by Scott Duff
I felt Gordon draw heavily on the line that ran through the park behind us. He gathered the energy to him until he had cycles going around him. Once he built it high enough, he cast it down the road creating a hundred thousand prisms in the air, maybe more, filtering the light between the road and the background behind the wrecked car. He was effectively screening us out of view. It was an interesting solution.
“Y’all see where everybody is, right?” I asked as we walked past the van and nearer the men. “Gordon, when I relax my shield, will you be protected? If not, I need to know now.”
“I can hold my own,” said Gordon, seriously. “I will say I don’t want to do this.”
“Neither do we, my friend,” said Peter, shaking his head. “Neither to do we.”
As we passed the step van, all four tires blew unexpectedly, making Gordon jump. Peter grinned at him, glancing sideways. He’d spiked their tires but hadn’t pulled on the line as Gordon had. I kept forgetting that people couldn’t see the power we held, just as they couldn’t see our auras, and certainly couldn’t see the lodestone batteries. I held four now while Peter held one. At some point soon, I was going to have to start asking how many was too many, but that’s for another day.
We stopped just past the van and surveyed the damage. Two van men each helping one of the convertible mages back toward their transportation, unaware apparently that they weren’t going anywhere on four flat tires. Maybe the wizards knew some handy triple-A type spells. The wizards looked a bit worse for wear, battered by the tumbling of the car before they could get shields up, no doubt. Did my heart good. When they were around twenty feet away and still hadn’t seen us, I decided it was time to let them know we were there.
“So what exactly was the plan, here?” I asked, loudly, arms crossed on my chest. Five heads snapped up at my voice. One of the wizard’s heads just lolled forward loosely. It was only partially a lie—he was dazed, but recovering faster than he let on and gathering power slowly, through the ground.
“No’ you,” grumbled one of the van men. “I wouldn’t’ve signed on if’n I’d known it was agin you.” I could barely understand him through his accent but I saw the streaks of fear run through him when he realized we were still here. Maybe it was that I was still here. I couldn’t tell if he was lying or not as he was partially hidden behind the recovering wizard. That, and I could barely understand what he was saying.
“That’s not an answer,” I said dourly. Without looking, I slowly tipped the side of the van over the incline by using the Stone as a jack on both ends, tipping it over onto its side into the ditch. Not an ounce of energy was exerted by me that they saw. Gordon didn’t jump this time. “Care to try again? Or do I get aggravated?”
The van men began extricating themselves from the wizards hurriedly, babbling things like “We’re just the muscle” and “We don’t know nuttin’” and “Please don’t hurt me.” The more injured wizard fell to his knees while the other one was able to stay standing. I might have been more apt to believe them if they hadn’t taken so long to notice us or, maybe, if they’d backed away faster and more convincingly. As it was, I expected something to happen, but I didn’t know from where—the injured wizard was too obvious…
Even as I thought it, I felt him pull hard on the line across the road and channel the energy down into the grass. He was chanting something I couldn’t hear from this distance as the grass blackened and smoldered around his hands, knees and feet, growing together into a circle. The energy shot downward hard in a ring of solid white when he looked up at us, shouting a word that made no sense, but its intent was clear. Destroy. His aura was a shambles once the spell was released. He was gonna hurt like hell if he survived. I almost, almost, felt sorry for him.
Gordon started off angrily towards them just as the van men changed their tunes and charged us at a run. Peter just held him back by the shoulder while I calmly raised my arms and brought out the Crossbow. I brought down of one of them on his second step and two more on their third, one to the head and one to the heart, each. It was sickening, but these people were trying to kill me first. The other three had shields the normal bolts couldn’t penetrate. And the remaining van man was closing.
Falling back into fighting stance, Peter let go of Gordon, who raged forward to meet him. I’m sure it was really stupid of me, but I watched him for a moment as he crashed into the man’s shield and tore it to shreds. It was as if he had hard crimson claws and just beat through it.
Gordon was a brawler. Doing pretty good at it too. Peter helped him out with a kick to the back of the knee as he moved by to deal with the first spellcaster. That left the quiet one for me. He was closer to me anyway.
Stodgy dresser, greasy hair—this guy needed a high school health class in a bad way. Even a quick flip through a Sears catalog could improve his wardrobe. But, he hasn’t quite been still so much as subtle and quiet. You wouldn’t think that would be possible just by looking at him. He was subtly controlling the creation of the other wizard’s spell: a dragon. Or maybe a drake, it wasn’t that big. I don’t really know quite what the difference is. It looked like the spell was meant to take more than two of them. The broken wizard that Peter was seconds away from wasting took the brunt of the sudden loss of the third, one of the sedan men, no doubt. Controller guy needed to be fresh for this to work and he definitely wasn’t.
He squatted down next to a huge blue puddle of liquid magic, the injured one’s ring of burnt grass. He had double loops of red and pink energy pushed down into the puddle. It was only a coupla feet wide. As he stood up the strands came up looped around a bright red, ten-inch lizard, whose skin smoked. The puddle pulled in on itself once the lizard was clear, disappearing quickly. The lizard fell lightly to the ground and a solid line of fire an inch wide shot across the grass at me. The Stone almost giggled at it when the fire brushed against it. I felt vaguely invincible as I turned to face my opponent in full Stone armor, Day and Night at my side and the Crossbow and Quiver on my back. That feeling may get me killed someday, but not today.
He thought it was a glamour. That was obvious. His first action with the drake was a full frontal: it just ran up and jumped on me, clawing at my armor and basically making me very hot. Those claws were sharp, long, and superheated. Very possibly made of the strongest stuff in the universe, just like the Night sword is made from the sliver of a dragon’s bone. Except this one wasn’t real, it was a magical construction of one. I plucked the thing off my chest with both hands, twisting it back so it had little control of its movement and looked down into the spell. The red cords back to the wizard were still there, just stretched and thinned to invisibility. The rest of it looked odd to me, blocky, kind of like it was made from a kit and held together with wires.
I looked over at the guy controlling it. He was jerking his arms and legs still, trying to wrestle the ten-inch lizard out of my grasp, ineffectually. Well, if he wanted the drake so badly… So I threw it at him, fast and hard.
His control spell had a distancing affect to it, built like a well, a gravity well, not a water well. This meant that it would keep the drake a certain distance away from him so he wouldn’t get burned till he could dismiss it. It would get harder and harder for the drake to get closer and closer to him. That is, until it gets to a certain distance, the lip of the well, then it falls in and it’s nearly impossible to get out of the well. That’s what I did. I threw the drake into the well. The uninjured wizard panicked. The drake kept doing what he told it to do, which was flail about. He wasn’t uninjured anymore with the drake’s long, sharp claws ripping and tearing through the flesh and bone of his torso. Then its heat rose uncontrollably and fast. Then the wizard wasn’t anything anymore.
I stood staring aghast at an over a yard wide circle of blackened dirt where the little red lizard sat calmly raising its feet one at a time, content to sit there for the moment. The soot from its conflagration was still falling to the ground farther out in the slight breeze. I called out t
he Night and stalked forward slowly on the firedrake, just in case it reverted to its nature with the demise of its controller. I had no idea what that nature would be, so imagine my caution. It didn’t move as I approached it though. Still not taking any chances, I lashed out with the Night and broke its interconnections, the wires between the blocks. The other wizard started screaming out in pain. Ignoring him, I let the Night suck the magic from the rest of the lizard body. It left behind a smear of red skin that looked like a dog’s rubber chew toy left outside for years.
The screaming stopped as suddenly as it began, but Gordon and his man were still fighting it out. Peter’s foe was nowhere to be seen, so I assumed he met a similar end to mine. Peter wasn’t the type to leave loose ends and I’d seen what that green and black ball of his did. I turned in time to see Gordon kicking the slumped man ten feet into the air. He landed over thirty feet away, not moving. Gordon roared, “Who’s next!”
It almost made me wish we had someone else for him. We all jerked around when we heard the engine start, but it was just Billy, turning the van around to get us. I sent the weapons home and Peter and I eased closer to Gordon. We needed to calm him down before we moved or we’d lose the van’s control before the end of the road. We needed to get to a phone, too, and could only hope the briefcases protected our backups well enough.
“Gordon, it’s over. They’re all gone now,” I said calmly, watching him carefully. I didn’t want him latching onto me as “next.” Peter was coming up in front of him just as slowly and saying similar things. Wild-eyed as he searched the vicinity for more victims, Gordon was sweating profusely and bleeding from a cut above his right brow. His chest was a bellows, heaving with each breath, and his power coursed through him like the waves of heat through a furnace. Billy pulled the van up beside us on the road and got out, leaving his door open.
“Y’done good, lad,” Billy said calmly to Gordon over the short hood of the van, “but it’s time to go. They be needing us at home soon.”
Gordon’s head snapped to Billy when he spoke and his breath caught on the inhalation. He started slowing his breathing down that way, staring at Billy for what seemed like an eternity. Billy held his gaze with his deep brown eyes. Peter made a dash for the van, dipping below their line of sight on the way. I don’t know if he thought Billy held some sway with Gordon or not, but I would have ducked, too. By the time I was beside Gordon, still murmuring calming words, his breathing was more normal and his stance far less aggressive. When I touched his shoulder, he turned and grinned at me.
“Well, that was exciting,” he said as he surveyed the scene behind me. “Let’s not do that again.”
I grimaced. “Can’t make any promises, man. Sorry. Somebody attacked the castle. Something is happening. We have to find out what.”
“It’s ringing,” called Peter from the van. He’d gotten his backup phone initialized incredibly fast. Gordon and I ran for the van. Billy was already in the driver’s seat.
“Kieran? We were attacked.” Pause. “Seven.” Pause. One-sided conversations sucked. “Gone.” Pause. All we heard was Peter’s responses, not Kieran’s, so nothing made sense. “Not yet.” Pause. “Yes.” Pause. “Who? Lucian? Damn.” Pause. “We’ll get him home safe.” And he snapped the phone shut, then fused it together with a flash of heat, tossing it out my still open door. “Billy, we still have to get Martin and we have to do it fast. Seth and I will pull a few tricks on the highway that will get us there a lot faster, but will disorient you like before. Do you think you can handle that?”
“Aye, I can do that,” Billy answered, throwing the van into gear. Gordon tugged on the line again and I felt a wave of dissimilarity rush from the road to the treeline. It crashed through his earlier prism spell and I had no sense of any of us around the crash sites or the remaining three bodies on the ground. We slammed our doors shut as Billy had the forethought to back down the road and turn around again to avoid the traffic jam the crashed convertible created.
Once we were moving, both Gordon and I turned to Peter with “Well?”
“This was a concerted effort,” Peter said, watching Gordon carefully. “There were three different attacks mounted at roughly the same time. Ours was the least effective of the three. The castle is number two and they’re still fighting it. They had an inside man that got them in past the ward: Lucian. Kieran said it answered as many questions as it asked, but it wasn’t Lucian’s fault. He’ll explain more later. The third target was the school.”
We all slammed to the left as Billy took a right turn too hard, flooring the accelerator to gain control and speed.
“All we know about the attack at Martin’s school is that it’s happened,” continued Peter. “All communications are out and wards are up all over the place. Gordon, maps. We need maps to the school and of the school.”
Gordon reached down into the console between the front seats and pulled out a wire bound book of maps, flipping through it quickly. He turned in his seat and put the maps across his knees.
Pointing, he said, “We’re here. We’ll follow this road, turning off here to here…” It was a complicated route, fast on the highways but twisting and turning a lot on the end. “I don’t have a map of the school. I can sketch a general layout for you.”
“Do that,” said Peter. “There’s not much to speed us up that we’re going to be able to do once the roads get all twisty anyway. All right, Seth, let’s get this party going. Show me how y’all do it.”
“Y’all? So you’re a Southern Canadian now, eh?” I grinned, pushing my senses out down the road through traffic. I could feel Peter follow me out, touching the flow of energies of the land around us, both natural and artificially generated. I found a likely spot ahead of us about a thousand feet almost in a direct line. I just skipped us to it. The van shuddered slightly, as I wasn’t as smooth as Ethan and Kieran at making the portal adjustments yet. Seek another spot and jump again. This skip was long and smoother. This was tiring, I realized, portal magic wasn’t as easy as it looked and this had to be really quickly done or wreck the van in the shifting.
“Got it,” Peter murmured. I sagged back onto the bench for a second while Peter took the next skip. He was smoother than me on my first. Billy didn’t bat an eyelash. “Damn, that’s hard,” he whispered, falling back next to me.
“Tell me about it,” I said, leaning forward again. I started pulling on nearby ley lines as we passed to recharge the battery I was draining while I was seeking my next jump point. Once I committed the skip, I’d fall back onto the bench to rest and Peter would take my place pulling energy in, too. We did this eighteen times before Billy warned us in a grumble, “We’re getting close.” We fell back onto the bench, exhausted. It did get easier to control as we went.
“Who’s Kieran?” asked Gordon, still turned toward us with the maps on his knees.
Damn, this was my fault. “Kieran is my brother, Ehran,” I said. Gordon didn’t believe me. Didn’t really blame him for that. He’d been attacked because of me, his home was being attacked, and his little brother’s life was in danger now, all because of me. No, I didn’t blame him at all. “It’s like a title, like ‘master’ or ‘sir’ from where he was trained, but anglicized. But the rest of the world knows Robert’s son as Ehran so we make that translation. Well, most of the time.”
“Twenty minutes,” Billy muttered, exiting the highway.
Gordon peered out the windshield, worried and building to another hormonal release. I missed his crash while we were skipping the van up the highway. If he thought the roadside fight was rough though, I wonder how hard he thought a school with hostages was gonna be?
“Here, take this,” I said, pulling a fully charged battery out of my cavern and into my hand. Offering the bright orange crystal to Gordon, I said, “When you pull on a line, you leave a huge signature. There are times when you don’t want that, so pull from here.”
“It’s a freakin’ ley line in a rock, man. It’s awesome,” said Pe
ter, grinning. “Now show us your map.”
“A lodestone?” he asked startled. “You have a lodestone? Where did you get this?” At the moment, the issue of Kieran’s name was forgotten. He tugged a line of energy from the rock and looped it around him, back into the stone. The man didn’t know how to do anything small, though—his test line was thick and heavy.
“I made it,” I said. “Now I know how it feels to me when it gets low on power, but I have no idea how it will feel to you, so be aware of that. Right now, it’s as charged as I’m willing to get it. Now, the map.”
“Billy,” Peter interrupted, pointing to a fast-food joint coming up on the road, “pull in there. We may not feel hungry, but we really need to carb load before we go in there and we need a few minutes to plan anyway.”
Billy pulled in and ran inside without asking about choices, not that it really mattered. I’d discovered I was pretty hungry right then, and I would’ve eaten just about anything. There was a wash of energy around us and I felt Gordon’s influence. He’d camouflaged the van, somehow, behind a veil, and had used my battery’s power instead of pulling energy from the closest line, practicing with it. That was good.
We started studying Gordon’s map while we waited for Billy. He’d drawn a fine sketch of the school campus on paper with a pen. Very finely done with quite a bit of detail in some places, very vague in others. This was a very defensible property, though. It was surrounded by tall hills ranging into mountains, very rocky. Twenty-three major buildings with three roads connecting them, but only one of those was drivable. Dormitories were fit for a hundred but usually only forty to fifty students were in residence at any given time. Teachers and staff usually counted as about the same number.
By the time Billy came back, we’d decided we didn’t know anything. It was pushing on noon and the parking lot was getting busier. We all stared at Gordon’s map while shoveling greasy fried food and overly sweet carbonated colas down our throats. This just looked impossible. We didn’t know enough. We didn’t know if the raid was to kidnap someone, presumably Martin, or to kill someone, again presumably Martin. It was difficult to believe that this didn’t revolve around me, but we did have to entertain that possibility as well. Did someone have something against the Cahills that had nothing to do with me?