by R. L. King
But how was he going to do it?
He stared up at it, his frustration growing. His legs shook. He swiped an angry hand across his forehead, flinging drops of sweat and water in every direction. His breath, coming through gritted teeth, sounded harsh in his ears.
He had to do something, damn it.
Before it had conscious thought to guide it, he brought both hands up, put them together as if he were executing a two-handed hold on a handgun, and pointed his index fingers at the spirit’s head. He screamed out a series of incoherent syllables at sufficient volume that the mere effort of yelling almost knocked him over backward, and sent out a shaft of pure magical force at the thing.
The ley lines did their job: even with his shield up, even with his body barely responding to his mind’s instructions, it was probably the most powerful spell he’d ever cast. He held nothing back, letting the dark thing have his best shot, if for no other reason than he had to take some action or he would go insane with frustration.
The spike of pure white energy, as big around as the water bottle he’d just picked up, flew unerringly from Stone’s hands, tracking an arrow-straight path to the shifting darkness of the spirit’s head.
And vanished into it without a trace.
“NO!!” Stone screamed, his frustration growing with exponential fury. He fell to his knees again, his head thrown back, his face shrouded in despair.
That had been his best shot—he was certain it could have punched through an inches-thick concrete wall like it was paper—and the spirit hadn’t even noticed, let alone responded. It remained where it was, focused on the portal, which grew more substantial with each passing second. Stone thought he could see things moving on the other side, but that might just have been a trick of his mind.
He blinked sweat and tears of anger from his eyes and continued looking up at the spirit.
It ignored him, as it ignored everything else but the portal in front of it.
“I can’t do it…” Stone murmured, his tone numb and lifeless.
For a moment, he took his eyes off the spirit to look at what was going on around him. Everywhere, people were moving: the crowd was in full panic mode now, screaming, trampling each other, trying to move through with vehicles, setting any nearby structures on fire. Flames and smoke rose up to join the night sky, obscuring the stars in much the same way as the spirit was. A few people loitered in the center of the playa, but most of them seemed to have an instinctive idea that the large black figure standing by the Man was something to avoid.
He couldn’t see Jason, Verity, or Sharra. He hoped they were still alive, and hadn’t somehow been taken out by the Evil’s forces.
What did it even matter? In an hour they’d all be dead anyway.
For a moment, he thought about giving up: about just sitting down where he was and waiting for the spirit to finish its work and make of him yet another snack, or for Trin to find him. There was a certain allure to it—to not have to always be part of the solution. To not have to be the one who made things happen. How conceited was that, to think that he could be?
The feeling lasted for about five seconds, and that was only because his brain was running more slowly than usual. “No…” he said aloud, and the sound was a defiant growl through gritted teeth. “I am not giving up. Not yet.”
He had no idea what he would do, but if he gave up now, there was no chance he could do it. Taking a deep breath, he trudged forward again toward the center of the playa.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Jason moved on inertia now. Frustration, grief, and a growing feeling of uselessness settled over him as he hurried along following Verity and Sharra, making sure to keep under cover of their shields as they chased down the Evil soldier who still struggled to elude them.
The soldier wasn’t making it easy: he was small and wiry, and used the milling crowd to his advantage. So far he was still in the middle area, which meant the crowd was sparse. If he made it to the edge, though, he could disappear into the massive herd of panicking people and make his escape.
If he didn’t get trampled first, of course, but Jason didn’t think he cared much about that. The Evil inside him knew what would happen if they caught him, if Verity got hold of him. He suspected that all the Evil had a pretty good idea about Verity and what she could do. For the soldier Evil, she was probably more frightening than Stone was.
“Faster!” Verity shouted. She picked up speed, and next to her, Sharra and Jason did likewise. They began to close the gap.
The Evil soldier would probably have made it if not for a very large, very drunk man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt who lumbered into his path, clearly oblivious to anything going on around him as his fellow crowd members darted around in terror.
The soldier didn’t have time to change direction. He swung his little SMG around and ventilated the man, but couldn’t stop in time to prevent himself from slamming into him before he fell. The two of them went down in a heap as the rest of the crowd screamed and ran away in all directions.
As Jason, Verity, and Sharra came running up, the soldier brought his gun around again and leveled it at them, letting loose with another spray that caromed off the shield and took out several more crowd members.
Unfortunately for him, one of the rounds ricocheted and tore a chunk out of his own leg. He shrieked and dropped the gun.
“Get out!” Verity screamed before he did it, pointing her hand at him. For a moment it didn’t seem as if it would work, but then the familiar gray puff of a weak Evil wafted upward and disappeared.
All three of them hurried up to the former soldier and dropped down next to him. “We’ve got you,” Verity said. Jason snatched up the SMG and secured it, slinging it over his shoulder by its strap.
The man, barely more than a teenager, sobbed in pain. “Oh, God, what’s happening to me? It hurts! It hurts!”
“We don’t have time to heal him,” Jason said, looking around. He felt uncomfortable enough not being on his feet when this many unpredictable human cattle darted around in aimless paths, but a quick glance at the portal told him they didn’t have a lot of spare minutes.
Verity grabbed the guy by the shoulders as Sharra turned to keep a lookout to make sure nobody was approaching them. “Hey,” she said to him. “We need help.”
“You need help?” he demanded. He clutched at her. “My fuckin’ leg! It’s bleeding! I’m gonna die!”
Jason slapped him—not enough to hurt him, but enough to get his attention. “Hey!” he said. “Listen to her!” He began ripping a strip off the bottom of his grimy T-shirt to use as a binding for the man’s wound.
The kid looked at Jason, stunned, but settled down. “Huh?”
“We need to know where the leaders are,” Verity said distinctly. “The bosses. We know they’re around here somewhere. Where are they?”
For a moment, it looked like the man had no idea what she was talking about. He watched Jason tying up his leg with a kind of disassociated interest, and Jason saw he was going into shock from the gunshot wound. “Answer!” he yelled in the guy’s ear.
“The leaders!” Verity echoed. “Where are they?”
He thought about it, then something clicked into place in his brain. “Tent,” he said, pointing. “Over there. They’re all in there. That’s what we were supposed to do—keep people away from it. The big blue one. See it?”
Jason looked, and he did see it: a massive pavilion-type tent at least three times as big as the ones at their campsite. “Yeah!” he snapped, standing up. “Come on, guys! I see it!”
“What about me?” the man demanded. “I’m dyin’ here.”
They ignored him. Jason felt bad about it: during his old days at the police academy before he got expelled, he had been trained to help people in emergencies, to take charge of situations like this and make sure whatever part of them were his responsibility were as secure as he could manage. To turn his back on somebody in need went against everything he was—but there wer
e already thousands of people in need here. The only way he could help any of them was to help deal with the root of the problem. And that meant keeping up with Verity and Sharra.
They ran toward the tent.
Ahead of Stone, towering above him even more dramatically as he drew closer, the spirit continued channeling power into the solidifying portal. If he hadn’t known what it was and what it represented, he would have found the portal to be almost painfully beautiful, its colors growing brighter and more dazzling as it continued to suck in energy as fast as the spirit could provide it.
Around it, the Man still burned. The flames had reached all the way to the top now, their tendrils licking up into the night like crazed cultists trying to touch their unseen god. The red lasers still pierced somewhere near the top of the Man, reaching their way to their terminal points somewhere among the campsites.
They had to be part of the ritual somehow: Trin wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of setting this up so carefully if it wasn’t needed. Obviously it wasn’t intended to last for the long term, since the flames would soon consume the wooden form of the Man and the whole thing would collapse in on itself. But if it was meant to endure until that happened—
“Yes…” Stone muttered.
Maybe there was something he could do after all.
He took a step back and aimed with care: not at the spirit this time, or the portal, but at the Man itself. This time he split his hands, pointing one at the structure’s head and one at the center of its body. Taking a deep breath and bracing himself, he let loose with two beams of energy.
This time, the impact was more satisfying. The beams contacted the Man exactly where Stone had been aiming, and their force blew it into pieces, sending hunks of flaming wood flying out in all directions. They crashed to the dust of the playa, still burning.
Another loud shrieking scream went up from the crowd.
The red lasers winked out.
“Yes!” Stone yelled, pumping his fist. Rather than draining him as he’d expected from casting two such large spells in his current condition, the small success energized him.
Apparently, though, it had done nothing else. The spirit still remained where it was, unmoving and unscathed, focused on the portal. The portal itself also remained, shifting and shimmering and becoming ever more substantial.
Stone bowed his head. Maybe by destroying the Man he’d done something he couldn’t see, or stopped something he had no awareness of. But he had no way to know for sure.
Before she’d gotten a hundred yards from her little shelter, Trin saw the twin shafts of energy fly up from somewhere near the middle of the playa. She saw them hit the Man, and she saw it fly apart. One of the flaming bits of wood almost reached her, crashing down only a few yards away. The lasers, which had really been for show more than anything else—something for the hippies to focus on while the spirit did its work—disappeared.
Trin smiled.
It had to be Stone.
He was running true to form again. The man could be dying, and he’d still have to be a fucking showoff. This time, though, it would be his last mistake.
Because now she knew where he was.
It couldn’t have been anyone else. There weren’t any other mages of Stone’s caliber here, unless they’d been hiding themselves well throughout the week. The apprentice wasn’t capable of that level of power, not even with the ley lines to help. She didn’t think the granola girlfriend was, either. That left Stone, and herself.
And once again, he had no idea she’d found him.
This time he wasn’t going to get away, though. She’d make sure of that. No more subtlety. If she saw him, she would simply fry him with everything she had. She was sure he had a shield up, but she didn’t think even his shields would be strong enough to repel her best attack in this magic-rich environment when he wasn’t expecting it.
Her step had a new spring as she moved forward. She broke into a jog, wanting to make sure he didn’t move again before she got to him. Fortunately, there were nearly no other people this far into the center part of the playa—the combination of the spirit, the portal, the gory vaporization of the dancers, and the general mayhem had scared almost all of them into a panicked herd that tried to move in the general direction of “away.” That left the open area empty, and made it easy to see the lone figure standing ten yards or so away from the foot of the building where the Man had been perched.
She studied him for just a second. Lit as he was by the flickering of the portal, he almost made her think he appeared heroic standing there—a tiny figure poised against forces he couldn’t hope to prevail against—until she got a little closer and got a better look at him.
There was no hiding it: Stone was falling apart. He was barely on his feet, his body shaking, his skin pale, hair hanging lankly over his drawn face. No trademark long black overcoat that she knew he wore to make himself look more intimidating: it was impossible to look intimidating in a ridiculously oversized hippie tank-top and baggy shorts. All he looked was exhausted, his face a study in despair and hopelessness as he no doubt realized there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to stop what Trin had set into motion.
She grinned as she raised her hands.
Pia Brandt, her shield up to deflect the terrified crowd, broke free to the inner side of the circle.
The trek had been arduous: she was neither large nor particularly strong, and shoving her way past dozens of bodies had taken the last of her energy. She blinked a few times and took in the scene.
She saw the spirit, still where it had been standing, unmoving and focused and nearly solid black now. She saw the remnants of the Man, and the swirling rainbow colors of the portal looming fifty feet up into the night sky. The sight made her pause for a moment, a guilty sense of satisfaction coursing through her: a sense of that’s there because of me.
And then she remembered what it had cost—and what it would cost—and almost collapsed again.
“No,” she whispered, reminding herself of why she was here. She lowered her gaze from the towering things above her, and swept it over what was going on down below.
There wasn’t much to see down here. Off to her left, off in the distance, the huge tent containing the Evil’s leaders loomed. She couldn’t tell, but it looked like it might be on fire: smoke rose from the area, but she couldn’t see from this distance whether it came from there or from some other nearby tent.
Before she could move in that direction, though, something caught her eye from her right. She turned, careful not to draw attention to herself, and tried to identify it, but nothing was there. She—
Wait.
There was.
She shifted to magical senses, struggling to focus past the crazy, strobing madness from the portal, the spirit, and the ley lines. Then she saw it: a figure creeping toward the center of the playa under cover of a disregarding spell. Then the figure stopped and appeared to focus on something out farther into the center.
It was Trin.
Brandt’s eyes widened as she looked past her to see what had caught her attention. Another figure, standing alone and unprotected a little distance away from the Man’s wooden building, looked up at the spectacle taking place above his head.
The other figure, she could barely make out, was Stone.
Instantly, she realized what was going on here. Stone didn’t see Trin. He had no idea she was there. And Brandt knew, from her last couple of months’ association with Trin, how much she hated him, and how long she had plotted to have her revenge on him.
There was no way this would end well.
Trin raised her hands and pointed them at Stone’s swaying figure.
“NO!” Brandt screamed at the top of her voice. She was not a combat-trained mage. She had never been in a fight in her life, except for her abortive attempt to fend off Verity’s magic earlier that evening. She was a researcher, almost all her magic focused on helping with her studies.
But damn it, she was
determined that her life would be worth something before she died. She couldn’t hope to stop the spirit, or the portal, or even Trin.
But maybe Stone could.
She let loose with her best and only attack, a concussion beam that she’d learned as a teenager to protect herself when she had to be at the University late and alone. It was not a strong attack—normally. But she hadn’t taken into account the extra punch it got from the ley lines. It flew from her hands at the same moment that she yelled, and slammed into Trin’s shields.
After that, several things happened.
The attack didn’t breach Trin’s powerful magical protections, but she hadn’t been expecting it, so it bowled her over, knocking her forward and onto her knees.
Immediately she spun without even bothering to get up, and spotted the source of the spell.
Even from where she was, Brandt saw Trin’s eyes narrow dangerously, and saw her bring up her own hands.
Right before Trin’s spell reduced her to ash, though, she saw something else:
Stone had heard her. He had noticed. He no longer faced the Man and the portal and the spirit, but had turned his attention to Trin.
Brandt smiled as she died. Now she and Anna would be together again; she hoped that her daughter, and God, would forgive her for what she had done.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Jason, Verity, and Sharra approached the tent. The soldiers had fallen back to protect it, and at least a dozen of them patrolled the area surrounding it, taking shots at any crowd members who got too close. Nearby, other tents burned, sending billowing clouds of dark smoke into the night sky.
“What do we do?” Verity asked. “There’s so many of them.”
“Got a spell that can take ’em all out at once?” Jason asked. He hefted the SMG, but didn’t want to use it. Even in this hellish situation, he knew the soldiers were nothing more than possessed people. They didn’t deserve to die for something that wasn’t their fault, at least not if he could help it.