Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

“The same Kel,” Matthias said. “Still so arrogant. Still unable to admit her mistakes.”

  “I have yet to make one,” Kel said. “Other than associating myself with you.”

  “It is only through me that you are even involved with any of this,” Matthias said, his voice hissing with barely contained anger. “I brought you in, remember that! You were nothing before I…”

  “Nothing?” Kel said. “You came to me. You needed me. Not the other way around. What about you, Dr. Adjani? Have you forgotten? Forgotten how desperate you were for a solution when your company was crashing down around your ears? Or has time dulled your sense of gratitude for what I gave you?”

  Adjani’s voice was measured, calm. “We all want the same thing, Kel. And we all have something to offer.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Don’t play games,” Matthias said. “Yes, you have the sphere, powered by your ‘harvest’. But it’s still only a power source. We have the Intron Code and the device to use it.”

  “Revival Tech has those things, Matthias,” Kel said. “Not you.”

  “And I am Revival Tech,” Dr. Adjani said.

  “Do they even know, Adjani? Anyone else at your precious company? Do they know how you’ve been playing a shell game with their resources so that you could play lap dog to Matthias and his desires?”

  “Your desires as well,” Dr. Adjani said. “Don’t pretend otherwise. You want what the Intron Code can provide as much as we do. You want to be something more.”

  “Our code, our machine to use it,” Matthias said. “Your power source.”

  “Yes, my power source. Mine. Which you want to take from me. Just as you’ve always taken it from me.”

  “No one’s trying to take anything,” Dr. Adjani said. “We’re offering a fair…”

  “Do you really think I’ve forgotten?” Kel said, sounding like she was spitting out her words. “You always try to take it away from me.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me. Ever since we were barely able to walk, you would always take it from me.”

  “Ever since we could walk?” Dr. Adjani said. “What are you talking about? We’ve only known each other for a few years.”

  “What’s wrong with her, Caleb?” Matthias asked. “She’s not making any sense.”

  Kel continued to speak, her voice getting more agitated with every word. “Anything I ever found, anything I managed to save, anything I managed to steal. I would hide it, but you would always find it. You would find it or you would twist my arm until I screamed and told you where it was.”

  “What are you talking about?” Matthias said. “What is she talking about?”

  “Do you think I’ve forgotten all the things you’ve done to me?” Kel said, almost shouting now. “Do you? I haven’t forgotten the way you would take everything for yourself. I haven’t forgotten how you would creep your way into my bed at night, and hold your stinking, dirty hand over my mouth.”

  “All right,” Matthias said. “I don’t know what kind of bizarre game you’re playing here, but we are leaving. This is over.”

  “Yes,” Kel said. “This is over.”

  Cass

  This was bad. Fly had mentioned that she was unhinged since the prison; now, it sounded like Kel’s Cuckoo Timer was about to hit zero and things were about to take a turn for the bloody. Dread could sense it, too; I could feel him tensing up next to me, itching to move, never taking his eyes off of the restaurant across the wide walkway from us, and finally, he had to say something.

  “Cass.”

  “I know.”

  “This is about to jump off.”

  “I know.”

  “There’s a lot of civilians over there.”

  “I know,” I said, getting back on my sleeve mike. “Michael, this is about to go sideways on us. We’ve got to move now.”

  “Negative. My agents in the restaurant say there’s too many civilians in there; we can’t risk provoking a fight.”

  “There’s about to be a fight, whether we provoke it or not!”

  “Stay where you are. Do not approach the targets.”

  I fretted and fumed and finally, Dread and I traded a knowing look.

  “Fuck it?” he said.

  I nodded. “Fuck it.”

  Mickey looked back and forth between the two of us. “What… what does ‘fuck it’ mean?”

  I drew the pistol out of the back of my waistband, holding it inside the front of my jacket so as to keep from startling any civilians nearby. Normally it doesn’t do to walk around in polite company with your weapon out, but this was about to get ugly, and I didn’t want to get killed on account of a slow draw.

  While it was true that everyone around me kept referring to me as a gunfighter, and yes, I did constantly drill on quick draws with a pistol, and also yes, I had been training with Lysette ever since the prison in Physical Magic to increase my speed and reflexes, still, I didn’t want to take any chances. For starters, my progress in Physical Magic was minor at best; I’d started at too late an age to be able to take it very far.

  On top of that, performing a quick draw is hard enough even with a proper tactical holster; trying to dig a pistol out of the back of your pants from underneath a jacket is clumsy under the best of conditions. Better to have your weapon drawn ahead of time and give Murphy’s Law less opportunities to ruin your day.

  “Oh, that’s what ‘fuck it’ means,” Mickey said, drawing her own pistol. “We’re about to do something stupid.”

  “Stay behind us,” I said. “Remember, stick to your Tricks whenever possible.”

  “They won’t work against ghouls,” Mickey said. “Not unless I use them against Kel herself.”

  “Be careful if you have to shoot. You don’t want to hit me or Dread or one of the civilians that are going to be running around once this starts.”

  “Remember… trigger discipline, muzzle discipline,” Dread said, setting a reassuring hand on Mickey’s shoulder. “You’ll do fine. You handled Fly, no problem.”

  “Right,” Mickey said. “Right. Okay, I’m ready. Let’s go do something stupid.”

  “Follow me,” I said, and led them out of the bookstore.

  We took up position in the walkway, at the wide mouth of the bridge connecting the two sides of the mall. It was about ten yards wide, give or take, and led directly to the front door of the restaurant.

  A quick glance to my left told me that Shifty, Lysette, and Jolly had spotted us from their position in the store next to ours, and were filing out of the front door to join us. Shifty noticed how each of us had our gun hands tucked inside of our jackets in a not-so-subtle manner, and he followed our lead, drawing his pistol as covertly as he could and holding it inside of his jacket.

  “What’s going on, boss?” he asked, and then, there was a piercing, ear-splitting shriek.

  I think it was a shriek. I don’t know if there was an actual noise, or if the sound I heard was just a part of my brain interpreting the blast of sensory data that hit us all in that instant.

  The best way I can describe it is like this. We were all standing there, on our side of the bridge, about to cross towards the restaurant, when my body was filled with agonizing pain. That piercing, shrieking sound filled my ears… hell, it seemed to fill my entire brain… and my vision went all white.

  I couldn’t see. I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t even think, because the pain consuming every part of my body was so intense it blocked out everything else. It felt like I was being burned alive and dropped in acid all at once.

  “Shifty!” I managed to scream through the agony, hoping he could put up a shield to block out whatever was happening to us, but almost as quickly as it began, the avalanche of pain ended.

  I could see again. I could hear again. It took me a moment or two to recover from the shock of so much pain flooding my body, but as I did, I got a look around and took stock.

  Whatever had affected me, had affected everyone. Not only my
team, who were all on the floor, blinking and shaking their heads, recovering from the same assault as me; everyone I could see in the mall were rolling around on the ground, hands over their ears, some crying, some groaning, all of them dazed from the experience.

  “What the hell was that?” Dread had time to say, before a tornado of violence erupted.

  Gunfire rumbled and roared inside the restaurant; I could see muzzle flashes on the other side of the plate glass covering the front but I couldn’t tell who was shooting or at what. Stray rounds punched starry cracks through the glass and snapped by our heads; we all pressed down flat to the floor to avoid getting hit.

  “Cover!” I said, rolling over to a large, heavy ceramic vase holding some sort of fake decorative plant. It was wide enough around that I wouldn’t be able to wrap my arms around it; hopefully it was full of dirt or something else that would stop a bullet. For the moment, I didn’t have much choice; it would have to do.

  Dread scurried past me, out onto the bridge, and dropped down behind a series of heavy couches set along the right side of the bridge. Mickey and the others all hunkered down below the waist-high railing that lined the gap between the walkways as panicked civilians began to flee out of the main doors of the restaurant.

  “Stay low!” I shouted to the people rushing past me. There was a hum of energy followed by a muted explosion… someone in the restaurant had launched a magespear… and then a sudden arc of lightning blasted through one of the plate glass windows of the restaurant, lancing through the air across both walkways. Some poor bastard running for his life caught it right in the chest; the energy threw him up against the wall of the bookstore and blew him to pieces.

  Son of a bitch. These assholes were unleashing hell in there on each other, with no regard for the innocents caught in the crossfire. We had to move on them, now, and try to put a stop to this madness before more civilians got killed.

  First things first. We had to get a shield up on that bridge to cover our advance, or our heroic rescue mission would be cut woefully short by the firepower cooking off in that restaurant. I shouted to Shifty and waved to get his attention, and then, things took a turn for the worse.

  There was another crash of glass, and three heavy shapes leapt through the remnants of one of the ruined plate glass windows of the restaurant and into the hallway on the far side of the bridge. They were not human; at first glance, all three creatures appeared to be dogs, but they were the size of large mastiffs and had two blunt, snarling heads each.

  Hell hounds. It figured that one of those assholes tearing up the restaurant was a Conjure mage. This was turning into a shitty day really quickly.

  Hell hounds are tough as nails and will viciously attack anything they see; if you don’t kill both of their heads, you just piss them off. Conjure mages love them because they can simply call a bunch of them up and turn them loose, letting them wreck havoc and chaos on the enemy and then either make their escape or started pulling other Tricks at their leisure.

  The down side is, hell hounds are pretty much impossible to control. They won’t attack their master, but anything else in sight is fair game. Two hundred pounds of muscle topped by jaws powerful enough to break bones can do a lot of damage and spread a lot of panic really quickly.

  The huge animals rushed onto the bridge, chasing after the fleeing civilians. One of the hounds leapt onto the back of a woman not ten feet away from Dread, knocking her to the ground and tearing into her immediately with both jaws.

  Tactically, it probably would’ve been smarter to have Shifty get a shield up across the bridge, holding back the hounds and saving the civilians that we could, until we could then engage the hell hounds safely and at our discretion. But that would’ve meant leaving that woman, and least a dozen other civilians, on the other side of that shield, fully exposed to the hounds and any other stray madness flying through the air out of the restaurant.

  So, “smart and tactical” had to take a back seat to “reckless and impulsive”. Dread started off the show with firing on the hound that had taken down the civilian woman; I got up and moved forward onto the bridge, shoving past fleeing civilians who were blocking my shot on the other two creatures.

  As soon as I cleared the last civilian and there was nothing but air between me and the two gigantic hell hounds charging across the bridge towards me, there was an instant of panic where I realized exactly how stupid this move was. Two huge killing machines, rushing me at close range, and little ol’ me with nothing but a pistol to my name? It felt like I was about to try to stop an onrushing tractor trailer with a squirt gun.

  Dread had his hands full with a hell hound of his own. Mickey would probably shoot me by accident if she tried to help. Shifty had civilians in his way, and Jolly and Lysette didn’t have guns. I was on my own.

  Still, I was in it, in the fight, and once you’re in it, you can’t let fear get a grip on you, or you’ll freeze up and get wasted for certain. You have to get mean, get mean and focus on the damage you’re going to do to the enemy, not what damage the enemy might do to you. As soon as I felt the panic rising up in me from the sight of those creatures rushing at me like a freight train covered in fangs, I pushed that fear back down with good old fashioned rage and hate and spite, snapping my weapon up into a high grip and cutting loose into the first snarling head that I saw.

  I’m good, and I’m fast, but hitting moving targets is no easy task, and I had maybe two seconds at most before those hounds closed the distance. I got off four shots. At least one bullet found its mark on the first hell hound’s left head; there was a spray of red tissue and that snarling head fell lifeless and limp.

  But like I said before, if you don’t hit both heads, you just piss a hell hound off. That big son of a bitch leapt through the air at me, coming straight on like a cannonball, and I threw up an arm over my face right before it slammed into me.

  When the impact didn’t happen… when the hell hound slammed into a force field right in front of me with a thud and a shower of blue energy spreading out from where the ugly bastard hit it… it took me half a second to blink and realize that I hadn’t been splattered onto the bridge after all. Shifty had gotten a shield up in time to save my ass; he was behind me and to my left on the bridge, and once the hell hound smacked into the shield and fell to the floor of the bridge, dazed, he moved up to my side, dropped the shield, and we both shot the shit of that damn monster’s second head.

  Once I saw that it was dead, I was split between two fronts. Hell hound Number Three had rushed past Shifty and I to charge the rest of the team. Hell hound Number One… the one who had taken down the woman… was all over Dread.

  It took me only a split second to decide. Dread and Shifty could definitely handle one hell hound between the two of them, but Jolly and Lysette were unarmed and Mickey… well, Mickey wasn’t remotely up to the task of taking on a two hundred pound rampaging monster.

  I patted Shifty on the shoulder, shouting “Dread!” and pushing him in that direction as I spun on my heel and ran back the way I’d come, after Hell Hound Number Three.

  I was too late.

  Of course the hell hound had to go for Mickey, of all people. The tiny, terrified Mentalist barely managed to fire a panicked shot from her little pistol into the floor, nowhere near her target, before the hell hound slammed into her and sent her flying.

  One of the heads caught her in its jaws and shook her like a rag doll back and forth. I could see the terror in her eyes; she was screaming out a hoarse, empty rattle of a scream, so lost to terror that she couldn’t even vocalize it.

  It made me sick to my stomach to see it. I was desperate to get to her, but even though I was sprinting as fast as I could, it felt like I was running through thick tar. I couldn’t shoot; Mickey and the hell hound were a flurry of bodies mixed together, and there was no way I could get off a shot without a strong chance of hitting her by accident.

  There was a blur of movement; Lysette streaked across the walkway li
ke a rocket and tackled the hell hound like a linebacker. The whole mess of bodies… Lysette, Mickey, and the hell hound… tumbled across the floor together in a tangled splay of limbs and torsos and snarling heads.

  By the time the tangle sorted itself out, Mickey lay curled up in a ball, her hands over her head. I couldn’t tell if she was conscious or not. Lysette rolled out of the scrum smoothly, getting her feet underneath her and her balance back long before the hell hound was able to scramble to its feet.

  She was ready for it. She did a sort of sliding move halfway past the hell hound, wrapping both of her arms around its midsection and then lifting it up bodily into the air like sack of grain.

  No matter how many times I see Lysette do her thing, I always seem to forget exactly how goddamn strong she is. She swung that huge hell hound around like it was a shotput on a rope, spinning around in a circle once to get some momentum and then slamming its twin heads off of the waist-high railing with a sickening crunch.

  One of the heads went dead with the impact, but the body went through some sort of desperate death throes, breaking Lysette’s grip and throwing her clear across the walkway. In the second it took Lysette to recover, the hell hound got its legs back underneath itself and went at her with the head that was still living.

  “Lysette, move!” I shouted, trying to get a shot, but they were too close together and moving too fast.

  The hell hound jumped at Lysette’s throat, but rather than shrink away, Lysette shoved her left forearm into the hell hound’s mouth and leaned into it. Now, if I had stuck my arm in that hell hound’s jaws, it would’ve snapped through the bones like dried twigs. But Physical Adepts like Lysette had to magically enhance the strength of their bones and ligaments along with their muscles, or they’d tear themselves apart doing the acrobatics that they do, so her bones held together under the terrible pressure when those jaws clamped down on her arm.

  Besides, she hadn’t done it out of some sort of suicidal desperation. It was a calculated move. Here’s what I mean.

  The natural reaction of any regular, sane person to a dog trying to bite you, is to pull away. But that’s what the dog wants; its teeth sets in to your flesh even deeper as it hauls backwards with all the strength in its legs.