“Every magic has its own traces and flavors,” Rose finished.
“Yes,” Carl told her, agreeing with a nod.
With the door shut, we couldn’t make out any sounds from the assembly, but we heard when the bolt was turned and the ancient hinges squeaked as the door was opened.
“Come and hear the sentencing,” Rasmussen intoned loudly.
Vivian shuddered and stood. Rasmussen held the door, and I waited until I was the last one, giving the others a moment to go on ahead.
“I could read your mind if it would make you ask the question quicker?” Rasmussen asked.
“Her heart was in the right place,” I told him softly.
Rose landed on my shoulder, and I felt her hand grab the side of my shirt collar. She started to whisper something, but Rasmussen was already answering, “So is yours. That’s why we asked the Council of Weres their favor in regards to abiding by whatever we decide.”
“You’re going to kill her after all?”
“It’s out of your hands, Thomas. It was never your choice to make.”
I walked in the door and waited; after he started walking, I followed.
I’d been seated near Carl and Yolanda. Rose decided to hover just behind me so she wouldn’t get glitter all over me. She had been mainlining too much hazelnut, and I’d have to talk to her about it. The chair where Vivian had been sitting before had been removed. Now she stood in front of her peers, the governing body of Mages in North America, and probably a big chunk of the world as well. For a woman with a death sentence hanging over her head, she was remarkably calm. Minutes before, she’d been sobbing, and my shoulder was still damp from that.
Slips of papers had been handed around until they all ended up at one side, opposite of where I was sitting on the other set of bleachers. Mage Kierston gathered them and then brought them to the podium and started putting them in piles. One pile was significantly smaller than the others, and with our nose-bleed seats, I could see that there were three altogether. I started to sweat, and Rose flew closer to me, her wings fanning the back of my neck.
“No matter what happens, boss, you tried.”
“I know,” I told her.
Several mages turned as if to shush me, but Rose flew in front of me a little bit and then turned, mooning them, sticking her head between her ankles. Yolanda giggled, and Carl gave her a look, but his heart wasn’t in it; the corners of his mouth were snaking toward his eyes in a smile he couldn’t fight off for long.
“Well I never,” the mage in front of me said loudly.
“And by the look of you, you probably never will, either. Might do wonders for your complexion.”
“Rose!” I said, trying not to die a physical death, embarrassment, nerves, or bray wild donkey laughter because I was sitting in the middle of the most powerful mages in the world and my buddy had just shown her ass to…
Rasmussen tapped the podium with a paperweight. The effect was like a judge beating a gavel. People quieted, and all eyes went forward to him.
“It appears a decision has been made. I would have been happier if it had been a unanimous decision, but it wasn’t. I am somewhat relieved that the death penalty was removed from the table. It seems that even mind readers can get things wrong from time to time.” A titter went through the crowd, and a few people clapped like it was a tent revival. “But by his own humility and his own words, the Alpha in question has given his forgiveness for transgressions against him. That leaves me with these two piles,” he said, both hands going over them, seemingly to hover a hand over each pile. “One pile represents those who voted for life imprisonment, and the other pile represents a more… interesting punishment. If you will give me a moment to tally these up…”
“What a showboat. Sigmund never used to live for this kind of drama,” Rose said to me.
She wasn’t trying to be loud, but her words carried to at least a couple people, and they turned to scold her again. She was standing on my shoulder once again, and out of my peripheral vision, I could see her raise a tiny fist in a one finger salute to the homely mage woman she’d mooned before. The mage made a rude sound, but I could see despite Rose trying to stir the pot, it wasn’t working on her any more as she was starting to crack a smile at the faerie’s antics.
“Okay, this is definitely unexpected. It seems that Mage Kiersten’s suggested punishment has carried the vote by two—”
The ground rumbled, and dust fell from the ceiling. A deafening boom above us somewhere had me covering my ears. I searched the figures, and my left hand shot out, catching Rose who’d fallen out of the air, both hands over her ears. People began shouting and leaped to their feet.
“Nice catch,” Rose said from my hand as I placed her on my shoulder.
“I saw you were about to get your bell rung and trampled, short stuff.”
“Speaking of getting trampled…”
Strong hands grabbed me and hauled me back. I reached for my holstered pistol on my right side, but I felt an iron grip stop my hand.
“Easy,” Yolanda said loudly over the din of shouting mages.
Rasmussen was trying to shout, and then suddenly a loud voice rang out. I winced and instinctively covered my ears with my hands as I stumbled to stay on both feet in the bleachers.
WE ARE UNDER ATTACK BY UNDEAD FORCES COMING FROM A GATE THAT WAS OPENED INSIDE OF THE MAIN ROOM UPSTAIRS. WE ARE ABOUT TO BE INUNDATED. PREPARE YOURSELVES. THOSE COMBAT INEFFECTIVE, GATE TO SAFETY. ALL HANDS ON DECK.
The mental voice had Rasmussen’s signature James Earl Jones voice in my head, and I nodded. A mind mage could project his thoughts at the speed of light. The entire message had been over before my hands had properly covered my ears, a span of less than a second or two.
“I heard it in my head,” Carl said.
“That hurts,” Rose said from my shoulder.
“The council is under attack,” Yolanda said mildly, one arm still looped around my middle to keep me from falling forward, her strength amazing to me.
“Let me go,” I said tersely.
She did, and I stepped down two steps before I heard Carl. “Mage, outside that doorway is death incarnate, I can smell it.”
I turned to face him. “Yes, but I’m not going to die down here.”
“Neither am I,” Vivian said, striding toward us, wiping her eyes. “I need you to come with me, Wright.”
“Boss, that doesn’t sound like a good idea,” Rose said, all traces of snark gone for the moment.
“Shut it, short stuff, you both are going to have to trust me. We need to close that portal, I can feel it.”
I thought to ask her what she was talking about but took her offered hand instead.
“Carl, I’ll be back in a second. Stay away from their teeth,” I warned.
He was already pulling his shirt off, as was Yolanda. I half averted my gaze but a growl got my attention, and I turned to see both of them shedding the loose bound clothing they wore.
“They better watch out for mine,” Carl said as he started transforming into his hybrid form.
“Let’s go if we’re going to,” Vivian said tugging my hand.
“I don’t have a gate—” I was going to say gate stone, but my words were interrupted as Vivian yanked me again, this time through a portal she’d conjured herself.
5
“Son of a monkey’s bastard cousin’s left testicle,” Rose screamed from my side and flew into the air.
We’d come out into one of the gate rooms upstairs, and if I had to guess, this was Vivian’s, the one she maintained when she was a covert op for the strike force. It was a plain room with one door. It wasn’t large, and the one time the three or four of us had used it, it had been a little cramped. That was why when the door was already open, and the room was partially occupied, it made me wish I’d stayed downstairs.
“Vivian, to your left,” I screamed as a zombified corpse took one lurching step toward her, with three more moving in her direction.
“Boss?” Rose asked, unsure why I had gone calm and silent so I could concentrate, then I moved.
I normally was a walking arsenal, but on this occasion, I’d gone in light. That meant I had only my Gerber folding knife and both of my M&P Shields. I drew both in a poor man’s gunslinger quick draw. Still, I knew it would take me one-point-three seconds, not fast by any means, but I had three seconds. I fired both guns twice. The first set of bullets had unbinding runes. I almost didn’t need my sight to correct my aim in the small room, but it helped that I didn’t hit anybody by mistake. The bullets found the two zombies closest to Vivian. The slow, heavy .45 slugs hit them center mass, and they lurched sideways from the kinetic energy of being shot at point-blank range. Then… they simply dissolved into an ooze.
The next two rounds in my pistols were dicier to shoot, but that was why I’d saved them for the ones closest to the door. The conflagration rounds took them in the torso also, and they exploded out of the doorway in bloody, flaming chunks.
“Rose, eyes in the sky, go invisible,” I screamed, and I felt her weight leave my shoulder and heard the popping sound of her poofing. “Come on,” I said, holding my left elbow out for Vivian to grab onto.
She pulled herself to her feet and brushed her pants off, gagging at the goo puddles. Gingerly she stepped around it.
“What’s your plan?” I asked her.
“We find the portal and shut it down.”
“That might work,” I told her.
There was a popping sound, and Rose materialized out of the air. “Boss, there appears to be a hundred or more zombies. Most are concentrated on the stairwell, but there’s a good dozen up here, and your gunshots are bringing the curious back up to us.”
“Maybe not,” I told her, using the back of my left hand to feel that I still had extra magazines in my back pocket and check they hadn’t been lost in the fight.
“Now that I’m over the shock… get close.”
Rose zoomed over to me and landed on my shoulder.
“You have to touch her, boss, get right up on her,” Rose prodded.
I got as close to Vivian as I could, and she reached back, pulling me directly behind her. I was pressed tightly against her back and was about to move away when she hissed, “You must stay in contact, I’m not good at shielding.”
I put my arms around her so I could use the pistols, and when she walked forward, I did too. We stopped as three figures walked by the door, one seemingly pausing to sniff the air. That got the others’ attention, and I raised my pistols, so I was now pressed against Vivian’s back, my arms across her shoulders in a double firing position. Opaque eyes roamed across the room and right through us, resting on the floor where the puddles of the unbound zombies were, and then they looked off to our left and started moving again.
Rose flew ahead and disappeared at the doorway and then flew back in, glitter trailing her. “They changed direction and headed toward the stairwell.”
“I shielded us from death, but I forgot to mask our smell. First time my two magics ever came in handy at once.”
Shielded from death? Then I got it, she had used her death magic to cast a veil over us that worked against the undead. That was all fine and dandy, but I was uncomfortably close to her; I could smell her, and it was starting to get to me. She was warm and pressed against my body.
“What way do we go?” I asked her.
“I can sense where they are coming from. I can get us there, but I need your help shutting down the portal; can you do that?”
“I don’t have magic powerful enough to do—”
“You’ve done far more with much less,” Vivian hissed. “I can’t close another mage’s portal, not if they’re holding it open.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I told her, suddenly having a little bit of an idea what she meant.
I could use my sight to scan the futures to see what course of action might work. I hadn’t immediately thought about that, and it’d take concentration and timing, something we seemed to be short on.
“Good, you mirror my movements exactly, or you won’t be shielded. I don’t know how many are going to be left up here, but I can feel more coming through from somewhere, I just can’t exactly pinpoint each one. There’s too many here.”
“It’s her death magic, boss,” Rose said hopefully.
“Got it. Let’s go,” I whispered, the room smelling of decay and cordite, a smell I never wanted to encounter in an enclosed place.
Moving across the office may have looked like an erotic dance between two people who were very, very close. It might have looked choreographed, but instead, I was trying to keep Vivian tucked between my two outstretched arms as the smaller woman moved and I mirrored her steps. I knew she was going slow so I couldn’t miss a step, but the pace was maddening. We snuck past the massed throng that was waiting to get into the stairwell. Since that door was about ten down from Vivian’s gate room, we were uncomfortably close.
Zombies, unlike the movies or TV, are usually spelled back into life by a necromancer, an evil death mage. A bite wouldn’t always turn you into a zombie right away, but once you died, it was almost a sure thing. Most death magic was banned, but because it was such a rare gift and there were so few good mages who practiced death magic, not much was known. At least that was what my mom had told me when she was alive. Avoiding magical society had really hurt things for me, and I realized the gaps in my knowledge could have deadly consequences, especially for us. That was when I noticed the doorway going into the conference room JJ and I had occupied not too long ago open, and more of the undead were shambling out.
“I think it’s in there,” Vivian said quietly.
Several of the undead snapped their heads in our direction, scanning the area for living flesh to consume. As unlikely as it seemed, Rose stayed silent. The little one had landed on my shoulder at one point and hadn’t even tried to whisper to me. I knew what she was probably thinking… six bullets left in each gun and seven more in reload for each. Not enough bullets and I couldn’t miss, not against these guys. All it would do at this point was draw attention to us and then when I ran out of bullets, I’d wish I hadn’t. I’d avoided even getting zombie splatter on me so far, and I didn’t want to start now, or get fangs and nails at a close range… So I stayed as quiet as Rose and followed Vivian’s movements.
The long oval table had been shoved to the side, and a mage in a robe was standing there, his back to us. At first, I was going to call out to him to help us but when another pair of zombies stepped out and looked at him briefly and then headed for the doorway, which we were standing in front of. I fired both guns. Vivian jumped as the hot brass ejected and she dropped into a crouch. The bullets drilled the zombies in the foreheads, dropping them into a pile of goo. The mage turned to face us.
He was younger than Vivian, and I could see his face sweaty at the strain of keeping the portal open. He had a focus item in his hand, an athame of some sort. It was a tool used by mages that started its life as a fancy knife, one used for ritualistic purposes. He turned, pointing the blade in my direction, and I fired. The conflagration round caught him high in the chest. From the nipples up he turned into a pink mist, most of it blown back into the gate. As his body fell, a zombie tried to step through, but the gate collapsed, shearing the undead in half, showing the mirrored one-way glass window on the othe
r side of where the dead mage had conjured the gate.
“That’s going to ruin the wallpaper,” Rose said sharply. “Behind you, boss.”
I spun and saw the zombies that hadn’t made it down the stairwell. Somehow, when Vivian dropped, her magic had quit shielding us, and I could see the raw undead hunger in their eyes as they saw me. A big meat popsicle standing in the doorway. Kind of like dressing up like a chicken nugget and dancing in front of JJ; not something I would recommend to anybody.
I fired my guns empty, each bullet striking a target, each bullet killing. Flames licked the carpet in front of us, and I saw a rush of bodies come back out of the far stairwell. I couldn’t get sight of how many because smoke was starting to get thick in the air. I slammed the door and turned the deadbolt then stormed over to the downed mage.
His body was a charred and bloody mess from halfway up his torso, and I pulled the athame from a firm grip and held it up. Runes glowed softly, winking out one by one as the magic was cut from the wielder. The body spasmed a moment, and I jumped back as both legs flopped. It was a somewhat normal reaction, and I’d unfortunately seen it and caused them to happen before.
“Wright, they are starting to mass,” Vivian said as the first fists started banging against the now locked door.
The smell inside was like it had been in the gate room. Cordite, zombie corpses, and the hot, scorched, sickly sweet smell of bacon from the dead mage I’d just killed.
“How many?” I asked her, reloading my pistols.
“Too many. A lot. Tons.”
“Short stuff,” I snapped, “Poof into the room on the other side of the one-way glass. I need you to be a lookout. Come back if they breach that room and warn us before they come through the glass.”
“Got it,” she said, and then there was a popping sound and she was gone.
“We’re stuck in here, but at least we closed the gate. I wonder who he was,” Vivian said standing.
Her suit coat now had a film of dirt on it where she’d dropped to her knees when I’d fired. She brushed at it absently as she stared at the corpse.
Second Sight: The Rune Sight Chronicles Page 4