Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

“I think maybe you eat too much red meat,” she said.

  “Very funny. By the way… ‘Freeze, Turkey?’ Yeah, Mickey, the ‘70s called… they want their cheesy cop show lingo back.”

  Mickey looked like she wanted to retort, but nothing came to her, so she shrugged and said, “Okay. That was a pretty good burn.”

  “You want to put the cuffs on him?”

  “Yeah, I want to put the cuffs on him!” she said. “Are you kidding? I’ve been dying to cuff somebody.”

  “You got to cuff Fly just last night.”

  “Yes I did, and I loved it,” she said. “Gave me a real taste for putting handcuffs on bad guys.”

  “All right, Supercop, so, roll him over and get some mage restraints on him.”

  “Yusssss,” Mickey said happily, digging some mage restraints out of a leather pouch on her belt and putting them on Oswald’s wrists.

  “Cass,” I said into my sleeve microphone, “we’ve got Oswald. Do you have Adjani?”

  “Oh, I’ve got Adjani,” Cass’s voice came back over my earpiece.

  “Is he alive?”

  “Yes, he’s alive,” Cass said, sounding annoyed. “Probably wishes he wasn’t, though.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “I heard from Shifty,” Cass said. “They took out Caleb and Martin.”

  “Dead?”

  “As a doornail.”

  “Well, two dead and two captured, including Dr. Adjani,” I said. “We didn’t get Kel, but at least this wasn’t a total clusterfuck.”

  ***

  “This was a total clusterfuck!”

  Cass fidgeted in her chair as Michael paced back and forth in front of her, at least as much as the tight space would allow. Her entire team, minus Jolly, was crammed into his office, watching Michael fret and fume non-stop. Jolly was at home, trying to get some rest after his exhaustive efforts in healing civilians after the shootout at the mall, and frankly, Cass was envious of him. He didn’t have to listen to Michael’s meltdown.

  “It’s really not that bad…” she began, but Michael was having none of it.

  “Not that bad? Not that bad? We’ve got dead agents, dead civilians… this is the op on the apartment building all over again.”

  “Not exactly. We did gain some ground on this one. And Jolly managed to save a lot of people.”

  Michael stopped his pacing briefly. “Where is Jolly, anyway?”

  “I sent him home to get some rest. He was on the verge of passing out after healing so many people at the mall.”

  “A lot of people still ended up dying, including four out of the six agents we had in the restaurant,” Michael said.

  “Yeah, because those agents were practically ripped in half by magefire. There are limits as to what Jolly can do. Let’s keep in mind, he did save two of them. Not to mention… what? A dozen civilians? As well as patching together a bunch more who might’ve been permanently injured?”

  “This is what I’m saying,” Michael said, leaning on his desk and gripping it hard, as if he could somehow purge his anxiety by squeezing it into the wood. “That much collateral damage? And we got… what? Two prisoners?”

  “Two high value prisoners. Adjani’s a big catch. And Oswald…”

  “Who we can’t interrogate, because he’s still in the hospital with his jaw wired shut.”

  “I did that,” Dread said, raising a hand. Cass couldn’t tell if he was apologizing, or bragging.

  “Why didn’t you have Jolly heal Oswald so we could immediately interrogate him?” Michael asked.

  Cass shrugged. “Jolly had to prioritize treating the civilians. So for the moment, yeah, Oswald’s confined at the hospital.”

  “Unconscious at the hospital,” Dread said.

  “Yes, we’re all very impressed with how hard you punched the bad man, Dread.” Cass said.

  “Just saying.”

  “Anyway,” Cass said, “there are other ways of interrogating Oswald.”

  “Are you talking about me?” Mickey said. “You’re talking about me, right?”

  “You people are missing the point,” Michael said. “A Wild West shootout, in the middle of one of the biggest shopping malls in the country.”

  “I told…” Cass began to say.

  I told you we should’ve….. was going to be how she started that sentence, but Dread grabbed her leg and squeezed it hard, out of sight of the others. Cass winced, but got the message. Keep the comments under control.

  “I could tell that there was going to be a fight either way,” she said. “It wouldn’t have mattered if we were there or not. Kel and the Cabal were going to duke it out, one way or another.”

  “In fact, we probably controlled the damage,” Dread said. “Scratch that. We definitely kept the civilian casualties down. If we hadn’t been there…”

  “… imagine how bad it would’ve been,” Cass said, finishing his sentence for him. “No Jolly to heal the wounded. None of us to put down the hell hounds and tie up the mages in fighting us rather than tearing the mall apart.”

  “I doubt the Deputy Director is going to agree on that point,” Michael said. He kept running his hands through his hair, as if he didn’t know what to do with them. “And then there’s Fly. God help us on that one, letting a prisoner escape.”

  “We had an ankle monitor on him.”

  Michael let out a derisive snort. “Yeah, for all the good it did. We found it in the restaurant. He got it off somehow. Did you know he could do that?”

  “Nope,” Cass said. “Skinny little fucker’s more resourceful than I gave him credit for.”

  “This is serious, Cass. There’s going to be a lot of questions. Like how you and the other convicted felons on your team got their hands on guns.”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Cass said.

  “Don’t bullshit me, Cass.”

  Cass waited a beat, and when Mickey sat and said nothing, gave her a little nudge with her leg. Mickey frowned and looked at her for a few seconds, and then her eyes brightened with sudden understanding.

  “Actually, um, sir, that was me,” Mickey said. “I did the shooting. Lots of shooting. I’m not a felon, and that means I… get to… carry guns.”

  Michael leveled a hard look at her. “You’re telling me that you did all of that shooting in the mall?”

  “Uh, yes, I… am?” Mickey said, looking around at the others, then she cleared her throat and nodded. “Yes. Yes I am.”

  “With that little pistol you carry?”

  “I have two other ones in my purse. Big ones. Big big ones. Because I love guns. Love them so much. Got to live that pew pew life, you know?”

  Cass pinched her eyes shut and tried to keep her groan on the inside. Jesus, Mickey, she thought. We’ve really got to work on your bullshitting.

  Thankfully, Shifty spoke up and punctured the tension in the air. “Sir, I was armed as well. I went through two, three magazines at least during the series of engagements in the mall.”

  “Whatever,” Michael said, waving them off. “You can try to sell it to the deputy director. He’s on his way up from D.C. with some sort of specialist.”

  “On their way here?” Cass asked.

  No wonder he’s freaking out, she thought. Some honcho actually drags his lazy ass up out of his chair to make the trip up here personally? Someone’s panties really are in a twist.

  “Teleporting in any minute now. So we’ll all get to explain how we lost a prisoner and let two other members of the Cabal escape with little or nothing to show for it.”

  “We took down four bad guys,” Dread said. “That’s not nothing. In addition to Adjani and Oswald, we took out two seriously dangerous street mages.”

  “Dead,” Michael said. “Dead street mages. We can’t learn anything from dead men.”

  “Their personal effects will be at the morgue with their bodies,” Dread said. “Maybe that will tell us something.”

  “Personal effects,” Michael said, look
ing at Lysette. “But it’s not like we can actually interrogate them and get some real information. You couldn’t have taken them alive?”

  Lysette’s nearly imperceptible shrug was her only answer.

  “Does she ever talk?” Michael said.

  “Not very often,” Cass said. “Look, Michael, it’s going to work out. We’ll have the video from the mall…”

  “No, actually, we don’t,” Michael said. “It’s all been erased.”

  “What do you mean?” Cass asked.

  “I mean, it’s all been erased,” Michael said. “Anything from the restaurant, any of the footage from the security cameras in the mall. It’s all gone.”

  “How?”

  “Another great question that I won’t have an answer for when the Deputy Director gets here.”

  There was a knock on the open door. A portly man in a baggy suit stood in the doorway, looking them over.

  “Hello? Is this Michael Hughes’s office?”

  “I’m Michael Hughes. You must be Dr. Keaney,” Michael said. “Dr. Keaney, this is the team that engaged Kel at the mall.”

  “Oh, perfect,” Dr. Keaney said, digging a small journal out of his jacket pocket and consulting it briefly. “But aren’t there… six of you?”

  “Our Healer mage is at home, resting,” Dread said. “He was pretty much wiped out from helping causalities at the mall.”

  “Of course, of course,” Dr. Keaney said. His head was large and almost completely bald; between that, the pot belly, and his thick glasses, Cass couldn’t help but start calling him “Egghead” in her mind.

  “Dr. Keaney is the FBI’s top expert on the physics of magic,” Michael said by way of introduction.

  “Oh, ‘top’ is very…” Keaney said, waving Michael’s compliment off. “Well. I do what I can.”

  “Maybe Egg… Dr. Keaney…. can explain what the hell happened to us at the mall,” Cass said. “Right before it all kicked off.”

  “What do you mean?” Keaney asked.

  “Some sort of Trick. It affected all of us; everyone in the area, really. Felt like… severe pain. Takes your breath away kinds of pain. It incapacitated all of us for a few seconds.”

  “Sounds like an Agony Trick,” Keaney said. “This is extraordinary.”

  “Yeah, it sure felt extraordinary,” Shifty said.

  “No, I’m serious. This is the only first-hand account we’ve had of this. It’s a Death magic Trick that we’ve only heard rumors about. It projects debilitating pain outwards from the mage; anyone caught in the area of effect experiences, well…”

  “Agony,” Cass said. “Sounds about right. I guess Kel used that to gain the upper hand in the restaurant before the fight started.”

  “What other capabilities did Kel or the other mages display?” Keaney asked, producing a pen out of his jacket pocket and beginning to scribble in his journal.

  “Nothing really new with Kel, other than the whole Agony thing,” Cass said. “Our Defense charms worked against her Death Trick.”

  “Who made those?”

  “I did,” Shifty said.

  Keaney nodded in appreciation. “Good work. I’d like to discuss their construction in further detail with you later. What about you? Did you see anything new during the engagement at the mall?”

  “Sort of new, I guess,” Shifty said. “We saw one of those hyena-men…”

  “Bouda,” Keaney said, never looking up from his journal as he scribbled.

  “What-a?”

  “Bouda. They’re called bouda.”

  “Whatever. We saw Martin conjure one up; I mean, saw it step out of the black smoke or whatever the hell is it they come out of.”

  “You actually saw the conjuration occur in real time?” Keaney said. “You are very fortunate.”

  Shifty grunted. “I’m very fortunate that I carry a gun, and that I can put up shields to keep that thing from eating my face.”

  “What I mean is, very few people have actually witnessed a…”

  Another knock on the open door, and Keaney shifted out of the way to let an FBI agent stick his head in.

  “He’s here,” the agent said.

  “Dennett? The Deputy Director?” Michael said.

  “Yes. He wants everyone in the conference room.”

  Michael blew out a slow breath and rose from behind his desk. “All right, well… let’s not leave the deputy director waiting, people.”

  Cass hung back a bit, falling in next to Mickey as the group filed down the hallway toward the conference room. Keaney was in front, chattering away with Shifty, who looked like he was half annoyed and half amused with the FBI’s top specialist in the physics of magic.

  “Are we going to get in trouble?” Mickey asked. “If they keep asking about where you got your guns…”

  “I think they’ve got fatter fish to fry,” Cass said. “Let’s just try to make sure there’s no Fudge Dance Incidents.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Mickey said. “You just make sure you don’t get mad and say something to get us in hot water.”

  “I never…” Cass said, then caught Mickey’s look. “Okay. Point taken.”

  They entered the conference room. Every FBI agent left in the local office was in there, along with Deputy Director Bill Dennett, who stood at the front of the room, looking over a file he held in his hands.

  Dennett was a severe looking man in a grey suit with a tight buzz cut who looked like he started every day with an angry round of pushups. He looked up briefly from his file, saw Cass and her team, and set the file aside.

  “I’ll get right to it,” he said. “I want to know why we’ve got a pile of dead agents, dead civilians, and dead suspects when we were supposed to have intel and prisoners. Which one of you is Wheeler?”

  “Here, sir,” Cass said.

  “You were team leader?”

  “Actually, sir, I was…” Michael began to say.

  “Pipe down, Michael. I’ve already read your report. I want to hear from the convict.”

  That’s not a great start, Cass thought, but forced a smile and said, “Where should I start, sir?”

  “What were you doing in the mall in the first place?”

  “Observation. We were following up on a tip that Kel was going to meet with the Cabal, to discuss some sort of code. The Intron Code, they called it in the restaurant.”

  “Intron Code?” Keaney said. “You’re sure they said Intron Code?”

  “Does that mean something to you, Doctor?” Dennett asked.

  It was Dread who answered. “Introns are non-coding portions of DNA, sir.”

  Everyone in the room stared at Dread in surprise, including Cass. Dread waited until the eyes were off of him before mouthing the words I Googled it to Cass. She tried to hide her grin as Keaney continued.

  “He… he’s right, actually. DNA is a long continuous strand of individual nucleotides, for which we use letters as shorthand. A, T, C, G. They form a sort of alphabet, using three letter combinations called ‘codons’… like AAT, for example… to code for a particular amino acid. These amino acids, in turn, link together to build proteins.”

  “That’s super neat and all, but…” Cass said.

  “Don’t interrupt, please. The strange thing about DNA is, only a portion of a given DNA strand is actually coding; that is, it codes in an intelligible fashion for those proteins. Another part… actually, a rather substantial part… is non-coding DNA. Essentially, gibberish. We call the non-coding parts ‘introns’. In fact, there’s even more…”

  “I think we get the idea, Doctor,” Dennett said. “What is the purpose of these non-coding introns?”

  Keaney shrugged. “We don’t know. Most of the reasonable speculation centers around introns being involved with the regulation of the normal, coding sections of DNA. If that’s true, and someone were able to de-code those unintelligible sections of DNA…”

  “They might be able to artificially affect gene expression,” Cass said
.

  “Dramatically affect, potentially.”

  “For what purpose?” Dennett asked.

  “There’s no way to know,” Keaney said.

  “Sure there is,” Cass said. “We ask Adjani.”

  “Not you,” Dennett said. “Definitely not you. Not with your previous involvement with Adjani, from the prison incident. Compromises the case. Quite frankly, it should not have been you to arrest him at the mall.”

  “Quite frankly, there wasn’t a lot of choice in the matter,” Cass said, immediately regretting her decision to start off with ‘quite frankly’.

  Me and my big mouth, she thought as she watched Dennett’s expression harden.

  “Maybe you could tell me how a simple recon and arrest turned into a massacre that continues to dominate every television news cycle as we speak,” Dennett said.

  Cass forced herself to swallow hard on a retort and keep her voice even. “We didn’t cause that.”

  “No?”

  “No. In fact, we’re the reason it didn’t turn into even more of a body count.”

  “There shouldn’t have been any body count at all, Wheeler. That’s my point. Perhaps you can explain to me why you and your merry little band of misfits felt the need to turn the second largest shopping mall in the country into your own personal bullet festival.”

  “We didn’t…” she began to say, then clenched her fists and forced her voice down to a conversational tone. “We weren’t at the mall to engage in a firefight.”

  “What were you there for?”

  “Like I said, we were there to observe,” Cass said. “We’d received information from a source…”

  “This… Fly individual?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who escaped in the chaos. We’ll get back to that, don’t worry.”

  Cass felt her cool start to slip and her temper heat up. “Fly told us that Kel was meeting with this Cabal that everybody seems to be so interested in. During that meeting, Kel started freaking out, talking crazy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s fucking nuts. The point is…”

  “The point is, if she was so damn dangerous, why were you there to provoke her in a public place? Resulting in how many deaths at the mall, and now I’m getting a report that Kel has murdered a family at a park nearby, and left the bodies in some sort of dried and desiccated state? Does this sound like a positive outcome to you?”