by Rachel Aaron
A ward that was tuned to only stop bullets shouldn’t have taken so much magic. The general rule was the more specialized the ward, the more efficiently it worked. But there was a practical limit to everything, and there were a lot of people shooting at her. The ground at her feet was already carpeted with crumpled slugs, and the work of canceling all that force had left the protective bubble of magic around her dangerously dim. Another ten seconds and it would go out entirely, which would have been enough time if she’d been running for the door. But she couldn’t run. Not until she got the others out, too.
Swallowing against her fear, Marci glanced back at Julius to see what she could do to help. Not much was the answer. Obnoxious as his arrogant bragging could be, Justin was guarding his downed brother like a wall. There were actually more spent slugs around his feet than hers, but the dragon didn’t even look winded.
That sight did more to calm her panic than anything else, and Marci was finally able to move past Julius’s immediate danger and focus on the next most important thing: salvaging the job.
By this point, her ward was in serious danger. It hadn’t cracked yet, though, so Marci forced herself to ignore the bullets and look for Katya. The man who’d been guarding her earlier must have had other things to do, because when she finally spotted the dragoness, Katya was lying on her side against the gym’s far wall, alone and miraculously untouched by the violence around her.
Target in sight, Marci darted across the gym, dodging the gunmen who tried to grab her. She lunged for Katya the moment she was in range, yanking her out of the black tarp Bixby had wrapped her in. But as the covering came off, Marci saw there was something else hidden beneath it. A dark, padded band had been wrapped around Katya’s waist, almost like a weightlifter’s belt with wires sticking out of it, each one of which was connected to a sewn-in compartment filled with a gray, clay-like substance that reminded her of—
“Enough!”
The enraged shout cut through the racket, making Marci jump. She whirled around as the gunfire died to see a panting Bixby standing by the card table where the illusionary Kosmolabe had rested before Marci had been forced to drop it. His hand was out in front of him, his fist wrapped around something that looked like an old-style joystick. There was even a red button at the top that he was currently mashing down with his white-knuckled thumb as his wild eyes slid over the room to stop on Marci.
“Hands up!” he bellowed. “She’s wrapped in enough C4 to take this whole place out. One false move out of any of you, and I blow us all sky high.”
Marci snatched her hands away from Katya, raising them instantly over her head. All around the room, Bixby’s men were lowering their guns and regrouping, but even though the shooting had stopped, it was hardly quiet. A horrible sound was coming through the broken roof, a mix of flapping wings and shrill, inhuman shrieking. The combination made Marci shake from her toes to her fingers, but while she was desperately trying to get a hold of herself, Bixby began to laugh.
“Well, well, well,” he said, looking from Marci to Justin, who was still crouched protectively over a bleeding Julius. “Life just gets weirder and weirder, doesn’t it? But it all came together just like the seer said. Even them.”
He jerked his head up to the dark shapes fluttering around the hole in the roof, and despite the ridiculousness of her situation, Marci’s curiosity immediately got the better of her. “What are they?”
“Magic eaters,” Bixby said, his face breaking into a wide, slightly unhinged smile. “A little known local specialty. I’m told they don’t usually flock in numbers like this unless there’s wounded prey to be had, but magical predators aren’t so different from the normal variety. All it takes is a little blood in the water to start them circling.”
His looked pointedly at Marci’s feet as he said this, and she looked down to see something red coating the ground where Katya had been lying. It was on her arms, too, staining the dragoness’s white shirt crimson. But while the color suggested blood, the liquid was much too shiny, and there was a rainbow sheen on its surface, almost like gasoline floating on water…
And that was when Marci realized that dragon blood looked very different from human.
“Oh yes, Miss Novalli,” Bixby cackled as her expression turned horrified. “It’s done. Just listen to those wings. It’s only a matter of time before we’re up to our necks in those bastards, especially with all the new blood your little surprise attack there is dumping on the ground.”
Marci supposed he meant Julius, and scared as she was, that just made her mad. “You don’t know what you’re messing with, Bixby!” she yelled. “It never pays to piss off things bigger than you.”
“Save your threats,” Bixby said. “I’m perfectly safe. The magic eaters don’t care about humans—at least, not about ones who aren’t mages. That would normally put you in a lot of trouble, but you’re in luck tonight. There’s better meat to be had.” He jerked his head at Justin and Julius. “Your rescue squad is about to be the main course of a monster-on-monster feeding frenzy, and if you want them to have a prayer of escaping with their lives, you will shut up and do exactly as I say.”
“Don’t do it,” Justin barked, making Marci jump. When she turned to him, though, the dragon wasn’t even paying attention to her. He was glaring at Bixby, growling with a rumble Marci could feel through her shoes. “Don’t do a thing he says. I will not be used as a bargaining chip by a human!”
“You do not want to push me today, buddy!” Bixby snarled, brandishing the C4 remote in his fist. “Now shut up and back off before I turn you into dragon salsa.”
His finger began to lift off the trigger as he said this, and Marci gasped. “Wait!” she cried, pulling the Kosmolabe out of her bag. “Here it is. This is the real one. I’ll roll it to you right now, just don’t be stupid.”
That must have been what he was waiting for, because Bixby’s face lit up in a triumph. “Oh, no,” he said slowly. “You bring it to me, nice and easy.”
Marci swallowed and glanced at Julius. He was always the one with the plan. Surely he’d thought of something. But Julius was still down on the floor, his bloody chest rising and falling in shallow, pained gasps. Overhead, the shrieks were getting louder as the magic eaters grew bolder. A few had already come inside, crawling upside down along the ceiling like spiders.
Now that she knew what to look for, Marci could actually feel their presence sucking the magic out of the air, leaving an emptiness even more awful than the Pit’s creepy death magic. From the set of Justin’s shoulders, she knew he felt it too, and that only made things worse. If Justin was getting nervous, they were really screwed, and it was that more than anything that made Marci’s decision.
“Okay,” she said quietly, standing up and walking across the shot-up gym with the Kosmolabe held out in front of her like an offering. “Here. Just take the stupid thing and let us go.”
Bixby grinned as she closed the distance. “Oh, they can go at any time,” he said, snatching the golden sphere out of her hand and shoving it into a warded bag tied to his belt under his jacket. “But you? You’re staying right here.”
Marci was about to tell him exactly where he could shove that idea when his other hand, the one that wasn’t holding down the trigger, shot out to press something large, square, and black straight into her stomach.
Intense pain flared in every part of her body. It was like getting a massive charley horse cramp, only instead of just her leg, it was everywhere. The shock was so intense, Marci didn’t even realize she’d gone down until she was on the floor. But it wasn’t until the spasmodic pain forced her to drop every magical protection she had—the last of her anti-bullet ward, the remnants of her illusion of calm, even the low-level safeties that warned her when other mages started fiddling with her magic—that she finally understood what was going on. Bixby had tased her.
“Don’t move!”
Considering none of her muscles currently worked, Marci had no idea how he exp
ected her to follow that command. A few seconds later, though, she realized Bixby hadn’t been yelling at her. He was shouting at the dragons.
“You stay right there!” he screamed, his voice high-pitched and frantic as he lifted the bomb trigger high with one arm and reached down to grab Marci’s still-twitching body with the other. He must have traded out his taser for a gun while she’d been on the ground, because when he yanked her into a choke hold against his chest, Marci felt the chamber of a revolver digging into her cheek. But even the warm pressure of gunmetal wasn’t enough to rouse her tasered body to fight as Bixby started dragging her backward toward the rear of the gym.
“Don’t worry, sweetheart,” he grunted, panting with effort as he hauled her across the floor. “I’m not going to kill you, not quite. See, I know my future. My seer told me I’d die the moment Aldo Novalli’s daughter did, and my seer is never wrong. So once I hand off the Kosmolabe, you and me are getting on a plane back home to Vegas where I’ve got a doctor lined up to put you in a coma. A nice little sleep with nothing to bother you, because we’re both going to live a long, long time together.”
By the time he finished, Marci was so angry she could barely breathe, but she couldn’t do anything about it. The taser had left her whole body locked up and unresponsive, and her magic was an absolute mess. Even if she’d been herself, though, she couldn’t have cast anything. The air was so empty of magic now it felt shriveled, like a bit of fruit left out in the sun. She couldn’t even feel the dragons anymore.
They must have already left, she realized dimly. Well, good for them. Running was their only chance of escaping the epic disaster she’d dragged them into. She only wished she’d had a chance to tell Julius how sorry she was.
She was still contemplating this when she finally managed to get her muscles working enough to turn her head. She used this newfound power to look back down the gym on the off chance of catching a final glimpse of Julius’s back. When she got her head around at last, though, her still-stuttering body stopped working all over again, because Julius wasn’t fleeing. He was standing beside his brother, who had Katya over his shoulder.
The sight sent Marci into a panic. But as she fought desperately to get herself together enough to scream at Julius to just run already, he did.
Straight toward her.
Chapter 17
When Julius had fallen through the roof and into the gym, he’d learned two important facts. First, falling is much scarier when you can’t fly, and second, there were things in this world that ate dragons.
On the way down, he hadn’t been able to properly appreciate just how big the thing trying to kill him was. After they’d hit, though, he could see every inch of it thanks to Bixby’s floodlights, and the sight made him wish he couldn’t. Monsters were supposed to be scarier in the dark, but at least up on the roof he hadn’t been able to see just how big the multi-faceted spider eyes staring down at him were, or the how the jagged fangs currently snapping at his throat were perfectly fashioned to puncture and rip. He could see it all now, though, and the sight of teeth flashing right under his chin sent instincts Julius had never known he possessed surging into action.
All at once, his body felt wrong, too small and too weak, his throat empty and cold without a flicker of fire. If his mother’s seal hadn’t been in place, he would have changed spontaneously for the first time in his adult life, but he couldn’t. He was blocked. He had no protections, no flame, just soft human flesh that the creature’s barbed talons cut into like knives through clay.
As the youngest, most bullied member of a violent family, Julius had been through a lot of pain in his life. Even in his worst fights, though, he’d never experienced anything like this. He could actually feel the tips of the creature’s claws inside his chest, holding him down while its teeth snared his neck for the deathblow. The shock of the bite was so intense, he couldn’t even get his hands close to the sword on his belt. But then, just when Julius was sure he was one heartbeat away from being just another stain on the floor, the whole building shook.
Even through the pain, the sudden jolt made him jump. The impact must have startled the monster, too, because it let go of his neck and looked up, raising its head just in time to lose it. The thing didn’t even get a final scream before its body went stiff, and then Julius felt hard hands slide under his arms to yank him to safety as the now-headless monster toppled over.
“You all right?”
Julius had never been so happy to hear his brother’s voice in his life. He was trying to stay as much when the roar of gunfire filled the room, a great deal of which seemed to be focused on Justin. That was wrong. The whole point of the plan was that the goons would waste their shots on Marci’s ward, but the bullets just seemed to be going everywhere. He should probably be concerned about that, but Julius couldn’t work up the energy to care. The moment Justin had yanked the monster off him, all the pain in his chest had vanished. He wasn’t even scared anymore, just empty, like he was floating in a void. He was about to say screw it and go to sleep when Justin shouted in his ear.
“Pull yourself together!”
His eyes shot open to see his brother looming over him with a scowl on his face and the Fang of the Heartstrikers naked in his hand. Bullets were bouncing off his shoulders and chest like hail, and though Justin didn’t actually seem to mind, Julius felt he should probably say something, just in case.
“You’re being shot.”
“Better me than you,” Justin said, dipping his sword down to bounce a stray bullet before it could land in Julius’s head. “Just stay still. That thing almost sucked you dry.”
It took Julius a good five seconds to understand what his brother meant. He’d been so glad for the lack of pain, hadn’t even realized he was missing magic. Now that Justin had pointed it out, though, the gaping hole in his essence was all he could feel. The emptiness in his head was no longer a floating, happy sort, but a sucking wound far more terrifying than the gashes on his chest, and he closed his eyes in panic.
“It’ll come back.”
His eyes popped open again just in time to see Justin flash him a reassuring smile. “I’ve taken much bigger hits to my magic and been perfectly fine five minutes later,” his brother said, turning back to the chaos going on all around them. “You’re just in shock and stuck as a human, which makes everything harder. Focus on breathing. Your power will fix itself.”
Julius nodded and closed his eyes, ignoring the bullets whizzing over his head as he tried to follow his brother’s instructions, because if there was anything Justin had experience with, it was recovering from damage. Sure enough, after a few quiet breaths, his magic began to expand again, creeping back to fill the void the monster had left.
The empty-headed feelings of detachment and weakness faded along with it, bringing back the sharp, immediate pain of his shredded chest. Even that was comforting, though. Pain he could work with, pain he understood, and while the ache was bad enough to bring tears to his eyes, Julius couldn’t help sighing in relief. Exceptionally short-lived relief, it turned out, because when he was finally stable enough to start paying attention to his surroundings again, the first thing he saw was Bixby tasing Marci.
He shot to his feet before he could think. Just rolled right up only to fall right back down again when the dizziness hit. But he was recovering with every breath, and the second time he got to his feet, he stayed there, looking around for Justin, who was no longer beside him.
After a few frantic seconds, he spotted his brother again on the other side of the room, kneeling down to scoop something onto his shoulder, but it wasn’t until he saw her pale hair that Julius realized it was Katya. The sight hit him like all the shots he’d avoided. Justin had Katya, which meant they’d done it. They’d gotten her back. They’d won.
Julius sucked in a victorious breath. Even with all the failures, his plan had worked. They had Katya! He wasn’t going to be eaten! Now all they had to do was save Marci from Bixby and—
His thoughts cut off when Justin turned and charged straight for him. For a moment, it looked like his brother was going to run him over, but Justin stopped just in time. “Good, you’re up,” he said, grabbing his arm. “Come on, we gotta go.”
“What?” Julius cried, eyes going back to Marci’s slumped body, which Bixby was hauling toward the gym’s rear door. “No! You have to rescue her!”
“Can’t,” Justin said, yanking him back toward the main door, which was currently packed with fleeing goons. “Bixby’s rigged Three Sisters here like a suicide bomber, and we’ve got magic eaters coming down our necks.”
Julius glanced up at where Katya was slung over his brother’s shoulders. Sure enough, a homemade bomb of plastic explosives was wrapped around her waist, but that didn’t explain the rest of it. “Magic eaters?”
His brother snorted. “Look up.”
Julius did…and immediately regretted it.
The hole in the roof where he’d fallen was now completely swarmed by more of the giant, winged monsters that had attacked him. They were crawling over the ceiling like roaches, hissing at the lights as they tried to get closer to the dragons in the middle. “What are those things?”
“I just told you,” Justin snapped. “Magic. Eaters.”
“Right,” Julius said, mentally rubbing the place where the chunk had been bitten out of his own magic. “But where did they come from?”
“They’re predators that eat magic, you’re a wounded dragon who’s bleeding all over the place. Do the math. Now let’s get out of here before things get worse.”
He turned to go, but Julius didn’t follow. He was too busy looking for Marci.
What he found wasn’t good. The taser must have been turned to max, because she still wasn’t moving. Bixby had dragged her almost all the way to the rear door by this point, one arm wrapped around her neck in a choke hold while the other clutched the bomb trigger against his chest. The rest of his men were in full retreat, throwing themselves at every available exit in their panic to escape the leathery winged monsters crawling down from the ceiling. A smart move on their part, and a stroke of luck for Julius, because with all his men jumping ship, Bixby was now alone.