by Karen Chance
The figure John had previously seen welded to the street, on the other hand, had been wearing the typical long coat that war mages used to conceal their weaponry. John could still see the bits of burnt leather in his mind, curled up on the strong back. But Caleb hadn’t had a coat on, had he? Before the world went to hell, he’d been doing paperwork in a warehouse with lousy air conditioning!
So, a doppelganger had died and Caleb had survived. John felt a surge of relief so strong that he actually took a step forward before stopping himself, remembering that his friend was not his friend right now. And that tripping merrily into the midst of a duel was not a smart move.
Unfortunately, manlikans are not smart.
Specifically, the doughboy wasn’t, and it had gotten the wrong idea from John’s abortive movement. It did a toddler-like run on its stubby legs out into the street, and then paused, as if wondering why John wasn’t following. And before John could call it back, it was hit with one of the spells flying about, an amber hued bolt that it absorbed through its porous skin, and that turned it a bright, glowing orange.
Among other things, John thought, staring.
He didn’t know what the spell had been designed to do originally—judging by the color, it was something offensive to hammer at Caleb’s shields—but it wasn’t doing that now. Instead, human magic was mixing with fey in the belly of the beast John had created. But instead of flaming out as he would have expected, or bursting the manlikan from the inside if it was powerful enough, it was doing . . . that.
“What the hell is that?” he saw Zheng mouth from the rooftop.
John had no idea.
The best he could tell, the two types of magic were warring, chasing each other around and around inside the pudgy form and bloating it more with each pass. But instead of tearing, the crappy ward serving as the creature’s skin stretched and elongated, and then stretched some more. In seconds, it was maybe six times the size of a man, as if the doughboy had been allowed to rise overnight.
And to fill the narrow alley with its pudgy “flesh.”
The duel abruptly stopped, possibly because the two combatants could barely see each another anymore. Or possibly because everybody else could. John saw Zheng suddenly gesturing wildly from the roofline, along with a couple of his men. The rest were still at either end of the alley, as John saw when he poked his head slightly beyond the doorframe. But a second later they were flying back, they were scrambling up the sides of buildings, they were getting out of the way.
Because two huge streams of war mages were breaking off the crowd and following swiftly behind them.
For a second, John just stared. The corpsmen been so single minded a moment ago that it had almost looked like they couldn’t see anything around them. Unless it became a target by trying to get in their way, that is. But now . . .
Yes, we definitely have their attention now, John thought, as they started throwing everything they had at the glowing orange doughboy.
And at the men with weakened shields standing in front of it.
The cowboy was all right, being tackled to the ground by his golem, and having better shields anyway. But Caleb was another story. The idea had been to get his shields weak enough that John could finish the job, whilst the manlikans distracted the other mage. It hadn’t been to kill him! But that was what was about to happen—any second now.
John swore savagely and pointed at Caleb. “Protect!”
The manlikans moved immediately to obey, except for the one John held back because his current shields were shit. Only his creatures didn’t bother trying to go around the doughboy as John would have. They went through it instead, walking straight into the massive creature, their skins merging with it like smaller streams flowing into a river.
John could see them resume their own, distinct shapes once inside, the color difference making them discernable from the surrounding orange “flesh” as they moved quickly toward their goal.
They didn’t reach it.
Because someone else had heard the command, too.
And god damn it, John thought, fighting to get out of his orange prison before the doughboy killed Caleb all by himself!
He wasn’t trying to. He was trying to do what he’d been told and protect the tiny war mage. And, like the golem, take him to ground.
Which he accomplished by the simple method of rolling on top of him.
John abruptly stopped fighting and stared through the translucent flesh at the dome of air that had been preserved inside Caleb’s shields—the same ones that were keeping back who knew how much weight. Considering how quickly they were contracting, pulling back toward his body as they lost power, it was probably a lot. His damned creation was going to crush the life out of his friend, any damned second if John didn’t do something!
And with spell fire concentrated on his location from both sides, there was only one option.
“Attack!” he yelled, pointing in both directions.
And suddenly, it was a whole new ballgame. The two and a half normal manlikans remaining—because one was down to child size after losing so much water—burst out of the massive doughboy, running headlong at the mages converging on the right. Whereas the great orange one rolled further down the alley, off of Caleb and toward the corpsmen on the left, forcing them to momentarily retreat to avoid being crushed.
And leaving a battered mage behind, under an eggshell thin shield that popped a second later.
Caleb was still deadly, of course, shield or no shield—a fact that many a foe had forgotten to his cost. John didn’t forget, and stayed behind his last protector while he threw both knock out bombs. He would have liked to have reserved one, but Caleb was rated high at spell resistance and John wasn’t taking any chances.
The bombs exploded when they hit the stones beside his friend, who had just jumped back to his feet. And who just as quickly crumpled onto the road again, out cold in the middle of a cloud of dark blue smoke. John breathed a sigh of relief, and ended up choking and gagging on a tendril of the overflow.
He spat it out and sent some wind to disperse the smoke, just as Zheng appeared at his elbow.
“Was this the plan?” he breathed, staring at the battle raging on either side of them.
“Does this look like the plan?” John snarled, running over and kneeling by his friend.
“Then let’s get out of here! We’ll take him upstairs,” Zheng jerked his head toward the rooftops, “and do it there—”
“Can’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I don’t know how the mages are being monitored!” John snapped, grabbing the arm Zheng had started to put around Caleb. “Any unusual movements, like climbing a damned building whilst unconscious, could tip off whoever is behind this! We do it here.”
“Then hurry the hell up!”
John couldn’t argue with that. But frisking his friend wasn’t going so well. Caleb was armed, of course, because war mages are always armed, even sitting in an office eating shortbread. What John didn’t know was whether—
Yes!
His hand closed over a small pack attached to the back of Caleb’s belt, which held emergency supplies. It was redundant—Caleb carried the same sort of things on the potion belt he usually had draped around his hips and in his coat. Both of those items were missing today, but the backup was in place. Because war mage training teaches that paranoia is a virtue.
Which it is, John thought, fumbling the little case open, and removing a small item.
It damned well is!
“Hurry up!” Zheng said again, glancing back and forth at the two sides of the alley. The big vamp didn’t look like someone who was usually nervous, but then, John doubted that he’d ever been in the middle of a magical breakwater. Which is what it looked like they were crouched in at the moment, with a bulbous orange ass blocking one side of the street, and what looked like a wall of water obstructing the other.
The normal manlikans had flowed together,
stretching their bodies outward like puzzle pieces, fitting together to bar the way forward. Fey magic or no fey magic, they should have failed under the barrage of so much energy by now. Except that, like the doughboy, they seemed to be absorbing a good deal of it.
But not all.
The once clear wall boiled with colors and swirls of power, actually glowing with it, and its flat surface had started to bulge outward with the excess it couldn’t contain. The bulge was growing by the second, like a huge balloon being blown up, getting bigger with every spell and stretching closer and closer to John and his two companions. He did not want to be there when it broke.
Apparently, neither did Zheng, who had graduated from yelling to smacking him on the shoulder. “Damn you, do it or leave it!”
John did it, finishing his incantation and then slapping a small bronze disk to the side of Caleb’s throat. “Got it!”
“Then let’s go!”
John couldn’t agree more. He took off his coat—damned thing didn’t fit anyway—and wrapped Caleb up mummy style, before dragging him into the deepest doorway he could find. And then stationing his last manlikan in front of him.
“Protect!” he said clearly, pointing at Caleb. And then just stood there, staring down at his friend and biting his cheek for a second, because moving him was a risk, but leaving him might be more so.
“Damn it, come on!” Zheng snarled, and grabbed John’s bicep. And then John’s decision was made for him, although not because of Zheng.
The huge bubble the manlikan wall had turned into had started shimmering and shaking and generally acting like something getting hammered by hundreds of spells and not taking it well. But the elastic nature of the crappy ward John had created around his creatures had expanded rather than given way, more and more until it couldn’t hold anything else. It finally burst, releasing not hundreds, but thousands of captured spells all at once, in a deluge of color and power and death.
With no shields, John would have died in seconds, except for the vampire. Who, big as he was, moved like nothing John had ever seen—and still didn’t. One moment, he and Zheng were on the street, straight in the path of all that magic, and the next they were two stories up, with John feeling a passing spell twist his ankle and rip a shoe off his foot. An instant after that, they were on the roof, putting them above the explosions erupting below as all of those spells flew down the alley, lit up the night, hit the massive side of the doughboy, and . . .
Ricocheted.
“Holy shit!” somebody yelled.
John thought there was a chance it might have been him.
He couldn’t tell, because it was impossible to hear anything. Not over the sound of spells going in every direction, since they hadn’t hit a flat wall but rather the curved ass cheek of the accidental giant. The result looked like a massive fireworks display had been set off in the alley, spewing multicolored death skyward and making John’s heart clench for Caleb—
And then for himself.
He felt the building under his feet shiver and shake, and suddenly, he was trying to run over open air. At least, that’s what it felt like with the roof crumbling underneath him. He wouldn’t have been able to keep ahead of it, since the same thing was happening to the roofs in front of him as well, as spells plowed through the houses below.
But Zheng was another matter.
He grabbed John around the waist like an American linebacker grabbing a football, and headed for the in zone. And headed fast. John had a vague sense of buildings literally disintegrating underneath them, of dust and debris flying through the air, of a crimson spell that ricocheted off something below and flew up through the roof, missing them by inches, and of Zheng’s constant swearing.
But they didn’t fall in. John received a new appreciation for vampire speed as Zheng and the blurs of his men leaped the sometime sizeable gaps between buildings, jumped over air conditioners and other obstacles, and somehow kept just ahead of the crumbling infrastructure. Which kept on crumbling, why John didn’t know, since it felt like they’d gone a dozen blocks by now!
And then he looked back, and saw why.
“Son of a bitch!”
“What?” Zheng said, and craned his neck, too.
“Son of a BITCH!”
There were echoes of more local types of curses from the boys, but John barely noticed. Because following them across what was left of the rooftops, scrambling over debris and fighting through a hail of spells, was a very determined orange doughboy. Or what was left of one.
It was about half the size it had been, maybe less, which still left it big enough to peer over the edge of the smaller buildings without having to jump. And to scramble over the taller ones like an overgrown toddler determinedly following its mama. Or its daddy, in this case, John realized sickly.
And everywhere that baby went, the war mages were sure to follow.
Along with their attack.
Well . . . shit.
Chapter Sixteen
C an’t you stop that damned thing?” Zheng demanded.
Not from this distance, John started to say as the big vamp put him down. They’d gotten far enough ahead to pause for a second, although that might not have been the best plan. Because a bolt of something ripped by John’s face, close enough that he could feel the heat on his lips, causing him to rear back.
And then Zheng started shaking him.
“Cut it out!” John snarled.
“Then do something!”
“If you’d brought me some usable weapons, perhaps I could!” John said, as they took a flying leap over another alley. The gap was a little wider than he would have liked, forcing him to have to expend magic to clear it, although the vampires managed it with ease.
Enough that one of them turned on him before he’d even touched down.
It was Kong, of course.
John didn’t know what the creature was saying, because his little interpreter was cowering in an armpit. She appeared to have a fear of heights. John tried poking her, but only succeeded in getting a tiny smack from a gold lace fan in return.
And then Kong was in his face.
“He said you would have your weapons, if you hadn’t turned the sun on us!” one of the other vamps said. “We barely got out of there alive!”
John didn’t bother to point out that he hadn’t done that, because he would have if he could. Not on them specifically, but on the tribunal. “What did you expect me to do?” he demanded. “Let several hundred war mages be murdered?”
It appeared that Kong understood English better than he spoke it, because he didn’t wait for a translation.
“He asked how many of us your men have killed today?” his colleague said, looking like he’d like to know, too.
“Less than they will if we stand here arguing!”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Then how about this? None. Not on purpose, nor by their free will. We are not your enemy—”
“You always enemy!” That was Kong himself, pushing his friend out of the way. “You kill us! That all you do! This no different!”
Zheng had gone ahead of the rest, over by the edge of the flat roofline, and he didn’t look happy. John started to join him, when the big vamp turned around and came back over, saying something sharply in Cantonese. It caused Kong to whirl away in disgust, but the tension was as thick as the smoke drifting in the air around them.
“His family was killed by a mage,” Zheng explained briefly. “He went after the son of a bitch, got cursed with vampirism for his trouble, and then almost died with no master to show him the ropes. He’s not your kind’s biggest fan.”
John looked through the clouds at Kong, who was now over by the roof edge where Zheng had been, but for some reason wasn’t jumping it. “For what it’s worth, that spell isn’t in use by the Corps,” he said. “I doubt most even know it. The Corps doesn’t specialize in making more vampires.”
Zheng snorted. “No, I suppose not. Still, keep your di
stance.”
That would be a good trick, John thought, as they crowded together on other side of the roof. And then stepped back abruptly—or at least, John did. The vampires, except for Zheng, sprang away like all the fires of hell were after them.
Which did at first appear to be the case.
John risked a quick glance over the edge of the roof, only to see that the buildings on either side of a wide street were burning and shooting flames out of a group of windows below. They looked like factory windows: large and square, and facing each other across the road. The duel updraft was feeding into an inferno that felt likely to roast him, even if he’d had shields.
He stepped back and glanced at Zheng, who, judging by his expression, had already realized that they couldn’t go around. The buildings on either side were too far away for even vampires to jump with accuracy, and the ground below was swarming with mages. And behind them . . .
The now smaller doughboy was gaining—fast. It looked like he’d taken one too many bolts to the butt, which was draining him. But there was still some magic there, and thus maybe some hope.
“I can bridge it,” John said, watching Zheng. “If you trust me.”
Zheng scowled. “Do we have a choice?”
John looked at the roofs behind them, some of which had caved in under the doughboy’s still considerable weight, and the rest were covered in fast approaching mages. “Not anymore.”
Zheng smiled, showing fang. “Then I guess we trust you.”
But did he trust himself, John wondered, staring first at his creature and then at the sky. It was still raining in fits and starts, sometimes heavy as a deluge, and sometimes almost playfully, like a child tossing water around. But even the harder bursts didn’t seem to be helping his creature or hurting the fires.
Unlike the wind, which had increased substantially in just the last few minutes.
It whistled down alleyways, ripped flames off rooftops and sent them leaping into the night. Or scattered them across suspended storage piles, which quickly turned into floating pyres, dripping fire and ash onto the mages below. And, increasingly, onto the fleeing crowds, huddled under spelled umbrellas to deflect both rain and magic, and trying to keep to the smaller streets. But fleeing all the same, because they feared fire more than battle.