by Karen Chance
It looked like they were finishing up, magic turning what should have been a day’s work into a couple hours’. The last bodies were being carted out, and cases were being snapped shut here and there. And, somehow, I couldn’t see James letting us stay behind on our own.
Just as well; I had another errand to run.
But Fin didn’t seem to feel the same.
“Same reason most shops don’t carry fireworks,” he squeaked. “Some moron’s gonna misuse ’em. Had a couple guys playing chicken with one of the acid bombs, and it ate a chunk out of the polyurethane on the bar. Had to get the whole thing redone—”
“Listen, Fin—”
“—and then these two losers got in a fight,” he said, his voice reaching levels usually reserved for twelve-year-old girls and dog whistles. “And knocked the box over, sending all these things bouncing around the bar, some of them ricocheting off walls and breaking stuff, others setting fires. Weak don’t mean dead, not when fifty of ’em get set off all at once. I had to shut down for the whole night—”
The war mage clicked his case closed and walked off, and Fin jerked on my arm, bringing me as close to his face as the nose would allow.
“We got trouble!” he whispered.
“What kind?”
“The big blue kind!”
I looked at him and frowned. And then I looked where he deliberately wasn’t: at the pile of selkies. All heaped up in one spot, even though there was no reason for them to be, and squirming, squirming, squirming . . .
And hiding, hiding, hiding, I realized, an additional couple people in the crowd.
Well, shit.
Chapter Thirty-six
I joined Fin in staring blankly at the crate, and tried to think.
Blue was massive—like, “I’ve lived in smaller apartments” massive—so he must be under the floor. No way were the selkies’ emaciated bodies concealing him and Granny any other way. But they could cover any light the reveal spell might have tried to shine up through the floorboards.
Like around a trapdoor?
Seemed like the kind of thing smugglers might build, if it hadn’t been there already. Concealment charms worked better on enclosed areas, like a closet or a small room. Leaving them to float around nebulously tended to disperse them and use up power faster, and then your talisman putzed out or the spell became too thin to actually conceal anything, and why was I thinking about this right now?
Maybe because I didn’t want to think about how we were going to get them out.
“We gotta get gone,” Fin said softly. “They’re gonna move those selkies in a minute, and then—”
“People die.”
Because no way was Blue going down easy.
And no way were a bunch of armed-to-the-teeth war mages, with macho meters set on overdrive, going to play nice with an illegal, homicidal, massive battle troll, and his gun-toting sidekick.
This . . . could be bad.
Apparently, Fin thought so, too, because he started pulling on me. “Yeah, like us if we don’t get out of here!”
I looked at him. “So that’s your solution? We just leave him to be slaughtered, or to slaughter somebody else?”
He nodded vigorously. “Now you’re getting it.”
He got up.
I pulled him back down.
“You could live with yourself?”
Tiny, furious eyes met mine. “Better than I could as a greasy spot on the floor! I’m not a dhampir. You wanna play hero, fine. Just don’t expect me—”
“Pity about those profits, though.”
“—to be Rambo Jr. because I ain’t—” He stopped. “What profits?”
“The profits you were rolling in tonight. The profits you’re probably going to make every time those two take on some slavers. You’ve invented a whole new way to broadcast the fights, and only you have it. None of those other guys had your foresight—”
“Damn it, Dory!”
“—and word is spreading. I could barely get in the door tonight; by tomorrow . . . well, if there was going to be a tomorrow. But I guess not.”
The eye flaps of squintiness made a reappearance. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing. I know exactly what you’re doing.”
“I just need you to drive a speedboat. Can you do that?”
“Sure, but—”
“There’s one outside.” I nodded at the lolling door, beyond which, tied up at the pier where the slavers had left it, was the boat they’d been planning to use for a getaway. Only Eagle Boy had kicked them off before they could, leaving it conveniently situated for us. Well, conveniently assuming we could reach it.
“So I’m supposed to do what?” Fin whispered. “Load ’em onto the boat while surrounded by war mages? Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
He just looked at me.
“I’ll provide a distraction.”
“Oh great. Oh yeah. That’s what I need. A dhampir-led distraction!”
“Would you stop bitching?” I said softly. “Just get them on the boat; I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Sure. Fine. Whatever. This is why I never go anywhere with you,” Fin informed me. But he slunk off in the direction of the selkies, while I looked around for a distraction.
Huh.
This could be a bit of a challenge.
On the one hand, I was without my usual bag of tricks, which I’d been forced to leave in the car due to the sad lack of trust between us magical allies, and I was currently surrounded by war mages.
On the other hand, distractions were kind of my thing. When you’re typically the smallest badass in the room, you have to use whatever you can to keep the bigger ones from all piling on you at once. Because they do that. All the time.
The movie bad guys who suddenly can’t shoot straight when the hero is on-screen, or who politely wait their turn to have a go at you, just don’t exist in reality. I’ve never been in a well-mannered fight, or fought a gentleman warrior nobly giving me a chance to beat him. Well, not unless you counted Louis-Cesare—
I stopped that train of thought abruptly, because it hurt. A stupid amount. It was also useless, because there weren’t any Louis-Cesares here.
There weren’t any guys like him anywhere.
Stop it.
So.
Options.
Under the circumstances, there were really only two: the tower of treats in the form of all those crates, and Huey and Louie by the door.
The crates would be more fun, and thanks to the troll’s rampage, there were plenty of things to send crashing into them. But there were a lot of them, and I didn’t think the guys could possibly have gone through them all. They were probably going to cart them off and sort through them later, meaning they didn’t know everything that was in there.
And neither did I.
And sending up a two-story mountain of magical weapons, however weak-ass they might be, wasn’t a plan.
So, the boys it was. And since they were already looking at me malevolently, or as malevolently as they could manage past the now-red-and-swollen stripes across their faces, this should be easy. And it probably would have been—except that another distraction flew through the door before I had the time to start.
Actually, make that several. Okay, more than several, I thought, watching a whole stream of flying cameras charge in all at once. It looked like the reporters had decided that the only way to get a good look around was to come in force, so they had.
And it might have worked, if they’d been dealing with anyone else. But war mages are a breed apart. And while their shoot-’em-up training is understandable for some of the challenges they face, where a split second of hesitation can get you dead, it can cause problems at other times.
Like now, for instance.
A fireball engulfed
one of the little flying cameras, frying it midair, and a spell clipped another, sending it spiraling toward the ceiling, where it detonated in a burst of expensive parts. But there were a lot of little black balls left, maybe half a dozen, and—predictably—somebody focused too much on the targets whizzing around and too little on what was behind them.
“No!” James ran back in, trying to corral his group of weapon-happy war mages. “Don’t contaminate the scene! Don’t contaminate—”
Too late, I thought, watching a fireball miss a camera, and hit the mountain of crates head-on.
What looked like the Fourth of July went off inside the warehouse’s old walls. The mages promptly shielded, the selkies fled through the open door, and I grabbed part of a pallet as a shield and ran for the side entrance. Because my work was done here. Or it would have been, if I hadn’t immediately gotten disoriented thanks to the thick, white clouds suddenly boiling everywhere.
There must have been a whole lot of fog bombs in those crates.
And a bunch of stupefaction bombs as well, judging by the way I was suddenly staggering around.
Not to mention incendiaries, because something set my shield on fire!
I dropped it and stumbled backward, awkwardly grabbing for another. But my head was spinning, my eyes were trying to cross, and I couldn’t see anything but fog and the multicolored sparks lighting it in patches here and there. Or hear over the firework explosions of more crates going up and some spell-enhanced war mage shouts. And so my hands grabbed something else instead.
Something that had been zooming by and still was, only now it was zooming me along with it.
Because whatever charm the reporters had put on their little camera balls, it was a strong one.
At least enough to tow me through a couple war mages while I tried to get my confused head to tell my fingers to let go. And then into a support column—ow—and then into thin air, as the determined flying camera I’d latched onto decided to kamikaze the ceiling. And the wall. And the floor again.
After which it shot back into the air for no apparent reason—except to try to shake me off, I realized.
Which was why I determinedly held on, even after all the knocking about had cleared my head. Because there was a reporter outside somewhere controlling this thing, and he was pissed that something was interfering with his attempt to get a scoop. If he couldn’t shake me, the next step would be to recall his little device to sort out the problem, which would get me out the door.
Assuming I lasted that long.
Which might be a problem, because the fog covered a lot of sins. And Huey—or maybe Louie; I couldn’t really tell them apart—was seizing the opportunity for some revenge. Only not with magic, because that leaves a trace, doesn’t it?
Unlike fists.
At least, I guessed that was why one of them had just swung for my head instead of throwing a spell. And then grabbed onto my legs when I tried to kick him. Probably assuming that I was too disoriented to fight back, since I was determinedly clinging to the little camera ball.
Which I smashed into his head a couple times, and then used my legs—which had bigger muscles anyway—to hurl him at a column. One he bounced off of and lunged for me again, because yeah. Dumb as a rock.
A rock that went barreling underneath me, because I picked my feet all the way up this time, to the point that I was hugging the camera.
My ribs didn’t enjoy it, but my eyes had fun watching him take out his partner, who’d been creeping up on the other side.
They staggered off into the fog, and I deliberately wrapped my arms around the remaining intact lenses, wanting to end this. It almost ended me when the camera went crazy, bouncing along the ceiling before slamming back into the floor and dragging me across the rough old boards. And out into the night, because the mage had finally figured out that the only way to clear the obstruction was to pry me off.
A guy came running up as the camera flew out the door. I let go, and watched it shoot skyward when a hundred and ten pounds of dhampir suddenly went missing. And detonate against the bottom of a helicopter, because the regular cops had just arrived.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy—the reporter, I guessed—yelled over the whup, whup, whup of the copter’s blades. He was a tall, thin dude with a shock of black hair and bright Asian eyes.
Then he looked behind me and his mouth dropped open, and I didn’t wait to find out why.
I grabbed him and took a flying leap behind a cop car, where a couple of New York’s finest were already hunkered down, staring as the warehouse all but exploded behind us, with sound and fury and lots of sharp flying bits.
The next seconds were a little confused. The guy I’d rescued started yelling at what I guess were more reporters, demanding to know if anybody had a camera that still worked. I got myself turned around to see that the building was still standing, sort of, but had crazy, multicolored sparks shooting out everywhere: through areas of missing tile on the roof, spewing toward the heavens; through the open door, cascading over the broken sidewalk; and—most spectacularly, at least from this angle—through the row of rectangular windows, which had shattered and were vomiting great tongues of fire at us, like the front of a dragon boat on Chinese New Year.
The whole building looked like a huge roman candle.
I realized that maybe it would be a good idea to move back, because the sparks weren’t just for show. They were spells, too, if very weak ones. But there were a lot of them, and they were raining down everywhere.
Including onto a passing garbage scow out on the water, which hadn’t steered away fast enough. And was now a burning garbage scow. Which would have been bad enough, but some levitation charms had been mixed in with the rest of the sparks, so the burning garbage was drifting up into the air and out over the water.
Despite everything, I just watched it for a moment. The blue-black water and the flickering orange-red garbage and the shooting sparks illuminating all the graffiti-covered rocks by the waterside . . . it was strangely beautiful. In a Brooklyn sort of way.
Unlike the huge piece of burning roofing headed straight for us.
I grabbed the reporter and took a leap into a ditch across the road.
“Who are you?” he demanded, staring at me. And I have to give the guy credit. Although for what, I’m not exactly sure, because he yelled the question while the big, jagged piece of metal bisected the cop car.
“Keep your head down!” I told him, while a frantic car alarm informed the fleeing patrolmen that there might be a problem.
“Answer the question,” he told me right back. “And you owe me for my camera!”
I stared at him. “Dick! I just saved your life!”
He frowned. “How did you know my name was Dick?”
“Just a guess,” I snarled, and started to crawl out.
“Wait!” He grabbed my arm. “Where are you going?”
I shook him off. “Out there! You stay here. Unless your shields are way better than most civilians’.”
“So you’re not a civilian?” He looked me over. “You don’t look like a war mage, and even less like a tech. They tend to be easygoing on the dress code, but not to that degree.”
“Dick,” I muttered, and he nodded, and held out a hand.
“Kim.”
“No, Dory.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” But apparently he did mind, and he’d used the ignored hand to grab my arm again.
“Richard Kim,” he clarified. “And you’re Dory—what, exactly?”
“None of your business!”
“Ah, but it is my business. People need to know the truth!”
“The truth is that you’re going to die if you don’t keep your fool head down!” I said, as another piece of detonating warehouse screamed above us.
It wa
s really starting to go up now, which had me worried for Fin. Everybody else around here—including the cops in the copter, who had wisely gotten some air—was shielded or out of range. Even the techs the Corps used went through the same selection process as the tank squad, meaning that they could probably stand inside the building while it burned down and never feel a thing.
I didn’t have their shields, but I’d raced through battlefields tougher than this. I wasn’t worried about me. I was worried about—
“Yes! Yes!” I grabbed the reporter and shook him, while he stared confusedly around. I didn’t care. I’d finally spotted the speedboat out on the water, well beyond the risk of the burning barge, and it even looked like they’d rescued Blue—
I stopped, blinking.
What were they doing?
“What are they doing?” Dick asked, squinting alongside me.
I had no idea. It looked like they were popping wheelies, or whatever the nautical equivalent was. Blue’s weight in back pulled the front of the boat up so much, I wasn’t sure Fin could see past it. Which might explain why they were just going in circles.
Big circles, over and over, while staring at the land but not the warehouse, which should have freaking drawn the eye.
Unless they were looking for me.
Shit!
I felt around my pockets, but sure enough, no phone. I hadn’t thought to take it out of the duffle before locking it in my trunk—in a car parked on the other side of the building. Shit, shit, shit!
“Do you have a phone?” I asked Dick.
“Why do you want it?”
“To call for pizza!”
“There’s no reason to get sarcastic. It was a reasonable—”
“Aghhh! Just give it to me!”
He gave it to me.
“You have fangs,” he pointed out. “Are you a vampire?”
“Wanna find out?”
He shut up.
I called Fin’s number. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting for you! What the hell?”
“No! Don’t wait!”