She bid me close my eyes. I did so, hoping her face wouldn’t be the last thing I saw before waking up chained to a wall in Montgomery’s dungeon.
“Alex?” Karyn’s voice sounded in my head. It was at once distant and near, the slightest echo of it reverberating through my mind. “I’m going to draw on your power in order to locate Montgomery’s lab. Do you trust me?”
“Do I have a choice?” I projected back at her, surprising myself with just how much snarky tone came through. “Sorry, this is a little nerve-wracking. Do what you have to.”
“Center yourself,” Karyn commanded. “Still your thoughts and lend me your power. I will use only what I need, but there is great risk should the connection be broken before I can sever it cleanly. Do you understand?”
I sent back something that was more a feeling of agreement than actual words, then settled in to the best meditative state I could manage. It wasn’t easy with Trey and Johnny hovering somewhere off behind me, so the first thing I did was remove them from my conscious mind. Easing into a waking mediation I’d learned from a New Age website several years earlier, I isolated every distracting thought, wrapping it in a glimmer of light before flaring it into nothingness. Trey and Johnny’s menacing presence became nothing more than imaginary smoke I exhaled on a long out breath. Inhaling through my nose, I focused on the physical sensations of discomfort in my body. One by one, I dismissed the sting of my injuries, the dull ache of my bent knees, the sharper pain of my sit bones digging into the tile floor. I inhaled calmness into my neck and shoulders, imaging my muscles as grains of sand that fell away, collapsing into a mound of unfeeling detritus.
Within minutes, I’d stilled as much of myself as I could. My focus had been reduced to the glowing ball of magic swirling within me, tendrils of which slithered out and into Karyn. The longer we held our connection, the more of her I felt. It was uncomfortably intimate. Parts of her thoughts and mind opened up to me through our connection. Snatches of memories mingled with the emotions that warred for dominance in her own brain. I knew she had stilled her consciousness as much as I’d silenced mine, but that didn’t seem to block my access to her truest inner self. Her pain over having been twisted into betrayal by Montgomery was visible as a black storm cloud of hate and anger sitting prominently at the top of her thoughts.
It was painfully tempting to dive deeper into her psychic brain. I could flip through her entire life like an audiophile dancing their fingers over rows of vinyl at a record store. If Karyn sensed my intrusion, she made no effort to stop me from probing into her emotions. Glimpses of her trust in me made me flinch inwardly at my own distrust of her. I was humbled near the point of tears at the realization that what I was seeing wasn’t hate for me, but rather envy. It shocked me so much it nearly shattered my concentration. Karyn’s animosity towards me didn’t stem from some past transgression I’d made against her. She saw me the way I saw her. I’d always been envious of Karyn’s natural aptitude for the Craft. She always seemed so strong and confident, everything I felt I wasn’t. Now, looking deep into what I guess was the closest thing to a soul any of us possessed, I knew her outwardly cold treatment of me was borne of insecurity over all the ways in which she imagined I was talented, confident, and bold.
This revelation was too much for me to process. Poking around in Karyn’s mind was too much like reading through a secret diary I’d dug out from under her mattress. Shame and embarrassment washed over me, and I quickly began filtering out her thoughts as I’d done to my own. I retreated to the thread of magic twisting away between us, following it out to where Karyn had sent it flowing into the building. Once again, I had no idea how she’d managed to cast such a difficult weaving. She’d taken my raw mage energy and stretched it out like a clump of wool being spun into fine thread. The web of magic that swept out from us was so delicate I could barely sense it. My mind reeled with the influx of stimulus as it snaked through the building, slipping between the walls until every inch of the place had been checked for active magic.
Shining brightly two floors up and almost directly above our heads was a pulse of magic so brilliant it pained my inner sight to look at. I couldn’t make out the exact nature of the work, but it was powerful enough to indicate Montgomery was right in the middle of infusing the quantum computer with magic. It wasn’t the kind of process easily abandoned once begun, giving me hope we’d have time to catch her before she closed up shop and ran.
Karyn wasted no time in retracting her spell, reeling in the thousand fingers of woven magic in a fraction of the time it took for her to send them out. Once the spell had been fully reversed, I expected her to sever the connection. Instead, I saw her face floating before mine. At first it was ghostly and ethereal, but soon it coalesced into a shockingly vivid psychic projection of our actual bodies still sitting cross-legged and still in the dark meeting room.
“Your parents,” her projection whispered.
Karyn slipped her hand free of mine and cupped my cheek. I felt the heat of her fingers on my skin. A tear escaped my eye, tickling my face as it scurried towards my chin. It was only then it dawned on me that Karyn had been given the same access to my thoughts and memories. My lower lip quavered, and I opened and closed my mouth trying to find words to encompass the riot of emotions battling for control within me.
“It’s not your fault,” Karyn said. “Their death was not your fault.”
I tried to tell her she didn’t know the first thing about it. I tried to explain that though she might have seen the most painful memories staining my soul, she could never understand what had happened that night so long ago.
Before I could find the words, I was interrupted by the crack of gunfire and Karyn’s physical body slamming into mine.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The abrupt sundering of our psychic link was like someone handing me two live wires before dumping a swimming pool’s worth of ice cold water over my head. Everything was dark and hazy in contrast with the crisp surreality of Karyn’s projection. It took me a few seconds of blinking and pawing at the weight pressing down on me to realize I was pinned beneath Karyn’s unconscious body. I ran my hands over her head and neck, feeling down her shoulders and along her back in search of the bullet hole. If I could get pressure on it, I could maybe stanch the bleeding. I just had to find the damn entry point.
Karyn groaned and rolled off me, eyes springing open as she arched upwards and inhaled loudly. Fear and panic burned on her face, as she scampered backwards until she bumped into one of the legs of the conference table in the center of the room. Despite looking about as bad as I felt after the surge of energy that had been released upon our disconnection, she didn’t appear to be any worse for the wear after having been shot. Only then did it occur that maybe I was the one who’d been hit. I frantically began patting myself down in search of new sources of bleeding.
“One of my charms kicked in,” Karyn muttered.
“It won’t save you from the next one,” one of Montgomery’s bodyguards said from the open doorway. He gestured at us with his gun. “Stand up. Hands flat on the table. You move, you get a bullet in the head.”
He waited until we’d staggered to our feet and put our palms on the table before raising the hem of his jacket sleeve to his mouth.
“It’s the witch and her girlfriend,” he said into a hidden microphone. He paused, likely listening to the reply that came through the white coiled wire leading to an earpiece. “No sign of the sidekick. Send someone to check the perimeter.”
No mention of Trey or Johnny? I scanned the room and saw no trace of them. There was no telling how long Karyn and I had been locked in our trance, but it couldn’t have been long enough for the idiots to have wandered away. On a hunch, I activated my mage sight and looked around the room again, this time seeing exactly what I expected and something I hadn’t been prepared for.
“No!” I shouted just Johnny and Trey materialized from beneath the concealment spell that had allowed them to
sneak to the edge of the room.
Trey cast a feeble kinetic blast at the hulking bodyguard the second their cloaking spell dropped, but what he hadn’t seen was the aura of magic energy I’d spotted around Montgomery’s goon. It only made sense that she’d have gifted or otherwise empowered people watching her back, and it went a long way towards explaining what had caused Chase’s car to explode after our crash.
The kinetic blast did little more than rumple the collar of the bodyguard’s jacket. He grinned maliciously and turned his focus to Trey and Johnny, firing the gun in one hand while projecting wild blue arcs of electricity from his other. A thin energy shield sprouted from a charm at Trey’s neck, deflecting the bullets and holding the bulk of the electrical attack at bay. Frenetic blue sparks licked around the edge of the convex shield, lashing across Trey and Johnny’s arms and faces. They huddled together and tried to make as small a target as they could manage, backing into the corner while Johnny muttered the incantation for a more robust shield spell.
Trey’s energy shield began crumbling within a matter of seconds. I shared a look with Karyn, seeing my uncertainty mirrored in her face. Letting the bodyguard take care of Trey and Johnny would be simple enough. Montgomery’s goon could do our dirty work for us while we waited for the right moment to strike him down. Three big dumb birds with one stone.
I couldn’t do it.
Instead of watching Johnny try and fail to bring up a shield before Trey’s severely weakened charm failed, I lashed out with my own kinetic blast. If Trey had flung a snowball, this was an avalanche. A torrent of energy flooded out of my outstretched hands, scattering wildly and sending the conference table and chairs flying to the edges of the room. Karyn and I were knocked backwards, the tail end of the blast tearing a hole through the ceiling, cutting through wires and light fixtures with a cascade of sparks and concrete.
“What the hell?” I grunted, scrambling back to my feet.
“Your energy is out of whack,” Karyn said as she pushed an overturned chair off herself. “Residual effect of our connection being severed too early. It’ll go back to normal, but it could take hours. Maybe days.”
Mental note: stay away from mage fire until this thing sorts itself out. I could only imagine how badly that would backfire if I let it fly as wildly as the overcharged kinetic blast I’d just unleashed.
Trey and Johnny had been knocked over, their feeble shield collapsing under the force of my spell. They looked dazed, but were quick to regain their feet. Montgomery’s goon, however, hadn’t fared quite so well. He’d been hit with the full force of the spell, knocked to the ground, then bombarded with flying office furniture. One of the sturdy wooden conference tables had partially snapped across his back. It lay folded atop his body, jagged splinters jutting up into the air above him.
A groan sounded from beneath the table. I lunged for Karyn, pulling her down a half second before the table became airborne, just missing our heads as it sailed across the room. The bodyguard was back on his feet by the time I looked again. His suit was dirtied and torn in several places, but there wasn’t a scratch to be seen on his skin. He didn’t even look that concerned about being completely surrounded by the four of us.
Trying to decide how to take him out with the least amount of collateral damage from my now unpredictable casting ability, I gathered power, shaping it into something of a reverse shield. I’d never attempted to contain something so large and powerful, but in theory I could use the spell as a sort of energy cage. The goon wouldn’t be able to cast through the barrier, and if I did it right, I could shrink it down to hold him immobile until we decided what to do with him.
It began well. I wrapped the spell around him, containing his next wave of electric energy. The normally pale white shield flared brightly against his efforts to cut through it, making him look like a giant version of one of those science toy plasma balls that made your hair stand on end when you touched it. The only difference here was touching the energy coming out of the human generator at the center would be a good way to fry someone to a smoking crisp. The goon raged against the containment spell, forcing more and more juice into his electrical discharge. I felt the reversed shield spell flex outward, straining against the pressure I was putting into it. Still, it held him even as his own clothes began to smoke and smolder.
Then I lost control.
Shaping and holding magic energy isn’t easy to begin with, but keeping a mental grasp on this spell was like trying to keep hold of a buttered carp. The spell writhed and fought against me, threatening to evaporate at any second. I redoubled my efforts, and was rewarded with the continued contraction of the containment field. It wrapped him up like a second skin, pinning his arms at his side and finally cutting off the flow of electricity arcing from his fingers. Mouth open in a scream that couldn’t penetrate the buzzing energy of my out of control spell, his face began to contort as the flesh of his cheeks and nose were squished into his skull.
“Careful, Alex,” Karyn said from beside me.
Energy poured out of me at an uncontrollable rate. I was being drained of everything I had. It was as though I’d turned the tap on full blast, then unscrewed the handle.
“I can’t control it,” I cried, falling to one knee. “I can’t stop it.”
“Don’t stop it! Kill the fucker!” Johnny shouted from off to my left.
Trey chimed in next. “Do it, Alex. He’ll kill us if we don’t kill him.”
I didn’t want to do it, I really didn’t. Using every trick I could think of, I fought against the spell with everything I had. I was dimly aware of Karyn’s hands on my shoulders. I felt her siphoning power away from the spell, funneling it back into me in the form of a warmth that melted my muscles and made my body droop. Numbness overtook me, my vision blurring until there was nothing but the spell swirling before me. There was a sharp crack, followed by several sickening pops. I’d have wept if I’d had the strength, but instead I collapsed, drawn and weak, the spell finally dissipating into nothingness.
For once, I didn’t pass out. I maintained a thin hold on my consciousness mostly due to Karyn’s effort in siphoning rogue energy from the haywire spell. Lying there like a month old pile of dirty laundry, I could only groan while she used her abilities to force magic back into my body. I wanted so badly to sleep, to drift away into darkness, but the constant flush of warming energy coursing through my system brought me slowly back to alertness.
“We have to get moving,” Karyn said as she helped me to my feet. “Montgomery will be on full alert now.”
“Hopefully she’s counting on her bodyguards to take care of us before we can get to the lab.” I braced myself against Karyn while I collected my wits. “If she runs, we’ll never catch her.”
“What do you want us to do?” asked Trey.
Both Trey and Johnny stood staring at me with what a more confident version of me would have described as awe and respect. Johnny’s eyes flicked down to the mangled corpse that had once been Montgomery’s bodyguard. He swallowed loudly then refused to meet my gaze. The two tough kids suddenly seemed just that — kids. They were teenagers playing with powers they didn’t fully understand. Only now did they realize the consequences of picking a fight with the wrong person. Montgomery’s team had died back at the port, but that had been easy to dismiss. They’d been crushed beneath a shipping container, unseen and unheard in the screech and slam of metal on concrete. That had been little more than the idea of death. It would be easy to pretend that they’d simply stood up, brushed themselves off, and walked calmly to the sidelines to sit out the rest of the game.
The twisted wreck of Montgomery’s bodyguard wasn’t something Johnny and Trey could ignore. The body had been thoroughly compacted beneath the force of my spell. The bodyguard’s skull had caved in on one side of his face, an eyeball dangling by a cord of optic nerves. One of his arms had impacted his body, cracking through his ribcage until it was flush with the outside of his torso. Parts of him looked like ar
tfully folded two dimensional paper. Blood spilled from splits and cracks in places where there shouldn’t be openings. If you could ignore the viscera leaking out of him, he looked almost like a cartoon character that had been partially flattened by a dropped boulder or anvil.
“We have to get upstairs,” I said. “How much offensive magic do you two know?”
“Not much,” Trey said. “Only the force blast I tried to use earlier.”
“I might be able to help with that.” Karyn unfastened a bracelet from her right wrist. We watched her twist the soft metal until she’d split one of the links in two. “Can I borrow your knife, Alex?”
She spoke a few words over the pieces, and they glowed with a soft purple light before fading back to dull silver once more. She flipped the blade open, bent down to the bodyguard’s feet, and cut off one of his bootlaces. Using the tough black cord, she lengthened each of the bracelet halves until she’d made them long enough for Trey and Johnny to wrap around their hands like a pair of dainty little brass knuckles.
“Thrust your fist towards an attacker and focus your energy into the bracelet,” she explained. “It’ll be lethal if you use enough force, but burn too much and you won’t get many charges out of it. Use restraint and it’ll last longer.”
Trey and Johnny both nodded in understanding.
Karyn held the knife out for me to take back, but I waved it off. “Keep it. The stupid thing has done me more harm than good. I think I’ll stick to fighting with magic from now on.”
I turned to Trey and Johnny. “Speaking of which, I need to save myself for Montgomery. Anyone comes at us, you blast them.”
“Can do,” said Trey.
Not wanting to waste another second discussing strategy, I yanked the conference room door open and stepped out into the hallway. We retreated to the last stairwell we’d seen, climbing the steps quickly until we reached the third floor. I motioned for Trey to go first, and he in turn shoved Johnny ahead of him. The two bickered silently until I growled at them to get moving.
Black Market (Black Records Book 2) Page 27