  The muscles on Lysette’s jaw clenched slightly. As little emotion as she usually showed, I figured that meant she was fuming on the inside. I thought about taking a peek inside of her mind to see if she was still going to do something crazy and violent, but I was really tired all of a sudden.

  “This one too,” the warden said, pointing at me. “Get some mage restraints on her immediately.”

  “Me?”

  “After what you just did to us? You’d better believe it.”

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to! I don’t even know how I did…”

  “You need her, Peck,” Cass said. “You need her free.”

  “You shut your mouth, inmate!” the warden practically screamed at her. “You have no idea what you’re in for! I will do what…”