by B N Miles
“Always stirring up drama.”
She did a little chef’s kiss. “Love that tasty drama.”
He laughed and kissed her hair. “What do you think of all this? Should we have brought more people?”
“You know we couldn’t.” She let out a little frustrated breath. “The girls needed protection, so we have to make do with a small group.”
He nodded once and knew she was right, and besides, it was too late to change his mind. They were going to hit that Medlar facility, just the five of them, and hopefully Wade was inside. Maybe this would be the end of everything.
“Let’s get moving,” Jessalene said, rolling up a map and shoving it into her backpack. She was dressed in black head to toe and wore some advanced magically altered body armor that Lumi had built. They all had a pair, except for Nikki, who claimed it would only slow her down. Jared thought about going without his as well, but it was light and flexible enough to allow him free, easy movement, and so he decided it was better safe than sorry.
They set out into the woods, moving in a tight formation. Nikki scouted ahead, moving like a shadow among the trees. Not much moonlight filtered through the heavy canopy and Jared wanted to cast a light spell to make their trek easier, but they couldn’t risk being spotted, even so far out.
Nobody spoke. Every crushed branch, every trampled leaf set Jared on edge. They climbed up a long, steep hill, flitted from tree to tree, and eventually reached the crest overlooking a small valley with a hollowed-out central area. There, a simple, gray, blocky structure stood surrounded by parking lots.
They rested at the top and waited for Nikki to return. She reappeared almost as if by magic, stepped out from the shadows with a wicked smile on her face, and knelt down next to Jared.
“Security’s tight,” she said. “Guards around the perimeter, but there’s a gap around the back.” She took the map from Jessalene and pointed at a spot on the building. “I ripped open the fence line here, and if we wait for the guards to make their circuit, we’ll have about two minutes to get through.”
“Sounds doable,” Jared said, nodding.
“Easy.” Nikki rolled the map up and Jessalene put it away. “Any questions?”
Nobody spoke up. Cassie stared down at the building with a worried expression and Lumi seemed almost bored. They’d been through worse situations than this one, and he could see how jaded everyone had gotten, so used to the dangers their missions brought. He stood and moved out, leading their pack down through the woods and toward their destination.
Nikki kept pace with him and didn’t speak. They reached the edge of the forest and skirted along twenty feet back, deep enough that the shadows blocked them from being spotted by the Medlar guards. Jared saw them in the distance, small moving specks that slowly paced around the outside of the facility. Barbed wire wrapped around the top of the tall fence line and he wondered how Nikki had managed to cut them a hole.
They reached the designated spot and Nikki halted their advance. She nodded toward the fence and pointed, and it took Jared a moment to spot the long, uneven gash in the chain link. He glanced back at the girls and gave them a quick nod before moving toward the front edge of the forest. They were more exposed there, but they wouldn’t stay for long.
The guards did their rounds like clockwork, and as they passed and disappeared around the edge of the building, Jared ran forward first. He sprinted to the chain, followed by Jessalene, Lumi, and Cassie. Nikki came last, and Jared pulled the opening wide, letting the girls go in first. They slipped through silently, Jared followed, and then they all dashed toward the building.
They’d studied this place the best they could. Bea’s scouts had gotten close, and even broken inside in one instance, but the map she’d returned with was incomplete. Going in blind was a bad idea, but Jared knew they had no other choice, and the longer they waited, the more likely it was that the Medlar would complete their ritual and destroy the world.
Lumi reached the door first and pressed her hands against the lock. She didn’t bother being subtle: the electric bolt mechanism turned to ice then shattered into tiny pieces. The door swung open without issue and they piled inside.
They stood in the back of what looked like a large warehouse. The ceiling must have been two stories high at least, and enormous shelving units filled the place. Boxes sat on each level, stacked as far as the eye could see. Jared moved forward into the dim space, walking past row after row of boxes, his shoes echoing off the concrete floor. The smell of mildewing cardboard and thrift store rot filled his nose as he knelt next to one of the shelves and opened up a box.
Paper was jammed inside. He rifled through it, trying to get a sense of what it was for, but only caught sight of random numbers with no clear pattern.
“What is all this crap?” Jessalene whispered, looking inside another box.
Lumi grunted and drifted ahead. “Who cares. We should just burn it to the ground.”
“On the way out,” Jared said, distracted. “It looks like accounting materials.”
“Why the hell do they have a warehouse full of paper like this? Don’t they have computers?” Jessalene shook her head and held up a handful of documents. “This is insane.”
“Their organization has been around for a few thousand years,” Nikki said. “Maybe they’ve accumulated a lot of junk over that time.”
Jared shoved his box back on the shelf. “Come on. We should get moving.”
Jessalene let out a sigh. He knew it’d be hard for her to leave all this stuff behind. It was a wealth of information, and whatever was on those pages might be important down the line, but they didn’t have time to sift through even a small percentage of it all.
The warehouse stretched on into the gloom. They slipped forward and Jared felt like a ghost among the detritus of their organization, a rogue numeral in a spreadsheet, infecting the rest of the accounting. He agreed with Lumi, they should burn it all to the ground, no matter what it contained—he wanted to hurt the Medlar as much as possible, and destroying their tax records seemed like a reasonable move.
They reached the far side of the room and lingered at a door. Nikki went first, pulling it open and stepping into a tight hallway. Jared followed, with Cassie, Jessalene, and Lumi bringing up the rear. They moved past a series of closed doors, some marked with letters and numbers, and some entirely blank. They didn’t look like prison cells, and Jared couldn’t hear anything coming from inside them, so he chose to leave them alone and not risk getting caught trying to break into a janitor’s closet. The far end of the hall terminated at a T-junction.
Jared paused, straining to listen, but Nikki strode forward and turned left. He sighed and followed as the hallway opened up into a larger open room. It took him a moment to realize it was set up like a prison—there were cells ringing a central courtyard area along several floors reaching upward. A set of steel stairs climbed the center of the space and multiple guards were posted in spots throughout the room.
Nikki moved first. She blurred toward the closest group of guards, two men sitting at a table playing solitaire, and ripped the first guy’s head from his shoulders. The other managed a shocked cry before Nikki punched his face so hard his skull cracked and he dropped back onto the floor, a mangled pulp.
Jared moved toward the stairs. A guard at the top fumbled for a gun at his hip. Jared reached for a memgram and snapped it into position, slicing a shard of ice up through the steel, spearing the man through his torso. He grunted in shock as Jared ripped the ice shard up, slicing him in half. Guts and blood rained down through the slats in the steel floor.
Lumi began hastily opening doors as Jared moved up the stairs, covering himself in thick layers of hardened air. Another guard was crouched back toward the far wall and opened fire as soon as he reached the landing, but the bullets ricocheted and smashed into the wall. Jared snapped his fingers and the man’s body caught flames. He burned brightly, illuminating the space as Jared searched for more threats.
There were none. Below, Cassie and Jessalene helped open more doors, and the common space quickly flooded with confused and angry Meta women. Nikki joined Jared as he surveyed the area, shaking his head.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“This feels off, doesn’t it?”
She shrugged. “Seems like all the others to me.”
“There were barely any guards.”
She grunted at that. “Maybe they’re watching something else.”
“Maybe. Come on, let’s keep moving.” He waved to Cassie and pointed back the way they came. She nodded and started shepherding the women toward the exit. Jessalene stayed to help while Lumi climbed up to join Jared and Nikki.
He walked along the ramp and found another door toward the back of the second floor. It led into a series of passageways lined with more rooms, each one sickeningly similar to the rooms they’d seen in other facilities: rooms filled with tests, with machines, with medical equipment. The place stank like blood and disinfectant, and he could only imagine the fear that still lingered in the walls and the tile floors. At the end of the hall, they reached an elevator with a set of stairs next to it.
Jared went up. He wasn’t sure why or what he was looking for, but he knew there had to be more to this place. The door outside the elevator was locked, but Nikki tore it open easily enough and left the mangled steel leaning up against the wall.
The hall turned plush, with a thick carpet and gentle, muted yellow lighting. He gave the girls a look and nodded as they moved forward. The first door they came to led to an empty bedroom, the bed covered in fluffy blankets and pillows. The next was a bathroom with a sumptuous tub and a huge walk-in shower. The final door opened into a living room area, with a television, a long, red-velvet couch, and a bar to their left.
It was empty and quiet. “Look for anything useful,” he said, and began to rifle through a stack of papers set on a desk in the far corner. There was nothing interesting: bills, letters, and what looked like a diary. He skimmed the entry until he reached the bottom and sucked in a breath. “Lumi, look at this.”
She came over and read the page, her eyes skimming, narrowing, then going wide. “It’s him,” she said, surprised. “It’s Wieland.”
“You think this is real?”
“I can’t be sure. I mean, I don’t know what his handwriting looks like.” She waved the paper in the air. “But this has his name on it.”
“Sounds like the guy’s in bad shape.”
She shook her head and started reading out loud. “The girls are a bore. Nine of them respect me, not the way I need, and indeed, they sometimes whisper behind my back. It is intolerable, the silly bitches, the foolish swine. I’ll rip out their entrails—one of these days, I suppose. For now, the shots keep the worst of my inclinations at bay, and I do say, they’ve been quite pleasant.” She made a face and tossed the page back down onto the desk. “He’s a fucked-up piece of work.”
“Look at this,” Nikki called out from over near the bar. She held up a black laptop, the screen glowing white, a password prompt displayed. “Might be useful.”
“Take it,” Jared said. “We need to find Wieland.” He turned and walked to the door, pushing it back open, and headed into the hall.
As he reached the stairs again, he heard shouts echoing up the concrete. He nodded back at Lumi and felt her power glow around her as Nikki brought up the rear, a backpack she’d found in one of the rooms slung over her shoulders. They descended back down the stairs together until they reached the first floor.
The voices were coming from beyond the door. They were muffled but sounded pissed. Jared guessed there were at least twenty of them. He nodded at the girls and pulled his shields around him before kicking open the door and stepping out into a bright, wide-open warehouse space.
Jared didn’t react at first. It looked so familiar—the etchings in the ground, the altar in the center—that it made him pause and remember the horrors of the first facility they’d blown up. A group of maybe twenty soldiers were gathered nearby and were in the process of locking and loading their weapons, probably intent on chasing down and capturing the Meta girls Jessalene and Cassie were freeing. They looked surprised, but their shock didn’t last long, as Nikki waded into their midst with a sickening cackle, and the blood began to flow.
Jared tore forward with fire while Lumi chose lightning. Bullets and gunshots tore up the air. The smell of gunpowder was thick, mingled with smoke and blood. Jared burned the men closest to him, cindering their bodies while Lumi arced lightning into their midst, making craters in the floor and tossing bodies into the air.
Nikki tore them to pieces, laughing maniacally.
The soldiers didn’t last long. They weren’t prepared for a full-on magical assault, mixed with an up-close Vampire attack. They had no cover and were clumped up perfectly. Some of the men tried to retreat, but Nikki cut them off and ripped their limbs to shreds.
Only one man remained, backpedaling away, heading toward the center of the installation. Nikki moved toward him, but Jared called out before she could kill him.
“Don’t touch him,” he said. “That’s Wieland.”
Lumi grunted and released her power. “I thought that was him, but what the hell is he doing?”
“He’s not using his magic.” Jared advanced as the Medlar man turned and sprinted toward the altar. He pulled up his power and cut him off by creating a wall of flames. Wieland cried out and stopped in his tracks as a wave of heat blew over him.
“Don’t run,” Lumi shouted. “It’ll only make things worse.”
Wieland turned to them, his eyes wild. He looked gaunt and pale, his hair long and messy. Jared almost didn’t recognize him. The last time they’d met, he’d been cool and collected, but this was almost an entirely different man. He looked twitchy and raw and rangy now, like he’d been through a war and barely survived.
“You,” he said, pointing at Jared. Nikki moved toward him on his flank but didn’t get too close. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Where’s Wade?” Jared asked, stopping ten feet away.
Wieland didn’t pull up his power, which confused Jared, until he noticed the marks on his arms and the look in his eyes. Then he realized: Wieland was deep in the Need, so deep that he’d turned to drug use. He’d seen it before in his own family, how the Need could reach a tipping point and toss a perfectly normal and otherwise powerful Magi into the abyss of madness, and once they went down that path, there was no coming back.
“Wade?” Wieland cackled. “Wade was taken from me, no thanks to you. That damn spell was perfect. Do you realize that? And now I’ve spent months setting it up again, and you’re here to destroy it. I won’t let you do it this time.” He threw up his hands like he meant to use magic, but nothing happened, and he looked at his fingers with a strange, pathetic expression.
“Where did they take him?”
“I don’t know.” Wieland took a step backwards toward Jared’s wall of fire. He didn’t seem to notice the flames licking his back. “You think they told me anything? You think they give a damn about this hell?”
Jared felt the power then, finally reaching up from inside Wieland’s shattered body. He growled with the effort of it but managed to force a hole in Jared’s fire wall. Wieland threw himself into the gap and sprinted toward the altar.
Nikki went after him. Jared dropped the wall but it was too late. Wieland reached the altar and pressed a button in the center of the simple stone slab an instant before Nikki smashed into him and send him sprawling. Wieland pulled more power into himself and threw fire at Nikki, but Jared stepped forward and slapped Wieland’s pathetically weak spell aside.
The floor shook and the lights dimmed several times.
“What did you do?” Jared demanded, advancing on Wieland. “What the hell did you do?”
He laughed, his head thrown back. “I activated the magic,” he said. “Oh gods, finally. I’ve been wanting to do that for s
o long now.”
Jared clenched his jaw and looked around. Some of the runes in the floor emitted a strange, orange-yellow light, and the lines that connected them began to fill in with white. Lumi took a few steps forward then made a slashing motion with her hand, cutting deep into one of the rocks with a gash of hardened air, cutting off the slow-moving white line. She repeated the process at a few more points, breaking the spell’s contact. Wieland’s laughter slowly died on his lips.
“Oh no,” he said softly. “Do you know what you’ve just done?”
Jared crouched in front of him. “I’m not sure I give a shit. You’re useless to me, you know that? You’re a useless, awful piece of garbage, and I’m not sure I care if you rot here.”
“The magic.” Wieland’s eye went wide. “There’s nowhere for it to go.”
In that moment, Jared understood. It clicked for him, a horrible, jolting realization, and he quickly stood and turned his back on the weak and broken man at his feet.
“We have to go,” Jared said.
“What do you mean?” Lumi asked. “We haven’t gone through the whole building yet.”
“When you cut off those ley lines, you broke the spell’s trigonometry, but I think Wieland still has batteries pumping energy into the structure anyway.”
Lumi’s face went white. “Which means it’s going to overload.”
“This building’s going to be a smoking crater soon. We need to get everyone out.”
Lumi nodded once then marched over to Wieland. She leaned over him, pointed a finger at his shoulder, and forced a long ice rod through his body. He gasped in shock and pain as Lumi pinned him to the floor and held him there.
“How do we turn it off?”
“You don’t,” he said, gasping. “You can’t. It wasn’t built to be turned off. We removed the dam and now the floodwaters are coming.”
She forced another rod of ice through his other shoulder. “Last chance.”
Wieland laughed, groaned in pain, then laughed again. “You were always such a hard ass, Lumi.”
She retracted the two rods then put a finger against his forehead. “And you were always such an asshole.”