by Dan Wingreen
Lee had always enjoyed being an exception.
The forcebolts—more like force blurs now—followed the momentum forward, slamming into Noah right after both shields dropped and exploding in a bright blue flash of unstable energy. The hunter flew backwards down the hall, bouncing off the wall with a sickeningly wet crack before crashing to the floor and tumbling several more feet before coming to a stop.
Lee wasted no time running after him. He'd gotten lucky with the hunter smashing into the wall like that, but he'd been in enough fights to know he'd be an idiot to assume Noah was dead. Or even out. All it would take would be one healing spell, and he'd be as good as new, albeit with a bit less magic.
Magical battles between two skilled casters were kind of like a chess game, with both of them chipping away at each other's reserves until one ran out or made a mistake. He stumbled a bit as his magic-ravaged body protested all the activity, but recovered quickly. Maybe he could end it here if he got to Noah before—
He heard the hunter groan just seconds before his body was engulfed with a white light. Damn. He'd healed a bit quicker than Lee had expected. Didn't matter though. Even as Noah pushed himself to his feet Lee put on another burst of speed. Magical fights were usually as much about putting a good amount of distance between oneself and his opponent as much as it was about hitting people with spells and such. The best way to rattle somebody was to get up all close, like. Lee made a fist as he ran. A punch or two never hurt matters much either.
Noah glanced up as he got to his feet, seeing Lee barreling towards him. Lee grinned. He always liked this part, when his opponent froze in confusion and tried to figure out why he was running towards him instead of casting a spell. Shoulda got up quicker! Lee closed the last few feet between them fast and raised his fist, waiting to see the surprised look on Noah's stony face—
Except Noah was grinning back, and instead of trying to back away or staring in blank confusion, he sprang towards Lee. It was Lee who faltered, and before he could recover, Noah was inside what would have been his guard if he'd bothered to put one up. The hunter grabbed the wrist of Lee's other hand.
A sudden wave of nausea swept over Lee as he felt an all too familiar draining sensation from inside his chest.
Bloody stupid idiot!
He'd forgotten the one defining characteristic of hunters: they were all natural siphons.
Lee broke his wrist free from Noah's grip before he'd taken too much magic, stopping short and spinning around to face the hunter.
Noah's eyes widened in surprise and, after a moment, a slow smile spread across his face. "I've always liked wizard magic."
Lee gritted his teeth, cursing himself for being a stupid bloody showoff idiot. He should have thrown spell after spell at Noah after he'd come to a stop. Anything but run at him like a bloody, drunken pit fighter. The nausea was slowly fading, but the clenching in his gut made itself known again, almost like it was mocking him for thinking he was going to able to win this. He was too battered, his body too wracked with pain, his magic reserves too low. And on top of all that, Noah had taken some of that magic, that wizard magic, and incorporated it into his own.
He wasn't going to be able to do the shield trick again either.
There was a very good chance he was going to die.
Lee's eyes slid past Noah, coming to rest on the hole Aidan had fallen through. "Trust me." Those were his last words to Lee. As last words went, they weren't so bad. Lot better than Lee's had been, at any rate.
Maybe he could do better this time.
But not while Aidan still needed him. Because the inverse of that plea was a pledge. “Trust me”, Aidan had said, “because I trust you.” He may not have said those words out loud, but they were implied nonetheless. “I trust you to keep yourself safe. I trust that we’re going to meet up again on the other side of this.”
Lee was guilty of many crimes, but if he could help it, he was never going to abuse the trust Aidan had gifted him.
Lee tore his eyes away from the hole and forced himself to focus on Noah. He raised his hands, and waited. Silently.
He wasn't quite ready to let Noah kill him just yet.
◆◆◆
Aidan groaned as he came to, his head throbbing and his right shoulder screaming like someone had cut it open and shoved broken glass inside.
Never. Doing that. Again.
He opened his eyes, blinking away tears as he wiped away the dust that had been kicked up by his fall. He tried sitting up, then let out a short shriek when he moved his other shoulder. Slowly, he slipped the hand on his uninjured side into his bag, which was mercifully still slung across his chest, and fished out a healing spell. He cast it, then moaned loudly as the pain melted away.
Magic was the best thing ever.
Aidan tried pushing himself up again, this time much more successfully, and looked around. He was still on the slab of floor that he'd cut out of the…well, ceiling, now, since he was under it. It had broken in several places after it fell, and he could feel it shift under him as he moved.
He'd fallen into a large cubicle farm, it looked like. The entire room seemed like a maze of the things, stuck together in groups of four with carpeted pathways running between then, and he briefly wondered what the room was for before deciding he didn't really care. He was just glad he'd managed to land between the cubicles instead of on them.
He glanced up, surprised at how far he'd actually fallen. He'd thought it would maybe be ten feet at the most, but the third floor had a really high ceiling and it was probably closer to double that. And if he was on the third floor, that meant he was closer to the second. The one he'd set on fire. Definitely not one of his smartest decisions. Although, if it helped Lee…
Aidan started as he realized he’d completely forgotten about the two cops. He looked around frantically, letting out a breath when he saw both were still unconscious. Barnes had gotten the worst of it. He was lying, stock-still, under part of the ceiling and a smashed cubicle, his left leg twisted at a disgusting angle at the knee. Aidan swallowed heavily and quickly looked away.
It was much easier to look at Bryce. He'd landed closer to Aidan, between cubicles and without any bones or anything gross poking out. In fact, other than a few tears in his uniform and the dust in his hair, he looked almost like he was sleeping. Aidan stared at him for a long time.
I should kill them.
The thought still managed to disturb him, but when he tried to push it away, thoughts of the agents guarding the basement floated to the front of his mind. Mercy hadn't helped him back there. It had, in fact, almost gotten him killed. And these two didn't deserve mercy anyway, not when Aidan couldn't look at them without remembering how helpless he felt at being held against that cold wall and told that they were going to steal the small bit of money he was allowed. How terrified he felt when they spoke so casually about burning off one of Aidan's hands.
He tried to justify it by telling himself he couldn't have been their first victim; they had to have done the same before to people who weren't lucky enough to have someone like Lee step out of the shadows and save them. That ending their lives would be for those faceless victims. That it was justice. But those excuses rang hollow even as he thought them.
Aidan wanted to kill them for what they did to him. Not just what they'd physically done, but for the fear he felt every time he saw a uniform. For making the dark that much more dangerous and horrible. Because no matter what he did, no matter how many necromancers he killed or how many times he broke into the most secure buildings in the country, just seeing the two of them took him right back to being a helpless, magic-less wizard, pinned to the wall, waiting for someone else to decide how much they wanted to hurt him.
If he killed them, maybe he'd never have to feel that way again.
Distantly, he heard the sounds of spells being thrown and grunts of pain. Of battle. He looked up at the hole in the ceiling again, this time seeing flashes of blue and purple light cast on t
he walls of the floor above. Lee was fighting the hunter. Alone.
Not that Aidan thought he couldn't do it. Normally. But Lee hadn't taken as much magic from Aidan as Aidan would have liked, and he still had that whatever-it-was going on with his own magic. As amazing as Lee was, and no matter how much faith Aidan had in him, he didn't know how long the sorcerer could last on his own.
That, more than anything, hardened his resolve.
He slipped his dark gray book out of his bag, opening it to the last of the Cut spells. Three left. More than enough to take care of two unconscious sorcerers.
Or, one unconscious sorcerer and one rapidly waking up sorcerer, he realized with sudden horror. Bryce was stirring, grunting under his breath as he pushed himself up off his back. Fear and helplessness surged through Aidan's body and he brutally fought back against it. His hands shook as he tore the spell out of the book.
"C-cut!" he yelled.
The page turned to ash as the sharp, almost invisible spell shot away from him, straight towards Bryce's throat.
And was absorbed by a shield.
Shit!
Bryce's eyes, much clearer than they'd been just seconds before, narrowed. "You ruined my uniform," he said darkly, raising one hand.
There was no way Aidan could tear out another spell before Bryce shot off one of his own, so he did the only thing he could do.
He dove behind the nearest cubicle wall, and ran.
Deathbolts scorched the floor where he'd been standing, then slammed into the cubicle he'd jumped behind. Bryce let out a frustrated yell, sending several more sailing after Aidan, but they all either hit different cubicles or went flying overhead. Aidan ran as fast as he could, grateful the cubicle walls were just above shoulder height so he didn't need to duck down too much to keep hidden. He made random turns, getting himself thoroughly lost before he finally stopped, panting heavily and cursing himself for being so out of shape.
"Get up!" Bryce was yelling. His voice sounded distant, but not distant enough. Aidan could still hear him clearly. "We need to find the wizard."
"What happened?" Barnes asked. He sounded a bit dazed, but otherwise uninjured. Bryce must have healed him, then.
Aidan swore under his breath. Why did I fucking hesitate?
"Did I…die?" Barnes asked hesitantly. His voice was fainter than Bryce's, but there was a small echo in the cavernous room that carried his words to Aidan. It also made it that much harder to guess at their location.
"If you died then you wouldn't be alive right now," Bryce said impatiently. "The wizard brought the floor down and almost killed us."
"He's got magic, too?"
"Obviously."
"Oh."
Bryce snorted. "If there aren't any more insightful observations you'd like to make, maybe we can get on with killing him before he escapes and gives the hunter an excuse to kill us."
There was a faint rustling and a small crash, probably Barnes standing up and pushing the debris off of him. "Right." Aidan heard several footsteps, and then nothing.
He chewed his thumbnail, willing his heart to stop pounding so loudly in his ears, and listened.
He couldn't hear anything.
Dammit! Where were they?
"Wizard!"
Aidan jumped at Bryce's voice, knocking his shoulder into the cubicle he was crouched next to.
"Where are you, wizard?" he sang.
He was too close. Or maybe he wasn't, and it was the echo making him seem closer than he was. Aidan couldn't tell.
"We know what you're about, you know."
Was he getting farther away? Aidan wanted so badly to poke his head up and see, but even he wasn't that stupid.
"Trying to find the Once and Future King." Distaste colored Bryce's voice. "You must think you've changed so much from that scared little wizard doing everything we asked him to like a good little citizen. Which, by the way, was incredibly stupid; anyone with half a brain would have run the second he saw us, and yet there you were, ‘yes sir, no sir, it was just an accident sir’. It was the most amusing and pathetic thing Barnes and I have ever seen, and trust me, we’ve met some very pathetic little nothings over the years. But you know what? You haven't changed at all. You've just gone from latching onto the nearest authority figure to latching onto some fantasy king because you think he'll care more. That you'll be more important. But the sad truth of you, wizard, is that you will never be important. And bringing people more important than you into the world will just make you that much more worthless."
Aidan clenched his jaw shut to keep from saying anything, not that he was about to fall for such an obvious ploy to get him to give himself away. Bryce's voice was definitely moving away now, but the bitterness in it was as clear as a bell in Aidan's ears. He wondered how much of that was supposed to taunt Aidan and how much of it was what Bryce himself felt.
He decided to chance moving while Bryce was distracted and walking away. Aidan peeked around the corner, then darted as silently as he could across the small pathway between rows of cubicles, around one of them, then down another row. He heard a sound, like a foot scraping against carpet, and immediately slipped into the space between two of the cubicles. It was a small space, he couldn't have stretched his feet out without hitting the other wall, but he was as well hidden as he could be. He listened intently for another sound, but all he heard was Bryce in the distance, trying to goad Aidan into saying something.
He couldn't have picked a worse place to try and fight off two experienced sorcerers. There were too many hiding places, too many things to take cover behind. He couldn't even pop his head up to see where he was in relation to anything else, because there was too great a risk of one of them seeing him and shooting a spell off before he could react.
I need to get out of here.
Which was a great idea; he just had no way of actually doing it. If only he could see where the cops were without exposing himself…
Aidan’s breath hitched as another random memory popped into his head. It had been after a WA meeting, one of the ones when he was a kid, actually. It seemed like a hundred years ago, back when all he wanted was for his parents to come and get him, to tell him it was all a mistake and he wasn't a wizard and they still loved him. He tried not to think about those early meetings much, but he remembered this one because of one boy who was there with him. Aidan couldn't remember his name, but he was one of those people who was annoyingly friendly, always talking and always cheerful. Aidan had always wanted to punch him, and the director there knew it, so he often went out of his way to make sure they didn't have to interact too much. It was one of the times where he failed miserably at it that Aidan was remembering.
The kid had cornered him at the doughnut table and was going on and on about his family and how great they were and did Aidan know his father liked to study medical magic and that he'd invented a bunch of spells to help figure out what was wrong with people. Aidan had endured about five minutes of breathless annoyance before he snapped and yelled at the kid. He told him his father was an idiot who was wasting his time. Who gave a shit about what was wrong with someone when healing magic just found everything that was wrong and fixed it on its own? Aidan had ended up getting in trouble, and the kid never spoke to him again, but one thing he'd said about his father came back to Aidan now.
It was one of the spells he'd been trying to brag about. One that let someone see through a person's flesh to see if there were any broken bones inside their body, and if magic could see through skin…
Worth a try.
As quietly as he could, he took his new purple notebook out of his bag. He hesitated, then put it down and slowly tore a few spells out of his older book. He winced at how loud the tearing sounded in the near-silent room, but there was nothing he could do about that. He closed the book and put it back, keeping the spells clutched in his left hand as he flipped the other book open and wrote out what he wanted.
I hope this works…
"See through th
e walls," he whispered. The spell burned up.
And the world went black.
Aidan had just enough time to panic before the world came back, and he barely kept from crying out in surprise.
He could see everything.
Walls that had been solid moments before were nothing more than vague, faded outlines that looked like they were covered in a blue filter. It was like looking through the ghosts of a cubicle farm. Aidan couldn't hold back a shudder. In the distance, about a hundred feet away, he saw a skeleton walking slowly, its jaw moving and the fuzzy outline of a large belly and a uniform seeming to float around it like oddly specific fog.
Bryce!
Aidan grinned. It actually worked. He felt a bit bad about yelling at that kid now.
Then he made the mistake of looking down.
If the ghostly outlines of cubicles were disturbing, the spectral flames raging silently below him were terrifying. It took every ounce of willpower he had to not completely freak out and run screaming. His entire body was telling him to flee, that he was standing over open flame and at any second he'd fall into it. He focused on the faint, shimmering outline of the floor until he got the panic under control.
Ancient fucking hells. Horrified wonder filled him as he watched the fire writhing below him like an angry demon out of half-forgotten legend. I didn't know it was that bad.
Then he noticed the skeleton.
It was darting around the outer edge of the flames, running back and forth as it desperately tried to find a way around the fire. As Aidan watched, more skeletons rushed about in a panic of their own. Every few seconds a few of them stopped and made sharp gestures at the fire. Sometimes the flames lessened, but not often. Once, a skeleton got too close and the flames struck out at it like a living creature, consuming the skeleton—the person—as its skeletal jaw opened in a silent scream. There were more skeletons in the fire, too. Deep inside where they were barely visible through even the spectral flames, but once he saw them he couldn’t stop finding more and more and—