Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  It was unwise to startle a feeding tiger, and it wouldn’t do to walk up on Kel like this announced. Fly snapped his fingers and held his hand up, and a small ball of light appeared in his upraised palm. It wasn’t quite as bright as a light bulb, but it filled the alley with enough light to let him see what was going on.

  Kel had her prey, the man she’d lured into the alley, pushed up against the wall with her hand on his chest. His face was a shocked mask of terror and agony; eyes wide and staring at nothing, mouth held open in a silent scream. His entire body trembled as Kel pressed her hand more firmly into his chest and worked her death magic Trick on him.

  The sudden light drew her attention. She kept her hand on her victim, but spun her head to face Fly, teeth bared in a savage snarl.

  “Stay back!” she said.

  Her eyes were black, completely black, and her teeth had grown outwards into sharp fangs. Her fingernails had grown long and thick and black as well, looking much like the claws of the ghouls she was so adept at creating out of the dead.

  Fly had seen her like this only a few times before, and only ever since the damage that was done to her mind at the prison. This was Kel at her most feral. She rarely needed to use this Trick to transform her body into a killing machine, considering her other powers, but ever since her mind had been shattered in the fight at the prison, Fly had seen her revert to using it several times, even when it wasn’t necessary. It was yet another symptom of her loss of control; when she was like this, she became a wild animal on the loose… untamed, untrustworthy, impossible to predict.

  “Kel,” Fly said slowly, holding up his free hand to show her that he wasn’t armed. “Kel, it’s me. It’s Fly.”

  “You can’t have it! It’s mine!” she hissed at him. “You always try to take what’s mine! You can’t have it!”

  Oh, shit, Fly thought. She was having another bad episode. Kel usually seemed to be able to keep herself together once she’d had her way with her victims, but if she went too long before taking another, her mind seemed to get further and further afield.

  “I don’t…” he began to say, but she interrupted him.

  “You always try to take it! You try to take what’s mine, and then you try to take me. Well, you can’t have it. You can’t have any of it! I’m not a weak little girl anymore; I’ll kill you, I’ll tear your life out of your fucking spine, I’ll...”

  “It’s yours, Kel!” Fly said. “It’s all yours! I’m not going to take anything!”

  He had no idea what she was talking about; when she was like this, Fly suspected that she was talking to someone from her past, not to him. But he also knew that there was no reasoning with her, not yet… not until she was done.

  “Stay back!”

  “Okay, okay!” Fly said, taking a step back. “Just finish what you’re doing there. You, um… you take it, or whatever, and then you’ll remember me, okay?”

  Kel stared at him with her all-black eyes a moment longer, her shoulders heaving with breaths of primal fury. Finally, she turned her attention back to her victim.

  The man’s mask of terror twisted even more horribly, and he sank to his knees in his agony. Kel leaned over to follow him down, keeping her hand on his chest, staring into his eyes. Slowly at first, then more rapidly, changes began to appear on the man’s face. It was most apparent in his skin; it first began to get pale, then it seemed to get dry, and then wrinkles began to form.

  Fly could only watch for a few seconds before he had to look away. He’d seen some ugly things while learning death magic from Kel, and had done some ugly things as well, but there were some places that Kel went where Fly didn’t want to follow.

  The Wither Trick was the one he hated the most. It took a long time, usually a minute or more, and watching a person age sixty years over the course of a minute wasn’t his idea of a good time.

  It hurt the victims, too; hurt them so badly that they couldn’t even scream, only let out a hoarse little rattle as they shook and trembled and died by slow degrees. By the time it was over, they were nothing but a gray-haired, shriveled husk, practically drowning in clothes which were now several sizes too large for what was left of them.

  Fly waited until he heard the body fall to the ground before he looked back, careful to keep his eyes on Kel so that he wouldn’t get a glimpse her victim’s remains. She stood up straight, her eyes and teeth and nails back to normal now, her face serene and calm.

  “Fly,” she said.

  He blew out a breath. Considering how powerful she was, seeing Kel get herself back under control was always a big relief to Fly.

  “Are you, um…”

  “I’m feeling better,” she said, looking down at her victim. “It always helps.”

  “We can’t stay here.”

  “Of course not. The body will be found soon enough.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant, we can’t stay in this city. We need to…”

  “We’re not going anywhere,” she said. “What we need is here. The end game is here.”

  “End game?” Fly said. “What end game?”

  “Soon enough. I’ve absorbed enough life from enough material over the last few weeks that I can start to make some moves and progress the game forward. You’ve spoken with the others?”

  Fly frowned. “They don’t like me very much.”

  “They don’t need to,” she said. “Their interests are aligned with ours. They want what I can give them.”

  “Do you think they trust you?”

  “They trust my power. They trust what I can do. They trust the plan.”

  “What is the plan?”

  Kel began to lead him down the alley, away from the corpse of her victim. “Soon. Soon, you’ll see it all. The sphere has power from what we did at the prison; not enough to finish the game, but enough to get us started. We have the power source. Now we need the means to use it.”

  “That genetic thing at Revival Tech, right? The machine, or whatever it is?”

  “Correct. It’s time to meet with Martin and Caleb and go over our next move.”

  “And at the end of all this?”

  “Power,” Kel said, and there was a light burning in her dark eyes as she said the word. “More power than you can imagine.”

  “You’re sure that… that you’re okay, right? Like, okay enough to do all this?”

  She turned on him. “Do you doubt me?”

  “No, no, no,” Fly said, holding up his hands. “I’m just saying, when I found you…”

  “When you found me?” she said. “Was that after I got you out of that prison, where you were rotting away for the rest of your life? Was that after I taught you to be something more than a pathetic second-rate street mage? Was it then?”

  Fly bit his lip.

  Kel took a calm breath before continuing. “Everything has gone the way that I have planned it. The sphere is here, in this country, powered and in my possession. You’re free from that prison. What exactly is the source of your doubt?”

  Fly glanced back in the direction of the withered corpse.

  “That?” she said. “A minor annoyance. Any residual damage done to me by that little Mentalist is easily managed. Once this is over, none of that will matter. And you… you will be more powerful than your wildest dreams.”

  “Okay,” Fly said. “Sorry, you’re right. I…”

  “Enough. Take me to Martin and Caleb,” Kel said. “And Fly?”

  “Yeah?”

  “In the future, you don’t need to tell me that I’m right. We will just assume it to be so.”

  Fly

  Man, I should’ve never listened to that death magic witch.

  I mean, sure, I was out of prison, and true, I was packing some serious magical punch that I never, ever thought I’d be able to throw down with, but still. Still. This woman was downright crazy.

  Not to mention the fact that she wasn’t the only one with residual damage from our little adventure at the prison. That little
Mentalist had messed with my head, too. First, she probed into my mind to find out what I knew, and ever since then… I can’t curse.

  I can’t. I just can’t. I try. I really do. I used to cuss like a sailor. It was practically a point of pride with me. But now… the words don’t come. It’s like, I know what I want to say, the spirit of it, but when it comes time to actually speak the words… there’s a blank hole.

  She did this to me; that… pain in the butt. That’s the best profanity I can come up with: pain in the butt. That’s the furthest I can go. I swear to God, if I ever get my hands on that little Mentalist, after she fixes what she’s done to me, I’m going to make her die slow.

  But crazy or not, I did owe Kel, and not only for what she’d taught me. During that last big fight at the prison, when Kel’s undead army finally overwhelmed the hub, one of the ghouls stopped and undid my mage restraints once the prison guards had all run off. I guess Kel must’ve tasked it specifically to do that.

  Once the restraints were off, I had barely enough time to stand up and pull myself together when the ghouls all started freaking out and screaming. It was like an instant migraine splitting my skull. Blue light started shooting out of their eyes and mouths, and then they all dropped. I had no idea what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t good. I got my skinny butt out of there.

  It wasn’t too hard to get some distance between myself and that prison; I got my start back in the day boosting cars. Not the old fashioned way, with the Slim Jim in the door to pop the lock and then twisting the little wires to hot-wire the stupid thing; one of the first Tricks I learned as a street mage was how to boost a car with magic.

  It was tempting as all get-out to take the Mercedes S500 that I saw, but that sort of ride is going to be missed fast and probably is all hooked up with that Lojack nonsense, and that will get you caught quick. So, I took an old Honda that I knew would be a safer bet.

  I’d made it just outside the city when she first called to me. That’s the best way I can describe it.

  Back when I was still in the prison, Kel had used the sphere as a conduit to communicate with me remotely. Once she’d gotten the sphere in her possession, she was able to broadcast her thoughts out to me… by instinct, I think, more than anything else. She later told me she didn’t even know she was doing it at the time.

  I don’t know what that little Mentalist did to her in the prison, exactly, but it sure messed Kel up good. The thoughts and images that came to me were disjointed, chaotic. It wasn’t a distinct voice in my head, like an internal monologue; it was more like flashes of what she was seeing or hearing.

  And her pain. I got flashes of that too.

  I tried to ignore it at first. I tried to keep driving and get as far away as I could from all the fallout caused by the massacre at the prison, but the flashes of dark tunnels and screaming faces and mental anguish kept coming, and I knew that if I didn’t find her, it would never stop and I’d end up going just as crazy as she had.

  And she had gone crazy. I’m here to tell you. When I found her, she was living in a series of abandoned subway tunnels near the park. We’d torn apart an entire prison not two miles away, and there she was, hiding in a hole smack dab in the middle of the city that was searching for us.

  Those tunnels smelled about as fantastic as you might imagine. I remember walking through them like I was on eggshells, trying not to get all that dirty gunk on my clothes or shoes as I travelled through the dirty, dark subway tunnels, following the images she was broadcasting into my mind, looking everywhere for her in that nasty place.

  And then, there she was. Her clothes were all ragged and dirty. Her hair looked like a rat’s nest. She looked worse than the homeless guys that had made a home of those tunnels before she came along.

  Well, the homeless guys who used to make a home of the tunnels, I should say. She’d killed and Withered maybe eight or ten of them by the time I found her. Kel had stolen the life out of that many people in an attempt to fix the damage that the Mentalist had done, and still, she was like a cornered animal when I found her.

  I can’t imagine what she must’ve been like right after the prison. As it was, I was barely able to get through to her. She kept raving about someone trying to steal her stuff, or have their way with her sexually, and it took a while for me to realize that she was talking about the past, not the present.

  Anyway, I managed to get her out of there and cleaned up a little. A few victims later, she started making a lot more sense, and she was able to tell me about the location of a safe house she’d set up before the whole prison situation, and life got a lot easier for the both of us.

  After that, it was basically her going out and sucking the life out of people to try to fix her shattered mind, and me trying to keep us from getting caught. That went on for almost two months, leaving a trail of bodies that started getting reported in the news and making me really freakin’ nervous.

  Then, a few weeks ago, a couple of other mages showed up. Kel knew them somehow from before. Some group they were all associated with. Whatever. They were a couple of arrogant jerks who wasted no time in talking down to me. I thought a couple of times about stopping their clocks, but you never know what sort of heat another mage might be packing, so I kept my peace, at least for the time being.

  Now she wanted to go meet up with them to talk over our next move. Martin and Caleb. I texted them the code to meet up on my burner phone and waited for the reply. They texted back that they would meet us at the safe house.

  Our safe house was really more of a safe apartment. Nothing fancy; not too expensive, not too cheap. Not a bad neighborhood, but not a swanky one either. The kind of place where people stay busy with their careers, keep their heads down, and don’t bother with talking to their neighbors. Kel was used to doing the whole “gray man” thing of blending in and not drawing attention to herself, with all the creeping around like an international spy like she’d been doing for… well, it sounded like she’d been doing it her whole life, actually.

  Not that she told me much about her life. I mostly had to piece things together out of side comments and little details that were let go by those two new chuckleheads who were always mocking me. I gathered that she was from somewhere in Central Asia or the Middle East, somewhere around there, and that her childhood had been pretty grim. She had moved around a lot and worked with a lot of different governments and organizations, but she didn’t seem to have any loyalty to any one of them.

  That was about it. Oh, and that she was as scary as the bogeyman, and more powerful than any other mage I’d ever seen… or even heard of, for that matter. On the drive back to our safe house, I found myself wondering yet again why I didn’t make a run for it… cut loose, head out, and be done with her.

  There were two answers. First off, she did deliver. Like I said, I was now a free man, and more powerful than I had ever dreamed of becoming when I’d been a street mage. Whatever she was planning, there was little doubt that at the end of it, there would be enough goodies to go around for everybody.

  Then there was the second answer. She scared the tarnation out of me. I’d watched her Wither countless men, and had seen the agony that it caused them up close and personal. God only knew what she would do to me if I abandoned her. So it looked like I would have to play it out.

  Martin and Caleb were waiting for us by the time we made it back to the safe house. Caleb actually had his nasty feet propped up on the coffee table; I think because he knew it pissed me off.

  “Oh, look who it is,” he said once he saw me. “The amateur.”

  “Ain’t no amateur here, son,” I said, but Kel stopped the argument from starting.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  That was it. One word, and everybody in the room knew to keep their mouths shut and let Kel have the floor.

  She took the center of the room and looked the two mages over. “You’ve been in contact with them?”

  Caleb took his feet off of the coffee tabl
e. “Just like you said. They want to meet. Public place. Big shopping mall out in the suburbs.”

  “Of course they want to meet. We have what they need. They can’t move forward without the sphere.”

  “And we can?” Martin asked, leaning forward in his chair. “Move forward, that is?”

  Kel nodded. “Using their equipment, and the Code, we can get the next phase going. And then, the end game.”

  “So… why the meet?” Caleb asked. “Why bother? We’re not going to give them what they want.”

  “No, we are not. This is their last chance to give in to my will.”

  “And if they refuse?”

  “Then we take them off the board,” Kel said.

  Caleb raised his eyebrows. “You want to go heavy, in a public place?”

  “The time for subtlety and staying in the shadows is coming to an end,” Kel said. “The prison was a warm up. What’s coming next will change the shape of the world.”

  “The Cabal is no joke, Kel,” Martin said, running his hands through his long hair. “I mean, everybody knows you’re a heavy hitter, but they aren’t exactly going to show up with their second string.”

  Kel nodded. “Good. Let them expose their best pieces so we can deal with them now.”

  “But we are going to try to negotiate first, right?” I said. “We ain’t going to go in guns blazing?”

  “Scared of getting your hands dirty, Flea?” Caleb said.

  “Fly. My name is Fly. And it’s not about that. You can’t go tearing up a shopping mall in the middle of the suburbs. Ever since 9/11, and with all the homegrown crazy terrorist crap since then, the malls have got cops all over them.”

  “Cops?” Caleb said. “I thought you street mages were supposed to be tough. You’re telling me you’re worried about a couple of cops?”

  “Those couple of cops got radios. They’ll call in a damn army down on top of us. So yeah, I am worried about that.”

  Kel shook her head. “It will be over too quickly for any of that. We will be gone before any realistic response time from the police. I have teleport capability, and so does Martin.”