by Harry Nix
He pulled himself up and ran for the door, hitting it with his shoulder at full sprint.
He was halfway across the road when the magic pulled so sharply it hurt, like it was dragging sandpaper over his skin. There was a moment of stillness before an enormous roar behind him split the air. Alex crashed into Boris, thrown by the force of the explosion and then found himself on the ground with his ears ringing.
Alex got groggily to his feet and turned around. Bailey’s front door was closed and inside a black fire was burning. On the street a few people had looked but then looked away, the Great Barrier pushing at them. The explosion had been only magical, and not physical, apparently.
Alex walked closer and cast Shield in case there was another explosion. There was no heat radiating from Bailey’s front door which was strange given the inferno raging behind it. Alex reached out a hand but then stopped.
Either Juno was in there and okay, in which case he could wait it out, or she was dead, in which case there was no point going in.
He stood there for five minutes watching the flames before they suddenly extinguished. His Shield had canceled itself long before then. After gingerly touching the door handle to see if it was hot, Alex pushed the door open. There was no dull clunk this time – the corroded bell was gone, presumably consumed by the fire. So was all the junk down the small corridor. There wasn’t even ash left behind. Alex was walking on concrete that had been seared clean.
He emerged from the small corridor to find Juno standing in the middle of the room, her head down. Bailey was gone. The cross was gone. Everything was gone.
“Juno?” he said.
She lifted her head and smiled at him.
“It’s okay now. It’s safe,” she said. She walked over to Alex and hugged him. The moment they touched, he felt her magic again. It was still stirred up, like an angry sea in the aftermath of a storm.
He heard her sigh and then she relaxed against him, resting her head on his chest.
“Who would do something like this?” he said, stroking his hand down her back.
“Corvus. Pain mages always do the most horrific things they can imagine.”
They separated but still kept touching.
“The problem is,” Juno continued, “they don’t have very good imaginations. Certainly not as good as mine.”
She took Alex by the hand and pulled him out of the shop.
Outside the sun was shining and people were wandering up and down the street. It felt wrong to Alex, like there should be panic or fear or something outside Bailey’s door. Not this... normality.
They drove most of the way home in silence. It was only when they were a few blocks away that Juno finally spoke again.
“That was Chaos magic before. Uncontrollable and intense. I’m very glad you decided to run because you wouldn’t have survived that.”
She squeezed his hand as she said it but Alex didn’t find it very reassuring. What if that happened while Juno was in the house? Could it happen while she was asleep?
They got to Juno's and went inside. The house smelled like it had been locked up and left vacant, which of course it had.
Juno gave Alex a kiss and told him that she was going to have a shower. Alex let her go, feeling powerless. He wanted to hug and kiss her until she smiled again, to have her laugh and be that joyful person talking about Space Buddies.
Alex knew it was a stupid wish. He couldn’t get the image of Bailey out of his mind and he’d barely known him.
For the lack of anything better to do right now Alex wandered out to the yard to find the watering can. The succulents are fairly hardy and could mostly survive on their own except when they were newly planted. Alex watered the garden bed, his mind leaping all about the place.
Firstly, there was crushing guilt that felt distant from him but approaching at speed. He'd told Bailey all about Corvus, all about the blood golem, and now Bailey was dead, tortured and murdered inside his own shop.
There seemed to be an unambiguous link there that if Alex had just kept his mouth shut, Bailey would still be alive.
He knew that part of this was stupid, that he couldn't predict the future and he hadn't certainly murdered the old frog or whatever it was that Bailey had been but still the feeling that disaster followed everywhere he went was growing stronger.
He also recognized however, that this was the kind of move designed to set him against the Corvus and thus may not have been them at all.
Perhaps it was someone attempting to cut him off from information or to scare him or to scare third parties away from supporting him. Someone else was out there engaged in their own asymmetrical warfare.
Alex realized he was standing by the garden bed, staring at nothing with an empty watering can in his hand.
He took it back to the garage and looked at the small cuttings that had been left there on a plate. A few of them had started to sprout roots so he found a small spray bottle and gave them a little water, feeling the strangeness of the situation. The mundane utility of what he was doing compared to what he had just seen.
The anger was starting to creep back again. Mages had destroyed his past life and made it so he couldn't work on the game with Howey and Puzo. Now he had a tiny collection of sprouting plants and what was meant to happen there?
Was he going to keep coming back from the wildness every week just to water them? He’d have to dig up the ones he planted and take them back with him?
He knew it was a small thing, incredibly minor, and he also knew that Juno's house wasn't his. There hadn’t been some long-term plan to live there, but there was still a loss of some kind.
He eventually went back inside and found that Juno was still in the shower. He listened closely, but he couldn't hear crying, which he took for a good sign.
They'd missed going to lunch so Alex opened the refrigerator, checked a few dates on foods and started making some sandwiches while setting the coffee to brew. He eventually decided to make what he used to call the Hobo Hamburger: egg, lettuce, tomato and cheese with a slice of bacon. The shallots were well past it, so he tossed them out.
Juno arrived in the kitchen just as the food was ready, giving Alex a weak smile when she saw it.
“Not quite the day we envisioned,” she said, touching him on the shoulder. He gave her a hug and then poured her a cup of coffee. They took their food to the lounge and ate in silence. When they were finished, Juno pulled out Space Buddies from a pile of old DVDs. It had clearly come from a bargain bin and had a large red one dollar price sticker on the front.
“It's a terrible day but we can make it better with our buddies,” she said, giving him a smile. She put on the movie and then snuggled in close to Alex.
They whiled the rest the day away with terrible films and not much talking. They kept going back and forth from the kitchen, eating snacks and making coffees. By the time they went to bed Juno had even laughed a few times.
She fell asleep quickly but Alex struggled. He could hear traffic, a low continuous distant drone, the sound of neighbors and could still smell the scent of plastic and artificial things. Even though it had only been a day, it seemed his nose was adjusting but just not fast enough.
Alex stared at the ceiling, trying to count sheep as time dragged on and sleep eluded him.
22
Alex awoke, surprised he’d been asleep and grimaced at the spike of tiredness pounding into his brain. Juno was gone and there was a strange scent in the air. Alex leaped out of bed, shifting to his hybrid form and rushed out to the lounge. The temperature drop was so sharp it was like stepping out into a blistering snowstorm.
“Oh Juno,” Alex said, looking around at the factual patterns of ice that were covering the walls and ceiling. Everything was coated in ice, the television, the coffee table, the sofa. There were flowers in a vase, frozen stiff.
“Juno!” Alex called out, knowing that he wouldn't get any response. He couldn't hear her, couldn't hear her heartbeat and knew instinctively whe
re she’d gone: the Corvus outpost.
He checked for Bailey, finding the car was gone, and then rushed back to the lounge. He grabbed his bag, doing a rapid shift to human and back again so the shifter charm could hide it away. Then he ran out the back, leaped the fence and shifted to his wolf form, sprinting away.
Alex ran like the wind towards the city, sometimes feeling the Great Barrier pulling on him. But he was too fast, vanishing into the black before people could be curious for long.
He soon reached the city proper and had to slow a little, running through the network of alleyways. There were far more people, more lights and he found himself having to shift to human to bolt across streets before turning wolf again.
On one corner he shifted to human and then stopped in shock when he saw a slowly cruising car, a wavering spell screen sticking out of the roof, code compiling on it.
It was the same mage as before, the one he’d copied the spell from. Alex internally swore, realizing he could have grabbed the last parts of the spell, if only he hadn’t deleted it to make more space.
He pushed the frustration away. Juno was on the warpath and who knows what would happen when she came up against the Corvus mages.
Eventually, Alex went hybrid and leaped up to the rooftops. He took off again, sprinting along and leaping between buildings. Although there was a fear in the heart of him that something would happen to Juno, there was a kind of wild joy and pleasure at the idea of fighting the mages and tearing them to pieces.
Alex ran through the night and soon spotted the Corvus outpost. Even from a distance it was evident that something was terribly wrong. He could see the glow of a fire and the guards had vanished. The front gate was smashed in. He decided to risk a full sprint and so leaped off the roof, running towards the destroyed gates. As he came closer, he felt the magic pulling.
It was Juno, no doubt about it. The magic was surging, being pulled towards her.
As Alex ran through the gate he felt an odd sensation, as though he’d stepped through a bubble. Immediately the sound of screams and gunfire rose up. There had been some kind of spell in place, keeping the sounds of what was happening secret and hidden.
“He was my friend!” Juno shouted. Alex heard someone scream, a horrific sound that went up in volume before there was a wet crunch. Alex skidded around the corner just in time to see the top half of a mage smash into the main building. Juno was standing in the center of the outpost and around her were no less than seven pairs of legs that ended at the hips. She’d been tearing mages in half.
“It's him!” he heard a mage shout.
Some of them were barricaded inside the main building, firing wands out the window and sometimes shooting guns.
Juno looked at Alex, catching his eye. She had a feral look on her face, a kind of madness intertwined with grief.
“Kill them, my love,” she called out, her voice ringing in the night air.
The smell of blood was in the air as well as burned flesh, gunpowder and viscera.
Alex saw a mage fire a gun at Juno. The surge of anger that he would dare do such a thing nearly took over entirely but Alex managed to hold back going wild. This didn’t stop him attacking however. He ran at full speed, diving in through the window. It was barred but Alex smashed through them like they were nothing.
He crashed into the room, hitting one mage with a swipe of his claws. There were three others in the room who were scrambling to escape while firing guns. Although he was enraged, Alex remembered to cast fire shield, grabbing two of the mages in an enormous hug. The fire quickly overwhelmed their protection spells and they were engulfed in flames.
He let them go and then threw one bodily at a fleeing mage, managing to catch his robes in the flames.
Alex then dived on the remaining one, knocking the wand out of his hand and methodically slashing at him until his protection spell was carved away.
Once the mage was dead, Alex went up the set of stairs leading to the second story. Even with all the commotion, he could hear heartbeats up there. There were at least ten mages, most of them screaming and yelling and firing at Juno.
Alex cast Know Thyself as he walked, checking his levels of mana, seeing the blue bar was almost full again. Despite the fact he just used flame shield he was still growing stronger, the spells consuming less mana each time he cast them.
He was halfway up the stairs when the green bar he’d imagined appeared. It even had nature written next to it, and was three-quarters full.
“Well, you picked your moment,” he said to the bar.
He reached the top of the stairs and burst into the room, immediately being shot multiple times. He hadn't realized his protection ring had been working, blocking numerous attacks. It was finally exhausted and a bullet got through, tearing into his shoulder. From the searing pain, Alex knew it was silver. He still had no idea exactly how resistant to silver he was but clearly it wasn't enough because the pain was enormous.
Alex managed to grab one of the mages and pulled him into the stairwell.
The man was kicking and screaming but couldn’t get away. Alex slashed at him until his protection ring was overwhelmed and then tore his head off before throwing it through the open doorway, back into the room.
Alex quickly cast purify on himself and no less than eight bullets dropped out onto the ground, forced out of his body, including the silver one. He was healing still, the wounds closing up but it wasn't fast enough so Alex summoned up his homebrew healing spell and touched his finger to every wound he could.
It used a fair chunk of his blue mana, but Alex didn't mind, he had others to rely on, his pain bar nicely full.
He risked a look around the corner and saw that only a few of the mages were facing him, some with guns and others with wands. The rest were looking out the window where Juno was floating up off the ground, looking like a demonic witch of destruction.
One of the mages was suddenly pulled out the window by an invisible force and then ripped in half, his legs falling to the ground. Juno then tossed his torso back through the window. The mage was alive when he landed, gasping, his guts trailing on the floor.
Another mage dived on him, touching his hands to his body. Alex felt the magic lurch as he drew mana through the pain.
Alex wasn’t going to let them charge up anything – he knew pain was enormously powerful and who knew what spells these Corvus mages had?
He cast flame shield and dived into the room. There were nine mages left and all of them were wearing robes that he’d already seen burn easily. He managed to grab three who ignited the moment their protection rings exhausted.
He let them go as they screamed and burned, turning to face the remaining six. Then he felt it – a wave, so sweet and delicious. The pain of the burning mages was roasted boar and he was starving. He wanted to drink it down and as his eyes grew half-lidded he saw the rest of the mages were nodding their heads, like they were drunk, holding out their hands towards the burning mages.
Alex reached out a hand to pull on their pain before he realized what he was doing. If he went down that path, this was where it ended? Covered in scars and drunk on pain when someone caught fire?
He quickly rushed the mages, tossing three out the window to Juno before they could stop him. She tore them in half with ease. She pulled another out with a spell that Alex felt rush past him. It was like a giant invisible hand.
The last two finally awoke from their pain stupor but it was far too little, too late. Alex cast flame shield again just as they shot silver bullets at him. One got through at the close range, hitting him in the chest and starting to burn but he managed to grab the pair and started hacking away at them.
Soon they were dead and Alex quickly cast purify to get the bullet out of his chest. He staggered to the window to find Juno ripping the final mage in half, tossing his torso to land in a pile of dead mages.
“He was my friend, you psychopath,” she snarled at the mage who was still alive. He died a moment la
ter. Alex leaped out the window, misjudging it slightly and landing on a pair of legs before stumbling and finally righting himself.
He’d barely managed to get his balance when Juno dropped out of the sky. Alex managed to catch her in his arms. She was unharmed as far as he could tell, although splattered with blood.
“I think there's one in the basement. We should keep him alive to tell the rest,” Juno said. Her voice was slurring, the drain of the magic obviously too much for her. Alex looked at the open gate – he could run right now but then decided against it. If he was leaving one Corvus mage alive he was going to send the bastard with a message.
He hauled Juno over his shoulder and went back inside the building. With all the mages dead all he could hear was the fire crackling away as it took hold. He found a set of stairs that led to a basement and after a moment of indecision, left Juno outside the door.
It was cool and quiet down there so he could hear the mage, their heart beating as fast as a rabbit.
Alex cast shield and burst into the room.
“Please, don’t kill me!” the young girl cowering in the corner called out.
Alex’s rush faltered. She was young, maybe as old as Jacob, if that. He walked forward and came to a stop, towering over her. This close he saw she was lucky to be fifteen. Her face was smooth and unlined, although she had some healed scars on her arms, as most of the Corvus mages did.
“I'm Alex Lowe. Do you know who I am?”
The girl nodded. She was crying and trying to wipe away tears. Alex saw she wasn’t wearing any rings. Just another disposable foot soldier, no doubt.
“Your enclave decided to attack me with a blood golem made from the blood of a hundred werewolves. They’ve sent weredogs and mercenaries and I’ve killed them all. Everyone upstairs in this outpost is dead now except for you. You’re going to take a message to your masters: they are to leave me alone or I’m going to wipe them from the face of the earth,” Alex said, letting a growl into his voice.