Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  “Get it off! Get it off!” she said.

  “I can’t,” Jolly said. “It’s stuck in your hair. Hold still.”

  “I can’t hold still, it’s going to sting me!”

  “No, no, I got it, I got it. I got the stinger thing.”

  “Kill it! Kill it!”

  “How?” Jolly said.

  “Anything! Squish it!”

  Jolly grimaced as he fought to control the giant bug flapping around in his hands. The long stinger tail whipped around like an unattended water hose set on blast; he could feel his grip slipping on it already. The rest of the creature twisted and flapped in his other hand; he was caught in a strange duality of trying to hang on to the thing for dear life while simultaneously recoiling away from it in disgust. Its body was soft and mushy and pulsed vaguely as it filled his hand.

  “Jolly!” Mickey said.

  Jolly closed his eyes, screwed up his face tightly in anticipation of being completely revolted, and crushed his hands together as hard as he could. There was a sense of the bug stretching to its limits, like a water balloon, and then like a water balloon, it finally burst. Thick fluid and runny solids that had to be blood and guts ran through his fingers in a massive flood, raining down on top of Mickey’s head.

  “Oh, God,” Mickey said, green slime dripping off her face and hair. “It’s in my mouth. It’s in my mouth, Jolly!”

  “Gross,” Jolly said, trying to fling the muck off of his hands. “So, so gross.”

  “Where’s the sink?” Mickey said, looking like she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. “I’m gonna puke. I’m gonna puke everything.”

  “Hang on, let me make sure we’re okay. I think that was the last one. Lys?”

  “We’re good,” Lysette said from the living room. “We’ve got the table over the window. Nothing else is moving around out there.”

  “Okay,” Jolly said. “Okay. We’re okay.”

  “Jolly, look at me,” Mickey said. Her hair was a matted swamp of green goo and bug guts, stuck to the sides of her head, dripping down her face and onto her shoulders. “I am anything but okay!”

  Cass

  Another day, another prison.

  I swear to God, there was a time when I didn’t get myself into so much damn trouble. Okay. Maybe that’s not true. I always got myself into trouble with my attitude, if I’m being honest. But lately, it seemed like I was finding new and interesting frontiers of shit to wade into waist-deep.

  “At least they left us our phones,” I said to break the silence.

  Dread grunted. “Are you going to get into a Candy Crush competition with Mickey?”

  This was better. I’ll take trading quips with Dread over standing in guilty silence any day of the week.

  “I’m just shocked that you weren’t able to talk our way out of this with your little grab-ass buddy from the Corps.”

  “Hey. Lay off the Corps, Cass.”

  “I wasn’t,” I said with a sigh. “I wasn’t making fun of your beloved Corps, Dread. I know better than that.”

  Rule Number One on dating a Marine… or even talking to one, for that matter: never, ever say anything bad about the Marine Corps. They might talk never ending reams of shit about the Corps… my CO was a moron, nobody had no idea what they were doing, and so on and so forth.

  They may. You may not.

  “I wasn’t making fun of the Corps,” I repeated. “I was making fun of you and how you’re the Boss Whisperer.”

  “The what?”

  “The Boss Whisperer. That’s what I call your super power. I say something to the boss, they never listen. Then you say the exact same damn thing, and…”

  “I don’t say the exact same thing.”

  “…the exact same damn thing,” I said, “and all of a sudden, it’s a great idea and they’re on board.”

  “Makes you a little nuts, doesn’t it?”

  He had a hint of that particular grin on his face that makes me want to punch him. “You know it does. And I know that you love how much it makes me nuts.”

  “Little bit.”

  I was quiet for a while, lost to my thoughts. Finally, I said, “Damn, I really got us into it again, didn’t I?”

  “I was right there with you,” Dread said. “Had to be done. Adjani needed to break. Now we know what Kel is up to. Her endgame.”

  “Yeah, well, fat lot of good it’s going to do us now,” I said, gesturing around the room. “I got us right back into prison.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to come to that. Dennett just needs to cool down. We’ve still accomplished more than this whole FBI task force put together. They won’t have squat if it weren’t for us. He’ll see that.” Dread gave me a little grin. “Even if the Boss Whisperer needs to work his magic.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my hands up and down my arms, mostly to give them something to do. “I worry about the others if this breaks up. Shifty and Mickey will be okay… no criminal record. Jolly should be, too. They ended his sentence early, and he’s registered now. But Lys…”

  Dread gave a little grunt.

  “What?” I said.

  He shook his head.

  “Oh, come on, Dread, still? Still, you’ve got some sort of thing going on with her?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Your little grunt said that. What is it with you and her? What, you feel threatened now that someone can bench press more than you?”

  He fixed me with a stare. “You know that’s not what’s going on.”

  “Then what is it?”

  It took him a second before he spoke. “You give her too much slack. I don’t know if it’s because of the time you spent together in prison, or…”

  “She kept me alive, Dread. She’s a good person.”

  “No, Cass. She isn’t. That’s my problem. That’s my thing with her. You don’t see it, because you’re too close to her. The truth is, she’s damaged goods.”

  I rolled my eyes. “This again.”

  “Yeah, this again. I saw guys like her back in the Corps. Most of us were there for all the right reasons. But some guys… they paid lip service to ideals like duty and country, when all they really wanted was an excuse.”

  “An excuse?”

  “To kill shit.”

  “Hang on,” I said. “Aren’t you the one who told me how worried you are about your temper? You know, how you secretly love it when you can finally cut loose?”

  It was a cheap shot, and we both knew it. That was a secret Dread had trusted me with; his smoldering temper that he always kept buried deep, hidden, because as big as he is, if he let his temper go, he might kill someone before he’d even known he’d done it. It was something he tried to hide from the world, something he tried to hide from me for the longest time, and I went and dragged it out into the open just because we were arguing and I wanted to win.

  Sometimes when I argue, I don’t play fair. I’m not proud of it. But Dread knew how I played my game, took it in stride, and didn’t let it rattle him. One of the many reasons why I loved him so damn much.

  “Yeah, I did tell you about that, and I also told you that I hate that about myself. I’m ashamed by it. That’s the difference. Lysette is a stone killer. Unapologetic. Drop the bodies and walk away like it never happened.”

  “She’s not like that anymore.”

  “She doesn’t look at people the same way you do, Cass. She doesn’t empathize. You don’t see it because you’re too caught up in trying to be like her.”

  Oh, great. This again. Ever since Dread found out that I was training off the books in Physical Magic, he never let me hear the end of it.

  Okay, it was technically illegal. But we started doing it as a way to keep the quiet at bay in prison, not with any nefarious intentions in mind. And once we got out of prison, we continued because… well… I liked it.

  Tell me you wouldn’t. Let’s say you’ve been training your whole life to get faster at the hundred yard das
h. You max out at, I don’t know, ten seconds flat. No matter how hard you train, you can’t break through that plateau. Or maybe you love to lift weights, and you can’t get past a three hundred pound bench press.

  Then, you find a new training technique, and now your hundred yard dash is dropping down to nine seconds. Your bench press is going up from three hundred, to three fifty, to three seventy-five. Of course you’re going to be excited about taking it as far as you can.

  And, if you’re training with someone who truly is a master… watching that master do what they can do inspires you to want more out of yourself. Everyone was awed by Lysette’s physical feats, but trust me, once you start to train in Physical Magic, and you can see how hard it is to actually perform those feats, it gives you a whole new appreciation for that kind of talent.

  So yeah, I guess I could see why Adjani was so obsessed with finding a way into the mage club. All those years working day in, day out, with people who could perform the extraordinary, and you’re stuck on the outside looking in… I could see how that could get under your skin after a while. It didn’t excuse tormenting and killing untold numbers of people in order to achieve it, but I understood it.

  “Dread, let’s not drag up this old argument again.”

  “No, no, I’m not talking about the whole illegal street mage training bit. I’ve said my piece about that. You know how stupid I think it is for you to be playing with that kind of fire.”

  “So, what are you talking about, then? The fact that she inspires me to be better than I am?”

  “You are better. That’s the point.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Lysette isn’t part of the team because she wants to protect and serve. She’s a sociopath who is obsessed with the idea of becoming more and more perfect. She thinks she’s superior to everyone else.”

  “She is.”

  “No. She’s faster. Stronger. That doesn’t make her superior. Just more dangerous. A superior person doesn’t need to flaunt their power over others. That’s nothing but a bully.”

  I bit my lip. I wanted to argue with him, but the truth of the matter was, Dread’s words were echoing the concerns about Lysette that I harbored deep down myself.

  “Maybe once she was like that. She’s come a long way since she’s been with us,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe it’s all a show. Sociopaths are good at pretending to have feelings in order to fit in.”

  “She isn’t a sociopath. She didn’t have what we had, Dread.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, a stable family life growing up. Guidance. Something to provide her with a moral center. Ever since she was a child, she was more powerful than anyone around her. And her family didn’t know how to handle it. So they kept her at a distance. Let her run wild. And everyone else in her life all exploited her talents to their advantage with no thought as to what that was doing to her.”

  “Every asshole has an excuse as to why they’re an asshole.”

  “I’m not saying it’s an excuse. It’s cause and effect.”

  “Okay, so what about Kel? Something made her into what she is, the same as Lysette. Does Kel get a pass if she had an unhappy childhood?”

  “Lys is not Kel,” I said.

  “If you say so.”

  “Kel is too far gone. Some people are too far gone. Kel. Fly. These are people who will never come around, because they’ll never want to come around. But Lys is not a lost cause. I’m not giving up on her. People do change, Dread.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “I really do. I just don’t want you to be disappointed if she goes back to old habits.”

  I wanted to keep arguing the point, but the lights went out, leaving us in total darkness for a second or two before the emergency lights over the door clicked on. Instantly, our discussion was forgotten, replaced by a knowing look we shot at each other.

  “Check your phone,” I said, digging my own phone out of my pocket as I spoke.

  “No service.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “Cass,” he said, speaking volumes with his tone.

  “I know.”

  We heard it through the doorway, then, muffled shouts of alarm and fear, followed quickly by the muted thumps of gunfire that we seemed to feel vibrating the walls and floors as much as we heard them. There was the sound of close thunder, not gunfire this time but actual thunder, and the shouts of alarm began to shift over to screams of pain.

  My hand shifted reflexively to the spot on my hip where I normally wore my holster. Of course there was nothing there, hadn’t been for months, but old habits die hard.

  “The Cabal?” Dread said. “Here to break out Adjani?”

  “Maybe. Or Kel managed to Revive her troops faster than we expected.”

  “And we’re stuck in here like rats in a cage.”

  Someone started hammering on the far side of the door, and we heard a muffled voice shout, “Cass? Dread?”

  Shifty. Thank God.

  “Yeah, it’s us!” I shouted through the door.

  “It’s locked. Stand back,” he said.

  Dread yanked me out of the way as a heavy pressor wave knocked the entire door right off its goddamn hinges. It spun through the air like a playing card flicked out of a poker player’s hand, crashing into the wall on the far side of the room. Shifty followed it into the room almost instantly.

  “Nice entrance,” Dread said.

  “You like that one, hunh?” Shifty said with a grin. “Been practicing it.”

  “What’s going on out there?” I asked.

  “Chaos,” he said. “The whole damn office is under assault. Magefire and conjurations. Not sure how many or who. I heard everything go to hell and came straight here.”

  “What kind of conjurations?”

  “I saw hell hounds and bouda.”

  “What-a?”

  “Bouda… the were-hyenas. Damn, Cass, didn’t you pay attention to the lecture at all?”

  “Whatever, nerd. You have your backup gun?”

  “Right, right,” he said, pulling up his pants leg to draw the cut-down pistol he kept there as a back-up. He handed it towards me butt-first. “Here you go.”

  I gave him a look. More specifically, I looked at his primary weapon, the larger pistol in his right hand, and then back at him.

  He caught my look and rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on! You, too? Why does everybody…”

  I kept up my stare. Shifty was a solid operator, no doubt; a seriously talented Defense mage and a good shooter on top of that, but… well. The simple truth was, I could run circles around him with a gun. He knew it, too.

  “Fine, fine, take the big one, whatever,” he finally said, handing over his larger pistol. “It’s not like it’s emasculating or anything.”

  “Mags?” I said, checking the chamber on his pistol to make sure there was a round loaded.

  “Sure, great, maybe you want my wallet, too,” he said, but handed over a pair of spare magazines from pouches on his belt. “Sorry, Dread. All I’ve got for you is my baton.”

  “From the sounds of it,” Dread said, “there’s going to be plenty of weapons lying around for me to pick up.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Shifty and I up front. One-two punches with your shields and my gun until we get Dread some firepower. Watch the background on your shots… it’s likely that friendlies and the bad guys are going to be piled up on top of each other.”

  “Push through whatever conjurations are out there and hunt down the mages?” Dread said.

  I shook my head. “They’re here for Adjani. It’s the only motive that makes sense. We push to him. That’s where our targets will be.”

  “They don’t know where he’s being held. Which room, I mean,” Dread said.

  “They will if Kel is with them,” I said. “She kills an agent, she can ask them anything she wants and they’ll tell her.”

  Dread shook his head as he extended S
hifty’s telescoping baton with a flick of his wrist. “Getting real sick of death magic.”

  “Tell me about it. All right. Adjani’s holding cell is upstairs. We push to the close stairwell to our left, ascend, and then see what’s what upstairs.”

  “Not the elevator?” Shifty asked.

  “No,” I said. “Elevators are in the center of the floor. We exit the elevator, and we could have threats to our front, left, or right. We stick to the staircase on the end of the building and all of our threats are essentially in front of us as we come out.”

  “Not to mention you can plug up the doorway with a shield to cover our retreat down the stairs if we get overwhelmed,” Dread added.

  “You guys are so smart,” Shifty said with a big grin, batting his eyelashes at Dread. “Can I be your best friend?”

  “Get your game face on, Funny Man,” Dread said.

  “It never comes off, Big Dog.”

  I found myself smiling a little bit despite the situation. This was more like it. This was a lot more like it. The three of us back together, just like the old days on Wreck Squad Four, before the nightmare with Polonius, before the prison, before Revival Tech. Back when we were all closer than family and nothing could stop us.

  “Can we go now?” I said. “Or are you two not quite done flirting with each other just yet?”

  “After you, boss,” Shifty said, gesturing toward the hole where the door used to be.

  “You first, guy with the magical shields,” I said.

  “Right, right,” he nodded. “I keep forgetting about that.”

  A casual observer might have interpreted Shifty’s words as his being careless, but I knew better. He was dialed in, like always. The more he joked around and looked like he was goofing off, the more focused he actually was.

  Good. If I was right, and Kel had Revived her troops in order to upgrade their abilities, we were in for a hell of a scrap.

  “Move,” I said.

  We moved out of the doorway and to our left, with Shifty in the lead. We could still hear the muted thumps of gunfire and magefire on the floor above us, and the sound started to stir up the blood in my veins as I psyched myself up for the fight.

  Wandering into a fight cold is jarring; it’s like trying to compete in a high-end athletic competition without warming up. It’s far better to let your mind get into combat mode, get your adrenaline working, your heart pumping, and that way, you head into the fight in top form.