Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “Yeah, it has!” Fly said. “As a matter of fact, it has! It ain’t right, doing that sort of thing to a man! I mean, this is… this is….”

  Mickey let him struggle for a second before saying it for him. “Bullshit? Is that what you’re trying to say, Fly? This is bullshit?”

  “YES!” Fly said. “Yes. That is what I am trying to say.”

  He took a moment to compose himself before continuing.

  “Listen,” he said. “Listen. This is all a big mistake, okay? I didn’t come here to hurt you, I just wanted you to fix me, that’s all.”

  “Oh, right, right,” Mickey said. “I believe you. Really, I do.”

  “No, now, just listen…” Fly said, but Mickey held up a hand to stop him.

  “Hold that thought, Fly. My phone’s vibrating again. Don’t go anywhere,” she said, chuckling at her own joke as she went back into her bedroom to retrieve her phone. “Ha! Go anywhere. Your legs are paralyzed.”

  Fly struggled fruitlessly to move his legs, but still, it was as if they weren’t even there. He was stuck on his knees, mage restraints on his wrists, when Mickey returned to him, her phone held in one hand, her pistol casually pointed at him with the other.

  “Hi, Cass,” she said into her phone. “Yeah, I know, I got him. No, I mean, I got him, like in mage restraints… hang on. Let me put you on speaker.”

  Mickey fiddled with her phone for a second, careful to keep out of arm’s reach of Fly.

  “Say hi to Cass, Fly.”

  Fly kept his mouth shut and looked away from her.

  “Fly’s a little upset with me. Apparently, he can’t say ‘motherfucker’ or anything else like that ever since I interrogated him at the prison.”

  “Ever since you violated my civil rights at the prison!” Fly shouted.

  “See?”

  “But you’re okay?” Cass’s voice said over the phone.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Be careful, Mickey. We don’t know if Kel came there with him.”

  Mickey shook her head. “I don’t think so. She would’ve made an appearance by now, I think.”

  “Still. Keep your guard up. We’re on our way to you.”

  “Okay,” Mickey said, ending the call and putting the phone in one of the pockets of her robe. “Oh, my gosh! I just thought of something!”

  “What?” Fly said.

  “I get to interrogate you again!” Mickey said with a big grin. “Wow! How do you feel about that, Fly?”

  Fly bit his lip and looked down at the floor, his shoulders slumped.

  “Aww,” Mickey said, sticking her bottom lip out in a phony pout. “Poor death mage. I’d feel bad for you, except, you know, you were going to murder me.”

  All Fly could do was shake his head, stare at the floor, and wonder how it had all gone wrong for him.

  Cass

  What a goddamn mess. Dead agents, dead civilians… The only silver lining in all this was the fact that we had that piece of shit Fly in custody.

  We left Michael behind at the scene of the massacre to coordinate with local PD and some of our remaining FBI agents to deal with the mess, and went to collect Mickey and Fly. I was in quite a panic until she finally answered the phone; my first call to her had gone to voicemail, and I’d feared the worst.

  Dread was behind the wheel, and he almost killed us all with as fast as he drove across town to her apartment. Even after I did get her on the phone, he sped the van through the streets like a lunatic on fire. Thank God it was late and almost nobody was on the roads.

  So much worry, and when we all rushed up the stairs and through the door to Mickey’s apartment, there she was, standing calmly in her robe like nothing was going on, pointing her little pistol idly at Fly. The death mage was on his knees, wearing mage restraints and looking like somebody had told him his winning lottery ticket wasn’t valid after all.

  “Hi guys,” Mickey said with a little wave. “Careful. Don’t let the cats out.”

  Just like that, we knew everything really was okay. We gave her a couple of minutes to get dressed while we packed Fly into the van; after Mickey had restored the function to his legs, that is.

  I have to admit, I was a little jealous. Being able to instantly paralyze somebody’s legs? Kind of a handy Trick.

  Once Mickey was ready, we took Fly back to the local FBI office and handcuffed him to a table in an interrogation room. Michael told us to wait until he got there to proceed, so I sat in there with him, staring at him in silence, with Lysette standing behind me.

  There’s something about complete silence that drives a person crazy. Try it out some time. Sit in a room with someone face to face, looking at them blankly, saying nothing. See how long it takes before it feels like the air is turning into taffy in your lungs and you’re practically screaming inside because you’re so desperate to fill the silence.

  It worked pretty quickly on Fly. He shifted around in his seat. He avoided our gaze. He huffed and sighed, and finally, he screwed up and tried to talk some shit like a tough guy. I guess he was trying to regain some of his mojo after getting his ass handed to him by five foot, zero inches tall Mickey.

  “So, what, this is supposed to intimidate me?” Fly said, giving us a defiant shrug. “You think this is the first time I’ve been in an interrogation room? I ain’t afraid of you. Either of you. This beanpole you got standing behind you, I dropped her skinny butt back at the prison with a…”

  Lysette shot forward like a snake, slamming an open palm down on top of the metal table with all of her supernatural strength. It sounded like a gunshot in the close confines of the room; Fly jumped in his seat and shrieked like a little schoolgirl.

  Full disclosure; as loud and sudden as it was, it actually startled me pretty badly, as well.

  “God, no!” Fly shouted, drawing as far away from Lysette as the mage restraints that chained him to the desk would allow. “You keep her away from me!”

  Lysette straightened back up and smiled. “You piss your pants awfully fast once you meet somebody you can’t push around.”

  “This isn’t…” Fly said, shaking his head, “…this isn’t right. You can’t do this. I want a lawyer. I got rights.”

  The door to the interrogation room opened up and Michael came in, followed closely by Mickey. As scared as Fly was of Lysette, his reaction to Mickey was absolute terror.

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Fly,” Michael said. His face was scowling; he was practically radiating fury out of his pores, he was so angry.

  “I know my rights…”

  “You have no fucking rights!” Michael said. “You conspired with a foreign national to commit acts of terrorism on US soil. I could Guantanamo Bay your ass.”

  I’d never heard Michael so much as curse, much less drop the F-bomb before. Fly must’ve sensed how bad the situation was for him, because of all the people in the room, he looked at me… me… as if I was the most reasonable one.

  “That’s right, Fly,” I said. “You screwed up on a whole new level. You were just a street thug and a lifer in prison; now, you’re a full-blown enemy of the state. Welcome to the big time.”

  “You do not have the right to remain silent,” Michael said. “You do not have the right to an attorney. You have no rights. You’re wanted for terrorism, mass murder… I’ve got a dozen dead federal agents, Fly. I can do anything I want to you.”

  Technically, that wasn’t true, but Fly didn’t need to know that.

  “I didn’t do that dead federal agent thing,” Fly said. “That was all Kel, taking pieces off the board, I….

  “Taking what?” Michael said. “Pieces off the board? You think this is a game?”

  “No, no, that’s how she talks!” Fly said. “Kel, I mean. Chess metaphors and all that. I didn’t have anything to do with that ambush, I wasn’t anywhere near…”

  “Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter.”

  Fly swallowed hard and looked around the room, trying to avoid Michael’s di
rect gaze. “Look. Look, I know things, okay? We can make a deal…”

  “I don’t need to make a deal,” Michael said, nodding over his shoulder toward Mickey. “I have her.”

  Mickey gave Fly a little wave, and then Fly really started to talk fast. His voice was like a little kid who was running so fast that they were tripping over their own feet.

  “No, no, no!” Fly said. “We ain’t got to go that route! Listen, this is bigger than me, bigger than Kel, there’s other… other people, I’ll tell you all about it…”

  “Fly,” Michael said. “Slow down.”

  “Okay, okay,” Fly said, pointing at Mickey. “You just keep her away from me.”

  “Where is Kel now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fly said, adding once he saw me look at Mickey, “I swear! I swear! She didn’t tell me! But I do know where she’s going to be.”

  “That meeting he and Kel were talking about, when I was listening in,” Mickey said.

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m supposed to meet her tomorrow at the mall. Eleven a.m. We’re all meeting.”

  “All?” I asked. “Who else?”

  “On our side, there’s me, Kel, and these two… jerks, Caleb and Martin. Caleb’s a Striker mage… I’m not sure what Martin is.”

  “How do they fit in to all this?”

  “Kel knew them from before, somehow. They were part of some group. They call it the Cable.”

  “Cable?” Michael said with a frown. “Do you… do you mean ‘Cabal’? The Cabal?”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s it,” Fly said. “Cabal.”

  “You’ve heard of them, Michael?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Rumors. Nothing concrete. This…”

  Michael stopped and looked at me. I knew what he wanted to say. This is big. Whatever this Cabal was, it had really caught Michael’s attention. When you’re in the middle of an interrogation, though, you don’t want to tip your hand on something that’s important to you. You’ll end up losing the upper hand.

  “Listen, if you want my help, I will help you, okay?” Fly said. “You keep the death penalty off of me and I will do whatever you want. You don’t understand. I want out. Kel’s gone crazy.”

  Mickey let out a little snort. “Gone crazy? Like she wasn’t before?”

  “No, no, you don’t understand. Before, she was just, like, cold, you know? Like Stalin or something; kill a whole mess of people and not blink an eye. But now…”

  He shook his head before continuing. “Now she’s different. Unhinged. Whatever you did to her back at the prison, it messed her up bad. She talks to herself. She gets, like, disconnected from reality, starts talking to people that aren’t there. If she Withers someone…”

  “Withers?” Michael asked.

  “It’s a Trick of hers,” I said. “She ages someone sixty years in sixty seconds.”

  “It’s more than that,” Fly said. “She steals your life. Pulls your life out of you and uses it to heal herself. It makes your body all dried up and messed up…”

  “We’ve seen her victims,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, it’s some sick business, but it seems to smooth her out for a while. But the craziness comes back. And as powerful as she is… it ain’t safe to be around her.”

  “Tell me more about this Cabal,” Michael said. I could tell he was picking his words carefully so as not to sound overly interested.

  “I don’t know much,” Fly said. “Those two jerks, Caleb and Martin, they used to be a part of it. And the people we’re supposed to meet, they’re all in it, or a part of it, or something.”

  “Why are you meeting?” I asked. “And why the mall?”

  “Public place,” Fly said. “So nobody starts anything. This ain’t a friendly meet.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “They want the sphere,” Fly said. “The one from the prison. And Kel wants something from them. They’re in some sort of stalemate; I think she’s trying to break it.”

  “What does she want?”

  Fly shrugged. “She plays her cards pretty close to the chest, you know?”

  Michael turned to look at Mickey. Fly’s eyes went wide, but before he could say anything, Mickey shook her head.

  “He’s telling the truth. He’s not holding anything back,” she said.

  Michael turned back to face Fly, who blew out an audible sigh of relief. His shoulders slumped forward like he’d just been given a stay of execution.

  “All I know is,” he said, “it’s got something to do with some kind of a code.”

  “A computer code?” I asked.

  “A genetic code. I think. I’m not sure. But it’s something that company, Revival Tech, was working on.”

  I couldn’t help straightening up in my chair. Of course. Of course those assholes were involved. It seemed like my life couldn’t go two steps forward without my stepping into some foul bullshit that Revival Tech was dumping on the world.

  “They’ve got some sort of… I don’t what,” Fly said. “A machine, maybe; she didn’t really talk about it. But Revival Tech has it. They can’t use it, though. They need a power source.”

  “The sphere,” I said.

  “The sphere,” Fly said. “Kel has it. They want it.”

  “And she wants what they’ve got,” I said.

  “For what purpose?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know,” Fly said.

  “Fly,” Mickey said in a warning tone.

  “I don’t!” Fly said. “But, I mean, it’s got to be about power. It’s always about power with Kel. That’s all she cares about; not money, not anything… only power. Whatever that code thing does, you can bet that it will make her more powerful. A lot more powerful.”

  “Let’s step outside for a moment,” Michael said to Mickey and I. “Lysette? Would you keep our guest company?”

  “Happy to,” Lysette said.

  “Oh, come on, you gonna leave me in here along with this skinny super ninja psycho?” Fly began to protest, but we left the interrogation room and closed the door on his pleas.

  We joined the rest of my team in an adjoining room, where they had been observing the interrogation though the one way glass. Dread’s face was as hard as granite.

  “Revival Tech,” he said.

  “It always seems to come back to them, doesn’t it?” I said. “Michael, what do you know about this Cabal?”

  “Not much,” Michael said. “I do know there’s a task force on them, but we know even less about them than we did about Kel. This is top priority. We have to be at that meeting.”

  He seemed lost in thought for a second, and then shook his head.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “We’re dangerously short on manpower. Our strike team is gone; I can rush a request on another out of D.C., but it’s almost six in the morning and the meeting is only five hours away. They won’t have time to assemble and make it here on time.”

  “You have a strike team,” I said. “Us.”

  He shook his head, and I knew I was going to have to sit through another lecture about how he couldn’t arm ex-felons.

  “You know I can’t. I will need you there as backup, especially Jolly in case people get hurt. Shifty and Mickey can be armed. The rest of you, non-lethals only.”

  “Non-lethals?”

  “Batons, pepper spray… you can use flashbangs if you want.”

  Oh, swell, flashbangs, I thought. Because that’ll be a load of help against a master level death mage and a gang of her superfriends. Thanks, Michael.

  I kept that on the inside, though, and with my professional outside voice, said, “So how do you expect to be able to handle this, then?”

  “We’ll have to use our plainclothes agents, and local PD if possible. I’m not sure how much I can pull together this quickly.”

  “Get a Wreck Squad from the locals,” I said.

  “Even if we can on this short of notice, they’ll still have to be staged far enough away that Kel o
r the Cabal won’t spot them and get spooked,” Michael said. “This is a mess. We need more time.”

  He was right about that. Dealing with Kel all by her lonesome would be bad enough; but the way it sounded, there would be two serious mages with her and probably three or four more meeting with her from this Cabal that Fly had mentioned.

  There wasn’t enough of anything; not enough time, not enough resources. With this level of threat, we should have a goddamn army in that mall, staged no more than a stone’s throw away from the action. Not only that, but this sort of operation would take days, if not weeks, to plan out properly to minimize the effect of Murphy’s Law.

  We had five hours. And no army. Plainclothes FBI agents, almost none of which had any magical firepower or defenses. Any locals that we could scare up on short notice would have to be set up so far away that if something did go sideways, they’d be minutes away when mere seconds mattered. Otherwise, someone like Kel would spot them a mile off and simply never show up.

  “We can’t take them all, Michael,” I said.

  He knew I was right. I could tell by the way he fretted and frowned, though, that this was going to be a tough pill to swallow.

  “That mall is going to be full of civilians,” I continued. “That’s a lot of people in harm’s way if this goes wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to take them all as much as you do,” I said. “But if…”

  “I said, I know!” he said. “It’s… if we only had a little more time! And with no strike team…”

  “She took them off the board,” I said. “Like Fly said. Kel’s making chess moves. That’s why she didn’t stand and fight last night; she took out our strike team, knowing that without it, even if we found out about her meeting with the Cabal, we couldn’t be ready for it.”

  Michael’s face got hard. “I want her. No matter what else… Kel is the priority.”

  “Agreed,” I said.

  “Put a wire on Fly,” Dread said. “Record the meeting, get audio and video on the Cabal, ID them if we can. Then afterwards…”

  “Afterwards, we follow Kel out until she’s secluded and take her,” I finished for him. “We’ll need a teleport screen to keep her from escaping.”