“And the ghouls were coming and I couldn’t run fast enough and I got so scared that I hid in one of the cells and I made myself invisible. I’m really sorry.”
“Mickey. I meant about Kel. What did you do to Kel?”
“You’re not mad about me running away?”
Cass gestured painfully at the dead ghouls lying near her. “I’m pretty sure you just saved my ass, so no, I’m definitely not mad at you.”
“Oh. So, I was hiding in the cell over there, and I heard her talking about what she was going to do to you, and I peeked and saw that she let her shield go down finally. Then I snuck up on her...”
“She didn’t see you?”
“I made myself invisible, remember? Since I was invisible to her, it worked on the ghouls, too, I guess, because they didn’t see me either. And then, I just turned her up to maximum.”
Cass shook her head. “What does that mean?”
“Remember when you bluffed her earlier, telling her about how I fried people’s brains out or something? I got to thinking, how could I actually do that? So when I snuck up on her, I cranked every neuron in her brain up to maximum. Blasted her with every input possible, at the maximum level possible. It would be like a car horn right in your ears, a spotlight right in your eyes, being freezing cold and burning hot all at once. But not just that. All of your emotions; hate, rage, fear, love… and your memories, too. On a scale of one to ten, I turned her brain up to eleven. Maybe twelve.”
Cass helped me pull myself to my feet. “What do you think that did to her?”
“That’s a good question,” I said with a shrug. “I’ve never done it before. But it messed her up pretty badly, I’ll bet.”
“And that agony must’ve transmitted out through the ghouls,” Cass said. “Of course, you could’ve just shot her with your pistol.”
I looked down at my side, and yeah, sure enough, I’d completely forgotten that I had a pistol holstered on my belt. Bad Mickey.
“You did great,” Cass said to reassure me. “Really. Nice work, Mickey.”
Everything in my body hurt, but I couldn’t help grinning a little with pride. “Thanks. But she still got away.”
“With the sphere, too. But at least it’s over.”
“Do you think the others are okay?”
“Let’s go find out,” Cass said, leading me back toward the hub.
“Cass?” I said, bringing her to a stop.
“Yeah?”
“Don’t… do it, okay?”
“Do what?”
“You know. Adjani. Escaping. Don’t do what you’re planning on doing.”
She stared at me for a little while. “You looked in my head.”
“Dread’s, actually, right before the attack. I was trying to get some of his confidence, and… well. Please don’t do it. You’re not a murderer. Don’t let your anger make you do something crazy.”
“You don’t understand. What they did to me…”
“Was awful. And terrible. And you want revenge.”
Cass was quiet for a bit. “Yes.”
“My dad used to say, that if you kept chasing after all the people who did something wrong to you, you’d end up wasting all of your time in that chase. And then they end up winning anyway, because you spent all your time and energy on them, rather than on making your own life better.”
Cass looked at me. “Your dad said that?”
“He says a lot of stuff like that. He’s that kind of dad; you know, pot belly, receding hairline, wears a lot of sweaters.”
Now she looked down at the floor. “Mickey, I … I don’t know where to go from here.”
It was so strange, seeing her like that. Cass was a ball of muscle and toughness and attitude, who always seemed to know exactly what it was we should be doing… not only what she should be doing, but what all of us should be doing… so to see her lost and directionless was jarring, to say the least.
“I don’t know,” was all I could think of to say. “But I’m exhausted and I hurt all over and I never think straight when I’m like this. Maybe… maybe you can just rest a little bit, you know? And once you’re not so tired… you’ll see things more clearly. Everyone says you’re a tactical genius; you’ll figure out a better way to improve your situation then a crazy murder spree.”
Cass stared at me again for a bit, then said, “I never really intended to go through with it. I was… so angry, I guess, that I wasn’t thinking clearly. It was just thoughts. Just words. I never meant to go through with it.”
“But if you kept telling yourself that you did mean it, you might have ended up believing it, and then you might’ve gone through with it. People talk themselves into doing bad things all the time.”
Cass shook her head at me and smiled. “You’re full of surprises, Mickey. I thought you ran and left me, and you ended up saving the day. I start to think you’re just a naïve kid, and you drop a bomb of wisdom on me.”
“I did save the day, didn’t I?” I said with a big grin.
“Yeah, well, don’t let it get to your head,” Cass said. “God! Those things I said to Dread. I was such an awful bitch, lashing out like that.”
“He’ll forgive you,” I said. “Come on, Cass, he’s crazy about you; you don’t need to be a Mentalist to see that. Just tell him that you’re sorry.”
We picked our way through the corpses lying all over the hub. The bodies were piled everywhere; it looked like somebody had shot a horror movie and forgot to clean up afterwards. I edged around the massive body of the golem, trying my best not to touch anything icky and dead, when Cass pointed out the empty mage restraints hanging from a nearby desk.
“Check it out,” she said. “Fly’s gone. Must’ve gotten loose somehow in all the confusion.”
We made our way towards the gatehouse, and to our relief, there they were, sitting in the hallway… Dread, Lysette, Shifty, and a few others, each waiting their turn for Jolly to put them back together. As soon as he saw Cass, Dread shot to his feet, rushing over to her and grabbing her in his arms, practically crushing her.
“You’re okay,” he said. “You’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” she said, resting her head on his massive chest. “I… I shouldn’t have said that awful shit to you, Dread. I’m so sorry. I was pissed and talking crazy and… it was wrong.”
“Damn right it was,” Dread said. “Hurt every single one of my feelings.”
Cass looked up at him, saw he was joking, and then buried her head back in his chest, punching him lightly on the arm. “You know, if my arms weren’t so torn up, I’d say we should go find an empty cell and… you know… make up.”
“Jolly,” Dread said. “Stop what you’re doing and fix Cass. Right now.”
“But, I’m…” Jolly began to protest.
“Jolly!”
“Okay, okay,” Jolly said, and came over to fix Cass’s wounds.
They disappeared into one of the cell blocks once Jolly was done, their arms linked together. I shook my head. I mean, it was sweet and all, but as awful as we all felt, I couldn’t believe they were actually able to even think about sex, and I said as much to Jolly once they’d left.
“Clearly, you have never been to prison,” he said.
“Mickey, you’re going to want to get rid of your guns,” Lysette said, joining us. “When the police come in, you don’t want them to mistake you for a hostile.”
Back in the hub, I’d seen her get all messed up and thrown across the room by the golem, but now she was standing up straight and she looked like nothing had ever happened to her. Well, her clothes were all ripped up, and Jolly couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off whatever parts of her anatomy that her torn clothing gave him a peek at, but other than that, you never would’ve known she was just knocking at death’s door.
“You sure you’re okay?” Jolly asked her, looking up quickly to make eye contact once Lysette caught him checking her out.
“Yes, Jolly, I’m fine,” she said. “Thank
you.”
Jolly’s eyes lit up and he practically started beaming. He started to stammer something barely intelligible to her, but by the time any sounds came out, Lysette had already walked off to check for more survivors.
“Did you hear that?” he whispered to me once she left, nudging my arm. “She actually said ‘thank you’!”
I didn’t have time to answer; the front gates opened and about a million cops ran into the place, rushing all around us, shouting out a bunch of orders and pulling us apart. I got lost in the flurry of blue uniforms; the next thing I knew, I was in the same damn room where all this started, where I first met Dread.
A couple of EMTs checked me over, and then a bunch of detectives asked me over and over again what happened. It felt like I was in there forever. I was so exhausted; now that the nightmare was over, my body started to shut down, and I found myself practically falling asleep in my chair even as the police asked me all of those questions.
They eventually figured out that I wasn’t an inmate or a bad guy, and collected my personal information so that they could follow up with me the next day. After that, one of the detectives escorted me out to the front hallway where the bodies were still being cleaned up, leaving me by the gatehouse leading to the outside world.
It was strange; once the cops told me I was cleared to finally go home, I almost didn’t want to leave. Not that I wanted to stay in that shithole of a prison, especially with all the bodies and blood and awful memories filling the place.
But I found myself standing at the front gates, not wanting to leave just yet, staring back into the hub, trying to catch sight of Jolly or Lysette or Cass or Dread. We’d been pulled apart so abruptly; I wanted to catch one more look at one of them. But I didn’t see any of them at first. There were too many people swarming around all over the place.
Finally, after staring for a while, I caught a glimpse of Lysette, standing still in the middle of all that movement, as if she were somehow above all that crazy hustle and bustle. She saw me and looked at me for a while, in that way she looked at everyone, as if she were studying you from behind a thick pane of glass. She had a pair of blue mage restraints on her wrists, and after we looked at each other for a few seconds, she raised a hand and waved goodbye to me.
I turned to walk away and out of nowhere, I started to cry. I don’t even know why I was crying, but once it started, it spiraled out of control until I had to stop there on the sidewalk outside the prison, hunched down in a ball, sobbing like a baby.
Maybe it was that after everything I’d been through, all those emotions needed to be let out of me. I don’t know. I don’t even know how long I sat there crying outside the outer walls of the prison, shivering a little in the cool evening air, with the blue and red lights of countless cop cars playing over me.
Someone finally came over to me and asked me if I was okay and I waved them off. That was enough to get me moving. I decided that I was simply too damn tired to try to drive myself back to my apartment, so I got an Uber and tried my best to not pass out on the ride home.
I couldn’t stop thinking about them; the people who had kept me alive. Cass, Dread, Lysette, Jolly, Shifty… they hadn’t known me at all before today. I was nobody to them. But they did everything they could, including risk their lives, to keep me out of harm’s way. And now I’d never see them again. I never had a chance to say thank you or even goodbye.
I didn’t know exactly what to think about that. But I didn’t like it.
I was so exhausted. Once the Uber guy dropped me off, I dragged myself up the stairs to my apartment, wondering how I was ever going to be able to have a normal day after today. I made it all the way up the stairs and had the keys in the door to my apartment before I realized… I’d left my big purse with my work tablet in it behind at the prison.
God damn it. Some shitty days never end.
***
Cass toyed idly with the handcuffs chaining her to the table. It had been two days since the incident at the prison… that was what the TV reports were calling it, the “incident”. The entire world seemed to know about the disaster at the prison by now; endless requests from the media kept pouring in through her attorney for interviews, statements, even movie rights to her story.
Trubuilt 187 was now out of commission; the loss of the sphere, the physical damage to the cell blocks, the deaths of most of the prisoners and staff, all added up to the survivors being transferred to nearby prisons while the authorities decided what to do with them. For Cass, that meant a cell in a much more modern, minimum security prison, with access to television and her lawyer.
That wasn’t who she was waiting to meet today, though. She wasn’t sure who she was waiting to meet, actually; the guards had come and escorted her to this room without a word as to who her visitor was.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out. The door opened and a clean-cut man in a conventional suit and tie came in; she’d seen enough federal agents in her day to know one when she saw one.
“Michael Hughes, from the Federal Bureau of Investigations,” he said by way of introduction, sitting down across from her and setting a handful of files on the table. Some of the papers spilled out of their folders, and Cass could see that they were reports on her and Dread and the others.
“What’s on your mind, Michael from the FBI?” Cass asked.
“I understand you’re suing Revival Technologies,” he said. “Something about illegal experimentation.”
“Dread’s idea.”
“Yes, well, that and your rather… heroic… attempts to stop the incident at the prison, and the Justice Department seems willing to consider a lighter…”
“Why don’t you skip to the part where you tell me why you’re here?”
Michael nodded and smiled at her. “Okay. I’ll get right to it. You’re the only people we know of who have ever actually seen Kel and lived. We didn’t have so much as a photograph before two days ago. And now… you went toe to toe with her, and lived.”
“She got away.”
“Yes. Yes, she did, and we need to find her. We’ve been trying to track her down for a while now, and now that we know she’s here, in this country, having smuggled a device of unknown power in with her…”
“You…” Cass leaned back, hardly believing what she was hearing. “You want me to work with you, don’t you?”
Michael gave her a smile. “They said you were direct. They also said you were the best at what you do. So yes. Yes, I want you to work with me at the FBI.”
Cass held up her chained hands.
“We can help with that,” Michael said. “This is a special case, to say the least. A master level death mage, running loose in the United States with a magical device that can do God only knows what? Who knows what her agenda is, or what foreign powers she might be working for?”
“So you’re going to let me out of here?” she said. “You guys called me a terrorist, remember?”
“I’ll be the first to admit,” Michael said, “that we may be a little quick to attach that label to some people. But given the circumstances of what Revival Technologies did to you… listen, this wasn’t exactly an easy sell to my supervisors.”
“No shit.”
“However, considering how high the stakes are, I managed to convince them that you are our best chance to stop Kel before she could do something even worse than at the prison. I mean, imagine what she could do at a crowded stadium…”
“You don’t have to sell it to me. I know up close and personal just how dangerous Kel is.”
“You’ll be under house arrest,” Michael explained. “You’ll have an ankle monitor on you at all times… the rest of the details, we’ll figure out. But I need you…. we need you… to help us catch Kel before she does something catastrophic.”
Cass found herself staring at the table. How about that, she thought. Turns out Dread was right about second chances.
“Dread,” she said. “Dread, too.”
“I assumed as much. Dread’s got the same deal as you. I figured you were a combo deal.”
“And Shifty?”
Michael shrugged. “Shifty is on administrative leave from SWAT, pending investigation for arming prison inmates during a riot.”
Cass stared at him. “Are you kidding me?”
“Hey, don’t look at me. That wasn’t my call.”
“But you could help him out.”
“A position with us at the FBI would definitely make for a soft landing for Shifty, should SWAT not come to their senses.”
Cass stared at Michael for a few moments, tapping a finger on the table idly as she thought things over. The hell with it, she decided. If we’re going to get the band back together, we’re going to get the whole band back together. New players and all.
“I’ll need a Healer,” she said.
“Oh, I see. You want this, uh… what’s his name?” Michael said, flipping through his paperwork.
“Jolly,” Cass said. “Everyone calls him Jolly. Yeah, I want him.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem. He’s a free man, now. The courts reviewed his case, and decided his sentence was overly harsh given the altruistic nature of his crimes. That, and his good behavior overall, and his participation in the defense of the prison… he’s been released with time served. He’s even registered now. So as long as he keeps his nose clean…”
“Lysette.”
Michael sighed. “Lysette… is a problem.”
“Oh, come on, Michael. You know the case they sent her in for was bullshit. She told me all about it.”
“Maybe so,” Michael said. “Maybe so; I don’t know all the details. What I do know, is, Lysette has done some seriously dark things in her time. I don’t know how much she told you, but she wasn’t only with SOCOM, she did a lot of black ops work…”
“I don’t care,” Cass said. “That’s in the past. You want Kel? You want me? You’re getting all of us. There’s a reason why we survived. We stuck together. We’re sticking together now.”
Michael stared down at his files, frowning. “Maybe… maybe I can figure something out. I hope you realize how much I’m sticking my neck out for you. This had better pay off.”
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 44
