by Olivie Blake
There, he thought. Now let’s really have a fight.
Reina seemed to be managing well enough with hand-to-hand combat; Nico caught a glimpse of her from the corner of his eye. She moved like a bull, attack after attack, and the force of her blows remained unfinished but heavy, unmistakable. He was a bit more finessed, more agile. The first gunman, now armed with a small utility knife, came for him with a blind overhand right hook, which Nico happily ducked, sending the gunman stumbling with a loud slur of profanity.
That, Nico thought, was certainly British English. CIA and MI6, perhaps?
How flattering.
Reina handled two of the gunmen, landing a hard but accessible shot to immobilize one thigh while Nico narrowed the remaining four men to three, twisting the gunman’s knife around for a blow to the kidney. He brought three to two with some tricky shots to the head, dazzling with a few careless jabs before shooting upwards with an uppercut, snapping the gunman’s neck back. All it took was a little precision to guide his non-dominant, uninjured hand.
It made sense, really, that whoever was trying to break into the Society would not have sent an entire company of medeians. Surely they knew what sort of security measures they were trying to breach, and a pack of special operatives could conceivably do just as much damage without sacrificing a drop of valuable magical blood. Yes, they would have to be accompanied by a medeian to break the security wards, but nobody Nico was facing now was dangerous unless he allowed them to be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he wasn’t particularly in the mood to be killed.
The two remaining gunmen weren’t stupid. They attacked side by side, making Nico the point of an isosceles triangle; a basic tenet of two-on-one combat, and therefore easy enough to predict. As was Nico’s decision to force them into an Orion’s belt, sprinting towards one while firing a blast of force at the other. For Nico, magic was merely an augmentation of his natural aptitude; he was sure-footed, well-balanced, compact and quick without any help from his powers, which would need to be preserved as much as possible. He could waste it, ending the fight sooner and requiring more time to recover, but he knew better than to do something short-sighted. These men may not have been magical, but someone here was, and they would surely prove it soon enough. Nico intended to be ready when they did.
He used only enough to give his blows the equivalency of electrocution, sending one gunman (now fully disarmed with the help of a summoning charm and the burying of the gunman’s own knife into the muscle of his quadricep) stumbling backwards, temporarily immobilized, while the other shot forward, missing Nico by an inch.
Nico, regaining control of the gunman’s knife, slipped just in time to avoid a shot aimed for his wounded shoulder—which, he supposed, was a bit of a giveaway as a pressure point, seeing as it was currently covered in blood. Luckily, his reflexive counter led his opponent directly to the spot of difficulty he’d hoped for, and his next slip, calculated to intercept the gunman barreling forward from behind him, caused the second gunman to make contact with the first.
Then he felt a little rumble underfoot; a warning, and a reminder that these were not the only intruders left in the house. Caught between the final two, Nico loosened the pull of gravity again to levitate himself parallel to the ground, slitting one’s carotid with the knife in his hand while aiming the arch of his foot into the sternum of another. The final gunman took the effect of Nico’s kick like a blow to his heart, halting mid-gasp and collapsing just as Reina drove a blade into the side of her assailant’s head.
Nico was about to turn and whoop—to congratulate her with a hand on her shoulder for having done slightly more than read a book—when he felt the unsettling sound enter his head again; this time, the dial had been turned so high he rose off the ground, floating in full-bodied paralysis.
Was that all this medeian could do? Waves? He supposed there was a reason only six of them had been chosen for the Society; not every medeian had both power and skill. This one seemed to have only one talent. In the medeian’s defense, though, it was a highly useful talent, and Nico was rendered instantaneously weak, having bled copious amounts during all the moments he wasn’t concentrating on clotting the wound to his shoulder. If he hadn’t already made such an expenditure of effort, this would have been no trouble at all to resist. He could overpower most medeians on strength alone, but not while he was crucially injured.
Still, it would have to be done. It would hurt, but it would have to be done.
Nico summoned what remained in the reserves of his abilities, half-exhausting himself in the process, and was surprised by a little spark; a jolt, somewhere in the unfeeling palm of his hand. It was a rush of something, like an electrical current, and Nico felt it leave him in a burst; an expulsion with the force of a gasp and the volume of a scream.
It had to have been Reina, but he couldn’t think about what had caused it just then. He had seconds before the medeian conjured another sound wave, so he shoved a cluster of magic—power, energy, force, whatever anyone wanted to call it—directly into the body of the waiting medeian.
The sound of his shot meeting its target was a woman’s cry of pain, and Nico cleared the fog and dust from the air, waiting until he and Reina could both clearly see her.
“Well,” Nico said to Reina, glancing at the medeian who was struggling to her feet. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”
He wasn’t particularly surprised when Reina smiled grimly, taking a step forward.
“I’m sure there’s room for both of us,” she said, placing a hand on his shoulder as Nico gladly summoned what sparked from his veins.
TRISTAN
Somewhere, Tristan caught the sound of a deafening explosion, followed by the unmistakable whoop of Nico de Varona’s laughter.
He was enjoying this, Tristan thought with disgust. When they’d last left Nico behind, gunshot wound and all, his steps had been so careless and at ease he looked like he was dancing, slipping between gunshots; as if gravity itself worked differently for him, which it probably did. Tristan hadn’t known anyone with the broad specialty of ‘physicist’ before, finding that most physical medeians had the narrowest fields of skill. With immense power typically came the ability to influence only certain things: Levitation. Incandescence. Force. Speed. Tristan hadn’t known it was possible for someone to be capable of all of that, and, by the looks of it, possibly even more. Physical magics were draining enough that Nico should have been exhausted by now, but he wasn’t.
He was laughing. He was enjoying this, and meanwhile, Tristan was going to be sick.
In Tristan’s mind, he had accepted the easier job; he was only going to ‘secure the perimeter,’ or whatever this sort of activity could be called. If anyone was going to shoot at anything, he reasoned privately, it was going to be all those guns aimed at Nico, whom Tristan hadn’t particularly liked to begin with. He knew the type—loud, showy, full of meritless bravado, like most of his father’s gang of witches. They all had violent streaks they barely concealed with a slavish devotion to rugby, and Tristan had assumed Nico was one of those. Young, brash, and prone to fights he couldn’t win.
Apparently Tristan was wrong. Nico could not only win, he could also do it with a gunshot wound to the shoulder of his dominant hand.
Even more alarmingly, he wasn’t the only one who could.
It was with immense reluctance that Tristan had initially agreed to split off with Libby, who had been little more than an irritation that Tristan suspected of being too insecure to last a day. Only chivalry (or something akin to it) had kept him from wandering off instead with Callum and Parisa, who had taken a left turn based on something the latter could read in the house’s mind. Tristan had thought, Well, someone’s going to have to keep an eye on the poor little annoying girl, or how else would she survive having no one to answer her thousand questions?
But then, of course, he’d been blindsided by a pack of what appeared to be spies with guns, and he was now having to rely on said annoying girl
much more heavily than he cared to admit.
“Get down,” Libby snapped as another gun fired, this time from somewhere behind them. It was, at least, a refreshing change of pace from her usual apprehensive mumbling. If there was one thing to be relieved about given all this, it was that Libby Rhodes was far more capable than she looked.
Tristan was beginning to regret not befriending any of the three physical specialties. Nico would have been ideal, given that he seemed to be a powerhouse of energy. The magic radiating from him was more refined than any Tristan had ever seen, and he’d seen quite a lot in his capacity as an investment analyst. He’d met with medeians claiming to power entire plants with the equivalent of nuclear energy who didn’t have the raw talent Nico had, and who certainly didn’t have his control. It occurred to Tristan, unhappily, that Libby and Nico may have come off as the least threatening for being the youngest and least experienced, but he suddenly doubted they were as juvenile as they seemed. He wished now that he hadn’t drawn a line between him and the others, because he doubted it would be easy to un-draw.
It was all an unpleasant reminder that Tristan’s father, a witch capable of moderate levels of physical magic, had always considered Tristan a failure. From the start, Tristan had been slow to show any signs of magic, barely able to qualify for medeian status when he reached his teenage years. An unsurprising outcome, considering they had spent so many years before that concerned he wasn’t even a witch.
Was that why he’d chosen to do this? Atlas Blakely had told Tristan he was rare and special and therefore he’d thought yes, fine, time to drop everything I spent years tirelessly cultivating in order to prove to my estranged father that I, too, can do something wildly unsafe?
“Do you know any combat spells?” Libby panted, giving Tristan a look that suggested he was the most useless person she’d ever met. At the moment, he suspected he might have been.
“I’m… not good with physicalities,” he managed to say, ducking another shot. These men seemed to be different from the group Nico had taken on in the drawing room, but they were definitely also outfitted with automatic weapons. Tristan didn’t know prodigious amounts about the intersect of magic and tech in warfare, seeing as James Wessex had chosen to handle any matters of weapons technology himself, but he suspected these were mortals using magically enhanced scopes.
“Yes, fine,” Libby replied, clearly impatient, “but are you—”
She broke off before something he suspected to be the word useful.
Which, as Adrian Caine had always made an effort to point out, Tristan had never been.
“Just come on,” she said in frustration, pulling him after her. “Stay behind me.”
This, Tristan thought, was a mildly infuriating turn of events. For one thing, he didn’t have a lot of experience being shot at. This was supposed to be an academic fellowship, for fuck’s sake; he hadn’t expected his time in the Alexandrian archives to involve ducking behind the closest piece of gaudy furniture he could find.
He could have stayed at Wessex Corp and never been shot at in his entire life. He could have simply told Atlas Blakely to shove it and gone on holiday with his fiancée; he could be having vigorous, herculean sex right now, waking up to discuss the future of the company with his billionaire father-in-law over an expertly blended Bloody Mary. Did it matter that Eden was a tiresome adulteress or that James was a capitalist tyrant if it meant never having to break a sweat aside from a drunken family game of badminton?
At the moment, it was unclear.
Libby, at least, was starting to take some initiative with her defense, having discarded any further hesitation in favor of survival. Whoever had broken in, they were covered head to toe in black and moving acrobatically around the room, like a small pack of ninjas. That felt like a childish thing to say, but there it was: there were three or four ninja-things coming after them, and Tristan couldn’t think of the first thing to do. There was so much magic in the room it was difficult to see anything but hazy, translucent leaks.
Libby turned and aimed at something; an expulsion of power that was directed at nothing.
“You missed,” he said, a muttered I-told-you-so moment that he would have decorously avoided if not for how potentially life-threatening all this was, and she glared at him.
“I didn’t miss!”
“You absolutely did,” he said through his teeth, pointing. “You missed by about five feet.”
“But he’s down, he’s—”
Hell on earth, was she blind? He should have stayed with Nico. “What are you talking about? You might have broken a lamp, fine, but it’s only Edwardian—”
“I didn’t—” Libby broke off, blinking. “You’re saying there’s nothing there?”
“Of course there’s nothing there,” he growled in frustration, “it’s—”
Bloody Christ; was he stupid?
“It’s an illusion,” Tristan realized aloud, scowling at his own failure to see the obvious, and then, without any further wasted time, he took hold of Libby’s shoulders and aimed her, pointing.
“Right there, see it? Straight ahead.”
She fired again, this time setting off a round of bullets by stopping their progression mid-air and instigating mass combustion. The gunman was blown backwards, the air littered with shrapnel, and the force of the explosion set off a momentary fog of smoke. Libby was frightfully incendiary, which Tristan suspected was something to conserve as much as it was a timely relief. It was probably going to cost her the same amount of energy as whatever Nico had been doing downstairs, so best not to fire incautiously while they didn’t know how many others they would still face.
“What does the room look like to you?” he asked in her ear, trying to concentrate as the smoke cleared. All he could make out were flares, torrents of magic.
“I don’t know… dozens of them, at least,” she said, grimacing. He could see she was battling frustration; for someone with her obvious control problems, the presence of illusions must have been particularly nightmarish. “The room’s crawling with them.”
“There’s only three left,” Tristan told her, “but don’t waste energy. Let me see if I can find the medeian who’s casting the illusions.”
Libby gritted her teeth. “Hurry up!”
Fair enough. He lifted his head to glance around, trying to determine who, if anyone, was doing the casting. He couldn’t see any indication of magic being produced, though he did spot a bullet—a real one; Libby must have not been able to tell it from the illusioned ones—just in time to throw up a fairly primitive shield, which dissolved on impact as Libby jumped, alarmed.
“The medeian’s not here,” Tristan said, which was possibly the most troubling conclusion he could have reached. “Let’s get rid of these three and move.”
“Aim me,” she said without hesitation. “I can take out three.”
Tristan didn’t doubt it.
He took hold of her left arm, guiding her just as one of the gunmen fired another round of bullets. As with before, Libby’s explosion ricocheted backwards into the assailant, though Tristan didn’t wait to see if he’d achieved his intended results. The others were moving, and quickly, so he pulled her into his chest, aiming first for the one coming towards them and then, with a little added difficulty, at the one who was slipping from the room.
“They’re headed that way,” he said, pulling Libby up and racing after the escaping gunman. “Must be where the medeian is. Can you—”
A thin bubble of atmospheric change warped around them, sealing itself with a little slurp of vacuumed pressure.
“Thanks,” he said.
“No problem,” she panted, as Tristan caught traces of magic and followed its trail to land them in one of the sitting rooms.
The illusionist was easy to find, even before they had fully entered from the corridor; the cloaking enchantment was obviously expensive, covering most of the room and reaching into the nearby access points. Tristan held Libby back, wat
ching the medeian first to see if he was working with someone else.
It looked like he was, though it wasn’t clear if whoever the illusionist was working with was a remote partner or someone else in the house; he was typing rapidly into a laptop that didn’t seem to be magical at all. Probably programming security cameras to be able to see, if Tristan had to guess, which meant they had seconds to spare. If not for having to control the illusions at the same time, the illusionist would have known they were there already.
“Go,” Tristan said to Libby, “while he’s not looking.”
She hesitated, which was the one thing he’d hoped she wouldn’t do.
“Do I shoot to kill, or—?”
In that exact moment, the medeian’s eyes snapped up from the laptop screen, meeting Tristan’s.
“NOW,” Tristan said, more desperately than he had hoped to sound, and Libby, thank bloody fuck, threw up a hand in time to stop whatever was coming towards them. The medeian’s eyes widened, obviously startled at the prospect of being overpowered, while Libby advanced towards him, shoving the force of the medeian’s own expulsion backwards.
The medeian wasn’t going down without a fight; he tried again, and this time Libby’s response was like a bolt of lightning, snapping the medeian’s control with a lash of something around his wrists. Tristan heard a cry of pain, and then a mutter of something under his breath; some basic obscenity, Tristan suspected, though his Mandarin was rusty.
“Who sent you?” Libby demanded, but the medeian had scrambled to his feet. Tristan, concerned the medeian might conjure more illusions as a defense, leapt forward, taking hold of Libby’s arm again and raising it.
“Which one?” Libby gasped. “He split.”
“That one, there, by the window—”