by Rachel Aaron
Oslo, however, did not seem to take the threat the way it was intended, because his reply was, “Break it down.”
The order had barely finished when the glowing wall of Marci’s ward flashed bright as the sun. Marci gasped at the same time, doubling over like someone had just punched her in the gut. “They have a mage,” she whispered through clenched teeth when Julius reached out to steady her. “They’re going to brute force the ward.”
He grimaced. “How long have we got?”
“Don’t know,” she said, her face pained. “Whoever they hired has some serious weight behind him. Bastard must be pulling off a small fortune in magical materials.” Another blow landed, making Marci’s whole body clench so hard it took her several seconds before she could speak again. “If I keep holding it up like this, I’d say two, maybe three minutes?”
Julius shook his head. Even if he’d had a plan, three minutes wouldn’t be enough to pull it off. His eyes darted over the trash, looking for something he could use when the time came—a gun, a shovel, even a baseball bat would be better than nothing. He was debating the weapon potential of the rusty rake in the corner when he felt something soft and freezing cold brush against his leg.
He looked down with a start to see Ghost sitting beside him, twitching his semi-transparent tail back and forth across the glass-strewn cement floor. Considering their situation, the sight of a death spirit, even one for cats, was enough to thoroughly creep Julius out. Marci, however, looked delighted.
“Ghost!” she cried. “Perfect! Get out there and do your thing. Jump on them! Eat their souls!”
The transparent cat gave her a look of absolute disgust and started bathing its paw.
“Oh, come on,” she pleaded as another hit landed on her ward. “You’re my death spirit. Go be scary!” Ghost started washing his other paw, and Marci slumped against the wall, defeated. “I don’t get it. I thought bound spirits had to obey their masters.”
“Well, he is still a cat,” Julius pointed out. “‘Obey’ isn’t exactly in his vocabulary.” Still, Ghost’s appearance had given him an idea. He actually liked it less than the attack-gunmen-with-a-rake plan, but at least this one had a chance of actually working. “Marci,” he said quietly. “If you had a strong source of magic to pull off, could you beat these guys?”
“If you mean Ghost, it won’t work. Bound spirits are at equilibrium with their masters. He can pull on my magic just as hard as I pull on his, so the net return—”
“I’m not talking about Ghost,” Julius interrupted. When she gave him a funny look, he took a deep breath. “What if you used me?”
Marci’s face went blank in surprise. “You?”
Julius nodded grimly. This wasn’t how he’d wanted her to find out the truth, but he didn’t have much choice. If they didn’t do something, they were going to die in a hoarded cat house to a bunch of human thugs, and after everything he’d survived since being dumped in this city, that end was too pathetic to stomach. “Do it,” he said, putting out his hand just as Bixby’s mage hit her ward again, sending sparks flying. “Quickly.”
“No!” she cried, horrified. “I can’t do that!”
Now it was his turn to be surprised. “Why not? You pulled on those lampreys last night just fine.”
“Those were animals,” Marci said, her voice frantic. “Drawing off another human’s soul is blood magic! It’s the mage equivalent of cannibalism, and it’s illegal even in the DFZ. Also, that stuff taints you for life. My magic would be ruined forever!”
Considering they were in a life-or-death situation, Julius thought that sounded like an acceptable price. Since he wasn’t human, though, it was also an irrelevant one. “Marci,” he said gently. “It won’t be blood magic. Trust me.”
Her panic faded as she stared at his face, and then her expression shifted to something he couldn’t quite put a name on. Cracks were already appearing in her ward above them, but Julius didn’t try to rush her. It wasn’t like he could force her to take his magic, anyway. All he could do was sit and hope that the trust that had allowed her to fall asleep beside him was still there.
Finally, she raised her own hand until her fingers were hovering right above his outstretched palm, but she didn’t touch him yet. Instead, she looked at him again. Really looked at him, like she was searching his face for the final bit of evidence that would convince her this was the right decision. She must have found it, because a second later, her hand slammed into his, fingers wrapping around his palm like a clamp.
Julius relaxed his guard at once, opening his magic wide to let her in, and Marci jumped like she’d been electrocuted. Seconds later, her shock faded, and then her face broke into the most beautiful smile he’d ever seen. “I knew you weren’t human,” she whispered, her voice humming through him like it was his own.
“We’ll talk when we get out of this alive,” he replied, breathing deep as he adjusted to incredibly strange feeling of having someone else inside his magic.
Marci nodded, squeezing his hand even tighter. “Ready?”
He nodded, and then nearly fell over as Marci yanked his magic so hard he saw stars. Julius almost broke the connection after that, but stopped himself at the last moment, clutching her tighter instead. This had been his idea. He’d asked her to take a chance and trust him, and she had. Whatever happened, he couldn’t pull the rug out from under her now, so he breathed through the pain, keeping his magic steady as Marci pulled and pulled and pulled until she was shining bright as a spotlight.
That was all the warning he got before Marci’s ward exploded.
***
Aside from the time he’d spent with Marci, Julius hadn’t seen a lot of human mages at work. He had, however, seen enough magic to know when he was witnessing something amazing.
The dust from her exploding ward had barely settled when Marci walked away from the shelter of the basement wall and into the open doorway, pulling Julius behind her. She grew brighter with every step, her body saturated in a golden haze of magic so thick, she looked like she’d been dipped in sunlight. Even for a dragon, it was an awesome sight, though Julius would have appreciated it more if she hadn’t been sucking him dry in the process.
Her hand was still clamped around his like a vise, drinking his magic down with impossible strength. He hadn’t realized a human could take so much, though he should have known better than to underestimate Marci. But though he was quickly going lightheaded, he refused to cut off the power he’d offered her, especially since it seemed to be working.
Now that she’d pulled him to the open door, he was able to get his first real look at their attackers. From the amount of gunfire, he’d expected ten guys, maybe fifteen. What he saw was a small army.
Thirty men were crowded in the overgrown driveway behind the house. Still more had fanned out to the sides of the property. Their weapons were a mix of assault rifles and automatic pistols, and most of them were clearly muscle augmented, their dark suits straining over their technologically enhanced physiques. All of them had the hardened, seen-everything look of professional criminals. Or, they would have, if they weren’t all currently gaping like fish at Marci’s sudden and spectacular appearance.
Their shock lasted only a second, but for Bixby’s men, it was a second too long. As soon as she cleared the door, Marci’s arm flew up, her plastic bracelets vibrating wildly on her wrist as she pushed Julius’s power through. Attached to her as he was, he could actually feel his magic flowing through her spellwork, the raw power twisting and folding like paper into a new shape. It was wondrous and terrible, and he was still trying to make sense of it when a shimmering wall of super-heated air exploded from Marci’s fingertips and slammed into the men in front of them.
Her spell hit the thugs like a freight train, the modified microwave spell cooking their skin even as the explosively expanding hot air knocked them through the bushes and into the neighboring yard. The thunderous boom of her first attack was still echoing when Marci sent out the
next, this time blasting the goons off her car. The old sedan was too heavy to be thrown by air pressure, but the heat of her attack blistered the fading paint on the driver’s side and cracked the half of the windshield that hadn’t been shot.
Marci didn’t seem to notice the damage. Even when the men on the side of the house recovered from their shock enough to start shooting again, she didn’t flinch, not even when a bullet grazed her cheek. She just kept going like a one-woman army, yanking power out of Julius as she launched wave after wave after wave, scorching the grass black and blasting everyone she saw until, at last, there was only one person left.
The moment Julius saw him, he understood why this human alone hadn’t been burned or thrown back. The young man standing in the middle of the cracked driveway was so covered in magic, Julius could smell it even over Marci’s. With so much blatant power, he didn’t need the blood trickling down the man’s face from Marci’s backlashed ward to know he was looking at Bixby’s mage. Marci knew it, too, and she yanked her hand back, muttering under her breath as a different bracelet began to vibrate.
The other mage responded by raising his own hands, which were encased in very expensive looking gloves worked all over with sparkling silver spellwork, and Julius felt a stab of panic. He would bet on Marci any day, but mage duels were famously deadly, often in horrific ways. He was trying to catch enough breath to suggest that Marci stand down before the situation got out of hand when she bared her teeth like an animal and pulled on Julius’s magic so hard he nearly blacked out.
If he hadn’t been fighting to stay conscious, the sight of the enemy mage’s cocky expression collapsing as he realized just how much power he was up against would have been comical. Marci was shining like a supernova now. The heat of the trapped power was so intense, smoke was starting to curl up from her bracelets, filling the air with the smell of burning plastic. But though she was holding enough magic to blow the whole place sky high, she didn’t release it. She just kept turning the power over on itself, folding and sharpening and honing the pressure until Julius’s ears were popping and the air itself felt tight.
The other mage was building something, too, but they never got to see what. He’d barely started pulling on the various magical sources Julius could feel in the pockets of his long vest when Marci threw her fist out like a punch, sending the ball of power she’d built through the pink bracelet containing the telekinetic choke she’d used back in the alley. But there was no choking now. Instead, Marci’s magic bit down like a bear trap, and the whole world seemed to shudder as the mage’s building power snapped.
The scream that split the air made Julius’s blood run cold, but with her choke spell going, the mage couldn’t fall until Marci let him. When she released him at last, he collapsed onto the driveway, clutching his silver gloved hands to his chest like they’d been broken. It was such a pathetic sight, Julius would have felt sorry for him, but that was impossible with Marci’s satisfaction coursing through him.
There was so much of her in him now, it was hard to tell where she ended and he began. He could actually feel the rush of joy and vengeance as she wrote the mage off and started looking for her next target. Considering what she’d been through, he didn’t actually begrudge her that, but when he felt her make the decision to pull more power off him in preparation to go hunt down the survivors, Julius knew it was time to end this.
Fast as he’d opened to let her in, he snapped his magic shut. If he’d ever bothered to train his power, he probably could have done it more elegantly, or kept Marci from taking so much in the first place. He hadn’t, though, so he had no choice but to cut her off cold.
She jerked when the connection collapsed, snatching her hand out of his as though she’d been burned. Without her support, Julius dropped like a stone, landing hard on his back in the grassy embankment beside the basement’s dug-out stairs.
“Julius!”
Marci was beside him in an instant, but though he could see her clearly, she sounded a million miles away. He didn’t have the presence of mind to listen in any case. He was too busy trying to breathe.
Now that he’d cut the connection, the emptiness she’d created when she’d sucked out his magic felt like a yawning cavern, and his whole body seemed to be collapsing into it, starting with his lungs. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get them to expand. But then, just when he thought he was going to black out for good, his lungs thundered back to life.
Breath exploded into his body so hard, he arched off the grass. He’d never tasted anything so sweet in his life as that first gulp of air, but the next burned like fire, sending him into a full body coughing fit.
He curled over in the grass, his body folding into itself as he tried to breathe through the coughing spasms. Finally, after what felt like ages, the attack passed, and he slumped into ground with a groan, twitching as he tried to find some part of his body that didn’t hurt to rest his weight on.
It was a hopeless quest. Between the magic and the coughing, he felt like he’d been run through an industrial crusher. It was all he could do to just lie still and keep breathing. But this was one of those times when being a dragon was actually a blessing. A human would have been motionless for hours after something like that, but Julius was able to roll over after just a few more deep breaths, grimacing through the pounding in his head as he looked around for Marci.
He found her a few feet away, staring down him with a look of absolute, horrified guilt. “Julius,” she whispered when he met her eyes. “I am so sorry. I am so, so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to take that much, I swear. I—”
She cut off when Julius raised his hand. After a second’s hesitation, she took it, helping him sit up. Now that his body had realized it wasn’t going to die, he was finally calming down enough to actually take in their surroundings. Or what was left of them.
Marci couldn’t have been pulling on him for more than a few minutes, but the area around the house was now completely empty. The only exception was the mage, who was still lying in a whimpering ball in front of Marci’s car. Julius could vaguely hear the moans of the other men from beyond the disaster area of broken bushes and shattered yard statues where Marci’s blasts had thrown them, but those who were still alive seemed more concerned with pulling themselves to safety than retaliating. By all accounts, it looked like Marci had just beaten Bixby’s force hands down, which was why Julius was so surprised when he heard the sound of a pistol cocking just a few feet away.
“Don’t move.”
Marci’s head snapped up at once, but it took Julius a few seconds to turn far enough to see a large, heavily augmented man with a bald head and a very nice, though now very dirty, gray suit step out from behind the trunk of Marci’s car. He must have used the vehicle for cover during the fight, Julius realized, which made him the only one of Bixby’s hirelings with the presence of mind to do something clever. But while that was unexpected and unlucky, what really caught Julius’s attention wasn’t the man’s unexpected survival or his gun; it was the golden ball he was clutching like a trophy in his left hand.
If Julius had had any lingering doubts, Marci’s horrified gasp would have ended them. The big man was holding the Kosmolabe, the priceless magical tool Marci carried in her bag at all times… the bag she’d left in the car when they’d run for the house.
“Put it down gently, Oslo,” Marci ordered, holding out her hands, though her fingers didn’t glow this time. A fact that didn’t escape Bixby’s second.
“You shouldn’t leave such valuable things lying around,” he said casually, tossing the Kosmolabe and catching it one-handed. “Anyone could just pick them up.”
He tossed it again, and Marci made a strangled sound. “You’re messing with things you don’t understand,” she warned. “That Kosmolabe is irreplaceable.”
“So I’ve been told,” Oslo said, tossing it again. “But I’m not in the antiquities business, and I’m getting mighty tired of chasing a ball like a dog.” He snatched
the Kosmolabe out of the air as he finished, fingers curling menacingly over the thin glass as he leveled his gun at Marci with his other hand. “The only reason you’re not dead right now is because Bixby wants to do it himself, but just because I can’t kill you doesn’t mean you’re safe.” Before Julius could even wonder what that meant, Oslo turned the gun on him, aiming the barrel straight between his eyes. “Hands up, or pretty boy here says goodbye to his head.”
Marci’s hands shot up at once.
Julius followed more slowly and with far less obedience. He might be drained, beaten, and unable to stand, but that didn’t mean he was ready to roll over. He’d spent his whole life cowering before real monsters. This human didn’t even come close.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a bad day, Mr. Oslo,” he said calmly, resting his hands on top his head. “But if you’d asked nicely instead of opening fire, maybe we could have found an arrangement that didn’t end with your men getting toasted and scattered all over the block. I’m sure we can still come to a compromise, however, if you’d just explain what this is all about.”
“It’s about you about to get shot,” Oslo snarled. “I don’t know what kind of line she fed you, buddy, but your lady friend there is a thief. Mr. Bixby doesn’t take kindly to thieves. Novalli here is about to discover exactly what happens to bad girls who steal from us, but there’s no reason you have to suffer, too.”
Julius snorted. “You don’t think I’ll just abandon her.”
“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Oslo said, tightening his finger on the trigger.
The soft click of metal made Julius go still. He hadn’t been taking Oslo’s threat seriously up to this point. He was only a human, and Julius had been shot before as part of his training. It hurt like all get out, but a single shot was almost never fatal for a dragon. As the concept of a bullet ripping through his skull shifted from threat to incoming reality, though, Julius suddenly realized he had nothing to defend with. He couldn’t change shape, and his magic was drained dry. He was a shadow of his true self, practically human, and humans got killed by bullets all the time. But just as it occurred to him that he should probably try to dodge, or at least keep the man talking until he could come up with a better plan, Oslo let out a blood-curdling scream.