by Chloe Garner
It was happening.
This was actually happening.
They’d said all the words before, for what to do if they succeeded, but she had to say them one more time, in hopes that it would happen.
They were doing this.
At the far end of the building, Ethan, Hanson, and Sasha turned, going down an alley past dumpsters and bags of trash, and Valerie stopped, leaning against the bricks. Shack turned away, crossing the street and going the other way down the sidewalk.
They didn’t say anything because there wasn’t anything else to say.
Valerie tried to wait long enough for Hanson and Sasha to make it to the front corner of the building, glancing around her corner once to see Shack crossing the street back toward the corner that he would hit.
He was the most exposed, and Valerie changed walls, getting where she could see him and back him up in case he got in trouble.
He had the cast out of his backpack even as he got back to the building, continuing past Valerie’s line of sight and attaching the spellwork to the corner of the building as he walked past.
That was as long as she was going to wait.
If Sasha’s cast went off a few moments late, it would just mean that Valerie, Ethan, and Shack had a few more seconds to draw attention away from the second door.
Valerie set her cast and started walking toward the door she would go in, hearing Ethan’s feet as he tried to get past her cast before it went off. He rounded the corner and caught up to her, grabbing her hand and kissing her cheek playfully.
He was an amazing liar.
The two casts behind them went off within moments of Shack’s, nothing but a sensation of rippling power. The ingredients that Samantha had given her were potent, and Valerie’s use of them had been… targeted. As if she’d known what she was up against.
Shack came back around the corner, waving at them and jogging up, and the three of them turned to the door at the same moment.
It was locked, but Valerie was hardly surprised by this. She took a cast out of the wraps at her waist - that was where the first ones all went - and she put it on the door, speaking to it to charge it. It went off and something in the door popped. Ethan was the first one through, tossing the stunning cast like it was a hand grenade.
It wasn’t, but it would work.
The people there in the hallway reacted individually - several of them turning around and returning to their offices, and others continuing on past as though nothing had happened. Two men stopped to talk to each other, neither of them speaking English, and a tall woman looked at Valerie.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“We’re here to see my dad,” Valerie answered, and the woman nodded going on.
“So we just need about a hundred of those,” Shack murmured, keeping tight against Valerie’s shoulder as they went down the first hallway.
“It won’t work more than once, I don’t think,” Valerie said. “Not on the same people. And they’re going to figure out that something happened after the confusion wears off.”
“Still,” Shack said. “That was pretty impressive.”
“If I get us out of here alive, you’re allowed to be impressed,” Valerie answered.
“Oh, you may as well own it. You’re thrilled that worked as well as it did. I can feel it.”
She looked over at him and frowned.
“What does that mean?” she asked, and he shrugged.
“Can’t tell you.”
He pulled out his own stun cast and threw it as a group of men rounded a corner ahead of them. Where it had worked on the office workers pretty well, these appeared to be more security-minded men, and only a couple of them had posture changes as the cast went off.
The others stopped in a formation of some kind and began casting back.
Valerie had trained with her father for this, but the context of that had been solely escaping. Her father hadn’t been teaching her to stand her ground, much less fight her way forward.
All the same, surviving cost a lot less energy than attacking, and she was going to make sure that coming after them cost the Pure something. She took a vial out of a slot at her hip and smeared the contents quickly across her palm, slapping it against the wall next to Ethan’s head as Shack prepared a counter-cast. A red bubble - not unlike the one Valerie had cast in Mrs. Reynolds’ class not all that long before - appeared around them, and Valerie took out her wand, pointing it from where her hand was still pressed against the wall to the other wall that Shack standing against, and a second bubble, lighter in opacity but deeper in color, appeared around them.
“Can he cast through that?” Ethan asked, and Valerie nodded.
“So long as I’m ready for it,” she said.
Shack nodded and kept working.
Someone was attacking the shield basically the moment it went up, and Ethan began counter-casting to that, taking out a marking stick and putting a mark on the floor that Valerie knew from class.
It was draining the magic energy out of the space into the cast, sourcing power that he could use for something else.
As Valerie considered it, that would be an excellent way to break out of the dorm rooms, if she was willing to power it up that high.
He put a smaller cast on the side of her boot, and she felt the surge of power from the building flow into her wall casts holding the security at bay.
Shack nodded and she closed her eyes, lifting her thumb off of the wall and visualizing the hole where it would need to be to let Shack’s cast through. She opened her eyes and pointed with the wand, and a physical hole appeared. Someone took advantage, tossing in a burning rag full of herbs, but Shack’s cast landed, knocking nearly half of the men off of their feet. Valerie pulled the wand back to the side, and the hole in the bubble closed.
“Cover it,” Ethan said. He took a vial of oil out from under his shirt and poured it over the bag, but it didn’t appear to help anything.
He turned his face away, and Valerie’s cast faded.
“What is it?” Shack asked. Ethan shook his head.
There were more men behind them, when Valerie looked, waiting for her defensive cast to fail so that they could take her. The pressure on her was significant, even before the smoke had started to fill in around them, and her limbs began to feel weak.
She shook her head, trying to get her thoughts clear, and the world went bleary and confused.
She put a foot out and stepped on the bag, speaking to it in… nope, she still couldn’t identify any of the languages individually, but there was a decent mix there, and it flamed up high for a moment, then quit.
“I have to let this go,” she said, not sure if either Ethan or Shack could hear her. “To get all of the smoke out.”
She felt the bubbles giving all on their own, and she pushed back against it for another moment, then let her hand drop, falling to her knees in search of clean air.
Ethan’s cast was still working, though, and the power of the building swelled through her as she regained focus. She pointed the wand forward, pulling the defensive cast back into place, but over top of the men who had been behind them.
She reached for the spot on the wall where her handprint was, but she couldn’t reach it from the floor. The smoke swirled around her and she gritted her teeth, casting with language she didn’t know to pull it into the new bubble. She pushed herself up against the wall, putting her hand back on the handprint and reached under her shirt to pull out one of the casts she’d done for Mr. Tannis, the paralytic half of the stun spell and she threw it forward, hoping the defenses she’d cast on Ethan and Shack would hold up against it.
She couldn’t carry them, and she hadn’t even been there if Mr. Tannis had developed a full defense against it. There was no way she was going to be able to figure out how to get it off of them, other than it wearing off…
At the last moment, she regretted the cast, but it went off and there was nothing more to do about it.
Some
thing slammed into her and glanced off, hitting the wall and leaving a dent in the plaster the size of a wrecking ball. Ethan was in the middle of a cast, but Shack was still on the floor, coughing.
She went to him, helping him to his feet.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, and he shook his head as if to clear it.
“I don’t think so.”
“What did you do?” Ethan asked, coming to help Shack up. Valerie looked over at the group of men.
“Paralytic spell,” she said. “Temporary, the way I cast it. We need to keep moving.”
“Any idea where we’re going?” Ethan asked, and she shrugged.
“Where would you put it?”
“Could ask,” Shack said. Valerie shook her head. The men had stopped fighting with the paralysis and were working on putting together casts again. If she and the guys stood much longer, they were going to get hit. The bubble behind them was thinning against the persistent attacks from that group, too, though the smoke had slowed them down some.
“I can’t remember which way we came from,” Shack admitted, and Valerie pointed.
“That’s back, that’s forward.”
Ethan was the first to start walking again, but Valerie and Shack weren’t far behind. He cast at the men on the floor, a silencing spell from the sound of it, and they ran on, past cross-hallways.
“Stairs,” Ethan said over his shoulder. “We should find stairs. I bet they’ve got a basement.”
Valerie nodded.
“I bet it’s locked,” Shack said, stopping to put a cast on the wall. Valerie hopped on one foot to back up and see what it was, impressed at the barrier he put up with several simple symbols.
“Ethan can’t get across that one,” Shack said. “Don’t know how many light users they’ll have here who can.”
An alarm went off and the light changed. Ethan cursed under his breath.
They moved in against each other, and Shack nodded.
“Now, that’s a neat trick,” he said.
The light, some kind of black light, developed casts up and down the halls, the ceilings, the floors, and Valerie found her feet rooted to the carpet.
“None of us expected this to be easy, right?” Ethan asked, and Valerie nodded.
“It was too easy, so far,” she said. “Just need to get loose before they find us.”
Ethan reached into his shirt and took out a bottle. Valerie looked at it, frowning, then nodded.
“Brace yourselves,” she said. The pressure on the defensive magic she was wearing was intense, but all of the preventive casting appeared to be holding, so far.
“Are you sure she shouldn’t cast that one?” Shack asked, and Ethan nodded, looking at his feet and speaking a cast over them. He lifted them, one at a time, as though he was walking through deep mud, then he looked over at Shack.
“Hold her up, okay?”
“You want me to be the one who goes flying into the wall?” Shack asked, and Ethan gave him a genuine grateful smile. Before Valerie could protest that she was every bit as tough as Shack, Ethan dropped the glass on the floor, waiting just a beat for the fluid to begin to seep into the carpet, then slammed his hand down into the middle of it - glass and all - shouting the three-word trigger that Valerie had given him.
His accent was funny.
She didn’t know where it came from, or if it was right or wrong, but Valerie had no time to think about it. The shock wave that came off of the cast was more than her defensive magic could take, and she went flying into Shack who held her against his chest as he staggered into the wall. Valerie twisted her face to the side against a scorching heat, putting her arm up defensively, and a roaring flamefront went past, licking at her skin, her clothes, but not catching anything.
“Wow,” Shack breathed in the brief silence as the cast burnt itself out.
“Wow,” Ethan agreed, standing. “That hurts.”
“Blood magic,” Valerie breathed. She hadn’t done any blood magic. Something about it sort of sickened her, and her stomach queased as Ethan pulled fragments of glass out of his palm, but it was undoubtedly what had leveled-up the cast.
The grating siren overhead glitched and failed, and the lights flickered as the casts on the wall melted slightly.
The pressure was still there, layer upon layer of defensive magic designed to keep the three of them out, but it was less.
It wasn’t like the school, Valerie guessed, where Lady Harrington was in charge of every single person who came and went, and people actually only rarely came and left. This was an office building with people in and out all day, probably even some non-magic users like mail and package delivery and that kind of thing.
The defenses couldn’t be as immediate and as suffocating as they would have been at school.
Did they just expect that no one would be foolish enough to try, though?
They were just three students. The entire weight of the world should have descended on them by now.
Though.
The demon.
They were supposed to have a demon powering all of this, and he wasn’t here, theoretically. He was in New Orleans fighting with Samantha Angelsword and the rest of her superheroes.
This was a window for a reason.
“Are you okay?” Ethan asked her, looking at her face with concern.
“Just… Trying to make sure we don’t miss anything important,” she said. “We shouldn’t be able to do this, so we shouldn’t expect it’s working.”
“Even when it is?” he asked, motioning. “There’s a sign for stairs over there.”
She nodded.
“What day is it?” she asked.
“Saturday,” Shack said, and she pointed.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she asked. “They aren’t all even here.”
Shack shrugged.
“Would make sense,” he said. They went to the doorway and Ethan twisted his head around a key-card reader, trying to figure out if there was a way to fake it out.
“There’s got to be magic involved to this,” Valerie said. Shack nodded.
“Door?” he asked.
Valerie knocked next to the door.
“That’s hollow,” she said.
“Don’t blow up the door, blow up the wall next to it?” Shack asked. “I like it.”
Valerie nodded.
She might have been able to even just put a foot through it - Susan had often told her about how people look at walls and see something that’s impermeable, and so people fail to reinforce it and make it impermeable - but she took out a marking stick and drew a pattern there, putting her hand to it as the mark dried and pushing. The wall turned to dust and her hand went through the next layer as well as though it hadn’t been there.
Ethan stopped messing with the key-card scanner and Valerie started pulling out sections of drywall to expose the wooden beams behind it.
The first hole she’d generated was too close to the door, and not even she would have been able to squeeze through, but the drywall was still crumbly for several feet along, and she found the next gap, which was wide enough for all three of them to make it through.
They found themselves on a stairway landing, and Valerie looked over the railing, counting two floors down and three up.
“We agree that we’re going down?” she asked, and Shack and Ethan nodded.
“Might not be able to get back out here,” Shack said, looking at the hole. “That’s easy to block off or guard.”
Valerie nodded.
“We’ll figure it out later,” she said. Shack shrugged and looked at Ethan.
“You good to go?”
“Why?” Ethan asked.
Valerie looked over at him and frowned.
Ethan was leaning against the wall with his arm across his stomach.
“What happened?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Shack had had a foot out over the stairs, b
ut he turned back, now.
“Stand up straight, man,” he said, and Ethan shook his head.
“I don’t know what you’re…”
He paused, realizing his posture.
He shook his head.
“Something’s wrong,” he said, and Valerie nodded.
“Clearly,” she answered, going to put her hands on his shoulders.
The moment of touch brought on a roaring, fiery pain in her stomach that almost dropped her onto the floor.
“Ethan,” she said. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really feel it, but there’s something there…”
He twisted his head to the side, then tipped harder against the wall.
“Come on, man,” Shack said. “Don’t give up on us here.”
“Let me look, I guess,” Valerie said, wishing Sasha was here. She pulled his arm away from his stomach, but there wasn’t anything to see.
“Magic healing is about feel,” Shack said, and she nodded, putting her palm flat against Ethan’s stomach there where he’d been protecting it.
Ethan groaned, his eyes going wide, and Valerie felt where something had punctured through the defensive magic she’d set on him.
“Are you bleeding?” she asked, and he shook his head.
“I don’t even feel it,” he said.
“Except that you do,” Shack said. “He’s right. Something’s got him, and you’ve got to get it unhooked before he can go any further. He’ll kill himself, trying to go down the stairs with us, I bet.”
Valerie shook her head, going through what was prepped, what she was carrying.
“I know how to get rid of everything on you,” she said. “But then you’d be defenseless. I can’t do that.”
“You have to,” Shack said. “Or else he stays here and the minute someone finds that hole and knows we came through there, they’re going to catch him and we’re going to have to come back to rescue him, next.”
“But what if it kills him?” Valerie asked. “I don’t know what passive magic they’ve got active right now, what the defensive magic is doing.”