The great voice laughed. “Fools. That material is already secured. Half of it is on its way to the storage site you requested and the rest will be delivered here, should you ever complete your task.”
The second man sounded skeptical. “You have proof of this?”
The bass descended into a rumble. “My word is enough for anyone with a modicum of sense. But perhaps you know of the various incidents this past Monday?” There was a pause. “All part of the plan to secure the explosives.”
Diana gave Bryant a light punch, and he nodded.
“Very well.” The Afghan sounded mollified. “We expect it will take another four days to reach the target.” His tone turned hopeful. “Unless you would like to assist with your special abilities?”
The man laughed. “Such work is beneath me, which is why you are doing it. Even if it were not, I am not at your beck and call.”
A third voice, also Afghan, joined the conversation with fiery indignation. “Who are you to say such things to him, to question us? We accomplished great deeds before coming to this country and will accomplish many more here as well.” His tone rose a notch. “You could make this easier, benefiting all, but your own arrogance and blindness make a fool of you.”
The first speaker’s voice became eerily calm. “It appears a lesson is in order.”
Bryant’s eyes widened, and Diana felt him move. They burst from the tunnel together, hurtled forward, and raised their rifles. They emerged as a cone of flame erupted from the wand held by a black-clad man and crossed the short distance to another figure. The flames enveloped their target and consumed the defiant worker more rapidly than any natural fire could have managed. There was enough time for the beginnings of a scream before the spell burned the vocal cords and the remains of the worker crumpled into a charred heap.
They appeared to be in another basement, this one smaller than the one at the start of the tunnel. Bryant yelled, “Everybody down!” and veered left. She echoed his command and sidestepped right. Heads snapped toward them, and each of the five presumed terrorists reached for weapons. The agents’ suppressed rifles generated tiny echoes in the small space as triple bursts stitched two of the enemies before they could bring their pistols to bear. The return fire from the remaining three resounded violently from every surface, and bullets lodged into the surrounding walls.
Bryant coughed as one caught him in the vest but continued to fire as he staggered back. Diana was in the middle of drawing a bead on her second target when things slowed down again. She dove forward while her instincts screamed at her to flee. The wash of fire sucked the oxygen out of the space she’d vacated and left her breathless as she lurched to her feet and scanned the area wildly.
The mage turned his wand toward her partner, and she screamed a warning. He dodged and darted behind the closest terrorist, and the flames washed over the enemy. She raised her rifle and fired a volley at the mage, who blocked them with a twitch of his wand—exactly like the bastard in the museum had.
But at least the fucker isn’t doing his dragon impression anymore. That’s something.
She flicked the selector to single shot and stalked toward him. The challenge forced him to maintain his defense while it preserved her ammunition. A cry indicated that Bryant had presumably dispatched the last terrorist. Additional rounds struck the mage’s shield.
He smiled at them and bared pointed teeth.
Eww. Not a good look.
“So very talented, Earth people. You saved me the trouble of killing them myself since most of the work is already complete. When you are dead, it will be a simple matter to finish the task.”
One hand dipped and gestured and a rock flew at Diana’s head. She dodged and rolled, flicked her fingers to lend it an extra tiny push away from her for safety, and came up shooting again.
Bryant’s yell added to the chaos. “Give it up, scumbag!”
The man merely laughed.
“Reloading,” her partner called, and Diana pulled her trigger twice as fast until the rifle clicked empty.
She returned the call and triggered the magazine release. The mage flicked the wand and hurled large crates at each of them, forcing them to dance out of the way. She scrambled to the side, afraid fire would follow, but instead, he conjured an opening that showed a bare room of polished stone.
“Oh, hell no,” Bryant said and broke into a run as their opponent stepped through. “Diana, go for reinforcements.”
“Bite me.” She was already in motion toward the portal. They made it through as the opening collapsed and she finished her dash with a diving somersault.
In the next second, she was on another planet.
The mage’s boots pounded into the distance as Diana dragged herself to her feet. She finished loading her magazine into the carbine and looked at Bryant. “What are you waiting for?”
He shook his head. “Expecting you to stay behind wasn’t realistic at all, was it?”
She grinned. “See, you’re already starting to get to know the real me. Good job.” She motioned with her rifle, and he led at a jog in the direction the wizard had gone.
It didn’t take long to find him. When the hallway opened onto a small room, he was there, and he was ready. He held an ornate wand in his left hand, and the other hand toyed with a glowing whip that seemed alive as it twisted and writhed on the floor beside him. He bared his stupid pointy teeth again in a wide grin. “It’s been some time since I’ve faced a real challenge. Usually, I must take on larger groups to find any satisfaction. But you are persistent. It will be a true pleasure to end your existence.”
Bryant spat in disgust. “This is your last chance to give this up before you get hurt, asshole.”
The mage laughed and flicked his wand at the man. A beam of light cut across the space between them and he was forced to dodge aside in a frantic roll. When it struck the wall, a small explosion threw shards of stone halfway into the room.
He has a blaster? Seriously?
She had no time to think as the whip snapped at her face. She raised her rifle to block it, and it wound eagerly around the weapon. The mage yanked hard, hauled the rifle from her hands, and twirled her as she slid out of the sling. She finished the spin with her pistol in hand and fired without aiming. He had already moved, and her bullets went wide. There was something weird about him, a shimmer that hurt the eyes, but she couldn’t quite identify it. The whip flicked at her again and she gestured, summoned her telekinesis, and batted it aside past the edge of her face.
Bryant growled belligerently. “Enough of this.” He charged the mage, weaving and shooting as he did so. The wand summoned the apparently standard-issue evil-mage shield to defeat the bullets, and the whip cracked toward the agent. He must have seen the attack on her because he sacrificed the rifle with the same dexterity Diana had summoned and landed easily. Without even the slightest pause, he hurtled at his adversary as he fired his pistol. When he was close enough, he flung himself forward in a flying tackle and missed entirely to impact into the wall behind and immediately slump, either dazed or unconscious.
There’s no way he’d misjudge that.
With this crucial information, Diana put the final pieces together and recognized the shimmer she perceived for what it was—another illusion. The wizard wasn’t where he appeared to be. She imagined he couldn’t be too far and fired a horizontal group of three bullets to the left, center, and right of where she saw him. The one to the left was deflected while the other two missed.
She showed him her non-pointy and reportedly quite attractive teeth. “Got you, smeghead.” He summoned his fire as she raced at him and he directed the wicked blast at her face. She slid beneath it, into where his legs appeared to be, and met no resistance. The left arm she threw out didn’t miss, though. It hooked around his ankle, and she yanked to break his balance as she added a telekinetic shove against his support leg. He shouted in surprise and the illusion vanished as he fell and lost the wand. She wrapped her legs around
him and gripped his foot to twist him into an Achilles lock. He screamed as she increased the pressure.
“It’s hard to concentrate,” she panted, “when your leg’s on fire, isn’t it, scumball?” He tried to speak, and she applied her weight with a small twist to draw another scream. Bryant stumbled over, looking dazed, and kicked the mage in the head with the point of his shoe. The man’s struggles ceased. She released him and trussed his hands and feet with zip ties. She connected them with another tie and rose wearily to her feet. Bryant freed a piece of the enemy’s robe with a small pocket knife and used it to gag him.
Diana smothered a yawn as the adrenaline that had kept her going began to fade. “Do you think that’s safe?”
He shrugged. “It’s safer than letting him talk.”
She nodded and registered the sudden onset of dizziness in enough time to put her back against the wall and slide down it with a modicum of grace.
Bryant sat beside her. “So, that was fun.”
Her laugh sounded weak and sickly. “You have an interesting definition of fun, Bryant. Remind me never to let you take me on a date.”
He snorted. “Do you want to go back?”
Diana looked blankly at him.
“I can cast a portal to send you to my apartment. You can get help from there.”
She thought about it. This had been a bad experience, and the memories it conjured up were worse. Screams of the dying echoed in her ears, and her guilt at surviving washed over her again.
Wearily, she closed her eyes and turned inward. Her therapists had taught her to observe her thoughts as an outsider and recognize that what she felt wasn’t necessarily Truth with a capital T. It let her get a little distance until she could ask herself the question her brain tried to avoid.
Can I handle dealing with magic like this all the time?
She ran a replay of the mission from the moment she’d parked her car and nodded.
Adequate.
She hadn’t been perfect, but she hadn’t been overwhelmed either.
I can do this. Mind over memory.
She stood and forced herself not to wobble. “No thanks. There’s still plenty to do here before we go home, don’t you think?”
The wizard’s bunker was small, only five rooms connected by short, narrow tunnels with no doors or windows. The room they’d appeared in was apparently kept vacant for arrivals and departures. They found his bedroom and another room filled with torture devices Diana preferred not to consider too closely. The fourth room held a large bathtub and related amenities.
The final room seemed to be a workspace—or maybe a playroom—and was triple the size of the next-largest. Tables were scattered in no apparent pattern and covered in unfamiliar tools and objects. They split up to search, and she discovered a dark wooden armoire with intricate carvings. She opened it and found a dozen black robes.
Of course.
As she pushed the door closed, her brain registered a strange hum that emanated from the bottom. She opened it again and dropped on one knee to push the robes aside. Her eyes widened in disbelief as she saw a troll, exactly like the ones she remembered from Saturday morning TV, staring at her with big eyes through the metal bars of a cage. He stood about five inches tall, had latte-colored fur, and his large pointed ears drew the eye away from his neon-purple shock of hair. A sad look covered his face, and he jerked back with a whine at irregular intervals, as if something was hurting him. She reached out and the air sparked, and she yanked her hand back with a curse.
Diana responded to his stress with the same tone she used with Max when he was anxious. “Okay, little guy, I’ll figure this out.” She lowered herself to her stomach and examined the cage and its surroundings. Finally, she found a small chip of stone that seemed out of place. The hand that extended before she’d thought about it was zapped.
She groaned.
Idiot.
“Okay, that one’s on me. Stupid move. Don’t judge.” The troll was clearly watching her but offered no comment on her idiocy. “I’ll be right back.” She stood and rushed from table to table in search of something long that wasn’t made of metal. A set of wooden tongs fit the bill. She returned and stretched them forward, fearing a snapping bite on her fingers, but it didn’t come. Her forehead creased in concentration, she rubbed them over and over against the chip until it broke loose. The hum stopped. She tried to open the cage but found it locked.
“If I were a stupid ugly mage, where would I hide the key?” She found it in the pocket of one of the robes and bent to the small prison once again. The troll literally bounced now, a wide smile on his face. She opened the door, and he bolted free and dashed up her arm onto her shoulder. Then, he grabbed her earlobe and squeezed it.
Bryant picked that moment to arrive, and she pointed wordlessly at the tiny creature.
He shook his head with a laugh. “Sheen, there’s only one thing I can say. Now, you’ve really done it.”
Chapter Eight
Bryant winced as he sank into the well-worn institutional chair. Special Agent in Charge Carson Taggart laughed at him, retrieved a bottle of ibuprofen from his desk, and slid it across the polished wood. The agent caught it and returned it in one fluid motion.
“I already had my daily dose.”
Taggart chuckled. “It’s only noon.”
“What’s your point?”
Shaking his flattop-crowned head, the ex-Ranger dropped the container back in the drawer. His voice was rough but friendly. “Okay, Agent Bates, this is where you drop the whining and report on the last mission.”
Bryant’s exhaustion showed in his sarcastic “Sir, yes, sir.” He realized he was slouching and pushed himself up with the chair arms. An aide arrived with two mugs of black coffee, and Bryant drank greedily. Thus fortified, he began his report.
“Penetration was by the book. They’d trapped the place to hell and back, which makes sense given what they were up to. I might have missed one, but she saw it.”
His superior raised an eyebrow. “Magic?”
“Yep.” Bryant nodded. “She definitely has something going on where hostile magic is concerned.”
Taggart leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers. “It sure would be nice to know what it is.”
“We could ask her.”
The other man’s headshake again failed to disturb a single black hair. It reminded Bryant of a perfectly mowed lawn. “It’s too soon. Let’s see what she reveals on her own. Continue.”
“When we reached the basement, they weren’t there. We figured out it was an illusion and dispelled it. That led to the tunnel, and the tunnel led to the basement of a building that must’ve been…what, halfway down the block?”
Taggart tapped a keyboard and squinted a little at the monitor on the corner of his desk. “That’s what the techs say, based on your GPS.”
“Anyhow, there were some unknown terrorists—”
“Known,” his superior interrupted. “Al Qaeda.”
Bryant’s eyebrows shot up. “Seriously?”
“True as the sunrise.”
“I thought they’d been folded into Al Arabiya?”
“It seems not. Or at least not all.”
He shrugged. “Wow. Okay. Anyway, Guerre killed some, we nailed the rest, and he tried to escape through a portal.”
“So naturally, you followed him. Why did you bring Sheen?”
A single laugh broke through Bryant’s restraint. “I didn’t bring Sheen. In fact, I told her to stay. She has chain of command issues.”
Taggart grinned knowingly. “All the good ones do.”
“Anyway, we brought him down as a team. She plays with others pretty well.”
“Could you have taken him alone?”
The agent thought for a second. “Maybe, if I got lucky. Probably not without some grenades or something. He was fierce.”
“Well, now he’s fierce in the Cube.” Taggart took an expensive bottle of bourbon and two etched tumblers from his
desk. He poured a tiny draught into each and slid one across, then raised the glass in a toast. “To another successful mission.”
Bryant leaned forward to clink glasses. “And to many more.” Both men drank, then expelled an appreciative sigh in unison.
The boss knows his whiskey.
“So, anything else notable?”
Bryant thought about Diana’s unique discovery and grinned viciously at the chaos the little guy would inject into her regimented lifestyle. “Not at this time.”
“Will you stop it?” Diana hissed, her hand over the mic of her phone. The troll now used the side of the couch she wasn’t occupying for gymnastics practice. He climbed onto the armrest to launch into a multi-flip floor routine, or up onto the back to do several tumbles in midair before he bounced into the cushions below. The finish of each invoked gales of laughter from the tiny being. Interspersed were shouts of joy and a constant undercurrent of chirpy babble she couldn’t comprehend.
“What? No, I’m sorry, there was a noise.” Her parents’ amusement was audible over the line. Normally, they talked by video, but even though they were the most open-minded people she knew, Diana wasn’t ready to reveal the presence of her new roommate.
Ha. More like life partner, it seems.
Several hours on Google researching trolls and human-troll pairings had not built her confidence. She found a decent amount of information on the former and very little on the latter, all of it connected to one specific pair. Leira Berens was a legend, as was her sometime-superhero companion. Diana realized she’d missed more of the conversation and tuned in barely in time to hear her mother say, “…about the new job.” An educated guess suggested that the words before it were “tell us,” and she launched into a quick, sanitized version of her adventures so far.
Magic Ops Page 6
