Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “Good afternoon, officer. What can we do for… Jesus, man, what happened to your eyes?”

  Things started moving quickly. The cop turned his slow walk into a sudden sprint, running two steps before leaping like an animal through the air and onto Travis’s partner. In the brief, panicked instants before the police officer jumped, Travis could see what his partner had been talking about… the cop’s eyes were as black as night, all black, and as he leapt through the air, he bared his teeth like fangs and raised hands covered in talons that were as black as his eyes.

  Travis stared in stunned silence as the cop slammed bodily into his partner, knocking him to the ground and tearing into him with those terrible claws. He couldn’t move; it was as if his eyes refused to believe what he was seeing and his mind refused to obey any commands to react to the sight of his partner being torn open in front of him.

  A part of his brain knew what it was witnessing; he’d never seen a ghoul, but after the incident at the prison nearby a few months back, news reports and articles and Youtube videos about death magic had been everywhere, at least for a few weeks until the buzz died down and the world got back to worrying about Democrats and Republicans and cat videos and Instagram models with extra-large asses.

  But even though he’d worked as a security guard for most of his life, even though he knew that the place where he worked was ground zero for magic dealing with reviving the dead, still, to actually see death magic up close and violently personal now numbed every sense he had and propelled him into a surreal haze of disbelief. Turning his head to look at the dark woman felt like he was forcing his way through thick tar, and watching her clench her hands into fists felt like he was watching it through a pane of thick glass.

  His partner screamed and suddenly, the sense of unreality popped like a balloon and Travis came back into himself. Adrenaline poured into the center of him like it was coming out of a bucket; his heart began to pound against the inside of his chest as he dug frantically at the pistol in the holster at his side.

  The cop… or whatever he was now… and the dark woman were still a good distance across the lobby, and the wide security desk still lay between them. Travis had a chance, he knew; that much territory would give him a few precious seconds to get his weapon into play, and even as his gun began to clear the holster, he had already decided that the dark woman was going to be his first target.

  His pistol came up and his sights were lining up on her when she disappeared. Travis blinked twice, eyes once again refusing to believe what he’d just seen, when he heard a popping sound behind him… the sound of a rush of air displacing.

  He turned to face the sound and there she was, no longer looking down at the ground to hide her features with the brim of her hat, but now staring straight at him. He recognized her immediately; her face had been all over the news the last few days.

  Kel. Kel the nightmare, Kel the monster, Kel the death mage, somehow here, somehow inside of the building past the wards preventing teleportation past the walls.

  But she didn’t teleport through the walls, he realized dimly, even as Kel closed the distance between them with a single step and thrust a long, thin dagger into his heart. Not through the walls. She simply walked through the front door and then teleported across the room.

  The adrenaline flooding his heart was gone, now, replaced by shock; when Kel twisted her dagger and withdrew it from between his ribs, a rush of lightheadedness washed over him like a flood, wiping away his consciousness, wiping away everything in a white mist of blankness. He didn’t even have time to realize he was dying before it had already happened.

  Less than a minute later, though, Travis rose again. He rose to his feet in a skittish, jerking manner, a marionette being yanked to its feet roughly on its strings. Blood covered the front of his shirt, still spreading from the hole in his chest, and his eyes were entirely black.

  “You are the one in charge of the security guards?” Kel asked him. “The… supervisor, or manager, or whatever you are called?”

  “Yes, Master,” the ghoul who had been named Travis answered.

  “Good,” Kel said, waving to the throng gathered by the front door. The dozens of ghouls who had filed obediently off the bus now passed through the front doors of Revival Technologies, spreading out into the lobby. Some of them carried bodies over their shoulders, corpses zipped up in heavy black body bags.

  Kel waited until they were all inside before continuing. “Initiate a lockdown of the building. No one can leave.”

  “Yes, Master,” the ghoul who had been Travis answered, and moved to the computer on the desk to carry out her commands.

  “The rest of you,” Kel said. “Here are your orders. Move upwards from floor to floor. Kill everyone you find. As you kill them, I will raise them to join you. Do not go onto the fourteenth through sixteenth floors and do not kill the people on those floors. I need them alive. Move now.”

  The ghouls wordlessly moved as one, swarming up the nearby stairs and elevators to carry out her commands. Kel stopped the ghouls carrying the body bags before they could join the others in the massacre.

  “Not you three. I need you with me. And you,” she said, looking at the ghoul who had been Travis. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes, Master. All exits are locked. None may escape.”

  “Good. Join us.”

  Kel led them to the elevators and waited patiently for the doors to open. The heavy construction of the building prevented her from hearing the screams of her ghouls’ victims on the floors above, but she could sense the death spreading outwards from the elevators and stairwells and upwards through the building as her ghouls progressed.

  She reached inside a deep pocket in her long coat and drew out a metallic sphere the size of a softball. This was it, the weapon of mass destruction so many had fought and killed and died for, first on another continent, then in the prison she’d smuggled it into a few months ago, and now here. It was time to put all of its stored power to use.

  She held it in both hands, even though it wasn’t really necessary to do so in order to tap into its power. It felt right, to physically surround it with her hands, to hold it definitively and unequivocally, as she channeled the extraordinary powers stored within.

  With it, she was easily able to sense the growing number of dead above her and raise them as ghouls. Normally, there was a limit as to how many ghouls she could raise and control at a time, but with the sphere amplifying her already considerable abilities, there seemed to be no limit as to how far and wide she could exert her power.

  A smile touched her lips. The elevator chimed once and then the doors opened, allowing Kel and her four undead companions to enter. She pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. By the time the elevator doors closed, her smile had spread wide.

  Kel

  I have to admit, as I stood there in the elevator of Revival Tech, I already felt triumphant.

  It is a dangerous phenomenon. When one has poured their heart and soul and energy for years and years planning and implementing a grand and wide crusade, as all of those efforts began to pull the puzzle pieces together and the end game begins to come into sight, it is natural to begin to feel elation.

  In fact, it can start to feel like victory is a foregone conclusion. After all, after so much has been accomplished already, how could the momentum of victory be lost?

  It is an illusion, though, a dangerous illusion that can lead even the most careful strategists to let their focus slip, there, at the end of things, right when all efforts are at their most critical. I had fallen prey to it myself, not too long before.

  At the prison, where I had smuggled this powerful sphere which had been such a lynchpin in my plans, I let my guard down and reveled in what I thought was victory. There, at the end, when I finally held the sphere in my hand again and had that pest of a police officer, Cass, at my mercy, I let my guard down for a moment to revel in my defeat of all those who had opposed me.

  And I had
paid dearly for it.

  That was when that insect, that little Mentalist who shattered my mind, was able to get past my defenses and do what she did to me. Thoughts of her pulled me out of my triumphant reverie in the elevator, and I rubbed at my shoulder where the same little insect had just put a bullet into me.

  The wound was nearly healed at this point. I had Withered several people before making my move on Revival Tech. I needed my mind and body at top condition for what was to come, and Withering didn’t only revitalize my mind, it also served to heal my body. The joint still ached vaguely, but it was more with the memory of injury than real injury.

  Good. Let it hurt, and let the pain remind me that the job was not done. Complete victory was not yet mine. It was nearly time for the endgame, but now was no time to slack off and congratulate myself on how far I’d come. There was still plenty of distance left to travel.

  I realized then that I had been smiling like a fool the entire time. I let my lips come back together and centered myself.

  “Open it,” I said to one of the ghouls, nodding toward the body bag over his shoulder.

  He shifted his load slightly to free a hand enough that he could unzip the bag. The face and head of the body stored inside came into view.

  “That’s enough. Oswald?”

  The body inside the bag opened its eyes. “Yes?”

  Normally, when I want answers, I kill the subject and raise them as a ghoul to interrogate them. It makes my control over them more complete. However, in the case of Oswald, I couldn’t raise him as a ghoul… that would’ve ruined his abilities as a mage for after he’d been Revived.

  I had plans for him and his abilities, so raising him as a ghoul was out of the question. All the same, my mastery over death magic is such that I do not require the material to be raised as a ghoul to interrogate it. They may not address me as “Master” in the manner in which my ghouls do, but they still can hold no secrets from me.

  “You said the equipment for Revival is still on the sixteenth floor?”

  That was where it had been when Revival Technologies first recruited my help for their attempts to resurrect the dead, all those years ago. Much of their protocols and procedures were based off my efforts.

  “Yes. The sixteenth floor.”

  His words were a bit garbled; his jaw had been wired shut while he was still alive. Still, he had made himself understood during my interrogation of him earlier that afternoon. Everything I asked him now I had already asked him earlier; asking him again served more as a reminder to myself to focus than to actually gain new information.

  “And the personnel who perform the work are mostly on the fourteenth floor, when they are not actually Reviving anyone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who is the supervisor for the process? In the absence of Dr. Adjani?”

  “Her name is McCoy. Alice McCoy.”

  “And she and her staff are capable of performing the procedure without Dr. Adjani being present?”

  “Yes, as far as I know. Yes.”

  “Good,” I said, and then, the elevator came to a halt at the fourteenth floor.

  The tingle of imminent triumph returned, and I clenched my jaw to rid myself of it. It was time to focus.

  I held the DOOR CLOSED button on the elevator for a moment and closed my eyes, reaching out with my mind to the floors below. My ghouls were moving quickly with their work; there were so many dead that even with the aid of the sphere, it took me a moment to raise all those they had ended.

  I looked briefly though the eyes of one of them. It was standing in the midst of violent chaos; men and women were running in all directions, screaming, bleeding, some trying to flee, some trying to fight, and all of them were dying.

  I turned the head of my thrall slowly from side to side to take it the full breadth of the carnage. So much struggle. Such scattered and unfocused effort. Soon, all would be quiet, and all would move with singular purpose. My purpose.

  I wanted to explain it to them, to let them know that the brief agonies they suffered were nothing compared to the clarity of purpose they would enjoy once they let go of the bounds of this illusion they called Life and became mine. There was no point, though. There never was. Even if I tried to explain it to them, they always screamed and thrashed and flailed and struggled, and then finally, there was peace as they became mine.

  Another moment of witnessing my thralls at work, and then I focused on what needed to be done. I directed a dozen ghouls up the stairwells to the fourteenth floor; my thralls had not reached anywhere near that high in the building yet and I needed to insure that no one from the fourteenth floor could escape that way.

  Once they were in place, I opened my eyes and released the DOOR CLOSED button. A moment later, the elevator chimed and the doors opened, letting my thralls and I onto the fourteenth floor.

  It wasn’t like the lower floors. No running, no screaming, no chaos. I doubt the worker bees in their white lab coats had any idea that their colleagues were ending their lives by the dozens below their feet.

  That was useful, in that I did not need to compete with screaming and panic and chaos in order to get their attention. It was unfortunate, though, in that I still would need to bring them to heel.

  A demonstration was in order. As more and more of the employees came out of the various rooms spread throughout the hallways in curiosity, I waited until I felt I had a sufficient audience. One of them stepped forward, a woman who moved with some sense of authority, who didn’t seem to react to me with fear, but rather with indignation at my trespassing.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “There’s no access to this floor for…”

  I interrupted her by killing the man standing next to her with the Death Trick. As he crumpled to the floor, gasps and shocked faces became the standard amongst the sheep in their white lab coats.

  Violence is always shocking to those who have long insulated themselves from it.

  “The rest of you,” I said. “Will not be harmed, so long as you comply.”

  It was a lie, of course. None of them were going to survive what was coming. But for the moment, I needed compliance from the living. If I simply ended them and raised them as ghouls, yes, they could tell me what I needed to know, but they would move much more slowly, with less precision. I needed speed more than perfect compliance right now.

  “What is it that you want?” asked the woman who had originally challenged me.

  “Alice McCoy,” I said.

  “That’s me,” she replied.

  “You were in charge of the Revival process, when Dr. Adjani was not here?”

  “Yes. Please don’t hurt anyone else…”

  “I need you to Revive some material,” I said, indicating the three body bags slung over the shoulders of my thralls.

  “I…” she began to protest.

  My new thrall, the one in the lab coat that had been standing next to McCoy, grabbed another nearby colleague and put their talons to the man’s throat. He began to beg and plead as my thrall slowly gouged shallow wounds in the skin of his neck; not enough to kill, but enough to draw blood.

  “All right, all right!” Alice McCoy said. “We’ll do it. Just… just don’t hurt anyone.”

  As if she could make deals with me. As if she could dictate terms. She would soon know the meaning of obedience.

  But not yet. Right now, I needed my pieces back on the board. So I allowed her heart to continue to beat as she and her underlings scampered about to Revive first Martin, then Caleb.

  The procedure was surprisingly quick. Even though I’d been a part of creating those procedures, that had been years ago, and Adjani’s scurrying little minions had clearly made some refinements to the process. It was now so fast, in fact, that Caleb and Martin had already been returned to me when the ghouls working their way upwards floor by floor finally reached us on the sixteenth.

  “What do you want us to do?” Caleb asked.

  Gone were any traces of the old
bravado and ego that had soaked his every word while in life. Now he was completely docile, completely obedient, completely mine.

  As it should be.

  “There is much to do,” I said. “While Oswald is being Revived, you and Martin begin teleporting around the immediate area of the city. Your job, Caleb, is to destroy cell towers and power transformers. I want the city blind and deaf.”

  “And my orders?” Martin asked.

  “As you teleport Caleb from target to target, start conjuring everything you can,” I said. “Everything within your power, in as great of numbers as is in your power.”

  “My power,” he said, looking down at his hands as he clenched and unclenched them. “My power has… h-h-has…”

  His voice stuttered a bit and his face twitched in a brief tic. A common side effect of Revival.

  “Your powers have greatly increased in magnitude,” I finished for him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you for this gift.”

  “I feel like I could pull down the goddamn sky itself,” Caleb said. “This is incredible. I can’t wait to…”

  “Don’t wait. Go now. As your conjurations kill, Martin, I will raise the fallen as ghouls to join in on the killing.”

  “Using the sphere?” Martin asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And all those deaths will continue to power the sphere even more so, won’t it?”

  “That is the point. Now go. Once your targets are all destroyed, return here for your next task.”

  “Yes, Master,” they both said.

  They had never called me Master while they were still alive. I far preferred them this way.

  “Do not hold back,” I said. “Indulge your new powers to the fullest.”

  They both smiled before they left. “Thank you, Master.”

  ***