Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “Contact,” Shifty said, followed by a brief burst of gunfire. “Clear. They’re hanging back.”

  Dancing around us, I thought.

  Good. They weren’t sure what they could get away with, not yet. That meant we could keep moving, but there was no way of knowing how long until the enemy felt confident enough to hit us again.

  “Pivot on me!” I said, taking that left turn and moving down the hallway.

  “Go!” Shifty said, following in my wake, watching our backs.

  I kept us moving forward, if slowly, keeping my eyes open for someplace we could defend long enough to figure out our next move.

  The whole time, I was thinking about Cass.

  Thinking about where she was, what she was thinking, wondering if she was hurt, scared, panicking. Promising myself that when this was over, we were going to sit down and I was going to spill my guts to her.

  For too long, we’d been dancing around each other like these hyena-men, unsure if it was safe to approach. It was long past time to take a chance and commit, forget the regulations and see if we could make something work together. But that would have to wait a little longer.

  For now, though, for now, I let my fears for her safety fire me up even more. I felt like a raging wildfire was burning inside of me; my lungs were straining for air, my heart was pounding, and my mind felt fuzzy around the edges, like I was stomping heavily through a nightmare.

  I’m not sure how long we moved like that. Our enemies kept trailing us at a distance, flitting in and out of sight too quickly for us to fire on them. We ended up in a corner of the twenty-second floor, and then, bam… the hyena-men were gone. They disappeared, gave up their pursuit, just like that.

  I kicked the door in on an office and laid Tara on the floor. She was still unconscious from the morphine we’d given her, which I figured was a mercy.

  There were two doors leading into the room that was our new temporary base of operations. We barricaded the one with a heavy desk and stood guard at the other.

  "Now what?" Shifty asked.

  Good question.

  “We can’t stay here long,” I said. “We’ll get pinned down, and we’ve got to get to Cass.”

  “Not to mention get some help for Tara.”

  Everything started to feel so damn heavy. My weapon, my gear, even the weight of my head on my shoulders. I was starting to slow down now, come down off the surge of adrenaline that had gotten me this far. A wave of fatigue started to set in, and I shook myself like a dog to try to hold it off for a little longer.

  “All right,” I said. “All right. We’ve got to come up with a plan here. How do we get to the twenty-first floor boardroom?”

  “And not die in the process. Don’t forget that part,” Shifty said. “I don’t know, man. They’ve got to be watching the stairwells, right? Those are the choke points.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I would do. Stack up resources on the stairwells, force us into a kill funnel.”

  “What about the elevators? Do you think they’re still working?”

  “Maybe, but I think we run into the same problem of getting trapped.”

  That’s when it started. Laughter.

  That damned, twittering, jabbering giggle, the kind that could only come from the throat of something utterly inhuman. Before today, I’d only ever heard the sound on TV documentaries about hyenas, and if I never heard it again for the rest of my life, it would be too soon.

  They sounded excited. They sounded like there was drool dripping from their jaws in anticipation.

  "Jesus, listen to that," Shifty said, as the twittering cacophony got louder. "There must be dozens of them."

  The radio broke squelch, as another series of twitters began… this time over by the barricaded door. It was a second group, coming up on our other side. We were surrounded.

  "I can't talk right now, Cass," I said, when the radio broke squelch again.

  "What do we do, Dread?" Shifty said. His voice was starting to sound a little jittery, and I could tell that he was scraping the bottom of the barrel as much as I was. All the Tricks he’d been pulling, from teleporting us in, to the thing with the ice, to all the shields and pressor waves during the fighting… he had to be almost used up.

  “What do we do?” he asked again, and my worn-out brain had nothing for him.

  "I don't know," I said.

  "Don't tell me that!" he whispered.

  I felt like snapping back, but like I said before, in this job, you have to keep your cool. It wasn't working very well… there weren't any windows for us to escape through, there were enemies coming up on both sides of us, and we were slowed down by an unconscious casualty.

  I didn't see a way out. I started thinking out loud. "Maybe we can make a rush through them."

  "Through those things, again?" Shifty said. "Carrying Tara and with hardly any ammo? I don't think so, Dread! We barely made it this far!"

  The twittering laughter continued to swell, and the louder it got, the more I lost my cool. What the hell did Shifty want from me? There was no way out, couldn't he see that? They'd backed us into a corner, and now they were closing in for the kill.

  God damn it. God damn it. I’d patted myself on the back for coming up with a way to get through on the radio to Cass, only to fail her by getting boxed in.

  Sorry, Cass.

  ***

  "Why me?" Cass asked. "Why did you take me alive?"

  Polonius shrugged. "To be honest, I wanted the one you call Dread. But, even the best laid plans can go awry. So, Stephen took you instead."

  "What for?"

  "I am going to make you a part of the next stage of human development," Polonius said, his shield making his form appear to wobble a bit.

  "Oh hey, thanks, but no thanks."

  "Don't be so hasty. You have no idea what you're saying no to."

  Cass glanced around at Stephen and Kerry. "I think I have an idea. I've taken down enough of you Vives to figure out how your rotten heads think."

  "Really? And how is that?"

  “Gotten a taste of power, haven’t you, Polonius? Not the quiet bookworm held back by the laws of society any more. No, now you’ve flexed your nuts all over this place, all over this city, and it felt pretty good, am I right?”

  Polonius stayed silent, his face inscrutable.

  “You’re probably telling yourself that what you’ve done here is justified for some whack-a-do reason or another. You said they kept you captive here?”

  Cass let out a little laugh before continuing. “No shit. Of course they held you captive. Look what you did, the second you got free.”

  The muscles on Polonius’s face began to move, slightly, as he ground his teeth together. Cass wasn’t finished yet, though.

  “Did you stop by a pediatric cancer ward and heal all the kids with your newfound powers? Nope. Did you teleport a person out of their car right before they had an accident? Nope. Instead of doing something benevolent, you slaughtered everyone you saw, and started dropping Biblical levels of damage on the city. Innocent people, who had nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Innocent?” Polonius said, but Cass ignored him and kept going.

  “You’re nothing but a bully, Polonius,” she said. “And I think you probably always were. Deep down inside, hidden away where nobody could see it, but now, now that all the shackles are off and you have an excuse to break bad and exercise your worst impulses, you dive in head-first. No rules, nobody to tell you ‘no’, now you can cut loose the restraints that the rest of us use to keep ourselves from becoming the worst version of ourselves. You’re nothing but a douchebag trying to make himself feel like hot shit by pushing around anybody he can.”

  "Watch your tone, Cass," Kerry said.

  "Fuck you, Kerry. Fuck all of you," Cass looked around the room. "You're all a bunch of traitors. All that crap, all those guilty looks about how we should trust you, Stephen, and you turn on us."

  "You don't understand," Stephen
said.

  "Explain it to her, Stephen," Polonius said.

  "Yeah, explain it to me, Stephen," Cass said. "Explain to me how you can turn your back on every ideal you've ever... you know what? Screw that. Explain to me how you can turn your back on us, on me. The team is gone because of you. Explain that."

  Stephen winced and didn't meet her gaze. "I didn't want it to go that way, but it had to. A few lives, Cass, of people who would've given up those lives if they knew what it meant. What he means."

  "What does he mean?" Cass asked. “What could he possibly have promised you that was worth selling your soul?”

  Stephen looked down at the ground once again. He looked like he was struggling to find the right words, but Polonius spoke before he could.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on him,” the Maestro said. “He never had any choice in the matter. Despite what Revival Technologies says, the Revived are still dead. Ever since my Isis showed me the way, I have had mastery over the dead.”

  “Ever since your who?” Cass said, looking around the room. “Your Isis? You mean like the goddess, Isis? I don’t see her here, Polonius, is she another figment of your loony imagination? Perhaps you’ve also got an imaginary girlfriend in Niagara Falls that you’d like to brag to me about?”

  “Your mockery betrays your ignorance,” he said. “I don’t expect you to understand. Your mind is so small, so closed. A balled up fist that will let nothing inside. But it can be pried open.”

  “I’d like to pry you open, asswipe.”

  “Again, you hurl crude insults, when you lack anything of consequence to say. But you were right about one thing, child. Power. I am Power. Power Incarnate. You have witnessed a mere fraction of my capabilities.”

  “If that’s true, then why hold back?”

  “This vessel.”

  “Ah, your body’s not what it used to be, is it, Maestro?” Cass said. “Falling apart at the seams? What a shame. Really. Looks like I won't have to wax you after all; you'll rot away to mush all on your own."

  “I told you to watch your damn mouth,” Kerry said, taking a step toward her, but Polonius raised a hand to stop him.

  “Let her spit out her little barbs. She cannot damage me with them,” Polonius said. “Besides, she speaks the truth. This body is damaged. It will not hold up to the rigors of what I have planned. Revival Technologies… their process is imperfect.”

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Cass said.

  “I tried to help them perfect their process,” Polonius said. “My Isis and I. And we did improve it. But as I said, the Revived are not alive. They are still dead.”

  “Including you,” Cass said.

  Polonius ignored the jab. “At first, I thought the entire endeavor to be a failure, but during the process of improving their flawed procedures, I discovered the key to power itself. The key to transformation.”

  “The key to lunacy.”

  “The key to becoming a god on Earth,” Polonius said. “What you see before you is a mere fraction of what I could become. The power I could wield. Imagine what I could offer the world. Think how many conflicting thoughts, loyalties, motivations, exist in a single person… much less a thousand, much less a million, much less a city of millions? Look at the world around us. Fragile, selfish egos, fighting amongst themselves. How many conflicting energies, how many conflicting purposes? Imagine what the human race could be if we were unified in our purpose, as one? I can provide that unity. I can provide that wisdom. I can take away all that separates us and make us one mind.”

  Now it was Cass’s turn to stay quiet, letting Polonius speak, like a fisherman letting his catch run out the line. She didn’t put much stock in the veracity or even the sanity of anything Polonius was saying, but the longer he talked, the more time Dread had to get to her.

  Get to her, and put about a hundred bullets in the Maestro’s dead ass.

  “Look at yourself,” Polonius said. “You live for the fight, and you don’t even know what you fight for. Some distant notion of law and order that you were spoon fed as a child. But the reality is, you’re never more at peace than when you are at war. You are a walking contradiction. And you’re not the only one. This city teems with those like you, who contradict themselves and each other each and every moment of the day. This is what I can remedy. This is what I can offer.”

  "Think about it," he continued. "Without those chaotic thoughts separating us, there will no longer be conflict. No violence, no greed, no suffering… just peace. Just wisdom. Just one."

  "Just you," Cass said. "If peace is all that's on your mind, why did you torch that apartment building? What is it about your noble plans for world peace that requires burning hundreds of people alive?”

  The Maestro shrugged. "I needed to get you in here. You see, I can control those who have returned..." he said, gesturing to the Revived troopers, "... but you’re correct. This body is failing. In order to complete the transformation that my vision for unity requires, I will need to be the living. I will need to be you.”

  “Need to be me?” Cass said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  ***

  “Jesus Christ,” Shifty said. “He’s going to Possess her.”

  Dread shook his head. “Possess… what is that? What does that mean? Is that a Trick?”

  “Hunh,” Shifty grunted. “A Trick. The Trick. An impossible Trick, one that only exists in theory.”

  “No one’s ever done it?”

  “No one’s ever been able to,” Shifty said. “Even most Maestros think it’s nothing but a fantasy, that it can’t actually be done.”

  “But Polonius can do it?”

  “I don’t know. Him coming back, being Vived… we know it makes mages a lot more powerful. But this… I don’t know.”

  “What is it? The Trick?”

  “It’s essentially pushing one person’s soul out of their body… and then taking its place.”

  “What?” Dread said. “Like… swapping bodies?”

  Shifty shook his head. “Not quite. The… target… doesn’t have anywhere to go, so…”

  “So it’ll kill her,” Dread finished for him.

  “Yeah. And then Polonius takes her body as his own.”

  So there it was. The reason why Stephen had dragged Cass off, taken her alive. Polonius was looking to escape his rotting body by taking over hers.

  “Even if Polonius can’t actually perform the Trick,” Shifty said, “attempting it will still almost certainly kill Cass.”

  Dread’s mind swirled, turned, twisted, tried to work out a solution, tried to find the missing puzzle piece that would sort out all of the variables and get Cass back in one piece. No matter how he tried to look at the problem, no solution came to him.

  This wasn’t his thing. Cass was the savant, not him. She was the one who could think around corners. But she was down there, held prisoner by four dead men, and he was stuck here, trapped in an office with the wheels of his mind spinning furiously in place.

  The twittering laughter of the hyena-men moving around in the hallways outside their room wasn’t helping, either. Their cries seemed to worm their way into his head, dislodging any thoughts that tried to take root.

  “What I’m saying, Dread, is we’re on a serious time crunch here.”

  "I know," Dread said, trying to ignore the increasing tempo of the hyena-men’s twitters.

  "I mean it, man. We've got to do something…"

  "What?" Dread shouted, the gibbers of the swarming hyena-men finally unhinging him. "What are we going to do, Shifty? Leave Tara here, for those things to tear apart? Even then, we wouldn't make it ten feet. We don't have the ammo and you don't have the strength to hold them off. And even if we could, we'd never make it in time. Figure it out, Shifty! We're screwed! We can't go through walls, we can't go through floors, and we sure as hell..."

  He stopped. The anger left his face, like snow blown away in the wind, replaced by the same look he’d gotten earlier when he had though
t of the cell phone solution to contact Cass. It was the look of epiphany.

  "Dread?"

  Dread nodded slowly, the cackles of the monsters surrounding them momentarily forgotten. "I've got an idea."

  "Well, shit, man, don't leave me in suspense."

  “Earlier, when we dropped on to the roof,” Dread said, still nodding slowly, as if he were working it out in his head. “You were talking about that screen, how Polonius was keeping us from teleporting in…”

  “Yeah?” Shifty said.

  “You said it was like a… skin or something. That he was using the outer walls of the building like a conductor.”

  “Yeah. It’s a way to focus the energies more easily, use up less of your juice. The walls act kind of like a guide.”

  “And that stops you from teleporting because you can’t remotely view a landing site through that skin. You can go all around it, but not through it.”

  “Yeah,” Shifty said, “but how...”

  “What about… what about inside of it?” Dread asked. "What about teleporting around inside of the building? We never cross the membrane, never cross the skin of the building."

  Shifty's jaw hung slack. "Goddamn. I am in the presence of greatness. We should... we should be able to do that. How come we never thought of that before? How come Polonius never thought of it?"

  "Because it's an oversight," Dread said with a grin. "For all his pretensions, for all his powers, Polonius is like us… he's fallible, he's human, and human beings fall prey to oversights."

  The twittering increased exponentially, and they caught sight of heavy shapes moving in the hallway from their vantage point at the open door. One of them lingered in sight long enough for Dread to fire a quick burst at it from his weapon, drawing a squeal of pain from the creature before it ducked back out of sight through a nearby doorway.

  “They’re pushing on us, man,” Shifty said.

  “I know,” Dread said. “Pushing on this side, which means they’re maneuvering to hit us from the other.”

  As if to prove his theory, the door on the far side of the office began to shake on its hinges under heavy blows. The desk they had used to barricade it shifted slightly with each impact.