Unveiled (Etudes in C# Book 2)

by Jamie Wyman

With the sound of whip cracking, fire bloomed in Baldy’s hand, a warning caressing his flesh. Great, a pyromancer.

  “Call her. Now,” Baldy said, his voice simmering.

  I didn’t waste time. I wet my lips and drew in a breath.

  Chapter Nine

  “Hoodoo”

  I thrust both hands flat against one of the tow trucks and exhaled my will into the beast. The engine roared to life, the thunderous sound rolling through my belly. White light raced in my veins, and the gears shifted. The tires spun, chewing up gravel and spitting out a cloud of dust, and the truck reversed at top speed.

  Karma exploded into motion, running up the side of the second truck and pushing off in an arcing somersault. She landed in a crouch on the cab of the rig I’d controlled. As one of the mooks went down beneath the behemoth, Karma rode it through the fence, her own power now guiding the truck. The razor wire shredded like crepe paper.

  Both Karma and the truck disappeared from my sight as a wall of flames sprouted up in front of me. I jerked away, flooded with supersonic panic. Incandescent, magical fire wreathed Baldy’s outstretched hands, and plumes of it erupted to either side of me. While two more thugs went running toward the back of the lot—toward Flynn—Baldy and Chu made to flank me.

  I staggered backward, my footing uneven in the gravel, and pooled power in my hands. I caught a blur from the corner of my eye. Beyond the fence, Polly and Nate circled to the hole Karma had widened with her ride. Polly screamed Flynn’s name, and Nate looked as if he wanted to jump through the ruined fence. But he hesitated. Did his Boy Scout sensibilities keep him from helping us, or was he allergic to fire?

  I’m allergic to fire, too, I thought ungraciously.

  From atop the tow truck—now idling outside the lot—Karma let out a high-pitched battle cry. Arcs of violet light left her fingertips and speared toward Baldy and Chu.

  Dodging Karma’s power, Baldy leaped onto the parked tow rig. I loosed a white bolt of my own magic a little too late. It splashed against the roof of the rig and managed little more than a spider web crack on the windshield.

  Karma flung another bolt his way, this one connecting with his shoulder. Snarling, the pyromage turned his total focus on her. Baldy shot fire from his hands, malicious glee pulling his lips back into a sneer. From atop their trucks, Karma and Baldy squared off, so that left me with Chu to worry about.

  I turned my eyes to him just as he wrenched both of his fists toward his chest. The gate behind him shook and rattled. Metal sizzled and convulsed, blue witch fire burning all along the links. His motions were fluid as a dancer’s as he worked his own will. Moving in tandem with his flow, the razor wire whipped out of its moorings atop the fence and lashed about the lot like a striking snake.

  “The fuck?” I heard myself say.

  Chu’s feet were spread apart and rooted to the ground in a martial artist’s stance, and Chu performed what appeared to be high-speed tai chi. As his hands moved so, too, did the razor wire obeying his commands. The whip struck out in my direction again with dizzying speed. Fire roared to one side of me and metal hissed at the other. The air popped with fireballs and lightning. And the screams. Karma, Flynn, Polly, and Nate all trying to talk at once. Their voices blended into a background noise of sorts, a sample track beneath the techno rhythm of my own heart smashing in my ears.

  More out of frustration than anything else, I sent off two blasts of my own white-lightning power—one each for Baldy and Chu. Without waiting to see if those strikes met their marks, I reached into my pocket and withdrew the last two of Loki’s darts. One after the other I sent them flying toward Chu’s eye sockets. The hypnotic flow of his motions didn’t break. Chu merely made deflecting motions with his hands, and both darts flew off course and harmlessly down to the gravel.

  Overwhelmed, outclassed, and outnumbered, I made for the gate but skidded to a halt as the pyromage hurled another fireball in my path. From his perch on the stationary wrecker, he sent out unpredictable blasts that kept me penned in the lot. I tried to juke my way around his shots and to the open gate, but his spells penned me in the center of the lot and pushed me around like a pawn.

  As I spun away from the fire, I saw Flynn engaging two of the thugs. His hazel eyes were full of wild urgency as he looked past me.

  “Karma!” he called.

  I whirled around to see her, still in her crouch atop the wrecker, surfing back into the lot. Her fingertips rested on the top of the cab, her will pouring into the truck to keep control of it. She was on a collision course with Chu.

  He adjusted his stance and thrust both hands down through the air in a sledgehammer motion. In response, the front of the truck crumpled into a wad of twisted metal as if it had smashed into a stalled train. I heard the crunch and scream of steel, the sound of the axle cracking. The truck stopped dead, and Karma flew off it.

  Flynn was past me in a blur, yelling his lady’s name. I saw the two thugs he’d been dealing with, one atop the other, in a heap on the ground.

  I didn’t get to see where or how Karma landed. Instead, razor wire whipped past once more, nearly slicing my eye. Chu advanced on me.

  “I’m tired of this shit,” I yelled to no one in particular.

  Out of darts and no match for him physically, I had to get creative. I was tapped out and more than a little desperate, but I held my hands in front of my chest as if about to shoot a basketball. The security light above me flickered as I pulled its energy into the space between my hands. An incandescent tentacle of power thrust itself out of the ball and, at my will, darted at Chu with sharp, staccato movements.

  He tried to parry with the wire whip, but this time, my own power caught the thin, barbed line. At my mental command, the white tentacle of my magic gripped the razor wire. I poured energy into Chu’s weapon, and it blazed brighter than Baldy’s latest barrage of flames. Lightning of my own conjuring chased along the length of the line, forking off and darting to the ground around Chu.

  Connected as I was to the wire, I sensed Chu’s magic—steely blue and scaly, like dragon hide. I thrust my energy through and forced my power into the wire until I alone had control of it.

  The moment he lost magical contact with the wire, Chu’s eyes widened with surprise. He searched the area for something, anything. I didn’t know what he’d found; I was busy commanding the wire to coil around him. A glimmering vortex of power and steel looped again and again. Before I had a chance to make it squeeze, however, Chu punched at the air again, and behind me, the gas pump crumpled.

  Gasoline flowed out of the demolished pump like blood from a chest wound as I ducked another fireball.

  Screaming incoherently, I let loose the last of my power in one Hail Mary. Lightning arced out of every coil of wire around Chu. He burst into a solar flare before crumbling to the ground.

  Flynn’s voice speared through the cacophony. “Cat!”

  The heat from the blaze behind me crept up my back, my skin tingling, prickling…

  “Cat, get down!”

  Burning.

  Baldy cackled as he sent another bout of flames past me and into the pooling fuel from the gas tank. I ran for the hole in the gate, and I saw Polly. Her lips moved quickly, her expression desperate. Was she chanting? All this stunting from a handful of mages and Polly was talking?

  I was hit from behind then and fell, feeling only the gravel beneath my face and pressure on my back. Then heat and pain. I breathed in the scent of burning hair and, with a moment of disconnected panic, realized it was my own. Flynn was on top of me, tearing my jacket away and patting out flames on the backs of my thighs.

  “Come on,” Flynn yelled.

  He grabbed my hands and pulled me to my feet, leading me in a sprint around the tow rig.

  “The veil!” Baldy called. The mage pointed at Polly. “Give it to me!”

  Flynn and I were less than ten feet from the hole in the fence when a fresh wall of fire bloomed between me and Flynn.

/>   I fell backward, limbs heavy and mind thick with the wavering heat and the many pains in my body. All that power-slinging left me weak as a kitten.

  With a world-splitting crack, lightning—real, natural lightning—struck a blow between the two wreckers. Metal screeched, voices cried out. On the other side of the flame, I heard Flynn call to Karma. “Can you get Cat?”

  “I will have the veil,” Baldy screamed. The pyromancer tilted his head back, opening his arms wide. In a guttural voice, he called out, “Belial! Free me!”

  With a sickening fwump, the mage went up in flames. Fire wreathed his body like a second, violent skin. His eyes burned as red as iron from a forge. He thrust out both hands.

  A blast of sound. A wall of force and a wave of heat. An explosion—the gas pump?—sent me flying. I landed in the gravel face-first. My chin and jaw throbbed while my mouth filled with blood. I spat a gob of it into the rocks and was grateful not to see a tooth there. Exhausted and light-headed, I only made it to my hands and knees before collapsing into a coughing fit. My eyes watered and stung with the smoke and gasoline fumes.

  Over the ringing in my ears, I heard Polly screaming.

  No, she was singing. How could she possibly be singing at a time like this? The sound was lovely, though, as her haunting melody filled my head.

  Fire surrounded me. In the small bit of sky I could see, clouds churned. My eyes drooped. Flames licked up the denim of my jeans, the seams of my T-shirt. The hairs on my arms curled. As cold rain began to fall in stinging pellets, I went limp on the gravel. The last thing I saw was a spear of lightning, tethering the pyromage to the angry sky.

  Chapter Ten

  “Sunburn”

  A constant hum ringing in my ears. The gentle whir of tires on asphalt. A voice whimpering somewhere.

  Oh, I thought numbly. That’s me.

  I couldn’t stop shaking. I tried to curl in on myself only to find I was still sprawled on my stomach. With each convulsion, my back screamed as if the flesh was parting one painful fucking nanometer at a time.

  I opened my eyes, and my lashes crunched dryly. Though blurrier than I’d ever seen it, I recognized the backseat of Flynn’s car. Karma straddled my ankles, her cloud of curls brushing the roof of the car.

  Twisting to see her sent fresh bursts of agony through my back. I would have screamed if my throat hadn’t been so damn dry. My lips, cracked and parched like the Martian landscape, tasted of blood.

  “Don’t talk, Cat,” Karma said. “Just let me get you stabilized.”

  Letting my head fall down onto my forearms, I heard the sound of tearing paper.

  “How many are you using?” Flynn called, his voice thin with fear.

  “Three. Her whole back is one burn. Glad she was wearing cotton or this would’ve been more serious.”

  Three? Three what? What about my back?

  “What’s going on?” I rasped.

  No one answered. Karma’s hands pressed something to my ruined flesh, and pain lanced through me, icy and white.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “Shh. I know. I know this hurts. I’m sorry. Shh…almost there.”

  I think I meant to say something like, Please, gods, make it stop. I meant to scream with enough force to give a chorus of banshees a run for their ghastly money. But all that came out were choked and sputtered syllables. Agony lit up every single cell in my back with electric venom. My flesh crawled with acid-soaked needles. My hands clutched the door handle, and I pulled with everything I was worth.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Let it work. Don’t fight it.”

  The wound writhed as though my boiling flesh insisted on knitting itself back together. “Can’t,” I said.

  “You can. You will.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Dammit, Karma,” Flynn yelled. “Do something!”

  Power gushed into me. Karma’s power. I choked on another scream that wouldn’t release. Every shallow, rapid breath came with a dry rasp, a fresh wave of pain. I wanted to burst, to die. Anything to make this stop.

  “God, please!” I called.

  Fireworks of color exploded behind my eyes. White, purple, and orange crashed together, and my icy shivers met the fire of my pain, and I turned to steam. Sweet, formless, bodiless steam. My breath was a soft, quiet hiss rather than a teakettle scream. I could float here. Float up and up into the air forever.

  “Talk to me, Karma.” Flynn’s voice was reedy, far away.

  “Give me…a minute,” she panted.

  “Do I need to get to the hospital or not?”

  I opened my eyes. Sliding my chin against the seat, I looked over my shoulder. Over the glistening expanse of my bare back, I saw Karma sprawled against the other door. Her head was tilted against the window, and she was drawing her breaths in erratic gulps.

  “No,” she said, raising a hand limply. “We’re all good back here. Just meet up with Polly and Nate.”

  The car rolled on, tires shushing over pavement. I closed my eyes and lay there shaking. Pain ebbed away, and I drifted out on a black wave of oblivion.

  …

  Red and yellow neon cascaded through the window and splashed over the half of my face not pressed against the seat. My body ached as if I’d been eaten by a dragon and spit out again, but the blinding pain had dissipated, so that was a plus. My stomach rumbled loudly—found the dragon!—and I realized that I was ravenous. I craved mass quantities of food and a gallon of water more than anything.

  I looked outside to see that the car had stopped in the parking lot of my personal mecca. We’d arrived at Denny’s.

  I practically launched out of Flynn’s car and into the awaiting arms of cheap food. Embarrassment brought me to a screeching halt, however, as I discovered the copious amounts of side-boob exposed by the wreck of my top. The back of my T-shirt had been burned to crispy tatters, and the rest…well, Karma sliced that away so she could administer her technohealing to my flesh. Likewise, she’d severed my bra. Its band dangled uselessly at my sides. Dammit. Good bras are so hard to find.

  I rushed to re-clip the bra, but the stinging skin of my back screamed its protests at that attempt. Using the trusty through-the-sleeve technique, I shrugged out of the bra and tossed it into the back of Flynn’s car. I pulled and tugged at the smock that was my T-shirt as tightly as I could without causing myself more pain and stood there shivering. Beside me, Karma looked exhausted. Puffy, purple bags tugged at her eyes.

  “You okay?” I croaked.

  “I’m so fucking hungry that if they don’t get here soon I’m going to eat this car.”

  “Preach.”

  We shared a weak fist bump of solidarity.

  From across the lot, I heard someone call her name. Nate and Polly sprinted toward us, their feet slapping against the pavement. Polly’s eyes were as big as saucers, her white scarf trailing after her like a cloud.

  “Sweet gods, are you all right?” she asked.

  A dim spark flared in my mind to bitch about how she and Nate just stood there while we fought a pyromancer and his gang. I quickly realized, though, that I was too tired to get into it with her. I dropped my eyes and trembled at the cold.

  Karma nodded, her hair rustling like dry leaves. And yet, my hair was plastered to my scalp in a sodden mess.

  I examined the group. Flynn’s and Karma’s clothes remained bone-dry. Likewise with Polly and Nate. I looked down at my sodden clothes. Jeans dark. Remnants of my black T-shirt soaked with water and blood. My shoes made squelching sounds as I shifted from foot to foot.

  Through chattering teeth I whispered, “Th-there was…l-l-lightning. Rain?”

  Polly nodded somewhat sheepishly. She cleared her throat. “Isolated thunderstorm, thanks to my father.”

  “Why am I the only one who’s wet?”

  Her eyes darted around the group sheepishly. “Very isolated.”

  I spocked an eyebrow.

  “Hey,” she said, “don’t knock it. It saved your life.�
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  No, I thought, Karma saved my life. You stood there and what? Asked Daddy to make it rain?

  “Thanks,” I muttered anyway. “Fucking pyromancers.”

  “What did those guys want?” Nate asked.

  “The veil,” I said, shooting a glare at Polly.

  Polly went rigid. “That’s what he said? You’re sure?”

  “Second time in as many days that someone has come after me with lethal force looking for that thing. You have something you want to tell me?”

  Nate chewed on his thumb and spoke before Polly could answer. “Does this have something to do with Muri?”

  “Look,” Karma barked, “You all can have your instant replay out here if you want. Me? I’m going in there, and I’ll cut the bitch that tries to keep me away from a full-on Moons Over My Hammy.” With that, she plodded off toward the shining beacon that was Denny’s. Nate followed her.

  Polly stayed, taking in my bedraggled state. “You look—” her eyes lingered over the dishrag that was standing in for my T-shirt “—cold.”

  She whipped off her jacket and put it over my shoulders. I shrugged into it, every muscle in my body tense. I met her eyes, silently asking if this was a trick.

  She dipped her chin. “Go on. Get warm.”

  I slid my arms into it. Freezing as I was—not to mention a stiff breeze away from full-frontal nudity—I truly appreciated the loan. “Thanks.”

  “Just don’t get any blood on it, okay?” she said with a feline grin.

  Polly glided on ahead, and then Flynn followed me inside and to our booth. The waitress looked us over wearily, sighed, and asked what she could get us. In unison we all said, “Coffee.”

  Karma ordered her food with drill sergeant efficiency. Polly and Nate got burgers and fries.

  “Not hungry,” Flynn said.

  The waitress aimed her pen at me. “And for you?”

  “Waffles,” I croaked. I lifted my hands to show the size I wanted—bigger than my head. “And bacon. Lots of bacon.”

  She bustled off to perform feats of waitress witchery, and I sagged. The Formica table seared my icy forehead, but I welcomed the heat. I sat like that while the others passed idle chat among themselves. There seemed to be some unspoken rule that we wouldn’t talk about anything serious—like fireballs, metallic whips, or lunatics asking for veils—until after we’d all had some quality time with sustenance.