Heat Stroke (Hedge Mage and Medicine Book 3)

by SA Magnusson

“Enough. Just hold your barrier in a way that I don’t get struck.”

  “I won’t allow anything to reach you.”

  I pushed out, and as I did, I used another spell, striking the nearest operative. As the spell exploded into them, I saw it was the Paralytic. Once again, the operative fell, dropping to the ground, this time near Veran. I couldn’t see what he did, but I could feel the effect of the spell he wrapped around the operative, holding him to the ground.

  I pushed out, throwing another coin, and as I triggered it, it missed.

  I changed, switching to the next coin, throwing it, and triggered it a little sooner. This time, there came another explosion, a blast that rivaled the last. As before, part of the roof was thrown free, and debris rained down around us.

  “That is impressive,” Barden said.

  “You don’t have to be quite so calm about it.”

  “I’m just impressed a hedge mage is the one protecting three high-level mages.” He looked at Cynthia as he said it, and I wondered if she had heard.

  There was at least one more on the rooftop, and I sent power through my spell, pushing outward, and used three coins, needing to make sure I didn’t miss. I was getting tired, and I didn’t know how many more I would be able to trigger before I was completely spent. I might be able to attack them, but one of the challenges of being a hedge mage was that I didn’t have the same strength a full mage would. Unfortunately, I grew weak rapidly. Maybe there was a way of triggering these spells which didn’t take nearly as much power? I needed to work on that. It was one more thing I needed to add to my list of assignments, tasks that needed to be completed to ensure I was able to survive all of this.

  Triggering the spells this time, it came as a cascade. First, there was a grunt as one spell struck, then a thud, and then an explosion. The explosion was delayed, and it was far more powerful than some of the others had been. As it struck, I felt Barden grab me, twisting me to the side, and he held his hand up behind him. In doing so, he sent a spell outward.

  We crouched there for a moment, the debris from the rooftop explosion raining down around us. Barden continued to hold onto his spell, wrapping me in a barrier of protection.

  “It’s a shame we don’t know what spell that one was,” he said.

  “I probably have more.”

  “Perhaps when this is all over, we can search through the ruins of the buildings and see if we can’t figure out which one has such a delightful explosion.”

  Cynthia looked over at him. “You should not encourage her.”

  “On the contrary, I think I must encourage her.” Barden turned his attention to me. “Are there others?”

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t know how much strength I have left, Barden.”

  “Then borrow mine,” he said softly.

  I nodded, and gripped the necklace, drawing on power. Cynthia and Veran watched me, an unreadable expression on their faces.

  I pushed outward, using a triggering spell, focusing on everything all around me. As I pushed, sending that power all around me, I detected nothing. That should reassure me, and yet, the same time, it didn’t, not like it should.

  “I don’t detect anything else, but what if they are hiding from us?”

  “Then we will be prepared for the next attack.”

  Cynthia stepped forward, sending power flowing out from her. “You gave her a charm tied to you?”

  “It was freely given, Cynthia Michaels. You don’t need to report me to the Council.”

  “Why?”

  “I know you will find this difficult to believe, but I am interested in ensuring Dr. Stone does not end up destroyed by the organization. She doesn’t have the power they do, and though she has shown significant potential, she needs help. She is a hedge mage, after all. Which means her power is limited until she begins to understand how to ration it.”

  I smiled to myself. That was what I had just been thinking about.

  “Besides, she has only used it in times of great need.”

  “You almost died twice because of me,” I said.

  “I wasn’t so close to death,” Barden said, waving his hand dismissively. “Besides, I have far more reserves than what I suspect you could draw through that charm. Now the wand, on the other hand…”

  “You gave her a wand?”

  Barden turned to Cynthia. “Are you going to challenge me on this, too? Again, it was freely given. It is tied to my own power, and not anyone else’s. So again, I tell you there is no reason for the Council to be concerned.”

  “It is most unorthodox,” Cynthia said.

  “So is having a dark mage on the Mage Council. Things are changing, Cynthia Michaels. I am only trying to ensure we change with it in a way that ensures our survival."

  “Our survival, or that of the Dark Council?”

  “The Dark Council is now part of the Mage Council, so our survival is all of our survival. In my mind, that includes the hedge mages.”

  I pushed out again, borrowing power from Barden once more, and in doing so, swept that power away from me, looking for a sense of resistance. I sought anything that might tell me there were any other operatives here. As before, I didn’t meet with any resistance, nothing that suggested they were here.

  Had we won? I stepped forward, away from the protective barrier Barden had placed. I reached the nearest of the fallen operatives and reached into his pouch, scooping out his spell coins, and stuffed them into my pocket.

  Moving on from him, I made my way to the next operative, and like the last one, I reached into his pocket, scooping as many of the coins as I could from him. They were in a pouch similar to the one Matt had given me, and like the one Matt had given me, there were protective spells on it.

  There were several other operatives lying on the ground. I moved from one to the other and, stopping at each, I dipped into their pouches, scooping up all of their coins, and adding them to my collection. I had no idea how many I might need, but suspected it was more than I already had. Some would go to Barden, and depending on what we faced inside, I wanted to be ready.

  “What is she doing?” Cynthia asked.

  “She,” I said, looking up at her, “is pilfering all the spells she can. We’ve already established I don’t have the same level of ability as you and your husband, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use these.”

  “I’m not so sure you should be using those,” Cynthia said.

  “Because of what they do?” I held the coins in hand, jingling them for a moment before setting them into my pocket. “I felt the same way at first. But the longer I’ve been using them, the more I understand if I don’t use them against the operatives, they’ll use them against me.”

  Cynthia studied me. “I think you’ve been spending far too much time around Barden.”

  I got to my feet. There were several other fallen operatives, and I hurried from one to the next, scooping their spells. There was a certain sweet irony in the idea I would use their abilities against them, and by the time I was finished going through the whole group, my pockets were full, practically jingling with the coins, like a kid who had emptied a piggy bank.

  As I looked around, I wondered how many more we might encounter. There had to be over a dozen here, and the fact there were so many suggested that whatever we were heading into was important to them.

  I looked to Barden, and could see the same expression of worry on his face. “You don’t like this, do you?”

  “There’s nothing about this that makes me comfortable. I don’t know what we might be heading into, but I worry.”

  “Why?”

  “Because this was just the attack they wanted us to know about. What happens when they hit us with the attack they want to conceal from us?”

  And once we went inside, I suspected we would find out exactly what would happen, and it might not be anything we could withstand.

  Barden glanced over at me. “You don’t have to go in here, Dr. Stone.”

  “After al
l of this, now you want to keep me out of it?”

  “If it were up to me, I would’ve kept you out of it from the beginning, but seeing as how you were the one to have revealed what we were dealing with, I thought you needed to be a part of it. Now I am not so sure.”

  I turned my attention to the door leading into the warehouse. Matt was in there, somewhere. Perhaps John Adams. And whatever else they were up to, whatever plan they had in mind in order to capture my friend. If I didn’t go in there, if I refused, then I would be a willing accomplice.

  I refused to do that. “We aren’t going to get in there any faster by standing here,” I said.

  “I will take the lead. You—"

  Barden didn’t get the opportunity to finish. Another flurry of attacks suddenly exploded around us.

  18

  I reacted the way I reacted every time I encountered an attack like that. My first instinct was to push out, to use whatever connection I had to power to force against the suddenness of the assault. As I did, I thrust power away from me. This time, I felt resistance. There were too many.

  “Barden, I can’t tell how many there are…”

  Barden was down, and he lay motionless, blood pooling around his head. My breath caught. Veran and Cynthia remained upright, power swirling around them, but they were caught under the flurry of an ongoing assault.

  I darted forward, reaching Barden, and dipped my finger into the blood pooling from his head, and dragged a circle around him. It was hasty, and wasn’t as neatly made as I would like to have done, but it was the only thing I could think of. As soon as I was done, I borrowed from his power, sending a surge through the charm on the necklace, and formed a barrier that surrounded him. If nothing else, I would protect him from another attack. I had a hard time believing he would survive whatever had happened to him, but he was a powerful mage, and powerful mages were able to restore themselves when others couldn’t.

  Too late, I realized my mistake. In forming the barrier around him, I had set myself outside of it. In doing so, it made it so I could no longer reach him, not without disrupting the barrier, and if I did that, I exposed him to additional attack. Until we knew just what we might be facing and how injured he was, I didn’t think I should do that, even if it meant not figuring out what had happened to him right now, or seeing if there was any medical intervention I could do.

  “You should get inside,” Cynthia said. She tried to hide the tension in her voice, but wasn’t doing as good a job as I knew she wanted to.

  “I’m not going to leave you,” I said.

  “I’m not sure there’s anything more you can do that we won’t be able to,” she said.

  “I don’t want to leave Barden.”

  That was the issue for me. I didn’t know Cynthia and Veran well, and the fact that they were here, that they had come on behalf of Kate, didn’t surprise me in the slightest. They would do anything for their granddaughter, and that was something I completely understood, more so after having seen the obvious affection they showed for her. Kate had once told me they had tried to keep her out of the magical world as a way of protecting her, fearing she was a dark mage. Having spent as much time with Barden as I had, I understood what they were trying to do by separating her. Living as a dark mage was dangerous. It meant a life apart, and being outside of magical society, outside of those who traditionally supported the Veil.

  Though I might not be as concerned about Cynthia and Veran—other than that I didn’t want my friend’s grandparents to get injured—I did care about Barden. And I wanted to do whatever it would take to ensure he wasn’t caught up in this. He deserved better. He didn’t deserve to be trapped by these attackers, and regardless of his willingness to get involved, all of this was because of my involvement. Had I never met Matt Gillespie, and had we never heard about the organization, we wouldn’t have had this issue.

  “I will keep him safe,” Cynthia said.

  With that, she stepped on one side of Barden while Veran stepped on the other. She nodded to me. “Go. Get inside. Find a place to get safe.”

  That was the problem, though. I didn’t say it to Cynthia, but I didn’t know if there was a safe place inside. If they were so willing to attack Matt’s place, then I had a hard time believing anything inside would be safe, either. And yet, each time I pushed out with power, I detected an overwhelming number of attackers, far more than I would be able to withstand. This time, I would be doing it alone, without Barden for help, forced to use my own stores of magic, nothing more.

  Did I have enough remaining? There was no question I had enough spell coins, but the real issue wasn’t the number of coins I possessed but how well I’d be able to use them. Ration. Wasn’t that what Barden had said? I needed to ration how I used the coins, how I triggered them, and in doing so, I could have a better control over how much power I exerted each time I did.

  The continued onslaught left me cowering. After waiting, I raced forward. Reaching the door, I glanced back at Cynthia and Veran. They stood over Barden, power surging off of them, the nature of it enormous. An overwhelming sense of magic was exploding out from them, leaving my bracelet—and my arms—cold.

  As I looked up, I could make out several operatives on the rooftop. But maybe there weren’t as many as it appeared. It could be that they were using a spell to make it appear as if there were more, but if that was the case, was there even anything I could do?

  Scooping up a couple of coins, I flicked them quickly at each of the attackers I could see, and sent out just trace amounts of power, triggering them. As they struck, the operatives were either thrown back in an explosion—though a smaller one than the ones I had used before—or knocked unconscious. I couldn’t see what happened to them, and couldn’t tell if they fell from the rooftops, but didn’t have any sympathy for them if they did. The attack seemed to ease, so Cynthia and Veran were able to get a better handle on what they were doing, and they were put in less danger.

  The door was locked. There had to be a way for me to open it.

  The bracelet.

  That seemed to be the key to so much that I was able to do these days, and I pressed it up against the door, and then, with a surge of power through it, the door opened with a soft click.

  Hazarding one last glance behind me, I ducked inside.

  I expected an immediate attack, but none came. There was no onslaught of power, nothing. Strangely, there was an increased drawing of energy here. It was something I hadn’t noticed before, and the longer I stood there, aware of it, the clearer it became.

  Why here? That was the thing I didn’t understand. Not only did I struggle with what John Adams was up to, but it didn’t make sense why it would be here.

  I wasn’t sure if Barden was right about the intention, whether there was something to using a Faraday cage to hold someone of power, but the other part of what he said, the part about how Kate had considerable magic and that would make her a target, I did believe. It was too easy to think they would find a way to use that power. Even if they couldn’t use it, they would find a way of manipulating her, forcing her to do what they wanted. There was little doubt in my mind that if someone like John Adams and the organization wanted to hold Kate, they would be able to do so. That was why I had to do whatever I could to stop it.

  Looking around the entrance here, an electrical tingling left the hairs on my arms standing on edge. It was like when I had been near the generator. I had recognized the nature of that power, and in doing so, was able to feel that electricity working through it. It was an impressive sense, the kind of power that told me whoever was working here would be talented.

  I couldn’t shake the sense there was something I’d missed. It all had to do with why this place?

  There came movement in the darkness, and I backed up, trying to wrap a barrier around me, but hesitated. If I were to do that, I would be risking expending too much energy. Drawing on such a barrier took a considerable amount of power, and Barden had told me I needed to use
my magic wisely. I needed to ration it. Throwing out power like that was not rationing.

  Instead, I reached into my pouch, pulling a coin out, and flicked it in that direction. As it rolled across the ground, I sent a trickle of a trigger through it. It was barely anything, little more than a surge of energy, but when it struck, the spell trapped in the coin exploded. It slammed into someone, and they cried out.

  I raced toward the voice, and found an operative lying motionless. Had it been a Paralytic? I didn’t think it had, not with the spell I had reached for. And if it wasn’t a Paralytic, why was this guy motionless?

  Checking for a pulse, I found a weak and thready one. I had learned enough about the operatives to know they could conceal what they were doing. I had to wonder if that was what was happening now? Could he be concealing something from me?

  Rather than giving him the opportunity to surprise me and wake up and attack, I took another coin, placed it on his chest, and triggered it. It was a Stinger, and he screamed, writhing in place. At least I knew he had been faking it before.

  Reaching into his pocket, I came across his pouch, and took all of the coins he had. I wouldn’t leave him with any spells. When I was done, I sat back on my heels, looking around. There was one operative here, but the likelihood there was just one remained low. More likely, there would be more than one, and…

  Cold bloomed on the bracelet. I backed up, reaching for another spell. I wasn’t able to tell where I detected the bloom of cold, but it was somewhere in the room, near enough that I could feel the building presence of it.

  Considering my options, I didn’t have any good ones. The only thing I had was an excess of spell coins. I took the ones I had pilfered from this guy and sent several rolling across the floor. As they went, I triggered them one by one, going softly, with barely more than a touch. With each explosion of power, there came a surge of resistance, giving me an idea of where to find anyone else near me.

  There were three in here. I had no idea if the coins had disarmed them, but from the lack of response, the absence of a scream or anything else that would suggest they had been taken down, I didn’t think I had been successful.