Unturned- The Complete Series

by Rob Cornell

  Two of the guys wore ties and didn't have much weight to them. If I had to go hand-to-hand with them, I doubted I'd have a problem. Not that sorcerers like myself had to go hand-to-hand with anybody. Not the good ones anyway.

  The third guy had a wide chest and a matching pair of shoulders. He wore a blue blazer with a red shirt stretched tightly against his barrel of a belly. He had wide nostrils, and if he put a ring through his nose, I could have mistaken him for a bull.

  Toro.

  The Bull drew a chrome-plated handgun from under his jacket and sighted it on me. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I stared him down, not a worry in the world. “You weren't expecting me?”

  The skinny guys exchanged a glance. One of them whispered, “It's the vampire guy.”

  I scrunched up my face. “I'm not the vampire guy. Jesus, you civilians don't understand a thing about our world, do you? I'm the Unturned.” I tried to make it sound ominous. Otherwise, no way would I have referred to myself by that dumb name. So I had vampire blood in my system, and it hadn't made me go vamp because of a magical brand on my shoulder. So what?

  But the moniker, and a boat load of bullshit rumors about what it meant, had spread through Detroit. I figured I had a right to use it if I needed to.

  Sure enough, even the Bull's eyes took on an unfocused glaze, as if the mere mention of the Unturned had paralyzed his mind.

  I could only imagine what they had heard about me.

  “Good. So you know who I am. Which means you probably know why I'm here.”

  The skinny guys threw each other another look, then they drew their own guns.

  “We're loaded with silver,” the skinny guy on the right said.

  It took every effort not to roll my eyes. I was going for badass at the moment, not annoyed teenager. Though that shtick had its place.

  “You really want to put those guns away,” I said. “We can talk like civilized adults. I'd really hate to have to kill you.”

  The Bull snorted. How appropriate. “You might be vampire,” he said with a thick Polish accent, “but you're not invincible.”

  I gave him a flat stare. “I am not a vampire.”

  He curled his finger around the trigger.

  “You shoot,” I said, “you die.”

  The dumb bastard shot.

  I called on the wind, this time hardening it to form a shield in front of me. His shot pinged off the invisible barrier with a spark. I, of course, stood tall, looking disgusted, as if he'd tried to spit on me instead of kill me.

  “You're going to have to do better than that.”

  Alas, these were the kinds of guys who thought guns could solve everything from home invaders to world hunger. All three started to unload on me. I just had to push a little more of my will into the shield to keep any of the bullets from penetrating. But the quick and concentrated fire tested the limits of my wind magic. Each round weakened it a bit, forcing me to continue spending magical energy to harden it.

  But they ran out of ammo long before my shield ran out of juice.

  A haze of gun smoke swirled through the room, and the air smell like firecrackers. The trio stared at me with wide, worried eyes. I noticed the Bull's gun barrel twitching as his hand trembled.

  The skinny guys, as if synchronized, stepped back and lowered their guns.

  I let my shield dissipate and stretched my right hand out at my side, palm up. I called on the power of fire, drawing both on the little bit of heat in the air and the simmering burn inside of me that had started two months ago—when my mother had been killed—and hadn't cooled since.

  Blue fire burst up from my palm. I could feel its heat, but it didn't hurt me. This was my fire, and it only burned when I told it to.

  The flame's color came from that rage inside me. I had learned not that long ago that I could feed my magic not only with the natural power I was born with, but my deepest emotions as well. Used to be, I only whipped out the blue stuff when I needed a shit ton of extra heat. These days, I couldn't seem to conjure any other kind.

  “Are you ready to answer some questions now?” I asked.

  The skinny guys didn't move, a couple of cowardly statues with empty guns.

  The Bull curled his lip. “You'll get nothing.”

  I looked from him to my flaming hand, then back. “Are you sure?”

  His own gaze flicked to the fire. His curled lip twitched as his eyes widened, but he recovered his hard stare and aimed it down the barrel of his gun at me. “Nothing.”

  I pointed at his weapon with my free hand. “You know that's empty, right?”

  As if spurred on by this factoid, he released the magazine. It slid out of the grip and clattered on the terracotta-colored floor tiles. Without moving his gaze from me, he dug into a pocket, pulled out a fresh mag, and slammed it in place.

  My patience had turned to gossamer, ready to rip open in a stiff breeze.

  “You rack that slide, I'm going to kill you.”

  “You don't look like killer,” he said as he reached out with his free hand and cupped it over the top of his pistol.

  “That's the kind of dumb thing villains in movies say. And while they're usually right, because the good guys are lame, I'll clear one thing up right now. I am not a good guy.”

  He racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber.

  I threw a blue fireball at him. It sailed across the restaurant like a like a wild, loose comet, and struck him in the face. A horrid shriek shot from his throat as his skin peeled away, exposing the muscle and sinew attached to his skull. He flailed back, managed to squeeze off shots that went into the floor, breaking some tiles, then he hit the table and keeled backward.

  His weight flipped the table toward him and onto its edge, tossing the bottle of vodka and glasses away to shatter on the floor. The table provided a backdrop for him to lean against as he plopped onto his ass in a sitting position. His flailing turned to twitching. His gun tumbled out of his grip. The heels of his shiny loafers knocked against the floor. And when the fire burned through his skull and liquefied his brain, he stopped screaming.

  The table cloth had caught fire. I sent out a bit of my will to kill the flames both on the tablecloth and on the Bull's head. (Didn't want to burn the whole place down.) What remained of his head looked like the scorched end of a spent match.

  He fell still, propped against the table like a gross art installation from a sickened mind.

  And, yeah, that sickened mind belonged to me.

  The skinny guys had actually used the time their comrade burned to reload. Their hands shook, and their aim sucked, but they did take me by surprise. They started shooting before I could throw up a shield. Their trembling caused most of the rounds to go wide, but one of them zipped along my left bicep. It cut through my coat and shirt, and dug a fair-sized trench along the width of my arm.

  I back pedaled and came up against the buffet.

  Another bullet tagged me in my right thigh. I hadn't had a chance to feel the pain from the wound on my arm, adrenaline keeping it at bay. But this shot to my leg sent waves of agony up into my crotch and down past my kneecap. I cried out and stumbled. I tried to grab the buffet to keep my feet, but I only managed to knock my elbow against the counter top. I landed on my left side, nothing to break my fall except the arm I'd just been shot in.

  Pain and more pain cut through me.

  I tried to use it to bolster my magic, but pure pain, outside of emotion's reach, only frazzled my concentration too much to conjure anything.

  Thankfully, the guys' guns clicked dry before I took any more hits.

  One of them fumbled into his pocket and pulled out another fucking magazine. The other ran for the doorway into the kitchen.

  I clamped my teeth together and focused my rage enough to puncture through the pain and draw on my magic. I used the energy to deaden the pain in my arm and leg. I hated doing it, because it meant splitting my power if I wanted to throw some more fire. And I definitely wa
nted to throw more fire.

  But me going against one little guy who had yet to reload his pistol wouldn't take much effort. I totally had this.

  I drew up more blue fire, engulfing my right fist. I didn't bother standing up.

  The skinny guy slapped home his fresh magazine. Unlike the Bull, I didn't give him a chance to chamber a round. I whipped my flame at him, the blast a little bigger than I had intended.

  He saw it coming in time to throw up his arms. A lot of good that did. The fire struck his forearms, but the excessive force I had used threw him backward on impact, bouncing him off the wall. His gun went flying. He dropped to the floor and flapped his burning arms, which only fueled the flames, causing them to spread up to his shoulders. The fabric of his shirt and tie disintegrated in a few seconds, and his skin started bubbling and puckering quickly afterward.

  “God damn it,” I shouted. “Stop whipping your arms around. You're making it worse.”

  He didn't hear me. Just kept flapping like a duck having a seizure.

  I was about to reach out and kill the flames with my power, but that's when the skinny guy who had run into the kitchen came out with a fucking Uzi in his hands.

  Chapter Two

  The guy with the Uzi howled as he held down the trigger and started spitting a barrage of nine-millimeter rounds at me.

  The gun had a kick he must not have been used to. His first burst went high.

  I conjured a shield, but it wouldn't last long against the rapid, fully automatic gunfire—eventually one round would make it through.

  I scrabbled across the floor and rounded the buffet. A second after I made it to the other side, pieces of the paneling on the buffet cracked into splinters against another burst of gunfire.

  My magic had numbed my wounded leg a little too much. I had to yank it toward me so I could sit back against the buffet. I hoped the gunner would spend the rest of his ammo with wild shooting that’s so easy to do with a fully automatic weapon. But once I was out of his line of sight, he stopped.

  My breath rattled in my chest. My heart knocked at a thousand beats per second. While I'd struggled my way to the opposite side of the buffet, my stupid duster had wrapped and caught around my ankles. I was so getting rid of that thing if I made it out of there alive.

  “You're pinned down and wounded,” the skinny guy shouted. “Come out from behind there and I'll let you walk away.”

  Bullshit.

  I looked down at my leg. Blood seeped from the bullet hole in my thigh. Even if I kept the pain at bay with my magic, blood loss was still blood loss. And the more that leaked out of me, the weaker I'd get. Pretty soon, the gunman could stroll around the buffet and finish me off without too much trouble.

  So I had to make a move before any of that happened.

  I scooted along the length of the buffet to the opposite end. I tried to move as quietly as possible so he wouldn't know what I was doing.

  “You really think you can take down a sorcerer with a gun?” I shouted to cover up the sound of my ass sliding against the tiles.

  “Looks like guns have done a pretty good job so far.”

  Touché.

  When I reached the end of the buffet, I peeked around the corner just enough to get my relative position to him. Then I pulled on my magic and began to weave the air. The plan: Blow the goon against the wall, knock the gun out of his hand, then knock him around a little more until he was ready to talk.

  I visualized it in my mind, choreographing it. Then practice time was over.

  I pushed myself up to a crouch and duck walked around the buffet's corner. I felt the blood pump harder out of my gunshot wound, saturating my pants, and tried to ignore it.

  I saw, too late, that the skinny guy had figured out my game. He had his Uzi pointed straight at me as I abandoned my cover.

  The air I had planned to use to knock him on his ass, I instead pulled together into a shield.

  His gun chattered. A steady stream of bullets hammered my shield, and I could feel it weaken almost immediately. The rounds came too fast for me to continuously compensate. Between that and having my magic split to stave off my pain, I didn't have a whole lot of magical finesse at my disposal.

  I dug right into my raw power and called on more fire. I hurled a bolt of blue flames nearly the same size as the skinny guy himself. It plowed into him so hard and hot, it ripped him apart. One flaming arm went one way, the Uzi still gripped in its hand. A leg tore free and went spinning like a baton in another direction. His torso nearly disintegrated entirely, exposing his rib cage and the fiery goop that used to be his heart and lungs. What remained intact of him flew backward, the force snapping his neck and ripping his head partially away from his shoulders.

  He slammed into the wall and crushed the plaster. Since so much of him had turned to fleshy slag, he stuck against the wall for a moment like a giant bug against a windshield. Then he sloughed off to the floor.

  I released all the magic I'd been holding, including what I was spending to fight off the pain, and dropped to my knees. The pain roared back and filled me with nausea. A cold sweat coated my face.

  I heard groaning.

  For a sick moment, I thought it came from the guy I had just obliterated. Then my rational mind picked up the ball, and I realized it came from behind the tipped over table.

  One of them was still alive.

  I tried to get to my feet. The pain shot through my leg as if it had taken a fresh bullet. I dropped to one knee. Grinding my teeth, I dipped into my magic once more, using just enough to quell the agony and leave me with a minor sting. I had more energy to work with, but I wanted to keep it available in case another asshole came running out of the kitchen with an AK-47 or something crazy.

  I limped my way over to and around the table.

  The one who had kept flailing his arms and feeding his flames lay at my feet. His face was a wicked mess of burns. His arms had disintegrated to the bones. I could see one side of his jaw through a hole in his cheek. The burns had forced his eyes into a permanent squint, but they were open wide enough for him to look up at me.

  What remained of his mouth moved, and he wheezed. He was trying to talk.

  Good.

  “You've had dealings with the Maidens of Shadow,” I said. “Tell me where I can find them.”

  His mouth moved again, but he only wheezed some more.

  “Tell me where to find them or I'll take one of those salt shakers off a table and empty it into your burns.”

  “Kill…me.”

  “You're worried about them killing you if you talk? Are you an idiot? You're pretty much dead already.”

  “Kill me,” he repeated in a tortured rasp.

  Then I realized what he meant. He wanted me to put him out of his misery.

  Not a fucking chance. Not until he told me what I needed to know.

  “I will,” I said. “And I'll make it quick. But you need to tell me how I can find the witches.”

  He made an incoherent string of noises, none of which sounded like an actual word.

  I pointed down at him. “You want me to let you lay here and suffer? I can do that. Like I told your big friend over there. I am not one of the good guys.”

  But he only gave me more wheezes and gurgles.

  I raked my hands through my hair and paced away from him. “Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck.”

  I had to suffer the truth. He was too badly burned. He wouldn't talk. He couldn't talk.

  I turned around and glared down at this pathetic excuse for a human being.

  “This is what happens when you ignorant assholes mess with what you don't understand,” I said. “When you make deals with witches. This is on you. All of this.” I waved my hand in a wide circle to indicate the surrounding carnage. “This is on you.”

  I threw my fist out at my side and called once more on fire. What I conjured up was a more brilliant blue than anything I had before. Even though I had willed it to life, its heat felt like it might actually
burn me this time.

  I didn't hold it long enough to find out.

  I turned that bastard into a scorch mark on the floor.

  Chapter Three

  I got into the car smelling like smoke and ashes. My leg was throbbing despite the magic keeping it from totally incapacitating me. I had found some dish towels in the kitchen and had tied one around my leg to keep the blood flow staunched as much as possible, though it had already soaked through and I was going to have an ugly stain on the driver's seat of my Jetta.

  I also had another towel with my consolation prize wrapped in it.

  I slammed the door shut and started the engine.

  “What the hell happened in there?”

  Odi, my apprentice and teenage vampire, sat in the passenger seat gaping at me. He wore a pair of ripped jeans and a Metallica t-shirt under an unbuttoned plaid flannel with the sleeves rolled up. His nest of red hair glistened with whatever kind of product he put in it.

  “Hold this,” I said and tossed him the folded towel. Some blood stained the fabric, not all of it mine.

  “What is it?” He opened up the towel and jerked when he was what was inside. “Dude, it's a freakin' ear.”

  I put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. We were out in Northville, one of the suburbs of Detroit. I hoped I could make it into the city before I passed out from blood loss.

  “Yes,” I said. “It's an ear.”

  Odi scrunched up his face as he folded the bloody ear back up in the towel. “Why?”

  “I didn't get the information I needed. I hope to use that for a vision spell. Hopefully, I'll be able to see far enough into his past to find a clue about where the Maidens are holed up.”

  “So you ripped off a guy's ear?”

  “Relax. He was already dead.” I gritted my teeth as I made a right at the next intersection. “They're all dead.”

  He made a disgusted grunt. “I told you to take me in with you.”

  “You didn't need to see all that.”

  “Like I haven't seen a bunch of burned up guys before. You do know who my mentor is, right?”

  “It's not the aftermath I was worried about. I knew I would have to get…firm.”