Mage Hunters Box Set

by Andrew C Piazza

  I was checking her pulse to make sure she was dead when the sound came behind me. It was little and quiet and most people probably would never have heard it, but my senses were as enhanced as my muscles, so it was practically an alarm bell.

  Without needing to look, I twisted and threw the throwing knife I kept on my belt. At that point, I rarely used guns, but throwing knives were quiet and handy, especially when you can throw one four inches deep into a block of hardwood with the precision of a rifle.

  It was their daughter, coming to see what all the noise was about. My knife buried deep into her heart. She was about the same age as that little girl I helped while fighting Caleb at the mall.

  I pulled the knife out and cleaned it off on her dress. For a few moments, I stood over her, looking at her while her body shut down.

  I didn’t watch that child die out of some sense of shock and horror at what I’d done. No, I was too far gone for that. I wanted to make sure they’d all died so that my orders had been carried out fully.

  Looking back, that was the worst part of it, the darkest part of my unforgivable sin. I didn’t feel a shred of remorse. Not at the time. At the time, I just washed their blood off my hands in the sink, and left, already wondering what my next target would be.

  It was only later, while in prison, that the depths of how far I’d fallen began to occur to me.

  That last mission… the one with the dead little girl… caught the attention of the press, and the story got splashed on every news station around the globe as a sign of American colonialism or global hegemony or whatever. It didn’t matter what they called it. What mattered was, it was a light shined on people who made their living in the dark, and as a consequence, they decided I had to go.

  They couldn’t turn me in for those killings. That would be admitting to their own involvement. So instead, they set me up for a fall, fabricating evidence that made it look like I’d stolen a few million dollars in cash that was supposed to end up in the hands of some Afghani warlord or another. The next thing I knew, I was in mage restraints and on my way to Trubuilt 187, the prison where I met Cass.

  I’d been there for three years when she showed up. All that time alone in a cell, nothing to do but stare at the old, musty walls and wonder about how I’d been wronged.

  Mickey said that the warden called the prison a “penitentiary”, as in, be penitent and think about your crimes. I did. And as corny as it sounds, it worked.

  I’d never sat still and reflected on my life before. Ever. My only thoughts were about moving forward, beating the next challenge, handling the mission that was put in front of me. Never a thought for the past. I only had eyes for the present.

  At first, I told myself that I was the victim of other peoples’ jealousy. I was too much for them to handle. Too strong. More than they could ever hope to be, and their fragile little egos couldn’t take it.

  And then I started thinking about that little girl. A lot. She’d been wearing a dress when I killed her, not a ballerina dress, but as I kept thinking about her, my memories started to twist and turn and I started to wonder if she’d ever fantasized about being a dancer, like I had.

  I can’t tell you the exact day I started to turn it all around. I don’t know if there was one exact day. I know I read a lot and stared a lot and thought a lot, and finally, finally I started to come around to the idea that maybe I wasn’t wronged. Maybe I wasn’t the hero of this story. Maybe I was the monster.

  And being alone for that long, I started to actually crave the company of other people. It was bizarre. I never cared about that before. People were there for me to either train with or chase down and kill.

  That’s when Cass showed up at Trubuilt 187. I watched her take on three convicts single-handed who tried to shiv her in the cafeteria… I swear, it’s always the cafeteria with these people… and it reminded me of the time when I knocked Mary Ellen on her prissy little ass.

  They stuck us together as roommates, in a tiny cell that really should’ve held only one person. But that was okay. Like I said, I’d started to crave some sort of human contact, and every other woman in my cell block was pretty much a disaster zone.

  Not Cass. She was different. She was like me. Sharp. Driven. Focused. We spent a lot of time together, and for the first time in a long time, I actually had a friend.

  I don’t know what it was about her. She had her shit together. She understood me. She’s good like that; she gets how people tick. And she doesn’t suffer fools, so if she likes you… it means something.

  I found myself opening up to her. And she didn’t judge me. She never said that what I did was okay, but she never looked down on me, either.

  Of course, I never told her about the little girl. I couldn’t. It was too big a risk. Finally, there was one person in the whole world who seemed to actually get me… what if I told her, and she couldn’t accept it?

  Then Kel came to the prison, all hell broke loose, and I met the others on the team. Couldn’t stand them at first. But, over the last few months, spending so much time with them, I started to see that they were the special ones, not me.

  They were good people. They cared about each other. They cared about me. I didn’t deserve any of it, and still they gave it to me.

  I was nothing but a self-absorbed killing machine, who had murdered a child without a second thought. But they saw me as something else. And goddamnit, I started wanting to be that person, the person they saw me as. I wanted to be worthy of that love. I wanted to be like them.

  But I never really thought I could be.

  I showed all those things to Mickey, as we stood there by that broken machine that had caused so much trouble for so many people, with her hands on my head and her mind inside mine. I showed her all those things, so she would know why it had to be me who went into that booth and didn’t come back out again.

  I’ve got it coming. I’ve tried to turn things around and be a person worth a damn, to be something other than a narcissistic butcher like Kel. I’ve seen what it means to make room in my life for other people, to value them for nothing but their company and their caring, and I’ve tried to redeem all the awful shit that I’ve done. But that’s a debt that can never be repaid.

  Oh, I could try to blame it all on my circumstances, on parents who didn’t know how to handle me, on the military only being too happy to exploit my weaknesses as a human being for their own purposes, but that’s all meaningless bullshit. The truth is, I let myself get obsessed with feeling like I was more important than everybody else, better than everybody else, when the truth was, everyone on my team was a better person than me. Maybe I was stronger, but they were better. I’ll be damned if I let someone decent like Mickey or Cass take the hit, when I’m the one who’s damaged goods. I’m the one who deserves to die.

  Every single one of them are better than me. Mickey, Cass, Shifty, that over-grown Boy Scout Dread, Jolly… especially Jolly. His talents are exceptional, and he doesn’t think anything of it, he just gives his gift away to help other people. There’s no ego. There’s nothing in it for him, other than that he’s figured it out… that using one’s talents in the pursuit of helping your fellow human beings is the best damn thing you can do with yourself.

  He’s the opposite of me. He’s been thinking this whole time that I’ve kept him at arm’s length because I don’t think he’s good enough. It’s the reverse. I’ve held him at arm’s length because I’m not good enough for him. Because I’m a tiny step off from being exactly like Kel. If it weren’t for Cass and Jolly and the others pulling me back from that edge… yeah, I might’ve taken Kel up on her offer and joined her in her mad crusade.

  And now someone had to make the sacrifice play, and of course Cass was going to be the one to volunteer. No way. It has to be me.

  I showed Mickey all that and then stepped away from her. She stood staring, lost in thought, trying to process all the images and memories I’d shown her.

  Dread’s voice came over the
intercom. “Cass? Cass?”

  “It’s Lysette,” I said, pressing the button.

  “Where’s Cass?”

  “She’s unconscious. I had to knock her out.”

  “What?”

  “She was going to get into the booth, Dread,” I said. “And it has to be me.”

  There was a long pause. “Lys.”

  “I owe her. I owe all of you,” I said. “Tell Jolly… well. Just tell him.”

  I let the intercom go and looked at the booth, trying to pull myself together for the long walk to oblivion. My feet were about to move when Dread’s voice came back over the intercom.

  “Lysette,” he said. “Cass was right. You were never a lost cause.”

  Fucking Beef. Right when I needed to be at my most stoic, and that overgrown Boy Scout hits me right in the feels.

  I felt it then, for the first time in a long time. Tears, filling my eyes. Part of me tried to blink them away, the rest of me let them fall, relieved somewhat that I was still capable of it.

  I pressed the intercom. “You’re still a big dumb meathead.”

  His smile could practically be heard over the speakers. “And your ass is still bony.”

  Okay. Okay, now I could do it.

  By now, Cass was starting to stir and come to on the floor. Time was up. I left Mickey standing there, staring at me blankly… she clearly was still trying to process everything I’d shown her and had no idea what to think of any of it… and stepped into the booth.

  And I have to admit, I hesitated. There was something about standing in that booth that felt like I was climbing into my own coffin. But then I saw that Cass was pulling herself to her feet and I knew that if I didn’t move now, she would do something stupid to try to stop me.

  So I pulled the door shut. It latched into place as Cass slammed up against it, pounding on it with both hands. She was shouting at me but I couldn’t hear the words; everything was muffled by whatever transparent material the booth was made of.

  There wasn’t time to tell her everything she meant to me, so I just mouthed the words thank you to her, reached over to the console on the wall, and pressed the button.

  ***

  “Mickey! Mickey, you have to help me!”

  “She… she…” Mickey said softly, lost to what she’d seen in Lysette’s mind.

  “Goddamn it, Mickey!” Cass shouted. “We have to get this thing open!”

  A whirring, whining noise came out of the sphere as it began to pick up speed, spinning faster and faster in its housing. More of the white gas began to vent out of the side of the machine where Kel had damaged it; Cass could smell it now, like burnt antifreeze.

  The booth began to fill with a blue light. Lysette looked up and around her, putting her hands out against the sides of the booth as if to support herself.

  The light got brighter and brighter, and Lysette’s face began to wince in pain. Cass’s hands pounded and pounded on the booth, and she kept calling out her name, but Lysette wasn’t looking at her anymore, her eyes were pinched shut.

  Lysette started to grit her teeth in agony as the light became too bright to look at anymore. Cass shut her eyes but still leaned up against the booth, pounding on the plexiglass more weakly now, sliding down the side of the smooth transparent material to collapse into a heap on the floor.

  She was crying now, completely blinded from trying to stare into the light emanating from the booth, her ears filled with the ugly whine of the sphere spinning out of control. She tried to open her eyes again, looking away from the booth this time back toward Mickey, but the light seemed to surround them, fill the entire room like water, and she was forced her pinch her eyes shut and then cover them with her hands to keep it out.

  It was past blinding; it felt like it was boring into her brain. Part of her begged for it to stop, part of her wanted it to continue, to get worse, to end her like it was ending Lysette so that she wouldn’t have to deal with the loss of her friend. In oblivion, there would be no mourning.

  The high-pitched whine of the sphere became as intolerable as the light; Cass wasn’t sure whether she should cover her eyes or her ears. She ended up hunched over on the floor in the fetal position, squeezing herself into a ball, trying to escape the noise and the light and the loss of her friend all at once.

  She wasn’t sure how long she stayed like that. After a time, she became aware that the noise was gone, and as she slowly let herself uncurl out of the fetal position, she realized that there wasn’t any more light boring its way through her eyelids and into her brain.

  Cass opened her eyes, and saw Dread and Jolly rush into the room. Shifty trailed behind them, moving more slowly, looking like he’d just run a marathon.

  “Are you okay?” Dread asked her once he’d knelt down next to her. “Cass, are you hurt?”

  She couldn’t answer; she opened her mouth to try to speak, but no words came out. Her face twisted into a frozen sob and she pointed at the booth. It was empty.

  “I know, Cass,” he said. “I know.”

  “Where is she?” Jolly said, pacing around the room this way, that way, every way. “Where’s Lys?”

  “She went into the booth, Jolly,” Dread said.

  “No, I know, I know, I mean, where is she, where’s the… I can bring her back, I can bring her back, I did it before, I just need to know where she is. Tell me where she is!”

  Dread stood up from Cass and took him by the arm. “Jolly.”

  “Tell me where she is, Dread!” Jolly shouted at him, pushing back against him, punching at him with his free arm. “You tell me where she is!”

  “She’s gone, man,” Dread said, holding him strongly against his struggles. “She’s just gone.”

  Something about the words, or how Dread said them, seemed to take the fight out of Jolly. His shoulders slumped and he collapsed against Dread, burying his head in the big man’s chest.

  “She can’t. She can’t, she can’t.”

  Cass stared at the empty booth, tried to force her mind to accept that Lysette was gone. It didn’t seem real. With no body left in the booth, with nothing there to prove that Lysette was really dead, her mind didn’t seem to want to believe it.

  She found herself lost in that stare, even as Dread tried to get her attention by shaking her shoulders. Jolly was leaning up against the wall now, pushing with both hands like he was trying to knock the whole building down.

  It was the sphere that brought her out of it. It rolled across the floor to bump against her foot. What used to be a perfect, smooth surface was now marred by gouges and stains that looked like scorch marks on its surface.

  “Looks like this thing is history,” Dread said, picking it up. “What do you think, Shifty?”

  Shifty shook his head. “Not getting anything coming off it. No magical energies. I’m pretty sure it’s wrecked.”

  Dread handed the damaged sphere to Cass. She took it numbly, turning it over in her hands a few times.

  She didn’t know what she should do with it. She didn’t know what she should do with herself. She was exhausted, totally spent, still in shock and disbelief from Lysette’s death. The fight was won. Kel was dead. Her sphere was destroyed. With Kel and Martin gone, all of the ghouls and conjurations causing havoc across the city would have gone with them. Now all that was left, was to clean up.

  Adjani. Adjani was still downstairs. Cass looked the dead sphere, at the ruined Intron Code machine, all around at the building she sat in.

  She dragged herself to her feet at last, locking eyes with Dread. “It’s not over.”

  “Adjani,” he said.

  “Amongst other things.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “None of this,” Cass said, gesturing around the room. “Nothing can survive. You understand, Dread? Even with Kel gone, even with the sphere destroyed, even with Adjani dead…”

  He nodded his head. “They’ll just do it again.”

  “Who?” Shifty asked. “Who will do
it again?”

  “Someone,” Cass said. “The Cabal. Anyone who can get access to Revival Tech’s research, or the remnants of this machine. It all has to go.”

  “The data will be backed up somewhere,” Dread said. “We’ll have to find out…”

  “I know where it is,” a voice said from the far side of the room.

  It was Dr. Adjani, standing quietly in the doorway. As soon as he saw him, Jolly flew into a rage, charging across the room at him, and Dread had to grab Jolly and restrain him to keep him from tearing Adjani apart.

  “It’s his fault!” Jolly said, straining uselessly against Dread’s bulk. “He built all this! It’s all his fucking fault!”

  “Yeah, it is,” Dread said. “And he’s going to pay up. Aren’t you, Doctor?”

  Adjani nodded. “I can erase the off-site backups of our research remotely from here. The onsite backups are all stored on the servers you saw earlier, the ones next to the monitoring station.”

  “Not good enough,” Cass said. “There might be hard copies somewhere in this building, even if it’s only fragments of your research. And all this physical equipment, something might be salvaged.”

  “Not to mention you, asshole,” Jolly said, staring at Adjani.

  “You’re right,” Adjani said. He looked around at them, and it might have been her imagination, but Cass swore he actually looked like he felt guilty for what he’d done. “I have a solution.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Cass said.

  “We will have to hurry. Our deal still stands, yes?”

  “You mean the part about you dying? Oh, you bet.”

  “Not just dying. I don’t want anything left of my body. I can… feel it, you see. I can feel the steady mental state that this young woman gave to me starting to slip away.”

  “I told you it wouldn’t last,” Mickey said.

  “I can’t,” Adjani said to Cass. “I can’t go back to that. Please. Whatever you think of me…”

  “What did you have in mind?” Cass said.