by Ann Macela
Otherwise, their beam did no damage. Zip. Nada. None.
Chapter Thirty-Five
“What the hell! I’ve never seen pentagon walls act like that before,” Saxt said. “Hit him again.”
They shot another volley of two bursts. Same result.
“The Hex must be causing that green color,” Johanna suggested. “The whole setup is weird.”
Phil shot another bolt and followed it with a fireball—both more powerful than the previous shots. Their pentagon walls repulsed the missiles, but they vibrated again.
“I think the last shot was a sixteen. Increasing energy to the walls,” Clyde told them.
“Yeah, the Hex is helping the bastard,” Saxt muttered. “No way can he throw those levels.”
She and Saxt retaliated with three more beam bursts at Phil.
More wave-like motions in his walls. Again, no visible damage.
“Wait a minute,” Johanna said. “His walls are actually absorbing and dissipating the energy we throw at them. We’re never going to punch through this way.”
“Cast a continuous beam,” Saxt said. “You concentrate on it, and I’ll watch Phil. One, two, three.”
Johanna aimed the stream of energy at the top middle of Phil’s right panel. The ripples again spread out from the strike. She kept the beam concentrated and the point of contact moving.
Aha! His wall wasn’t totally impervious. The beam gouged a golden line down the surface as she advanced it across the panel, and golden smoke rose from its trail. The ripples undulated faster, but they didn’t wash away the line.
“Phil’s flinching,” Saxt reported. “I don’t think he’s going to shoot. He’s talking to the Hex again.”
“Increase our power.” They sent more energy through the beam, and she dragged the tip straight down the side.
More smoke—gold mixed with green—billowed up. The top of Phil’s walls turned a murky blackish green. The ripples became waves until the entire surface of the translucent fortress roiled like an angry ocean.
“Get ready, Phil’s about to try a maneuver with the staff,” Saxt warned her.
Although focused on the beam, Johanna could make out a wavery Phil holding the staff in two hands and lifting the head to a level close to her point of contact.
Phil sort of stabbed or punched or poked with the staff head at the golden line.
Crack! A black line of energy darted out of the baggie and hit their beam. Small, shocking tremors traveled down it, up along their blade, and to their combined grip. Johanna gritted her teeth at the little zaps and said, “Cancel the beam.”
“Hah!” Phil shouted, when their beam disappeared. He lowered the staff and threw a lightning bolt with a distinctive greenish glow. It ricocheted off their left wall, leaving a long streak of moldy green and a nasty odor momentarily behind.
“You okay?” Saxt asked.
“Yes, startled more than hurt. The shocks weren’t bad, once I got used to them. More like a bunch of needle pricks than real pain. If the Hex increases its power, however, that maneuver is going to hurt. Let’s try again, with more power.”
“Here we go,” he said, and greater energy poured into her center and circulated between them.
Thank goodness, she didn’t have to worry about lack of power, from either the ring or her mate—or even within herself. Her center happily accommodated whatever she pushed through it. She and Saxt were balancing energy to their blade as if they’d been doing it for years, instead of only since this morning. Together, they pushed more through the blade than they had before.
“Catch a new one, Phil. One, two, three.” This time the golden beam had a whitish glow as she pulled the point of it across the two walls facing them. Smoke followed the etching.
Phil yelled and tried punching with the staff head again. Black beams shot out, but, thanks to his erratic movements and poor aiming, only one connected with hers. She quickly changed direction and brought the blade to bear on another spot and then another.
Phil couldn’t move the staff fast enough, and the Hex’s subsequent shots zoomed out in various directions. When they hit the room’s walls and ceiling, they blasted off baseball-sized chunks of granite.
“Cancel,” she said, glaring at Phil’s still undulating walls, and they did so. “We’re not making any progress.”
“Clyde, come up here,” Saxt called. “See if you can act as a diversion. Don’t let his beam catch yours, though. You take the right side, we’ll take the left.”
Clyde took his stance, Saxt said, “Go,” and Johanna started their beam tip from the floor this time.
Both she and Clyde jumped their tips from place to place on the walls when Phil brought the staff head close to them. Returning to the same spot again and again, she made some headway, almost breaking through.
Either Phil or the Hex, however, quickly realized that Clyde wasn’t powerful enough to cause harm to their walls. When they concentrated on stopping her beam alone, she and Saxt quit shooting to assess the situation.
Phil used the lull in their attack to send them a few more lightning bolts and fireballs under his own power. Without the Hex behind the missiles, they hit with only a pitiful little thump and scattered into fiery bits. Phil ceased fire to glare across the space, shake the staff at them, and shout curses.
In the pause, Johanna and Saxt ignored Phil and canceled their blade to stretch. Their one-blade position was not the easiest to maintain.
“This is so frustrating. We must apply more power on more places to make him use up his energy,” she said. “We were hurting him with our attack at floor level, especially when we almost breached the wall.”
“He’s figured out he doesn’t have to worry about Clyde,” Saxt said. “That leaves you and me to attack.”
Johanna watched Phil, who was talking to the baggie again. Hmmmm. Interesting posture and gestures. She turned to the group behind the ring. “Chuck.”
“Ma’am!” The boy straightened up and stood at attention. The Grim Reaper had had his usual effect.
“When you were with Phil and he had the baggie, did he talk to it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mom sent me to the store this morning, and he and a couple of his guys grabbed me there. He had the baggie in the car. He talked to it once in a while, and when we got here, he did it more.”
“Did Phil ever act like the stones were talking back to him?” she asked.
Chuck hesitated and finally said, “Kinda. Sometimes he asked questions like, ‘Is it this way?’ ‘Is that what you want?’ Yes-no type questions. He’d tilt his head and stare at the big square piece. One of his favorite questions was, ‘Will I have her?’ I don’t know if he heard an answer to that one.”
“Where are you going with this?” Saxt asked her.
“Watch Phil,” she answered. “He’s talking to the stones again. He’s standing hunched over and smiling, nodding like a henchman, not a wielder of a powerful crystal. I’ll bet the Hex has taken over. When Irenee was fighting the second Stone in Bruce Ubell’s hands, she said it was clearly directing the man holding it, not the other way around. Phil’s not acting like his usual arrogant self. We may have injured him yesterday more than we realize, and he doesn’t have the power to rule the Hex. He may think he’s in control, but he’s not.”
Saxt glanced over at the other pentagon. His face settled into a mask of determination. “Okay, let’s hit him with everything we have, as fast as we can. If we can take him out, that leaves the Hex by itself. Clyde, while your primary task is with the ring, can you throw some of those fancy illusions to block his vision from time to time? Anything that will keep him off balance.”
“On your signal,” Clyde nodded and positioned himself to be able to cast while working with the ring.
“Get ready, folks,” Saxt said to the team members. “We’re going to draw power from the ring like never before. Spin it fast.”
Pat answered for all of them. “We’ll have all you need. You just destroy tha
t bastard. Chuck, get up here. You can supply power, too.”
Saxt and Johanna faced the opposite pentagon again and assumed their position. Saxt murmured in her ear, “Will he have you? Never. Let’s show him and that damned stone what we can do. Narrow the blade aperture some more.”
They cast their sword and first made sure the opening through which the power flowed was as small as they could fashion it. Then they started firing a continuous beam at the base of Phil’s fortress. Phil clearly wasn’t ready and hadn’t been watching because he jumped about a foot when the first strike hit.
The narrower opening doubled the strength and intensity of the beam, now a deep gold. Where it struck the wall, the tip flashed white. While Saxt gave her a play-by-play report on Phil’s actions, Johanna worked at keeping the beam on one spot for as long as she could before the Hex attacked it. Golden smoke rose from the waves.
“Hah, yourself, Phil,” she muttered as she shifted her tip to another position.
“To hit us, he has to place the baggie close to the point of our beam and turn it so the hand faces us,” Saxt told her. “He’s having trouble keeping up with your changes in directions.”
The Hex’s misfires blasted more granite out of the walls. Twice one of the black beams hit their pentagon, and the panel vibrated wildly, but held.
Where the battle had been relatively quiet with only the crackle and boom of lightning bolts and the whoosh and detonation of fireballs, now the crack of the Hex’s shots, the bang of their hitting the stone walls, and the subsequent avalanche of granite grew almost deafening. Thank goodness their fortress was far enough from the building’s walls that the flying rocks hadn’t hit them—yet.
She and Saxt actually penetrated Phil’s fortress wall a few times. Unfortunately the beams hit neither Phil nor the staff as they passed through. They only managed to strike the far side of the pentagon, and the Hex neutralized them on the rebound.
“Ready for a diversion?” Clyde called out.
“Do it!” she shouted.
Clyde cast a waterfall. When neither Phil nor the Hex retaliated by shooting through the illusion, Johanna kept the golden beam on the same target point until the deluge faded. This time, the hole was a good-sized one.
Saxt yelled, “Clyde, shoot something through that!”
As Clyde’s lightning bolt ricocheted around the interior of the fortress, Phil dropped the staff and dove for the floor. The baggie fell out of the staff’s hand, but didn’t break open. From the floor, the Hex fired and killed the zigzagging energy.
“Hit him again!” Saxt whooped, and Clyde sent two more bolts into the hole.
Johanna saw an intense flash of black flame within the baggie. When the next bolts came through the opening, the Hex was ready and shot them down. It retaliated with a black beam at their wall to Johanna’s right, and the missile struck with a reverberating boom.
“No real damage,” Saxt said, “Only another green smear.”
Phil rose to his hands and knees and pushed himself upright, using the staff as a crutch. He picked up the baggie, but appeared to be having trouble positioning it to sit in the carved hand. Several times he lifted the plastic pouch to rearrange the contents.
“I have an idea. Give me more power, and build up your own. When I say ‘cancel,’ do it immediately.” Johanna sucked up energy through her center and filled her right hand with it. Saxt’s left pulsed with it in their grip. She aimed their blade carefully. “One, two, three.”
The golden beam struck Phil’s wall on the left edge of the existing puncture. She swept the tip in a semi-circle and chewed out a hunk of the swirling noxious green. “Cancel.”
“Good work! It’s bigger by half. Do it again. Clyde, be ready to follow up. How are you doing?”
“We’re holding up fine here,” Clyde reported.
“Incoming,” Johanna said.
Phil jerked around at the hit and was holding the staff so the hand faced them again. The Hex fired several times in succession, each strike shaking their walls harder than the previous one.
Was it growing in power? Was it fusing with the other pieces, or using them in some way to concentrate energy? Not an outcome she wanted to contemplate at the moment. “Let’s work on the hole again.”
They shot, Clyde sent in two lightning bolts, and although their beam enlarged the hole, the Hex again anticipated the bolts. It sent a barrage of black bursts, first at their shots, then at them directly.
One hit bent their wall inward about six inches. The next made it bulge about a foot. The third caromed off a panel and struck a side wall. With a sound like guns going off, large chunks of stone showered down on the floor.
After a slight pause in which Phil rearranged the contents of the baggie again, the Hex resumed firing—a methodical attack of black beams on the same point on the same wall.
“Phil looks as sickly green as the walls of his own pentagon, and he’s not holding the staff steady,” Saxt told her while she aimed at the hole again.
Thanks to Phil’s shaking the staff, the Hex’s aim wasn’t true, and more shots rebounded or glanced off their panels. More stone crashed to the ground, large pieces that broke apart when they slammed into the floor. A couple of small ones flew through their fortress and only narrowly missed Pat and Charles.
Johanna reminded herself that pentagons couldn’t keep out solid objects, only magic energy. Where was Jim Tylan with his gun when they needed him? Were they going to have to grab some of those rocks and throw them at Phil to subdue him and the Hex? She aimed a beam through the hole and made the evil junk in the baggie work harder.
For several minutes, she and Saxt exchanged shot for shot with the Hex. Phil ceased casting his own bolts and became only the prop for the staff. If he was doing anything except rearranging the stones within the baggie, Johanna couldn’t see what it was.
Phil’s fortress wall was almost totally a translucent blackish green, and, although their strikes did damage, they didn’t appear to bend his walls like the blows from the Hex on their own pentagon.
“Cancel the beam, but keep the blade,” Saxt said. “Let’s consider our tactics.”
Johanna raised her voice to be heard over the concussions as more baseball-sized gray hail shot out of a side stone wall. “It’s going to take us forever to blast through. I think the Hex is growing more powerful. If it hits us with those granite bullets, we’ll lose somebody.”
“Yeah,” Saxt agreed. “We’re going to have to use ring power to shore up our pentagon if we can’t hurt it or strike through to Bellman. I don’t know where Miriam and the others are. The way that Hex is acting, we can’t hold out much longer. We need more firepower. A way to hit him equally hard with two strikes simultaneously.”
“How?”
“When we were practicing earlier, I had a crazy idea. It appeared to me out of the ether, all of a sudden. What if we split our sword into two, create one in my left hand and one in your right? Channel our increased power out both blades.”
Johanna tilted her head to be able to see his face. “How strange. I had a similar thought in the middle of the duel—why weren’t we in the same pentagon and why didn’t we have two swords. Whatever’s giving us these ideas isn’t finished with us or them yet. My center’s vibrating. It likes the notion. Although I’m not wild about experimenting in the face of the enemy, I’m willing to try. Let’s throw everything we have directly at Phil and the Hex.”
“Get ready, people,” Saxt told the team. “We need more power. When I give the word, spin the ring as fast as you can. Clyde, send them another waterfall right now so Phil can’t see what we’re doing.”
Clyde cast the waterfall. The Hex’s beams stopped for a few seconds, then restarted. The cube had the range and the position targeted. Their wall began to bulge ominously with each hit. Out of the corner of her eye, Johanna saw Clyde strengthen the panels. That helped—a little.
She ignored the problem to concentrate on producing two new swords. “I
f we’re going to create two blades, we’d better unlock our grip.”
Saxt agreed, and they slid their gripping hands apart only far enough to keep their locking fingers next to each other. The movement enlarged the open area between their palms.
The hilt of the sword in their hands expanded to fit the space.
“Hot damn! I think we’re onto how we’re supposed to use this ability,” Saxt exclaimed.
“I can feel two hilts.” Johanna used her right-hand fingers to grip the new handle.
“So can I. Hold on to yours and separate our hands.”
She took a firm grasp and began to move her right hand away from his left. That resulted in two hilts attached to a single blade in a Y formation. Both hilts and the single blade flickered as her energy output shifted almost automatically to her right. She balanced the power in both hands, and the color solidified. “Keep our energy equal on both sides.”
“Right,” he said, “and keep our outside hands tight against the gripping one. Pull apart slowly.”
Carefully, they separated the swords from the hilts up. When the tips came apart, they each relaxed a little. Success! Where one sword had glowed, now two golden blades gleamed in the spell light from the pentagon walls.
Saxt turned his head toward the team. “When I say ‘okay,’ Clyde, cut the illusion, and everybody keep the ring spinning.”
Johanna’s center hummed and expanded even more, then seemed to merge with Saxt’s through their robes. Power infused every cell in her. The energy flowing between them eclipsed all they had experienced before.
In her ear, Saxt murmured, “I think we found the answer to our problem. Ready? Single-shot, one huge, concentrated bullet of power, like destroying an item. Wait for the illusion to drop. I’ll count twice. First count to fill your blade. Second to shoot.”
Aiming her blade for the middle of Phil’s pentagon and slightly to the right of the point—directly where Phil’s chest should be—Johanna smiled grimly as she narrowed the aperture of its tip. “Oh, yes. You go left, after the Hex. I’m going right. Phil is mine.”