Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  By the time we reached the stairwell, I was rearing to go. Hell, I was practically impatient to get up those stairs and start handing out some violence to Kel or whoever else was causing problems up there.

  Shifty shouted and almost shot a handful of FBI agents retreating down the stairwell from the floor above. They were all torn up, and not only physically. You could tell at a glance that their will to fight had fled the scene long ago.

  Street cops, generally speaking, get somewhat used to violence directed at them, but a lot of those FBI agents weren’t street cops. They were experts in forensics or accounting or IT or something like that, and while they were armed, the vast majority had never so much as drawn their weapon before in the line of duty. Now, they had no end of doom and chaos dumped on their heads, right in the middle of where they’d felt the safest. No wonder their nerves were shot.

  “Hey. Hey!” Dread said, catching a hold of one of them. “How many are up there?”

  “What?”

  “How many? How many hostiles?”

  “I don’t… I don’t…”

  The poor guy kept stammering. Dread gave up on trying to get any information out of him and let him go to flee with the others down the stairwell… after taking his pistol away from him and checking the magazine.

  “Need a mag,” he said to me.

  I handed him one as we pushed up the stairs. Lucky for us, the FBI issued the same pistol that Shifty liked to carry as his primary sidearm, so the magazines I had would work in his gun. Dread had his weapon loaded and ready to go by the time we reached the doorway leading to the floor where the party was being held.

  We stacked up on it, Shifty first, me next, Dread bringing up the rear. We each had our pistol pointed safely away from the others, with our free hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us. Dread gave my shoulder a squeeze to let me know he was ready.

  “Magefire sounds like it’s coming from the far side of the floor,” I said. “Be sure to get a shield up between us and it.”

  “Roger that,” Shifty said.

  I squeezed his shoulder and he pushed through the doorway. Dread and I followed closely behind.

  With the door open, the sounds of the battle went from muffled, muted thumps to heart-stopping thunder. It was dark; the power was out and the floor was poorly lit by the emergency lights scattered here and there, punctuated by the strobes of gunfire and magefire being exchanged back and forth.

  Most of the floor was essentially one giant room, divided up into cubicles by those low, moveable “walls” that didn’t even reach shoulder height. It was a lousy landscape to fight in. Those little flimsy walls wouldn’t stop a bullet, much less serious magefire, but they did a great job of obscuring sight lines, which could allow the enemy… or in this case, the enemy’s conjurations… to move up on us unnoticed.

  As we came through the door, I was able to spot the enemy almost right away on the far side of the floor, mostly due to the flurry of magedarts flying out of the extended hand of one of them. Like I said, it was dark, and magedarts aren’t so bright as to light up the room, so all I saw was four dark shapes standing close together, in almost the exact opposite spot as we stood by our stairwell.

  In between us was a tangle of FBI agents and other dark forms difficult to identify in the poor lighting. The FBI agents were shooting at everything that moved; most of their fire was ineffective and desperate, because of the conjurations that leapt over the low walls of the cubicles and tore at them with fangs and claws.

  There was an emergency light set over the doorway to the far stairwell, and as the four shapes across the room moved toward it, they came more distinctly into view. That’s when I saw her.

  Kel. And next to her, I could also recognize Martin and that asshole Caleb, who was the source of all of the magedarts flying around the room like machine-gun fire.

  As I spotted her, she spotted me. Our doorway had an emergency light over it, too. Her eyes narrowed and she pointed at us.

  “Shifty!” I shouted, but he already had his shield up between us and them.

  Good thing, too, because Caleb didn’t bother with spitting out a handful of magedarts at us. Bright arcs of light jumped from one of his hands to the other, and then, a blinding arc of lightning shot across the room at us, slamming into Shifty’s shield.

  Let me tell you something. No matter how many times you get a lightning bolt shot at you, you never get used to it.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever been stuck outdoors in the midst of a serious lightning storm, but really, even that’s not a sufficient comparison. First off, in a storm, the lightning comes randomly. From a Striker mage, that lightning is directed straight at you with malice and intent.

  The light is so bright, it’s blinding… worse than a spotlight right in your eyes. The thunder that accompanies it is deafening, and shakes your spine with the concussion of the sound waves slamming into you. You flinch and duck and squeeze your eyes shut involuntarily; you can’t help it. It’s reflexive. It’s primal. Trying to not flinch when lightning is flying your way is like trying to not reflexively pull your hand back from touching a hot stove.

  It’s one of the reasons why lightning is such a popular Trick with Striker mages. It isn’t only that a good-sized lightning bolt will blast a human body into pieces. Lightning is a weapon of terror. You’d be hard-pressed to find a quicker way to scare the beJesus out of a group of enemies… even trained, hardened veterans… than tossing a lightning bolt through the middle of them.

  And it works. It worked on us. Blue energy radiated outward in a circle from where the lightning impacted on the shield, and despite how loud the accompanying thunder was, I heard Shifty actually shout out loud in the effort of keeping his shield up under the barrage. Dread and I reflexively covered our eyes with our forearms to keep from being completely blinded, and I had to shake my head a few times to clear the ringing bells out of it.

  Still, this wasn’t my first goddamn rodeo, so the instant the shock of all that light and noise and energy being directed at me fell away, I started punching back. Dread and I both broke left past the border of Shifty’s shield, firing as we went.

  “Shifty! Keep Caleb off of us!”

  “I’m trying, Cass, but he’s ten times stronger than before!”

  It was a pretty long reach across the room for pistol shots fired while on the move, but Dread and I put enough volume of fire downrange to get all four of our targets ducking and dodging. With all those bullets whizzing at him, Caleb wasn’t able to fire back, and as I took an extra instant to line up my sights properly and get a good shot off at him, a shield went up in front of him and caught the bullet that I’d aimed at his heart.

  Oswald. The fourth shape on the far side of the room moved far enough into the light for me to see him now. It was his shield that stopped my bullet.

  But unlike Shifty’s shield, which only extended partly across the room in front of him, Oswald’s shield looked like it extended all the way across the entire floor, keeping out anything and everything from getting anywhere near them. From the looks of it, that shield would be able to stop a tactical nuke.

  Sometimes, I hate it when I’m right. Kel’s little buddies were vastly more powerful than before, and it looked like whatever else getting Revived did to you, it also made Oswald decide to join up with their team.

  Still, the good news was, with that shield up, the bad guys couldn’t throw anything back at us. Unless, of course, they’d practiced the one-two punch that we did with Shifty where he put up a shield, let us get a nice solid aim on a target, and then dropped the shield long enough for us to open fire before he put it back up again.

  I doubted that, though. Oswald had been Kel’s enemy up until a few hours ago, and I doubted that he’d spent his time with his new friends by holding hands and practicing squad tactics. So, really, all we had to worry about were Kel’s ghouls and the monstrosities that Martin had conjured up that were rushing around the floor ripping everyo
ne apart.

  First things first. As dark as it was, we were going to have a hell of a time identifying friend from foe, much less actually aiming and engaging the enemy. Lysette’s magically enhanced vision let her see pretty well in low light conditions, but I hadn’t progressed very much in that aspect of my Adept training, and besides, I needed Dread in the game, too.

  “Shifty, we need some light!”

  He nodded and snapped his fingers with both hands, holding them upwards. Five small balls of bright light appeared above his palms, which he then pushed outwards like he was flinging open a set of double doors. The lights spread out across the room up near the ceiling, chasing away the darkness as they spread.

  That helped. Now, I could pick out what was what. I saw a Hell Hound dash across one of the aisles made by the cubicle walls, and a few of those hyena-men that Keaney called bouda tearing up friendlies around the room.

  I’d just dropped a ghoul that rushed us from behind a nearby cubicle wall when someone shouted to my left to get my attention. It was almost impossible to hear them over the gunfire, but with Shifty’s magical lights floating around the ceiling, I could see Michael hunkered down behind a cubicle wall waving at me.

  He went to move towards us, but a heavy shape vaulted over the cubicle wall next to him and knocked him flat on his back. Michael barely had time to get his free arm up in time to protect his neck before the bouda that jumped him grabbed a hold of him with its jaws.

  He screamed at the top of his lungs. I moved to help, but Dread was closer. He closed the distance with a short run and a leap and tackled that big ugly thing, knocking it off Michael.

  They both rolled end over end in a tangle, but Dread managed to keep the bouda’s back like a wrestler. He had Shifty’s baton in his left hand, and now, he wrapped it around the front of the bouda’s neck. Catching the free end of the baton in the crook of his right elbow, he was able to pull back with his entire body weight and use the baton like a bar to choke the bouda.

  The hyena-man thrashed around like the wild animal it was, trying desperately to reach back and rend Dread with its claws, but Dread hung on grimly, using the leverage of the baton to drag the bouda down and pin it to the ground.

  “Michael!” he shouted. “Shoot it!”

  Michael dragged himself to his feet, his left arm dangling, bloody and useless. He stumbled the few steps over to Dread and jammed his service pistol into the bouda’s temple, blasting two rounds through the creature’s head and into the floor below.

  I watched long enough to see Dread helping him reload his pistol before something moved out of the corner of my eye and I spun to face it. It was a hell hound, coming in low and fast.

  It was close, but unlike the bridge, this time I wasn’t panicked and rushed, and I was able to take out both heads before it could close the distance. Shifty knocked a nearby bouda off its feet with a pressor wave and I lined up my sights on its head.

  Click.

  Shit. Never a bullet when you need one. I let my hands go quickly through a speed reload… I’d done it so many times, that I didn’t even need to think about it, and I was able to yell to Shifty about keeping his shield up so that Caleb couldn’t fry us to cinders with his lightning.

  “They’re gone!” he said.

  I completed my reload and gave the bouda a little love-tap to the head before glancing up to see what he meant. Sure enough, Kel and company were nowhere to be seen.

  Damn. She’d made her move on Adjani while we were stuck playing catch-up with Martin’s playthings.

  I had a little internal wrestling match. Chase after Kel right away? She was the head of the snake, after all. If I could put her down, I could put a stop to all of this, not to mention whatever else she had planned once she got Adjani out of here.

  But that would mean abandoning any of the FBI agents who were still alive to whatever ghouls and conjurations that were left roaming around the office. Kel wasn’t stupid. She’d left me with two lousy situations to choose from. In chess they call it a “fork”; to threaten two pieces at once. Dread called it a shit sandwich. Both terms felt appropriate.

  “Did they teleport out?” I asked Shifty.

  He shook his head. “She can’t, boss. Floors and walls are all warded against teleport. Only place to teleport is the roof.”

  The roof. All right, then.

  “Dread, you and Shifty help Michael rally the survivors and clean up the stragglers,” I said.

  “Where are you going?” Dread asked.

  “After Kel,” I said.

  “You can’t go alone!” he shouted after me, but I was already through the stairwell door and rushing to the roof.

  ***

  It was only a short run up the stairs to the roof, but the recent fighting and adrenaline had Cass’s heart thumping and her breath heaving by the time she reached the doorway leading to the roof. She took a half second to collect herself before kicking open the door and taking a quick look onto the roof.

  A bright light blinded her, and she ducked back into the stairwell reflexively as a lightning bolt slammed into the open door, tearing it off its hinges. Purple spots temporarily clouded the center of her vision from the intense light, but around them, she could make out some low structures jutting out of the roof near the stairwell… air conditioning units, or something similar, she guessed.

  They would have to do. There was still the matter of crossing the space from here to there without getting blasted apart by lightning, but Cass hoped that her new Physical Magic skills, as poorly developed as they were, would give her the edge she needed.

  Memories of training with Lysette came back to her. If you want to move faster than is possible, you can’t think about it, Lysette had said. You can’t focus on it. You have to know it’s going to happen, without giving it a thought. You can’t do that if you’re preoccupied, or nervous, or anything but absolutely confident.

  “Focus but don’t focus,” Cass said. “Sure. Nothing to it.”

  Don’t think you can. Know you can.

  She pushed through the cool night air in a running leap that turned into a roll. The lightning bolt came right on schedule, seeming to split the air into shards above her. Cass swore she could feel its energy caress her skin as she moved, but she came out of her roll behind the air conditioning unit intact and unscathed.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said to herself. “I think it worked.”

  She risked a quick glance around the unit. There, on a helipad that doubled as a teleport site, Kel stood with Adjani and her henchman. Caleb was already prepping another lightning blast, and Martin stepped forward with a raised hand as well, ready to conjure up some nightmare to send after her.

  “Don’t bother,” Kel said. Her face held the same confident sneer it always seemed to. “She’s alone, and no threat. Go.”

  Caleb and Martin looked at each other, as if disappointed, and then stepped back to the center of the helipad with the others. Cass risked breaking cover to snap off a few shots from her pistol at them, but Oswald caught the bullets easily on a shield, and an instant later, the three Revived mages and Dr. Adjani disappeared with the popping sound of air displacing that always accompanied teleportation.

  Kel lingered on the helipad, shaking her head at Cass. “The dog. First the prison, then the mall, now here. You keep trying to bite me, and you keep snapping at nothing but air.”

  Cass came out from behind her cover, holding her pistol steadily at Kel. She knew from experience that the death mage would have a shield of her own surrounding her, but the pistol created a stalemate between the two of them.

  “Why don’t you try your little Death Trick on me?” Cass said as she closed the distance. “See who’s faster on the draw? Come on. It’ll be fun.”

  Kel’s sneering smile seemed to fade. “You are such an irritating insect. I look forward to when I have a spare moment to finally swat you.”

  “Why wait? Go for it. I’m game.”

  “And drop my defe
nses so you can fire on me? No. No, your time will come soon enough, once my plans are complete.”

  “The Intron Code?” Cass said, felling a little sense of satisfaction when she saw Kel’s eyes narrow. “That’s right, Kel. I know all about your plans. You self-absorbed cunts never cease to amaze me with your egos. All this insanity, just to boost yourself up a few notches.”

  “A few notches?” Kel said. “You know nothing. When I am done, the Intron Code will make me into something more powerful than this world has ever seen.”

  “What? A god?”

  “A goddess, yes. A goddess of death magic. A goddess of supreme power.”

  “A goddess of supreme lunacy. For all your pretense, for all your posturing, you’re just another street mage scrambling for power.”

  Kel straightened up. “This bores me. You bore me. Goodbye, dog.”

  “I’ll be seeing you soon,” Cass said, lowering her pistol to stare into Kel’s eyes before the death mage disappeared with the popping sound of rushing air.

  She gave herself a second before running down the stairs, back to where Dread and the others would be cleaning up whatever forces Kel and company had left behind. She didn’t hear any more gunfire, but still, she couldn’t be sure that it all was over, so she didn’t slow down until she came back out on the floor where all the madness had occurred.

  The lights came back on as she exited the stairwell. Dread and Shifty were helping move the survivors of the attack to a relatively open area of the floor that they could use as a casualty collection center. Michael stood nearby, cradling his bloody arm in such a way that Cass suspected it was broken.

  “You okay?” she asked Dread.

  “Yeah. Without those four psychos throwing heavy firepower around the place, we were able to rally everyone on this side of the office,” Dread said. “Bouda and ghouls are nasty, but without direction, they aren’t exactly geniuses. Once we were all together with Shifty holding down the flank, we basically turned into a firing squad.”