“He’s still behind us,” I said after risking a look out the back window. “And things are about to get worse.”
The back windshield puckered with a spider crack before exploding when the second bullet hit. More bullets thunked into the car’s body, one too-close-for-comfort round slamming into the dashboard between us. Hunkering down as low as I could manage, I peeked in the side view mirror, just barely able to make out the familiar figure of one of Montgomery’s bodyguards reloading an automatic rifle while hanging half out the SUV’s passenger side window.
“It’s not Quan,” I shouted over the struggling engine. “Looks like our interference got back to Montgomery somehow.”
“We’re almost at the end of the construction zone,” said Chase. “I’m going to try to smash our way through.”
Heavy orange barricades loomed in the near distance, increasing in size as we sped towards them. I knew the waist-high blocks were filled with water, and that they wouldn’t just bounce over the hood of our car as easily as the simple rubber cones had. If Chase didn’t hit them just the right way, he’d crumple the front of end of the car.
Hand on the dash, I wondered idly if I was about to eat a faceful of airbag. As the final seconds before impact ticked by, I’m not ashamed to admit that I closed my eyes in anticipation of the collision. Had they been open, I might have realized that Chase had aimed us for a slight gap between the barriers in the hopes they’d pivot out of our way. I’d also have noted that only one of the barriers had moved, the other was propped up by the cement blocks stacked behind it. I’d most likely have wet my pants when the driver’s side of the car lifted upwards, forcing us onto two wheels before putting us into a fifty yard skid on the side doors.
As it was, I heard the pop of my window breaking, followed by the screeching howl of steel on concrete. There was a whoosh of air as we flipped onto the roof, then the rending crunch of metal when the car tilted over the steep embankment on the far side of the bridge. There was a pause too short for me to even process relief at not being dead, then we tipped sideways, the car’s weight rolling over on itself to flip down the steep grassy slope. Our bodies were jostled around the interior of the car like dice in a Dungeon Master’s hand. Seat belts strained to contain us, cutting into our waists and torsos while our limbs flailed beyond our control.
The car was on its roof when we finally came to rest. Dazed, yet still conscious, I braced my feet against the dash and pushed back as hard as I could. This relieved enough pressure for me to pop my seat belt. With nothing to grab hold of, I could only try to curl up into a ball in an attempt to minimize the impact of falling down out of the seat. Panic-fueled adrenaline gave me a much needed jolt of energy. I scrambled with the latch of my door, finally resorting to kicking it several times to get it clear of the twisted and bent frame.
“Chase!” I shouted, reaching for the wrist that dangled down from where he hung against the straps of his seatbelt. “Wake up buddy. I need you to wake up so I can get you out of here.”
Desperate, and knowing I only had a few minutes before this burst of extra vitality wore off, I tapped my power and levitated him in place while I popped his seatbelt. As delicately as I could, which wasn’t half as smooth as it should have been, I floated him down and out of the car. Once free of the wreckage, I burned as little of my power as I could, half dragging Chase out of sight beneath the highway overpass.
“The fuck…?” Chase said, his eyes fluttering open.
“You rolled the car right over the edge of the off-ramp,” I told him. “I think I got us clear enough if it explodes though.”
Face already red and swollen from its impact with the steering wheel and pretty much every other point of contact in the car’s interior, Chase surprised me by laughing.
“Cars don’t blow up like you see in movies.” He struggled to his feet, swaying unsteadily until he regained his balance. “I’ve got some valuable stuff in the trunk. I’m going to get it before Montgomery’s goons catch up to us.”
He made it two steps towards the car before it exploded, knocking both of us back onto our asses.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We were far enough away from the blast that neither of us was anything more than a little dazed from the unexpected force of the concussive shockwave. Chase was back on his feet in seconds, reaching down to help me up so we could move deeper under the overpass. The fireball and ensuing clouds of thick black smoke billowing into the sky would draw a hell of a crowd soon enough, and if there was any chance our pursuers thought we’d been in the car when it exploded, I was going to use that to our advantage.
“It shouldn’t have exploded,” Chase mumbled as we hobbled away. “The only thing that can blow up is the gas tank. It would have already had to be on fire for that much pressure to build up.”
“Probably the work of Montgomery’s bodyguards,” I said. “I could be mistaken, but I thought I saw something like a bolt of electricity arc towards the car a second before it blew up.”
The ringing in my ears faded to a dull buzz. I stepped away from Chase’s supportive arm, forcing myself to walk as casually as possible. The area below the highway bridge was mostly light industrial, but a few people had already wandered out of their buildings for a look at whatever was going on. The last thing I wanted was for someone to run up to us asking if we needed help. We had to get as far away from the scene of the explosion as possible before someone tied us to the accident. If police or fire crews got ahold of us, we’d be stuck in the back of an ambulance trying to lie our way out of handcuffs after what had happened on the bridge above.
“We have to warn Karyn,” I said after rounding the corner onto a quiet side street. “If there’s even a chance they knew she was the one harboring us at the safe house, she’s going to be in danger.”
“Shouldn’t we maybe get you somewhere you can change first?” Chase’s eyes drifted to my shoulder.
I glanced down to a frisbee-sized circle of blood seeping through the white cotton fabric over my shoulder. Another thin line marked the spot at my side. The entire left half of my jean shorts were stained dark with the blood I’d lost earlier. Without a car, we wouldn’t be able to make it across town to Karyn’s place with me looking like I’d just walked out of a war zone. No cab driver in their right mind would pick up a fare with this much blood on them.
“Can you magic out some of the blood at least?” Chase asked.
I shook my head.
“I’m pretty drained as it is,” I said. “What little energy I do have, I’m saving for self-defense. With both Trang and Montgomery on our asses, we don’t know what we’re going to find when we get to Karyn’s place. I want to be as ready as I can be.”
Chase scanned the area. He nodded towards a small warehouse parking lot, and I followed him up to a rusted Honda Civic. The car looked like it had seen far better days, but watching Chase snap off the antenna so he could bend it into a small hook gave me a good idea of why he’d chosen it. Within seconds, he had the makeshift slim jim threaded through the driver’s side window gasket. He cursed a few times while fishing around for the door lock mechanism, taking longer than I’d have expected to pop the lock.
“I don’t exactly go around stealing cars on a regular basis,” he explained after he’d leaned over and lifted the lock on my side. “Same with hot-wiring. I know the theory, but I’m a little out of practice.”
I slunk low in the car to not be seen while I watched him use a multitool to pry the plastic covering off the bottom of the steering column. Once he had the ignition wires exposed, he reached across me to pop the glove box where he had to dig beneath several CD cases to get at the owner’s manual. After consulting a diagram illustrating the various wire connections and color codes, he cut two of the wires in half, stripped the rubber ends away, and twisted the exposed bits together.
The car’s stereo came on, nineties grunge rock blaring from the speakers before Chase quickly reached out to snap the volume down.
“Hey, I kinda liked that song,” I said.
“Maybe you and the owner can rock out together when he comes running down here after hearing his stereo from a half mile away,” Chase said without looking up from where he was stripping two more wires.
He tapped these exposed wire ends together to bring the engine to life, then quickly put the car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot. The whole process had taken nearly fifteen minutes when all was said and done. Had I spared an ounce of energy, I could have gotten us in the car and moving in the time it took us to hop in and buckle our seat belts. Dragging Chase from the car had already dipped into the minimal reserves I’d managed to build up again. Even with the car, we were a good fifteen minutes away from Karyn’s downtown condo. Without a word, I reclined the seat as far as it would go, closing my eyes and falling asleep almost instantly.
In what felt like seconds later, I startled awake at Chase’s hand on my arm. I inhaled deeply, attempting to calm the dizzying nausea that overtook me. I’d been so deeply asleep I felt like a drowning woman gasping for air after having been pulled to the surface. I struggled through the sleep confusion until I could sit up without feeling like I was going to pass out, then looked outside to see that we were parked at the edge of an alley one street away from Karyn’s building.
“Bad news,” said Chase. “Looks like Montgomery got here before us.”
Sure enough, one of Montgomery’s bodyguards leaned against the wall a few feet away from the front door, smoking a cigarette while staring at his phone. Despite his relaxed posture, he was clearly acting as a lookout for whoever was inside. His thumb never touched the surface of his phone, a clear sign he wasn’t actually doing anything on it. The longer we watched him, the more obvious it was that he spent more time looking up and scanning the street than anything else. His position against the wall made it impossible for anyone to sneak up on him, effectively locking down the whole front of the building.
“Back door?” I asked.
Chase pulled out of the spot and drove around the block until we found the alley behind Karyn’s building. There were no obvious entrances, but there was a ramp leading down to the parking garage.
“Any chance you can deal with the security box?” Chase asked, nodding towards the keypad entry station outside his window.
With no idea of how the security system worked, I didn’t know how to focus my energy in such a way that it would be possible to override the system to make the door open. I knew it was possible, but I also knew rockets used some kind of controlled explosion to propel themselves into space. Knowing something was possible was only the first step to making it happen. In this case, I didn’t even know which variables to consider, let alone how to manipulate them in order to get the desired result. I was no closer to being able to unlock the gate with magic than I was launching it to the moon.
Lacking any better option, I sent a tiny jolt of electricity into the security box. The small green LCD panel sparked and hissed, sending a small white curl of smoke up into the air. An odor of burnt plastic wafted into the car. The gate remained as firmly shut as ever.
“So that’s a negative on the magic hacking,” Chase grumbled as he shifted the car into reverse and backed out of the garage entrance.
We stashed the car on a side street and returned to the back of the condo building. Chase spent several minutes checking the area out before explaining his plan to me.
“No way,” I told him. “I’m not climbing up on those balconies. A piece of shrapnel nearly gutted me, I’ve got a bullet hole in my shoulder, and I’m both physically and mentally exhausted. Karyn lives on the eleventh floor. You can’t possibly expect me to climb up there.”
“We’re only going up a floor or two,” said Chase, already scrambling up the low cement wall that protected the ground floor residents from people like us.
With no other choice, I accepted Chase’s outstretched arm and climbed up after him. Even though I bore the brunt of the effort on my good arm, the force of hauling myself upwards pulled at the edges of the barely healed gash in my side. My whole body throbbed in time with my heartbeat, excruciating pain radiating away from my shoulder as Chase boosted me up to the first balcony railing. It took both hands to grab hold and pull myself up. When I finally pitched forward over the metal railing to land in a heap on the narrow platform, I prayed no one was at home to see me dry heaving on their balcony.
“We’re in luck.” Chase pulled the sliding door open with ease. “Lights are off. I doubt anyone’s home, but let’s get through and out to the hallway as quickly as possible.”
Instead of following Chase through the living room towards the unit’s front door, I made a slight detour to the kitchen were I was very happy to find a six pack of bottled smoothies on the bottom shelf. To my credit, I waited until we were safely down the hall and in the stairwell before cracking one open and chugging it down. It wasn’t magic, but it went a long way towards restoring my energy.
I left the empty plastic bottle in the stairwell and followed Chase up to Karyn’s floor. Cracking the door a little, Chase peeked out to report that the second of Montgomery’s two bodyguards was standing guard at her front door.
“Montgomery must be interrogating Karyn inside,” I said. “Unless you’ve got another plan, we’re going to have to take him out to get in the front door.”
“Can you cast that sound blocking spell on him from here?” asked Chase.
“Yeah, but he’ll still see us coming and have plenty of time to shoot at us or bang on the front door. There’s only so much I can muffle if I have to cast it from a distance.”
Chase stood up and tapped his finger against the fire safety floor plan screwed next to the door. “I’m going to go back down a floor, cross to the other stairwell, then pop out on the far side of him. Silence him, then hit him with whatever you’ve got.”
“I won’t be able to immobilize him,” I said. “If he gets his gun out before I can knock him down, or even after, there’s not going to be anything I can do.”
“Then you’ll have to hit him hard enough to knock him out the first time,” Chase said before shrugging and heading off down the stairs.
I took up my position at the door, watching for the first sign of Chase’s distraction while mentally preparing the two spells I’d have to cast right on top of one another. I’d been working on my efficiency over the last few months, and I’d gotten to the point where I could stretch my reserves a little further than usual if I had a minute or two to prepare myself. It was actually a relatively simple matter of considering the most efficient way to shape raw magic into the desired outcome. These days it seemed I rarely had the chance to think before casting. Spur of the moment defense spells still drained me far more than I liked, the previous night at the shipping terminal proving no exception.
The door at the other end of the hallway opened ever so slightly, warning me it was time to go. Fighting the haze of pain and exhaustion, I let loose the sound muffling spell at the exact same moment Chase burst forth into the hallway. He waved his arms over his head and danced a little jig, provoking a confused head tilt from the bodyguard.
That was all I needed. Unleashing spell two, I aimed the focused kinetic blast at the back of the bodyguard’s head. It hit him square in the base of his skull, knocking his chin forward into his chest before he slumped over with all the grace of a wet noodle. I reached his body a half second after Chase, noting the gentle rise and fall of the unconscious guard’s chest as proof I hadn’t hit him hard enough to kill him.
Chase knelt down to rifle through the bodyguard’s jacket pockets. He slipped the guard’s gun from its holster, then fished two thin plastic zip ties from an inner pocket. He used these to secure the guard’s hands and feet before ejecting the magazine, checking it, then sliding it back home. He chambered a round, flicked off the safety, then pointed it down and away from us.
With a twist of my hand and a little surge of energy, I picked the dea
dbolt lock with a simple spell. Then, still muffling the area around us, I stepped back and let Chase open the door.
Gun leading the way, he entered the unit in a low crouch. The sound barrier was as much a liability as it was a benefit, so I put a finger to my lips to warn Chase to be quiet as I lowered the spell. Almost immediately, the sound of Karyn’s voice rushed in to fill the silence.
“Don’t even try to blame this fuck-up on me,” she said. “I left them sitting in a basement for you. It’s hardly my fault your idiot bodyguards failed to take out an amateur mage and her ungifted partner.”
Chase’s wide-eyed confusion mirrored my own feelings. I risked a peek around the corner to see Elisha Montgomery standing with hands on hips, her mouth a thin line of irritation at being talked to in such a manner. She and Karyn were squared off in the middle of a stylishly decorated living room, their postures that of business partners in the middle of a fight rather than one of torturer and victim. This was undeniable proof Karyn was the contractor who’d been responsible for teaching Trey’s crew to tap the power of the nexuses. All the while she’d been helping us, she’d known exactly what we were after. It explained her quick exit the night at the SkyTrain station, and made her standoffishness at the café the day before make a lot more sense.
Still, it was a bitter pill to swallow. Karyn and I had never been close, but I’d never have pegged her as someone who’d sell me out so easily.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“I’m going to kill that bitch,” I muttered, summoning power to my fingertips.
I hadn’t forgotten how strong Montgomery was. I knew I needed to hit them both hard and fast if I was going to have any chance of getting the drop on them.
“Empty that whole magazine into Montgomery’s head,” I told Chase. Then, seeing the look of horror on his face, “Don’t worry about killing her. I just need you to distract her.”
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 21