All this teleportation should be exhausting her, Cass thought. She isn’t only healing herself with the sphere; she’s re-charging herself.
Kel reappeared, this time near Lysette. Her taloned hands grabbed on to Lysette’s gun before the Adept could bring it to bear, and they struggled over the weapon, bullets spraying around the room randomly as they fought each other for control.
Finally, Kel tore the P90 out of Lysette’s hands at the same time as the Adept knocked her backwards with a head butt. The death mage shook her head to clear it, staggering a few steps back as Lysette drew the sword off her back.
Lysette was fast, but Cass could tell that she was going to lose this race. Kel recovered almost immediately from the head butt that had momentarily dazed her, and there was no way Lysette would be able to close the distance before Kel shot her to pieces with the P90.
Then, as Kel made her move, Cass’s eyes squinted uncomfortably, exactly as they had earlier, and ten Lysettes appeared, all identical, all holding swords in the exact same manner, spread out around Kel. The death mage stumbled backwards in confusion, firing desperately at the images around her until the submachinegun clicked on empty and the multiple Lysettes were nearly on top of her.
Illusions, Cass realized, as Lysette leapt forward and struck. Nice one, Mickey.
Lysette’s sword point rebounded off the air in front of Kel, sending a shock wave of blue energy spreading out along the shield the death mage had put up at the last second. As the shield went up, the illusory copies of Lysette disappeared, leaving only the real one striking uselessly at Kel’s shield.
Cass saw that Mickey was scrambling around on the floor where she’d fallen earlier, looking for her lost weapon. Now that Kel was behind her shield, making further attacks pointless, Lysette moved to Mickey’s side to keep Kel from ambushing her while she was unarmed.
“Mickey,” Cass said. “Stick to your magic!”
Her words seemed to draw Kel’s attention, because this time, when the death mage disappeared, she re-appeared next to Cass. Just like with Lysette, she grabbed Cass’s weapon with both hands, trying to pry it out of her grip.
She was strong, terribly strong; Cass felt like she was struggling against Dread when he wasn’t holding anything back in the training room. There was no way for her to win this fight, she knew that, even as she felt her grip slipping off her weapon.
Kel looked up at her, smiling as the weapon started to come free from Cass’s grasp, and then the smile faded and Kel’s face fell as she looked as if she might suddenly pass out. She swayed on her feet and Cass could feel the strength come out of Kel’s arms as she wrested the weapon away from the death mage.
Mickey, she realized. Tried to knock her out like she did to Dread a few days ago, but it didn’t work all the way, and this was as much as she could affect Kel.
She didn’t question it further; she seized the momentary advantage to snatch her weapon completely out of Kel’s grasp and then knocked the death mage back with a stomp kick to the stomach. There wasn’t any time to aim her P90; Kel had already shown that she could get her shield up in the split second that she recovered, so Cass fired a long burst from the hip, punching bullets into Kel’s pelvis.
The death mage hunched over from the impact, and now Cass had the moment she needed to line up her sights on Kel’s head to end it all.
Pain. Sudden, terrible, blinding, unrelenting pain filled every part of Cass’s body, dropping her to her knees and pulling a short scream out of her mouth that turned into a dry rattle as the agony became too intense to bear.
Her weapon fell out of her hands, but she wasn’t aware of doing it, wasn’t aware of anything other than the pain. She couldn’t see anything, couldn’t hear anything, nothing existed but the agony exploding outwards from the center of her spine.
Something about it was familiar. A distant part of Cass’s mind still able to function in the midst of all that torture recognized the sensation from the beginning of the fight at the mall, before everything kicked off.
The Agony Trick, Keaney had called it. Kel had stunned them all with her Agony Trick to buy herself time to recover from being shot.
Cass pieced that together as the pain subsided and she began to come back into herself; first she was aware of sensation on her skin, then her hearing came back, then the world popped back into place as her vision returned. She was on her hands and knees, gasping for breath, still reeling from the aftereffects of so much pain shorting out her nervous system all at once.
She looked up in time to see Kel closing in on her. The death mage was still hurt, that much was clear; her stride was pained and slow and clumsy, with bullet holes still evident in her torso and pelvis where Cass had shot her.
Her talons were raised and ready, though, and Cass fought through the lingering agony still making her muscles shake to drag herself up to her knees as Kel fell on her. She grabbed Kel’s wrists, stopping those black talons inches from her throat.
Kel was still terribly strong, although her wounds had taken their toll on the death mage’s strength. Cass struggled and strained and fought like a drowning victim to keep Kel’s talons at bay; everything hurt inside of her, everything screamed at her to give up, give in, it was all too much, she was allowed to quit now.
Cass stared up into Kel’s all-black eyes. There was no humanity in them. No soul. No compassion. Nothing but hunger and hate. Cass couldn’t give up now. Not to her. Not to this.
“Fuck you,” she said into Kel’s face, the words coming out as little more than a hoarse rattle. “Fuck. You.”
Hate made her hands move. Rage made the muscles work. Sheer, stubborn defiance twisted Kel’s claws away from her throat.
For all that, Cass knew she was fighting a losing battle. Blue energy floated out of the sphere and across the room into Kel, sealing up the bullet holes, and with every second, the death mage’s inhuman strength returned in greater and greater amounts.
Cass’s arms began to fold backward. She felt like she’d been hanging from a pull-up bar for ages and now, her burning forearms had reached their limit and were failing under the strain.
Kel’s claws came closer and closer to her neck. Panic began to rise up in her; frantic thoughts about which way could she twist, what trick could she pull, what rabbit could she pull out of her hat to keep those talons from tearing out the soft flesh of her throat, knowing there wasn’t any answer. Kel was simply too strong and getting stronger by the second.
A loud, neutral tone began to sound across the room. Cass looked toward the sound and saw that the light over the booth had switched from red to green.
Kel’s eyes followed hers. Her mouth twisted into a tangle of sharp fangs.
“Time’s up,” she said. “Goodbye, dog. This really is checkmate.”
Kel’s hands now began to pull away, and against every instinct, Cass grabbed and hung on for dear life, begging her muscles to not fail her now, to give her another second or two of effort to keep the death mage from escaping. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lysette struggling up to one knee, using her sword as a crutch to help her up.
“Lys!” Cass said, as her hands gave way and Kel’s arms came free. “She’s going to teleport into the booth!”
There was the popping sound of air displacing as Kel vanished yet again. Across the room, light flashed and glinted as Lysette threw her sword, not at where Kel had been standing as she struggled with Cass, but instead at the open Intron Code booth.
Another pop, as Kel appeared in the booth, just in time for the sword to drive home into her chest. The blade impaled her down to the hilt, and the impact of the weapon sent Kel rebounding off the back of the booth and then down to her knees.
“You,” she said, first towards the floor, then she raised her head to stare at Cass with her black eyes. “You… can’t.”
Cass’s body still wasn’t completely under her control. Pain from the Agony Trick still lanced along every nerve, feeling like electric shocks
, and her forearms burned and her hands trembled into useless claws from the struggle with Kel.
“You can’t have it!” Kel shrieked at her. Her hands reached around the hilt of the sword to try to draw it out of her chest, but it wouldn’t move. Kel let her hands fall away to her sides.
Cass saw that Lysette was still not completely recovered from the Agony Trick, either, stumbling slowly and clumsily toward Kel as wispy blue light floated out of the sphere and into the death mage.
“You can’t have it!” Kel shouted again, her voice stronger now, staggering to her feet and towards the sphere, the sword still jutting out of her chest. “You can’t take it from me! You’ve always taken it from me!”
Kel wasn’t talking to her, some part of Cass realized. Searching the room, her eyes squinted painfully and she saw someone else appear, then, someone she’d never seen before. It was a young man, wearing worn, dirty clothes, with features vaguely similar to Kel and who leered at her with lecherous eyes and dirty teeth.
Kel screamed at the illusion of the young man, her voice completely unhinged now. “Not this time! Never again! Never! I’ll kill us both first!”
She was lost to the hallucination, distracted, and Cass seized the opportunity. A P90 lay within reach, and Cass forced her cramping, burning muscles to obey her, forced them to ignore the lingering pain still lancing through every part of her, and she finally got the weapon into her hands and fired the last dozen rounds left in the weapon.
Her hands and arms were so cramped, she couldn’t even aim; she had to use the laser sight to guide her fire, and even with that, she had trouble controlling the weapon enough to land her shots on the death mage’s body.
The bullets tore into Kel, sending her to her knees again in front of the sphere. Cass pulled the trigger again and again, even though she knew there was nothing left in the magazine, as if she could somehow finish Kel off with nothing but rage and hate and murderous intent.
She still wasn’t dead. The energy coming out of the sphere kept the death mage alive, somehow, propping her up with death magic, and even as Cass pulled her trigger uselessly, Kel began rising to her feet once again.
“Lys!” Cass said. “Lys, you have to stop her!”
Lysette was moving faster now, gaining speed, running across the room toward Kel. She was almost there when Kel got to her feet again, turning towards Cass one last time to glare with her black eyes.
“You… can’t… have it!” Kel cried, and then turned to slam her fist down on the sphere’s housing.
Something broke on the side of the machine. A whitish gas began to spray out of the side of the sphere’s housing like steam, gutting outwards and upwards towards the ceiling.
Lysette finally reached Kel, moving at full speed now, pulling the death mage away from the machine and spinning her around so that they were face to face. Kel tried to swipe at her with one of her clawed hands, but Lysette hit her in the face with a quick fist to stun her and then grabbed the hilt of the sword, tearing it downwards and outwards, the blade eviscerating Kel as it carved its way out of her body.
Now, it was Kel’s turn to scream in agony. She grabbed at her intestines, trying to hold them in from where they bulged out of the gaping wound in a bloody, loopy mess, as Lysette spun in a tight circle and cut Kel’s head off her shoulders with a two-handed swipe from her sword.
Kel’s body fell to the floor. Her head landed a few feet away, her eyes open and staring and still black as night.
The strange young man disappeared. No more blue wisps of energy came out of the sphere to enter into Kel.
Lysette fell against the wall in exhaustion. “Regenerate that.”
Cass felt enough life come back into her limbs to crawl over to where Mickey lay. The little Mentalist was twitching, trembling, eyes closed and mouth gasping for air.
“Mickey? Mickey, are you okay?”
Mickey’s eyes stayed pinched shut, but she said, “Please, God, tell me she’s dead.”
“You’re okay,” Cass said, patting her on the shoulder. “Who was that guy? That last illusion?”
“Not sure,” Mickey said. “I looked in her head and put up an image of the thing she was scared of most as a kid.”
“Good job, Mickey. Good job. Lys? You okay?”
Over by the Intron Code device, Lysette gave her a silent thumbs up.
Cass pulled herself to a seat. The last remnants of the Agony Trick were dissipating now, and she found herself staring blankly at Kel’s remains, as if unsure that she could believe her own eyes, as if some part of her was certain it was all some clever trick and the death mage would rise again to kill them all.
It was the noise that pulled her out of it; a soft, high-pitched whine, slowly increasing in intensity. It took Cass a minute to realize that the sound was coming from the sphere.
She’d seen the sphere in use before, at the prison. It had never made a sound then, but had always spun silently in its housing.
Something was wrong. She wasn’t sure what, yet, but something was scratching at the back of her mind.
“Cass,” Lysette said, gesturing toward the gas venting out of the side of the Intron Code machine, “this doesn’t look good.”
As if on cue, the intercom crackled with Adjani’s voice. “What’s happened up there? Can you hear me?”
Cold water began to pour over Cass’s nervous system. Kel hadn’t tried to keep fighting them at the end, when she realized she’d lost. She’d attacked the machine.
Her mind started to whirl. Of course it couldn’t be over. Not this easily. Of course Kel had to inflict some parting shot on them.
You can’t have it. I’ll kill us both.
Kel had known everything about the machine. It was the focal point of her entire existence. And now that her endgame was denied to her, she knew exactly how to damage it to send it into overload.
Cass forced her way to her feet, stumbling over to the intercom and pressing the button. “Adjani. Adjani, something’s happened. Kel’s damaged the machine.”
“That explains the readings I’m seeing down here.”
“She said something about… something about it going critical. A critical overload. What happens if it goes critical? Kel said it could destroy the whole building.”
“More than the building,” Adjani said. “If it overloads with no focal point, the energy within the sphere will go kinetic and explode outwards with the force of a three megaton nuclear warhead.”
“Oh, my God,” Mickey said.
“You said with no focal point,” Cass said. “Does that mean there’s a way to bleed the energy off of the sphere without it going critical?”
“Yes. By running the Intron Code.”
“What do you mean?” Cass asked. “Get into the booth? That’s it?”
“You don’t understand,” Adjani said. “Whoever gets into the booth becomes the focal point for all of the energy contained in the sphere. But with the machine imbalanced and the sphere out of alignment…”
He didn’t finish.
“What?” Cass said. “What, Adjani?”
“It will be lethal.”
Cass closed her eyes. Damn you, Kel. You had to take someone with you. Damn you, wherever you are.
“How long until it goes critical?”
“Minutes, at most.”
“Cass?” Mickey asked. “What is he saying?”
“He’s saying that one of us has to get into the booth and hit the button,” Cass said. “And they aren’t coming back out.”
She looked down at the ground, blew out a tired breath. “All right. All right. Tell Dread…”
Her words were interrupted by Lysette catching her from behind in a chokehold, Cass’s eyes going wide with surprise for no more than a few seconds before closing. Her body relaxed completely as Lysette lowered her carefully to the floor.
“Lys!” Mickey said. “What are you doing? What are you doing?”
“Relax, Mickey,” Lysette said. “She’s fi
ne. Just unconscious. She’ll be fine.”
“Why? What?”
“She was going to get into the booth,” Lysette said. “And it has to be me.”
Mickey looked down at Cass’s unconscious form, then at the booth, then at Lysette. “No, no. No, Lys, you can’t, Adjani said it would be lethal. There’s got to be another way.”
“There isn’t.”
“No, come on, we can think of something, we can get the others up here and figure out…”
“No time.”
“Please, Lys, please,” Mickey said, pulling on Lysette’s arm to keep her from walking toward the booth. “Please don’t do this. Please don’t make me watch you die. I can’t, I can’t…”
“It has to be me, Mickey,” Lysette said, taking Mickey’s hands in hers. “Look inside, and see.”
“What are you talking about? Look inside where?”
Now Lysette put Mickey’s hands to the sides of her head. “Look inside, and see.”
Mickey pressed her fingers to the sides of Lysette’s head, looked inside, and saw what she had to show her.
Lysette
It has to be me.
I’ve got it coming. It’s just that simple.
Ever since I was eleven years old, I’ve been the most dangerous person in the room. It took me a long time to realize how strange that must be for other people to wrap their heads around.
It almost didn’t happen. My aptitude for magic was discovered at a very early age, essentially by accident. We were at one of those shitty county fairs, the kind where they give you little paper coupons to pay for riding rickety mobile rollercoasters that probably had questionable safety standards.
They had all kinds of booths and stalls. Some were hawking garbage food like funnel cakes or fried Oreos, some were games of so-called skill with cheap stuffed animals or worthless knick-knacks as prizes.
My dad didn’t want to “waste any damn money” on any of that; in fact, he didn’t want to be at the fair at all. My parents weren’t exactly made of money, as my father kept reminding me and my mother every time we wanted to splurge on something.
Mage Hunters Box Set Page 81