Fire Fall (Old School Book 4)

by Jenny Schwartz

  The longer a place went without attack or drama, the lazier people became about security protocols.

  The compound ought to have mundane surveillance such as night vision and infrared sensors, but there was no stirring within the compound. Either he and the yeti hadn’t been detected or the guards relied on the ward keeping everything out. Or the lack of response could be a trap. On balance, Seth suspected he and the yeti would be going in with the element of surprise on their side.

  If he could destabilize the anchor to the leyline.

  Anchors could be different things. The most accomplished witches could set a land ward with anchors simply sketched a moment in sand. For this land ward, he felt the weight of what were likely rocks inscribed with runes and buried. But the fifth anchor, the one that tapped the leyline, it wasn’t a physical object. The witch or sorcerer who’d set this ward had shaped an anchor out of energy. That made the anchor more powerful and capable of being directed to the leyline. Otherwise land wards tapping nearby leylines was a matter of chance. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. The founders of the Hunters Lab hadn’t wanted to gamble on a maybe.

  Wizards like Seth, capable of activating null-space, were exceedingly rare. The hunters couldn’t have guessed someone like him would tackle their ward. To anyone else, an energy anchor would be invulnerable. For him, if he could shape null-space in direct counterpoint to the form used to construct the anchor, then he could siphon its energy into the Void. The risk would be if his control of null-space wavered and it grazed the leyline itself. Then the Void would destroy him as it drew directly on the colossal power of a leyline. Humans couldn’t survive channeling so much power.

  If he didn’t break the ward, what would the phoenix do to Vanessa?

  Rage kept flaring up in him at the thought of Vanessa once again taken hostage in an attempt to coerce the men in her life. Her first kidnappers had wanted her father’s money. The phoenix wanted Seth’s talent and experience.

  He smiled with grim amusement. Once he attacked the energy anchor with null-space, rage or any other emotion would no longer be a problem. The Void would suck all of that from him. He refused to speculate on what would be left of him, his personality and ability to connect to others, after a null-space activation powerful enough to take out an energy anchor.

  He could be sacrificing himself for Vanessa.

  The yeti shifted its weight fractionally. It was eager for the fight ahead of them.

  Its presence was also a reminder that Seth wouldn’t just be sacrificing his emotional self for Vanessa, but for the fantastical creatures trapped and tortured by humans. Perhaps justice required his sacrifice?

  He was wasting time.

  On the rare occasions when his uncle called on him to bind another wizard’s magic—as he’d done with Andrew—the act required Seth to “see” the wizard’s connection to magic. It wasn’t physical sight, but an awareness of the flow of energy in and around the wizard. In a sense it was a refined and intensified version of how he scryed the environment for a sense of active magic.

  He concentrated, and the ward blazed in front of him, almost enough to dazzle his magical sight to any other emanation of magic. Seth had expected that effect, and he directed his attention to the yeti, using awareness of its wild magic to clear his vision.

  The energy anchor was just in front of him. Someone had patterned it on DNA, using a double helix that drove it into the ground and called to the leyline. The structure made him rethink his strategy of attack. He’d been going to attempt to use null-space to swallow the anchor, but that risked his null-space brushing against the raw power of the leyline and it destroying him. Instead, the double helix structure meant that ensnaring one of its two helixes would be sufficient to destabilize the anchor.

  “Be ready,” he said to the yeti and positioned himself near enough that he could grip its shoulder in a silent signal for it to break the land ward. He stared at the double helix that existed in front of him in his not-quite-vision of the anchor. He braced himself for the risk and the existential terror of opening himself to the Void, then he stabbed null-space at a single helix.

  The selected helix shook. The vibration entered Seth’s soul. He lassoed it with null-space and pulled. His fear vanished along with his anguish at his separation from Vanessa. Power thundered through him as null-space dragged at the helix. The power poured into the Void. The helix sagged out of shape, and with its distortion, the remaining helix collapsed. The energy anchor disintegrated, releasing the power of the leyline back into its natural flow.

  Seth gripped the yeti’s shoulder in the agreed signal for it to act. The sensation of its coarse fur against his hand and the earthy scent that emanated from it, no longer triggered the frisson of fear that had lurked unacknowledged in Seth’s psyche.

  Seth no longer felt any emotion. His mind noted the fact and approved it. Such was the price paid for the successful unleashing of null-space to destabilize an anchor plugged into a leyline. Most magical theorists would have claimed it couldn’t be done.

  He’d released null-space to enable the yeti to work its magic, but the Void still pulled on his emotions, dragging them out of him before he could feel them. The result was a howling emotional wasteland.

  The yeti charged the land ward, Josh dangling limply from its shoulder. Its strategy for breaching the ward was brutal but effective. It slammed its magic and Josh’s body at the ward, and the ward broke.

  Seth held his gun ready as he ran after the yeti. He maintained a tactical distance between them. Two separate targets would be harder for the enemy to take down than if he helpfully and idiotically clumped himself and the yeti together.

  Inside the compound, with the ward down, his brain didn’t act faster than usual, but it felt that it did. Without emotion clamoring and cluttering his thoughts, options for action could be sorted through and discarded with precise ruthlessness.

  His objective for this mission was simple: to save Vanessa. To do so required him breaking into the Hunters Lab and freeing the fantastical creatures caged inside. What those creatures would do with their freedom was not his immediate problem, unless they interfered with his ability to return to Vanessa.

  He took cover against the side wall of the shed and faced the ranch house. He pulled on his magic, found it sufficient, and directed it through one of the first spells he’d mastered. The spell locked down the ranch house. Nothing and no one could enter or exit the house. Any guards trapped inside it would stay there, as would their magic, phone messages and all other actions or communications. It was a powerful spell and while he held it, Seth’s ability to enact other spells was compromised.

  It’s worth it. In locking down the house, he’d likely halved or more than halved the number of people he and the yeti would have to fight. That improved their odds of success in storming a compound without intel on it.

  The yeti ran at the door to the barn and, at the last minute, kicked out. The door crashed open, torn from its hinges, to the accompaniment of the yeti’s snarls.

  Light shone from inside. Whoever guarded the lab hadn’t thought to switch off the lights, or else knew that at least one of the attackers wasn’t human and could likely see in the dark.

  Seth ran. He’d just cleared the doorway when the first gunshots rang out. He swiveled toward the sound, aiming and firing with smooth efficiency.

  The gunman fell. He was young, perhaps just out of his teens, his blond beard sparse and his blue eyes bulging in shocked disbelief that he was mortal. Maybe if he’d had a few years more experience he’d have been able to resist the fear triggered by the yeti’s dramatic entrance. He should have stayed hidden while assessing the threat. Seth with a gun was a more immediate threat than the yeti, for all of its snarls. The yeti had to close the distance between it and its prey. A bullet didn’t take anywhere near as long.

  Seth kicked the gun away from the man and left him bleeding out. He glanced at the yeti. “Are you hurt?”

 
The yeti grunted a non-answer and strode away.

  Good enough. Seth concluded his ally remained functional, and continued with the mission.

  The barn smelled of hay and animal feed, of chemicals and of poop. It was well-organized. At the front, to the left, was an office. Music and canned laughter emerged from it. Seth checked it quickly. “Clear.” The guard had been watching a DVD. Other screens, that should have showed a live security feed, were dark. The guard’s dereliction of duty had made Seth’s mission easier, and contributed to the guard’s death.

  On the other side of the doorway a cold storage room had its door shut.

  Within the ranch house, its occupants were awake and aware of the lockdown spell securing them. They fought it. Their efforts—at least one of them was a wizard—meant Seth couldn’t steal enough magic from his spell to scan the barn. Instead, he cleared the cold storage room the mundane way: gun at the ready.

  “Clear.” He was operating as if he had a Stag team with him, but the yeti had a different agenda and no training. When Seth turned, it was out of sight.

  The contents of the barn were organized in two rows. Three large tables stretched between the cold storage room and shelves of supplies—or were they products? The smell of poop made sense if they were. Some magic users would pay for anything related to fantastical creatures. The hunters were even selling their captives’ poop.

  On the other side of the barn, the rows included bales of hay, crates and feed bins. A deep trough was plumbed in.

  The yeti stalked up the central aisle, still carrying Josh over its shoulder. Abruptly, it stopped. It swiveled to the right and grunted.

  Assumptions were dangerous, but so was wasting time re-checking the remainder of the barn. Untrained or not, Seth had to assume that the yeti wouldn’t have left an enemy alive. He walked down to where the yeti stared at an empty, dusty stretch of floor space framed by hay bales and bags of kibble.

  One advantage of losing contact with his emotions was that Seth didn’t waste time feeling frustrated at the yeti’s lack of language. He simply stared at the patch of empty floor and noticed the way his gaze kept flickering away, his body trying to turn aside. “A look-away spell.”

  The yeti’s upper lip curled in a snarl. It readjusted its grip on Josh. Then in a powerful move, it threw the unconscious barrier wizard at the floor.

  The floor vanished. Josh fell heavily onto wide concrete stairs and tumbled down them.

  Now Seth understood why the phoenix had translocated Josh with them and why the yeti had hung onto him. It hadn’t been for vengeance. They’d had a practical purpose.

  For all of Josh’s claim that he hadn’t ever been at the Hunters Lab, it was his barrier spell with a look-away spell woven into it that had hidden the underground entrance. And since it was his spell, his blood broke it.

  In the distance, the occupants of the ranch house attacked Seth’s lockdown spell. Given time, they would escape it.

  From below came the sound of gunfire. Someone spooked as easily as the man Seth had just killed. They shot at Josh’s unconscious body. Seth made a mental note to avoid slippery pools of blood in his descent.

  He and the yeti needed to get down those newly visible stairs, but whoever waited down there was trigger happy.

  Some of the caged fantastical creatures would be nocturnal. Not only would they feed at night, but the potency of anything harvested from them would be stronger at night. With the guard room in the barn, it was likely that those underground were support staff, tasked with dealing with the creatures of the night. As lab technicians, they might have some magical ability, but they were accustomed to dealing with caged enemies rather than free and motivated ones. They’d be panicking now, and their unconsidered actions could be used against them.

  A large hook on a pulley system hung over the stairs, revealed as the look-away spell broke. Seth ran to switch on the pulley system. The heavy hook and the chain that supported it slowly lowered to floor level, and then, down the stairwell.

  The yeti watched him, nearly vibrating with urgency to charge down the stairs, but restrained by the same knowledge that guided Seth: without a distraction they’d be vulnerable as they descended.

  Seth pulled out a smoke bomb from his pocket. He’d gone into the Rocky Mountains prepared for trouble. He just hadn’t anticipated how much trouble he’d find.

  But Vanessa will be safe. I’ll make her safe.

  “Smoke,” he whispered to the yeti. Then he pulled his shirt off and covered his nose as another sign to it to protect itself.

  The yeti snarled softly under its breath.

  Seth threw the smoke bomb down the stairs. Smoke swirled out and up, and Seth jumped for the chain that held the hook. He used his shirt to protect his hands on the swift descent, and held his breath.

  The yeti sprinted down the stairs, rivalling Seth’s sliding descent for speed. Blood-red light flared in the smoke, struck the yeti—and rebounded.

  A man screamed.

  The red haze to the smoke vanished. Seth realized he was seeing magic; his brain interpreting visually something he sensed magically. The blood-red color had indicated a death spell, one that the yeti had repelled. Seth dropped to the ground, and stayed low, able to see beneath the smoke to where a man lay, arms and legs flung wide, a shattered charm on his chest. Dead.

  The charm had held the death spell. Perhaps the man had been meant to withstand the use of the charm. Magic users could. It was mundanes who, when they used a charm, powered it with their life energy. But if the man had been a magic user, he’d been a weak one; hence, the need to augment his power with a charm. When it rebounded from the yeti, the magic user hadn’t survived the backlash.

  Or perhaps the man had been mundane and whoever had given him a death spell set in a charm had meant for him to die as collateral damage.

  Through the smoke a second man threw away a handgun and waved his arms in the air. “I surrender. I surrender!”

  The yeti lunged toward the man, and the man squealed and scurried to Seth. If he was a wizard, he was too panicked to enact a spell.

  Seth caught him by the throat, lifting him onto the tips of his clean boots.

  The man’s eyes bulged. He was short and skinny, with a wide red mouth in a pale face. He wore a white coat in some sick mockery of professional standards. If he thought that Seth would be a safer option than the yeti, he was wrong.

  The lab had an incredibly efficient, automatic ventilation system that was quickly sucking the smoke out of the air, and with that, visibility increased. The yeti prowled through a doorway in the direction of the howls, moans and shrieks that echoed out and into the lab. The lab, itself, was pristine with white walls, stainless steel counters and sinks, and expensive equipment.

  “Open the cages.” Seth dropped the man back on his heels. Had there been only two men in the lab? A night staff of three, including the guard dead on the barn floor, would be enough to operate the lab in the quiet hours.

  “They’ll kill us,” the man gasped.

  Seth squeezed a pressure point in the man’s neck. “Or you can die slowly.” He released the pressure point. In three more seconds, it would have rendered the man unconscious.

  Instead, the man moaned.

  Seth gave him no time to consider. He grabbed his arm, twisted it behind his back, and marched the man through the doorway after the yeti.

  The first cage was actually a pen that contained jackalopes.

  “Open it,” Seth ordered.

  Jackalopes—hares with antlers—were relatively safe, although a jackalope buck could inflict some nasty injuries. Still, the man wouldn’t be terrified of jackalopes, which meant he was more likely to obey Seth’s order. And resistance once broken was harder to resume.

  The man fumbled and opened the door to the pen.

  Seth watched the magic that released the door. It seemed to be an open-sesame spell, but tied to recognition of the man himself.

  So he’s a wizard. Seth wo
uld have to watch the man, keeping the pressure on him so that he didn’t have time to resist or attack.

  The next cage held a behemi, a flying pig. The wizard freed it readily enough. Had the safer, prey rather than predatory animals been kept nearer to the door? The behemi trotted out of the cage, butted Seth’s knee, then flew for the door.

  The third cage held a croclyn, and the wizard’s steps dragged.

  Seth gripped the man’s neck.

  The wizard squealed at the implied threat of pain and death, and hurried to the cage door; only to flinch back into Seth as the yeti loomed from behind the cage.

  “We need the wizard to open the cages,” Seth said. He might be able to break the spells that secured them, but only if he dropped the lockdown spell that the wizards in the house still attacked. “If you can communicate with any of those trapped, tell them.”

  The yeti growled.

  Seth shoved the wizard past the yeti to the door to the croclyn’s cage. The trembling wizard undid the spell, but didn’t open the door. Seth let it go. He pushed the wizard to the next cage, while the yeti opened the door behind them. A scratching sound of claws on concrete faded as the croclyn escaped.

  A minotaurus, kappa, sphinxel, death worm and orang-bati were all freed in quick succession. The bunyip and shuck required more caution, but it was the ahuizotl that caused problems. It resembled a cross between a dog and a monkey with a dog’s head and three simian arms. It had a whippet’s skinny build and a monkey’s agility.

  At the yeti’s snarl of warning, Seth turned in time to see the ahuizotl hurtle from the yeti’s shoulder, avoiding its grab and Seth’s own swiping motion, to land on the wizard’s shoulder and sink its long canine teeth into the man’s throat. Blood gushed out, the wizard falling dead to the floor as the ahuizotl avoided the yeti’s kick and ran shrieking triumphantly to the door. Its cry of vengeance satisfied faded into the distance.