Maker

Chapter: 9-2

The tension returned.

There had to be another room below us. Shifting Theresa onto my hip, I went to the door again and looked out. I was looking out on the main area again.

The first thing to catch my eye was one of the hulk-sized doormen dragging his stabbed, bloody form towards the truck. I didn’t know what he was trying to do, but I assumed I wouldn’t like it and tried to aim. I shot at him twice and missed. I’d never practiced shooting bad guys while carrying children. One of my bullets punctured the gas tank, and with the worst of luck, a tracer round ignited the fuel. Now the place was on fire inside as well, and the only stairs down were covered in flames. On the bright side that also took care of the doorman.

I jumped over the railing holding Zora, the big man, and both kids. It strained my coat and we landed hard, but all five of us were ok. My brain was working overtime thinking of how to get five people out of here alive. I handed Theresa off to Zora. She moaned every time she was jostled, but didn’t wake up.

The room under the summoning room was actually five smaller rooms. Obviously, it was the administrative offices of whatever used to be here. One of the rooms still had a cubicle in the corner. I counted three dead bodies before we came across a room with a man still alive.

He was wearing jeans and the same dark cotton hoodie all the guards on the ramparts were wearing. He was trying to put pressure on a bloody mess that used to be his left leg. He saw us enter and his eyes went wide. “No please. I surrender—”

Zora smiled. “Aww how cute. He surrenders.” She dropped all three people she’d been holding, stabbed him in the throat, and was back in time to catch them. The scream he took a breath for came out as a pathetic sounding gurgle instead.

Zora was a surgeon with her katana. She’d pierced his trachea, esophagus, and carotid artery—and I knew she’d done it just the right way on purpose. The only question was whether he would drown in his own blood as it filled his lungs, or bleed out, desperately trying to swallow it all. A shot to the heart would kill someone in about ten seconds. It would take him two or three minutes to die.

“That’s just cruel. Finish him.”

“What? Why?!” Zora said scrunching up her face and tilting her head to one side. Honestly, I wondered the same thing. The priority was getting the hell out of the burning building, not being nice to the people who would happily kill us.

“I said finish him.” The confused look never left her face, but after a stab through the heart, he was gone.

We moved on to the last room where we found the blonde bombshell trying to roll an old refrigerator that looked like it was from the fifties. She wouldn’t be in a burning building screwing around unless that fridge was important. There was something in it.

She screamed something and threw fire at my head. I rolled. The room wasn’t big. I felt the heat of the flames as they sailed over me. I came up on my feet not far from her and threw a handful of dust at her face. It didn’t stop her, it just bought me a second.

She coughed right before my fist hit her and ruined those supermodel features. Her head went back to the wall and I put more effort in it, smashing her skull between my fist and the concrete. I felt bone crack under the blow. Wizards often made the mistake of being so dependent on magic that they couldn’t fight a lick without it. Bombshell had made that mistake; I hadn’t. There was shock on her face as she fell.

I grabbed her head, twisting up with a violent jerk, and snapped her neck. I let the twitching body drop and went to the fridge with my fork. I could only hope she’d been guarding something important.

Zora came in with her back to me, sword raised in one hand and watching the door. She’d somehow managed to get both children under one arm and the man in a fireman’s carry. It looked precarious.

“So warm-blooded; you should unfinish her,” she giggled.

“Yes,” I said, inspecting the fridge. “That’s the proper thing rather than leaving enemies alive to come back and trouble us.”

“Well, you aren’t gonna win any feminist points that way,” she said with a smirk.

“I treated her as an equal. What more do you want?” The fridge had a simple padlock on it with a wire running from it into the fridge. I suspected someone had rigged it to explode if anyone opened the door. I knelt down to one side and started digging at the metal. “Please don’t fail.” I chanted as the fork dug a hole in the side.

“Maker.” Zora coughed. That was the great thing about fire. It didn’t have to burn you to kill you. We could suffocate as the fire stole away oxygen or by breathing poisons released into the air from things that were never meant to be burned.

I decided the best course was to waste even more oxygen. “Please don’t fail. Please don’t fail.” I carefully moved the big hole of the refrigerator to the floor and saw my pack inside. I heard a scream of joy that probably came from me as I grabbed it.

I saw papers underneath. I grabbed those too. There was also some money, a small blue figure, more papers, a weird looking small disk, and several bags of what looked like blood. Everything in the safe went into my mundane satchel. The only things that didn’t were the four sticks of dynamite and blasting cap duct taped to the inside of the door.

Glad I’d stopped to look.

“Maker!” Zora screamed. I looked up to see the fire getting to the door. Slightly more alarming was the short, balding man who now had only one arm. His sleeve was mostly gone as well, and he was covered in blood up to the shoulder. The stump had a strip of cloth cinched down tight, forming a tourniquet.

And here I had kinda hoped he was off somewhere bleeding to death. Instead, he was walking cautiously towards us through the flames. He looked like a predator searching for an opening.

Zora had her sword raised in a defensive stance. Not much offense to be done when carrying three people. Despite the fact that she’d taken off his arm, we were all sitting ducks.

Suddenly, I realized these guys had no idea how weak I was. They didn’t know a thing about me except that I had made an extra dimensional space—which I admit is pretty complicated. Like long division, there are a lot of easy steps, but they had to be done in the right order, or you ended up with nonsense. They might not know that either.

Sure, I’d used grenades and not magic, but that could be chalked up to not wanting to break one of Merlin’s laws. Also, they know that many of their people got hurt when they hit me last night. Bombshell was still twitching behind me as her body came to grips with brain signals that made no sense. He had sized up the situation and was being wary. I would do the same in his position.

That hesitation was all I needed. “Digger,” I growled, and threw the satchel in the air. A wand appeared in my hand: a simple gnarled root, slightly thicker than a finger, and about a foot long. It was a simple looking wand, yet it was the most powerful thing in my pack that I ever dared to use.

I pointed it at the wall behind us, and an eight by eight section of concrete imploded and went into the tiny stick. In the same fluid motion, I brought it forward. Zora was already blurring past me at unnatural speed. Even while carrying a man twice her weight and two kids, she made vampires look slow. She caught the pack, slung it over a shoulder without the slightest sign of slowing down.

That left me with the bald man. We were standing in a burning building; he was on the other side of the room and I still felt the cold from his spell. It dwarfed anything I could do. “Ignus Sayunto Fausto!” the man screamed. At the same time, I yelled

“Expel!” A ton of stone and rocks and dirt flew at him as fire the size and ferocity of a demon tiger came for me. They met somewhere on his half of the room, and I saw him get blown back just before I was.

The whole world went white.

* * *

“That sucked,” I groaned when I came to. I was outside, face down on some grass. Zora was kicking my leg. I shook my head a few times and got up to my knees. The tall figure that had been on the center of the stage doing all the talking was at the far corner of the building and stalking towards us. This one was not being cautious. He had a brisk, confident stride. He wasn’t sizing us up; he was coming to kill us.

I was on my feet so fast I had to shake off a little dizziness.

“OOOOOOO,” bellowed the trapped god in my head. Dammit, I didn’t have time to be dealing with headaches.

I gripped my wand in one hand and the fork in the other. I must’ve looked like an i***t. Facing down a crew of ‘locks with an old plastic fork and a twig.

“Go,” I whispered.

“I’m not leaving you,” she fired back.

“This isn’t a movie! I’m not fighting. I’m running away.” I said, pretending to dig in the satchel. “Kitty Pride. Kitty Pride.” I said. The two bottles of black liquid appeared in my hand in less than a second. Man that felt good. I handed her one, and she drank. The man had stopped moving closer. Instead, he stood not far away looking like he was confused. “If I get caught, you can rescue me. If we both get caught, we’re screwed. Now, go!”

Zora was a rare person. When things got emotionally charged, she had the ability to listen to reason. In my experience, that was a rare thing. She sheathed her sword with a man on one shoulder and two kids under the other.

“Hit and away,” she whispered. And then she was gone. Not even a rustle of wind to show her passing. The shadow potions were literally made for her; I’d come up with them when I was experimenting ways to make her even faster. That was before she came into her own as a mage and started getting insanely fast on her own. One shot of shadow potion turned her from kinetomancer into the flash. She was forced to have her bubble up, otherwise she couldn’t see things and process them in time.

I drank mine and shoved the glass bottle into a cargo pocket. “Dr. Blackstar, I presume. Where’s my pack?” The man smiled and lowered the hood. His hair was salt-n-pepper at the wings. His moustache grew down into a neatly trimmed goatee, which was also starting in on the grey. He reminded me of Ras Al’gol from the Batman cartoons.

“I’m assuming she’s your apprentice. Very talented—you must be proud.”

“Where’s. My. Pack,” I growled. The anger was real, and the fear was real. I just had to keep him talking long enough to find an opening to escape.

“I’m afraid, my new friend, that it is there,” he said, gesturing to the building. The wand was drawing in rocks and dirt as we circled each other. I’d crush him under a ton of rubble, throw some spells on the run, and bail. It could be done. “Do not worry. You will join me. I will take you and give you all you need to make another, and all it contained. We will rule, you and I.”