by K. F. Breene
The two older ladies huffed at the same time, but neither of them refuted him.
A shock of magic shot into the air before an explosion shook the house. A chunk of the far side of the house went flying, tumbling across the manicured lawn. An animal went with it, hitting the ground and not getting back up.
“They’ve got dirty mages,” Callie yelled over the noise. “A lot of them. They have this place primed for attack. Karen saw it all. She was just blabbing everything she saw out loud. Which was fine at first, because that scarred one—Axel Rod or something—”
“Alder,” Dizzy said.
“—was soaking it all up. But one of the mages overheard and tried to get off a spell. Then more joined in, the know-nothing hacks.” She jerked her filled hands at the front of the house. “I had to blast us out of there. We barely got back to the car and the shotgun before they reached us.”
“You must’ve missed,” I said, glancing around and spying some blood splashed across the gravel. Another step brought me closer to the blood trails.
“Axel Rod dragged the bodies out of the way before running back to the house to get their people organized,” Callie said.
“It’s Alder, hon,” Dizzy said.
“Mages think with their spells, not with their heads,” my mother said, cocking the gun and flicking a switch. “Bullets are much quicker than spells. No offense.”
“None taken,” Dizzy said, his face screwed up in concentration. “Reagan usually employs a similar philosophy.”
Explode.
Another explosion sounded a moment later, debris flying up into the air from the back side of the house.
“Why are we standing here?” Emery yelled at Reagan. “Get the keys and let’s go.”
“No.” My mother looked out at the driveway. “We can’t get out that way. We’ve missed our window. They’re coming. The enemy. The Guild, it must be, unless the shifters have another enemy that can attack in the daytime. My cards, my ball—even the tokens and trinkets—all painted the same picture. The Guild is coming after us before we’re ready. But they have one huge, glaring issue. They don’t realize we have chaos on our side, led by the power of three.” She nodded at Reagan, Emery, and me. “Unpredictability. We need to counterstrike now, when they are occupied. We have to get out from under them. It is our absolute best bet. And unlike the pizza situation”—my mother shot Callie a look—“I am nearly positive about this.”
“My kinda plan,” Reagan said.
“It’s the worst kind of plan,” I moaned.
“But there’s a problem…” Reagan spun and struck out her hand, gripping her fingers in the air. A mage holding a fistful of green leaves sprouting magic ran around the corner and into an invisible wall. His nose spouted blood as he bounced off and fell onto his butt. The air condensed around him, squashing him.
I turned before seeing the completion of the gruesome display.
“Be more careful with your magic,” Callie warned, her knees bent, ready to release a spell should anyone charge.
Wolves ran around from the far side of the house in a loose formation, Roger at the front. A lion roared somewhere in the trees, the sound rattling my bones.
“Mages will be pouring in through those magical doors they’ve been making in the ward,” Dizzy said, his eyes aimed at the trees.
“They’ll be easy prey for the shifters.” Reagan patted her various weapons while shifting from side to side, clearly ready to go. “The shifters are in their element out there.”
“Yes. We need to head off whatever comes up that driveway.” My mother rolled her shoulders. “Roger had damned good timing, calling us when he did. Even still, they’ll likely have numbers on their side. We need to run for it.”
“If we can’t take the car, how are we going to get out of here?” Reagan asked. “And what about the shifters? We can’t just leave them behind.”
“I didn’t say we couldn’t take the car, I said we’d missed our window. We have to stay and fight for a moment. As soon as the coast is clear, we’ll get the shifters to follow us out.” My mother’s gaze didn’t leave the driveway.
“How?” I yelled, feeling magic emanating from somewhere in the trees. Pressure rose and fell, vibrated and pulsed. There was no intent attached to it. No threads of magic rising up. I wasn’t sure what it meant.
Emery’s hand landed on my shoulder. “The warning. It’s here again. Something is coming. Where’s your power stone?”
He meant Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, the stone that sent out a shock wave whenever an attack was imminent and our people were grossly outnumbered.
I ripped open the compartments of my utility belt. The other stones were all present and accounted for, but not that one. I dashed to the car and looked in the back, belatedly remembering I’d taken Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky and Emery’s Plain Jane out because they were making sitting awkward.
“Stupid,” I muttered to myself, ripping the door open and grabbing the stones.
Plain Jane pumped out a blast of power. Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky practically sang in happiness.
“Whatever is coming, it’s coming right now,” I said, stuffing the stones into their designated compartments.
Roger looked at us as the presence drew near, his dual-colored eyes intense and intelligent. A darker gray wolf with a scar walked up beside Roger, scrappy looking and dangerous. Axel Rod, as Callie kept calling him. A large bear lumbered out from the side and chuffed, joining the wolves, before various other animals did the same.
A few minutes ago, this scene had been chaos. Roger clearly knew how to lead, and he was damn good at it.
My heart hammered in my chest as silence descended over the scene. A cloud drifted over the sun, darkening the air. A whiff of coming rain rode the breeze.
“Is there a road at the back?” I whispered.
“No. One road in or out,” Dizzy said, lifting his hand to wipe his forearm across his forehead. “Lots of woods all around. This is a shifters’ stronghold. Roger chose well.”
“The location, maybe, but not the people who were supposed to keep the location secret and safe.” Reagan took two steps out, giving herself more space to work. I stayed right where I was, behind my crazy mother and beside my dual-mage partner. Safest place to be—and a good position to do plenty of damage. I was just fine with using magic and not a gun.
The whine of a small motor made me tilt my head. Another joined it, then one more, the chorus drifting toward us.
“Motorcycles,” Emery said. “Dirt bikes, probably.”
Another lion’s roar made me grit my teeth, way too far away for me to feel any magic. A different roar—a bear—came from the opposite direction. The bikes’ whines wobbled as the riders tried to get through the woods.
Roger stepped forward a few feet, and those behind him fanned out. Those not in the wolf pack stood to the side, waiting patiently.
Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky sent out a pulse of power. Like a wave, I saw it roll through the shifters, each animal flinching or bracing as they felt it.
“The mages on the inside were probably supposed to attack as the rest of them made their way in,” Emery said quietly, anticipation in his voice.
Reagan’s phone rang. “Really? Now?” She dug it out.
“They would’ve been sitting ducks, too distracted by the surprise attack to act.” Emery rolled a ball of magic between his hands, and I saw immediately what he was going to create.
“Wait, add this.” I started working as more whines drifted out through the trees, all around us now.
“Two of Vlad’s strongholds are under attack,” Reagan reported. “They have a few combat-ready humans on hand to defend them. The third stronghold was left alone. Clearly the mages didn’t find out about that one. That’s the one he’s in. Of course.” She shook her head in annoyance, dropping her phone into her fanny pack. “That guy is just too good for his own…good.”
“Or else the Guild didn’t want to attack someone on their side,” I muttered, my unea
se over Vlad having grown throughout all of this. There was never any one thing that made me nervous, but a lot of little things. Things it was getting harder to ignore.
The crunch of tires on dirt and gravel invaded the quiet afternoon. The glint of sunshine on metal announced the first car speeding up the small road. It slid around the bend toward the driveway.
“I have always wanted to do this,” my mother said as she stalked forward.
“What?” I asked, my heart speeding up as more cars sped into sight.
She braced herself in the middle of the parking area entrance and lowered her gun. Brakes squealed as the drivers noticed. Tires locked up and skidded.
“This!” My mother aimed. “Say hello to my little friend!”
26
Kak-kak-kak-kak.
The semiautomatic rifle spat bullets at the incoming cars. The first cranked the wheel. It just missed a tree and came flying into the parking lot.
Emery yanked me away as the next car dodged the gunfire, slamming into a tree trunk on the other side. Metal crunched as the car behind it didn’t slam on its brakes in time to avoid a collision.
“There goes our way out.” I gritted my teeth, finishing up Emery’s spell as my mother continued to pepper the cars with bullets.
“The cars are in a single-file line because of the shape of the road. We’ll just steal a few at the back,” Reagan said, strapping on her own gun, which she’d previously stowed in the car. She didn’t take it out, though. Instead, she ripped her sword out of its holster and checked her fanny pack.
“Ms. Bristol!” Emery shouted.
My mother raised the business end of the gun toward the sky, but she didn’t step out of the way. Emery darted around her and released the spell. It hit the ground and expanded to his height, forming a perfect sphere. In a moment it started rolling toward the—now stuck—line of cars. Nearly there, it burst into blue flame, the heat so intense it blew back at us.
“Wow.” Callie straightened up just a bit. “I had no idea naturals got that kind of boost when they formed a dual-mage pair.”
The tires of the first car popped from the heat, the sound so loud they were nearly explosions. Paint peeled and shriveled as the magical ball of fire rolled over the vehicles.
“We’ve got special naturals. Come on.” Reagan took off at a jog. “We gotta get out of here. I don’t want to miss an opportunity to save my boyfriend. Again.”
The shifters didn’t follow. Instead, Roger looked at my mother, clearly waiting for her signal.
“Your mother has what it takes to be an Alpha,” Emery said with a smile, waiting for me while I waited for my mother. I didn’t want to run after Reagan until I was sure my mother was coming with us.
“Don’t tell her that. You’ll just encourage her.”
“I heard that, Penny,” my mother said, starting forward. The gathering pack of shifters started forward with her. “And Emery, acting the part of an Alpha is easy. You just have to know more than anybody else in the room, and not be afraid to stare the others down until you get your way.”
“Roger wasn’t even in that room.” I flinched as another roar rose from way off in the trees.
“Roger clearly has sense and listened to his second-in-command. Now, enough talking. We need to get out of here before we lose too many of our people.”
I jogged to her side. “What’s the plan, here? Do I stay with you?”
“Penny Bristol, stop being so worried about plans! Your friend is taking on a line of mages by herself. Get down there and help her out.”
A female mage broke from the tree line on the other side of the parked cars. She pinched something between her fingers.
Tear.
I didn’t know what her spell would do, but I could see it somersaulting through the air. I pulled elements from the organized mass hovering above my head quickly, intuitively, the counter-spell already in my mind. As I weaved it together, still walking toward the line of cars, Emery’s magic swished through me. He inserted some truly excellent embellishments into my weave, then took the whole thing from me and sent it off.
“Come on,” he said, starting to jog.
Our spell tore through the coming spell without a problem, without even slowing down. It rocketed on, splitting into two. One half cut right through the middle of the mage I’d seen, and the other sliced into a mage I hadn’t even noticed. All in a handful of seconds.
“Holy crap, that was a helluva upgrade,” I said.
“Penelope Bristol, just because we are in a battle, does not mean swearing is suddenly okay,” my mother berated.
“Yeah, okay, let’s run,” I said. If fighting an army of mages wasn’t a good reason to get away from my mother, nothing was.
Drops of magical fire from our sphere burned on the dirt or blackened the metal of the cars. Papers, seat covers, and, probably, people still burned within them. We hadn’t set the ball to track the people or cars, though, and certainly not the road. When it had reached a turn, it had kept on going, setting fire to a couple of trees and a swath of brush. Thankfully, Reagan had seen it and sucked the flame away, leaving only half of each tree a blackened mess.
“Oops,” Emery said, noticing what I had. We ran around the first couple of cars. He touched one of the hoods before flinching away. “The metal is hot.”
“Yes. It looks hot. Thank God for Reagan, or we would’ve set the whole place on fire.”
Leftover flames crawled out of the windows of a Ford, reaching through the air in my direction. I swerved on the crackly, burned ground beside it, reaching the first bend in the narrow road. Intact cars lined the way until the next bend tucked them behind the trees and out of sight. Mages had left their cars and were hurrying toward Reagan, satchels open and ingredients in hand. She stood in the middle of five mages with her sword in one hand, and her handgun in the other.
“Hurry.” Emery put on speed, rushing for her.
Two mages down the way slipped into the trees, and I knew they were going to cut through the woods to get to the house, avoiding us. No magic swirled around them, which would make them harder for the shifters to track.
“Roger’s people can get those,” I said, running right behind Emery.
A spell rose, shooting toward Reagan. With her left hand, she sliced her sword through it, unraveling it like a string on a sweater. With her right hand, she turned, aimed, and shot the mage who’d attacked her right in the middle.
“Crap, she’s good,” Emery said, and I could hear the competitiveness in his voice. If—no, when—we got through this, he’d probably train twice as hard to be better than her.
Feeling out the situation, I pulled down ingredients, weaved threads together, then braided them—what would have once seemed crazy complex felt freaking easy with the new magic at my disposal. I hop-stepped forward, turned, and ran my palms through the air, as though throwing a skipping rock across a calm lake.
The magic slid over the ground before it started rolling like rocks, picking up speed as it went. As I neared Reagan, I yanked my hands apart, still having control over the magic from a distance.
“Definitely a big upgrade,” I muttered, watching as the spell busted the kneecaps of three mages, bringing them to the ground, before covering them like blankets. Their screaming cut off quickly.
Emery looked back with wide eyes. “This magic suits you.”
“I feel your rage. Your wildness. It blends so perfectly with my magic that…I don’t have to think. I just…go with it.” I kept running forward as a fierce growl sounded somewhere to my right. A larger distance away, working toward us, another mighty roar shook my bones. Thank God the shifters were on our side!
“Scatter them so we can get by them,” I heard from behind, my mother yelling directions.
Kak-kak-kak-kak-kak.
Bullets slapped the cars farther down the road on my right.
“Too dangerous, Mother! You might hit one of us.”
“You do you. I’ll do me,�
� she yelled back.
I clenched my teeth and started another massive, rolling fireball.
“I need fire, Penny,” Reagan yelled, reading my mind.
I worked faster, knowing Reagan needed me to cover her using her magic.
“Now, Penny. Shoot it!” she said, jumping up onto a car, running across the hood, and then jumping down in attack mode, slashing her sword through a mage’s shoulder. These mages had never trained with a moving target as animated and deadly as Reagan Somerset, and they were caught standing still.
“I don’t know how to shoot fire—” I strained to grab more elements, bending them into my fireball so it would ignite and grow. Spark, heat, and a touch of destruction. For balance, I threaded in some of Reagan’s icy magic, then something that gave me a feeling of glitter. Sparkly and fun and wonderfully explosive. “I might still be cracking up…”
I scrabbled up onto the trunk of a car, not able to jump as high as Reagan, and stomped onto the roof (not as graceful, either). Leaning on Emery’s energy, I pulled strength up from my toes and shot off the spell.
Magic roared from my hands. For five feet, nothing happened, and I worried I’d just wasted all that energy. But then blue heat twisted to life, turning yellow and then orange before flaring. A stream of blistering fire spewed down the line of cars.
Emery dove out of the way. Reagan spun, her magic covering her in that complex symphony of ice and fire, blocking out my magic, and the mages in the way screamed and threw up their hands. Magical fire blasted them and continued onward, their bodies dropping like something had thrown them to the ground. The fire spread out the farther away it got, catching the reaching branches and setting fire to the trees.
Emery stood up slowly with wide eyes, watching the destruction for a moment before turning back to me with his mouth hanging open. Reagan had a huge grin on her face. She shook her head before waving her hand, and all the offshoots of my fire diminished to blackened char.
“I was just looking for cover. I didn’t expect you to actually do it. Wow. You are the best kind of shocking, Penelope Bristol,” she said. “The absolute best kind of shocking. What fun.”