Dream Snatcher

by Clara Coulson

  The cab turns onto Charlotte Braun’s street.

  Ella grabs her backpack as the car pulls into the driveway of a light gray two-story house. There are no vehicles in the driveway, and no lights on in the home—no one’s there. Perfect. Ella doesn’t want some random, nosy parent spotting a mystery girl exiting a cab in their driveway and then sticking their head out the door and shouting at her. That’d be a really dumb way of alerting Sartell to her presence.

  She pays the cab driver, thanks him, and gets out of the car, walking up the driveway toward the front door as if she’s coming home for the evening. The cab idles in the driveway until Ella reaches the front steps, and to maintain the illusion, she pretends to search her pockets for a door key while the cab backs out into the street and starts to drive away. As soon as the car hits a soft turn in the street, and the cabbie’s view is obscured by a tall hedge on a neighboring property, Ella moves away from the house, cuts across the yard, and situates herself behind a tree.

  Braun’s place is about sixty feet away, on the other side of the street.

  Three male DSI agents guard the front yard, one on the porch, one leaning against the garage door, and one situated by the fence that separates Braun’s property from her neighbor’s. There’s no view of the back yard from Ella’s current position, but she figures there are two more agents on the house, if Riker’s team of five is anything to go by.

  It’s hard to read the visible agents’ expressions from so far away, but their postures are relaxed, and though they seem alert, each one turning his head from time to time to scan the street, they clearly aren’t expecting any dangerous company this evening.

  She spies a curl of smoke rising from somewhere in Braun’s back yard. She inhales deeply, catching the distinct whiff of a charcoal grill. As Ella feared, Braun is taking advantage of the nice weather to cook, and probably eat, outdoors. There might be numerous family members and friends at the house right now, any of whom could end up casualties of Sartell’s impending attack. Sartell doesn’t care about collateral damage. The last time he had a dispute with someone in a residential setting, he burned a whole house down with an entire family trapped inside.

  He’ll do it again.

  Without hesitation.

  Ella can see Sartell approaching the guard situation two ways. One, he can quietly take out the agents in the front yard, and then sneak around to the back yard, catching the other two agents unaware. Or, if he’s worried about the front-yard agents sounding the alarm and giving Braun a head start, he can jump into the back yard from a neighboring property at an opportune moment—maybe when everyone’s huddled near the grill, loading their dinner plates—and launch an attack powerful enough to kill Braun (and everyone else) in one fell swoop. Or…

  Remember the response time tests, she reminds herself.

  Sartell wouldn’t have gone through all that trouble with the fake calls if he was just going to drop one big fireball on Braun’s house and be done with it. He’s planning a drawn-out murder for the assistant DA, which means he’ll need to eliminate all the DSI guards and simultaneously prevent Braun from escaping. But how could he do that? How could he ensure—?

  Twenty miles away from Charlotte Braun’s house, a massive inferno blooms into the sky. Ella stares in abject shock at the enormous mushroom of smoke expanding into the air, flames licking at its base as they recoil from the initial wave of fire. But no shockwave travels through Aurora, and there’s no rumbling boom like you would expect from an explosion. So that means the fire wasn’t caused by a bomb. It was caused by something else. It was caused by magic.

  Sartell’s diversion has begun.

  Ella’s attention snaps back to Braun’s house in time to watch the DSI agents in the front yard move from their lookout positions toward the black van parked in the driveway. She realizes they must be aiming for a radio or police scanner in the vehicle, so they can find out what the hell is unfolding in the heavily populated area where Judge Sutherland lives. As the first man reaches the driver’s side door of the van, there’s a flicker of movement in the corner of Ella’s eye: hunched behind a tall bush thirty feet away, hidden from the view of the DSI agents, is a figure in a gray sweatshirt.

  Suddenly, Sartell’s plan is startlingly obvious.

  But Ella’s too slow, too goddamn slow, to stop it from unfolding right in front of her.

  She opens her mouth to scream at the agents in the same instant Sartell springs up from behind the bush, his poisonous yellow magic aura wrapping around him. And before a single syllable can leave Ella’s throat, the mad wizard has conjured a fireball the size of a horse. He reels his arm back like he’s pitching a baseball, and then he launches the fireball. Straight at the DSI van.

  None of the agents can react in time.

  The fireball slams into the vehicle, and it explodes. The agents are consumed by fire. The garage disintegrates. Braun’s entire porch goes up in flames. A powerful shockwave tears through the neighborhood, breaking every window along the way, and it slams into Ella’s chest so hard it knocks her flat on her ass.

  Dazed, Ella rolls over onto her knees and hauls herself back up using the tree. Only to find Sartell already moving into the next stage of his attack. Running faster than Ella thinks is humanly possible, his body actually blurring in her sight, he crosses the street, rounds the fiery carnage in Braun’s front yard, and races to the back side of the house, fire burning in his palms, prepared to launch a brutal melee attack the remaining DSI agents won’t be able to withstand. Two regular people versus a pyromaniac wizard—they’ll never survive.

  Screams erupt from behind the house, and the roar of fire fills the air.

  Someone has to help.

  Ella lets go of the tree.

  Someone has to help.

  Trembling, she steps onto the sidewalk.

  Someone has to help.

  A stray fireball flies up into the air and dissipates in a flash of steam.

  And there’s no one here but me.

  Ella runs.

  She rockets across the asphalt, jumps the opposite sidewalk, and races around the charred, smoking mess that used to be the front yard. She ignores with all her might the blackened, humanoid shapes among the debris, unwilling to admit they were living people only a minute before. Around the side of the house she goes, following Sartell’s attack path, hoping she can surprise him the same way he surprised the people in the back yard—because if she can’t, this is going to be a very short attempt at heroism.

  At the corner of the house, she almost hesitates. Almost. But she powers through her fear using that memory, that memory, Sartell stepping out onto the road and so casually throwing a deadly spell at her mother. That memory and all that followed. The loss of Ella’s childhood home, its contents cleared away. Her months spent in rehab, forced to stretch her burns until she screamed. Abigail Dean’s grave, nestled among her ancestors’, marked with a set of dates that are far too close together.

  Ella uses these ideas as fuel for the building fire in her chest, and with a growl of fury, she barrels around the house onto the battlefield.

  Two female DSI agents are in the middle of the yard, facing off against Sartell. Both are already injured, one so badly burned she won’t live to see the weekend, the other with an arm and a leg broken in multiple places. Sartell stands in front of an overturned grill on a patio, a table piled high with untouched food sitting nearby. At the far end of the yard, behind the DSI women, is a group of cowering people, Charlotte Braun among them. The yard is fenced off on all three sides, and the fence is too tall for most to climb.

  They’re trapped.

  As Ella closes in, the DSI woman with the broken limbs raises her good fist and shoots an honest-to-god lightning bolt from a set of rings on her fingers. The lightning arcs across the air toward Sartell, but the mad wizard doesn’t flinch. The bolt strikes an invisible barrier set about two feet in front of him and fizzles out with a weak crackle of thunder.

  A shi
eld, Ella realizes. Sartell has a magic shield.

  It’s shaped like a wall, however, not a bubble. The lightning rippled straight across it and didn’t curve around an edge. Which means if Ella shifts slightly to the right, she can tackle Sartell like a linebacker.

  Which is exactly what she does.

  Sartell doesn’t see her coming until she’s five feet away, her footsteps hidden beneath the din of the fire now consuming Braun’s house. He spots her in his peripheral vision and moves to counter, thinking she’s another DSI agent, but when he turns his head and sees her full on, he falters—because she’s a teenage girl dressed in summer clothes with a backpack on her shoulders.

  And then she’s a teenage girl dressed in summer clothes with a backpack in her arms.

  She heaves the heavy bag at Sartell’s face.

  He narrowly dodges it—but he can’t dodge her.

  She rams his chest with every ounce of strength her small body can produce, and the mad wizard’s feet slip out from under him. Sartell lands on a pile of glowing charcoal spilled from the guts of the grill. Ella rebounds off his chest and tumbles away. She clips the edge of the concrete patio with her arm, flaying off a long patch of skin, then careens across the grassy lawn until she crashes into the tall fence with bruising force.

  The air evacuates from Ella’s lungs, and she blacks out.

  Chapter Ten

  When Ella comes to sometime later, she finds through her spotty vision that the battlefield has changed drastically. The burned DSI woman now lies dead about ten feet from Ella, and the other woman is at the far end of the patio, defending the dinner guests and Charlotte Braun as they make a break for the front yard. Most of them have already escaped, except for a middle-aged man, Braun herself, and an elderly woman with a cast on her leg the first two are trying to carry to safety.

  The remaining DSI agent is fighting valiantly, throwing all sorts of ring magic attacks at Sartell, interspersed with well-aimed shots from a handgun. But Sartell’s shield blocks everything, and the woman has no angle to get around the mad wizard’s defense. As Ella watches, listless, her body radiating with pain from head to toe, Sartell summons another giant fireball above his right hand, intent on taking out the DSI agent and the assistant DA behind her in a devastating final strike.

  Can’t let him win, says a tinny voice in the back of Ella’s head. You can’t let him win again.

  Ella scours the battlefield for some way to stall Sartell long enough to let Braun and the others escape. Her eyes find an object near Sartell’s feet, among the red-hot charcoal, glittering in the light of the growing fireball. A black, metal object with a bend in the middle—a gun. One of the DSI agents, the poor burned woman probably, dropped her gun when she was making a desperate charge against Sartell. And now it’s sitting at his feet, close enough to fire a fatal shot with ease, but there’s no one left on the battlefield to fire it.

  Less than five feet away from the gun, lying forgotten in the grass, is Ella’s backpack.

  A vague plan falls into place in her mind, like a half-won game of Tetris.

  Testing her limbs—they all move, though her back hurts with every twitch—she rolls onto her knees and elbows and begins to inch toward her discarded backpack. Ahead of her, Sartell launches his fireball at the last agent standing. The woman can’t dodge it (else it’d take out Braun and her friends). So she holds her ground as the sphere of flame approaches, raising her one working arm. With an indecipherable shout, she casts another ring spell, and a transparent ripple fans out through the air in front of her. The fireball collides with the ripple and ricochets away.

  Sartell huffs in a haughty way that makes Ella hate him all the more. “You really think your beggar tricks will stop me from taking my revenge?” he sneers at the woman.

  The woman spits blood onto the patio. “You really think I’m going to let you get away with murdering another DA?”

  “You don’t get a choice in the matter.” Sartell conjures yet another fireball. “You’ve overtaxed the ambient energy in the air, little Crow, and you don’t have enough juice left in those rings to deflect another attack. It’s time to join your colleagues in the afterlife and leave me to my business.”

  The woman smirks grimly at Sartell, acknowledging he’s right—she doesn’t have the power to stop him. But she still doesn’t back down. She flexes her good hand, and sparks crackle between her magic rings. “I’ll happily go to hell,” she chuckles out, “if I can drag you with me.”

  Ella, still creeping closer to her pack, can’t help but stare at this woman in awe. She’s standing helpless before a man who’s going to kill her, and yet, she shows no fear. Are they all like that, DSI agents? Do they all laugh in the face of death? Are they all crazy…?

  No. They’re not crazy, Ella realizes, as she looks past the woman to the yard beyond. The agent isn’t bantering with Sartell because she’s not afraid of dying—she is afraid, she must be. She’s doing it to stall the mad wizard while Braun and her two companions hurry around the house. The assistant DA is almost out of Sartell’s sight now, and if the DSI agent can hold the wizard off long enough for Braun to reach a neighbor’s house and call for help, or find a good hiding place, then she’ll have successfully done her job: protect Charlotte Braun. She’ll have done her job, even though her life is forfeit.

  Dedicated. That’s the word Ella is looking for.

  DSI agents are dedicated.

  And Ella needs to be too.

  She reaches for her backpack, intentionally coughing loud enough to catch Sartell’s attention. He whirls around, the fireball wavering above his palm, and glares at the girl who dared to tackle him.

  For the first time since she ambushed the man, Ella sees his face. There are huge, round, blistered welts where the charcoal seared his skin, and one of his ears is so badly burned it’s shriveled up like an overcooked piece of meat.

  Sartell clenches his free fist as Ella’s hand brushes the strap on her pack, and he raises his latest fireball to launch it at her instead of his original target. “Oh no, you don’t, you little bitch,” he growls, taking the bait. “I don’t know who the hell you are, but—”

  “You don’t know who I am?” Ella mocks his tone. “I’d be insulted if I didn’t already know you’re an idiot.”

  “Excuse me?” Sartell’s face flushes pink around his burns. “Why would I know who you are? We’ve never met.”

  “Oh, please!” Ella pushes herself into a sitting position. “Everyone and their grandma tells me I look just like my mom. You’re a total moron if you can’t see the family resemblance.”

  “Your mom?” Sartell lowers the fireball and tilts his head like he’s looking, really looking, at Ella for the first time. “You…” The revelation descends. “Abigail Dean’s daughter.”

  “Hey, you finally caught up to the rest of the class. Great job!” Ella gives him a thumbs-up.

  “Don’t patronize me, little bitch. I have the upper hand here.” He scoffs. “Plus, how was I supposed to recognize you with that godawful boy’s haircut? You hardly look like a girl at all.”

  “Well, first off, the least you could do is recognize your own handiwork.” She gestures to her hair. “I lost my long hair when you attacked my mother’s car. And secondly, you don’t have the upper hand anymore.”

  “Oh?” His eyes narrow to slits. “Why’s that?”

  “Because your would-be murder victim and her protector are getting away.”

  Sartell wheels back around to face the DSI agent across the patio, but he only captures a glimpse of her injured leg as she hustles around the corner of the house to catch up with the fleeing Braun, who must be close to the road by now.

  Ella takes Sartell’s astonished expression as her cue to run.

  She grabs the backpack, hauls herself up, and takes off as fast as her unsteady legs will allow, aiming for the garage side of the house, which is obscured by a field of smoke from Sartell’s attack on the DSI van. The mad wizard spins on
his toes when he notices her trying to escape, but Ella pulls her new standby trick and throws the backpack at his head again. This time, it bounces off his shield, but it slows him enough to stop him from launching his fireball at her back while she’s in plain view. She sucks in a painfully deep breath, her bruised ribs screaming, and flits away into the smoke.

  Or at least, she tries to.

  Ella smacks face first into something solid that should not be. She bounces off this invisible wall—another magic shield, she realizes in horror—and falls back into the grass, choking out her held breath. Before she can scramble up and try to hop the fence or run a different direction, a hand shoots out from behind her and wraps around her neck. Sartell lifts Ella like she’s made of feathers, bringing them face to face. The fireball hisses and spits in his other hand, so close to Ella’s skin she starts to sweat.

  Sartell glowers at her. “I’m not as stupid as you think I am, girl.”

  “But you’re not as smart as you think you are either.” Stall him. Stall him. Stall him. “If you were, I wouldn’t have been able to follow you around for the entire afternoon. If you were, you would’ve made me the moment we almost ran into each other.”

  “Ran into each other.” He looks her over again. “You were that girl, at the bookstore.” A chuckle escapes his lips, and puffs against Ella’s face. His breath smells like sulfur mixed with alcohol. “Ah, damn. I was so focused on the task at hand, I didn’t even give you a second glance. But you gave me one, huh?” His grip on her throat tightens slowly, cutting off her air inch by inch. “I guess you couldn’t forget my face, after I killed your cunt of a mother.”

  Ella spits in his eye.

  He recoils, and raises his fireball threateningly. “You really want to die the same way your mother did, don’t you?”