CHAPTER 4
Nate Garrett
Nate, Nate, are you okay?”
I looked up at the face of Grayson, who was kneeling over me, an expression of concern on his face. Speckles of blood sat in his trimmed white beard, and judging from the lack of bleeding anywhere I could see on his face or bald head, I was sure the blood didn’t belong to him.
“What happened?” I asked. The last I remembered was hearing gunshots and explosions before I was smashed into a brick wall.
“You tried to get up, fell back down again, and blacked out for a few seconds. You suffered a fairly serious wallop to the back of your skull, and you’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”
“It was like every piece of magical power was leaving his body at the same time.” I rolled onto my front and got back to a kneeling position. “Never seen anything like it.”
I looked over at the fighting, which continued outside.
“This is bad,” I said, grabbing hold of the remains of the reception desk and hoisting myself up.
“You should not be walking,” Grayson said. “Or moving in any way. You’re lucky you don’t have a fractured skull.”
“It’s too dense to fracture,” I said with a smile.
“You should know there’s blood over your face, so you smiling is pretty damn awful.”
I stopped smiling. “Sorry.” My head continued to swim for a few seconds, and I wondered why my magic wasn’t doing more to heal me. I looked down at my wrist and found that the bracelet was partially broken.
“Help me outside,” I told Grayson.
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Not enough magic in here to heal me. I need to get outside to do it.”
“People are trying to kill you out there.”
“Me and everyone else. Beggars can’t be choosers, and probably other useful sayings.”
Grayson put my arm around his neck. “You hit your head again and you’re going to sound like Mordred.”
“Nah, I’ll need someone to shoot me in the head first.”
“There are people with guns outside. I’m sure they’ll help you.”
“How many are hurt?”
“We don’t know.” The pain in Grayson’s voice was easy to hear even in my less-than-ideal state. “The fighting is still happening.”
As we made our way through the room toward the exterior doors, several people who worked alongside Grayson as doctors and nurses helped the dozens of wounded.
“You need to get the security shut off,” I told Grayson. “Too many people in here don’t have the power to heal properly. The bracelets don’t let enough power through.”
Grayson barked an order to a nearby nurse, who ran off to do as he was told.
“You must be a fun boss to work for,” I said, and swayed slightly as we reached the exit.
“There’s a time for shouting, Nate.”
I took two steps outside of the building and felt my magic wash over me, filling me, healing me. Grayson let go of me, and I dropped to my knees.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “Body is healing. It uses a lot of power, but I had some souls stored up.”
“Won’t that leave you vulnerable?”
I noticed he didn’t ask who the souls had belonged to, nor how I’d come across them. At one point the idea of using my necromancy to take someone’s soul to use as a makeshift battery for my magic would have been difficult to imagine, but now . . . well, now times were different. I didn’t take souls lightly—it came with the unwanted gifts of living that person’s life, of seeing every awful thing they’d ever taken part in. But sometimes that was necessary, and using my necromancy to power my magic was considerably more powerful than using my magic alone.
I looked around the chaos-strewn parking area where Tommy and his people were fighting for their lives. Several dead enemies lay on the ground, most missing parts of their bodies . . . fighting against a werewolf of Tommy’s caliber often left his opponent with fewer limbs than when they’d started.
“Nate,” Grayson said as I got back to my feet, feeling a lot more like my old self. “You’re going to be vulnerable without a soul to boost your power.”
Gray glyphs ignited over the backs of my hands and arms. “I won’t be for long.”
Grayson looked back into the reception area. “I need to go.”
“Help people. I’ll be fine.” I turned to face the battle and heard the war cry of one of the assailants as he ran toward me, a machete raised high above his head.
I flicked my hands toward him, and the shadows closest to him tore out of the ground, enveloping him as he screamed in fear. Several of the attackers closest to me stopped for a moment, and I noticed the fear on their faces. “I’ll be right back for the rest of you,” I told them, and sank into the shadows beneath my feet.
I ended up in my shadow realm. Every sorcerer who could use shadow magic had their own personal realm which they were able to move into and out of with ease. Once in the realm, I knew where nearby shadows back on the Earth realm were, and could move between them easily—essentially allowing me to teleport between shadows. Unfortunately it wore me out quickly, so I wasn’t able to do it for long distances, but it was useful in a pinch.
Also, as my would-be attacker discovered, I was able to drag people who couldn’t use magic into the shadow realm. He threw the machete at me, but the shadows around me leapt up, picking it out of the air where it vanished into the darkness around us.
“You can’t hurt me here,” I told him. I motioned to the tiny pockets of light, the locations of the Earth-realm shadows. The closest ray of light moved toward us in an instant. “That’s your way out.”
The man was terrified and clearly wanted out of the predicament I’d placed him in.
“Who sent you?” I asked.
“My Liege,” he said.
“Why are you here?”
“My Liege,” he snapped, seemingly angry.
“Is that all you can say?”
“My Liege, My Liege, My Liege!” He screamed the last word and sank to his knees. “My Liege, My Liege, My Liege.”
I sighed. “Someone broke your mind.”
He looked up at me.
“You were sent here to die. If you were ever captured, your mind would snap like a twig; you’d be able to say nothing but whatever they needed you to say. Blood magic did this. Very powerful blood magic.” I walked over to him and crouched. “I’m going to undo your shirt. I need to see if you have any marks.”
He tore his shirt open, the buttons making no sound as they hit the floor. A large blood-magic curse mark sat on his chest. It was different than the marks I’d seen on the man who had exploded in the reception area. The attacker kneeling beside me was never meant to take his own life. He hadn’t been a sorcerer, so had been given a different, but no less fatal, job.
I stood and pulled up my T-shirt. “Do you see the mark on my stomach?”
The man looked up and nodded as he saw the dark mark. I’d lost one a year ago, which had given me a further boost in magical power. Five down, two to go. The last mark was invisible and had been placed on my mind to ensure I remembered nothing of the first eight years of my life. I hadn’t even known of the final mark’s existence until a few years ago, and its discovery was still somewhat of a sore point.
“Someone put that mark there, and more like them. Someone cast a blood-magic curse on me so powerful hundreds had to die to fuel it. Do you remember anything about the person who did this to you?”
He shook his head. “My Liege, My Liege.” He tried to stop himself from saying it a third time. “My Liege.” He struck the floor beside him.
“You were told to come here, to kill and hurt, and in return you’d be given something. Power, money?”
He shook his head.
“Freedom?”
He looked up at me and nodded slightly.
“Freedom from what, though? You were in someone’s servitude?”
He shook his head.
“A prisoner?”
A nod.
I walked away as sounds began to gather in the darkness around us.
“It’s nothing to fear,” I told the man.
That was a lie, and it was an exceptionally big one. Somewhere out in the darkness was a wraith. All sorcerers who used shadow magic had one. They fed on anyone sent to the shadow realm. While I was here, the man was safe, but the second I left, the wraith would pounce, devouring the man to make me stronger.
“Ordinarily I might take your soul and see the information I need, but with your mind broken, I’m unlikely to see anything useful.”
The man stared at me.
“You shouldn’t have come here. You shouldn’t have tried to kill my friends. Did you see this My Liege person?”
He nodded.
“Just one person?”
He nodded again.
“A man?”
Another nod.
“Did you see his face?”
He shook his head.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t have believed someone in his position, but he appeared to be so angry about his brain being fractured by the blood-magic curse that I was certain he was being honest. The expression on his face told me that he knew he’d been betrayed. Yet I felt little sympathy for him. He’d come here to kill and maim innocent people.
I took a step toward the light. “Thank you for the information. I’m going to find this My Liege character, and I’m going to kill him.”
The man laughed and started shaking his head.
“Enjoy the last seconds of your life,” I told him, and stepped into the light, vanishing from the shadow realm and reappearing in the shadows of an overturned car.
The fighting had continued to rage while I was in the shadow realm, with many of the attackers lying dead on the floor. The group I’d been with in Tommy’s office were fighting their own battles all around me. A second truck had arrived, increasing the number of attackers. But Tommy’s people outnumbered those who would hurt them by a considerable margin. The fight wouldn’t take long. I got the impression that wasn’t the point.
One of the attackers aimed a gun in my direction, and a slither of shadow jumped out at him, knocking the gun aside and dragging him down into the shadow realm. I wasn’t sure how many the wraith could feed on at once, but I knew having the boost of two people was better than one. A few seconds later the familiar tingle of power spread through my body, followed closely by a second one. The two men were now gone forever; no traces of them would ever be discovered. I felt no horror or unpleasantness at that thought. Their fates were sealed the second they decided to come after the people I cared about.
A blast of air magic threw another attacker into a car near where Diana stood. She grabbed him with one massive, paw-like hand and punched him in the chest so hard that I heard bones snapping. She released him, and he fell to the floor like a bag of cement. She placed a foot on his head and pushed down, the noise forcing me to look away. Death and blood were staples of my world, but seeing a man’s head crushed like a grape was a step over even my own considerably high threshold of violence.
It didn’t take long until the last of the attackers were mopped up, but as I looked around to find Tommy I heard a roar behind me. I turned as two huge cave trolls tore through the back of one of the two trucks, flinging pieces of metal about and causing several people to dive for cover.
“Where did they come from?” Zamek asked from beside me. He was covered in blood, and the blades of his two axes were drenched in it.
“We’ve got the one on the left,” I shouted to Diana, and tore off toward the smaller of the two cave trolls, although “smaller” is a relative term. It was still nearly eight feet tall and about the width of a tank—which, considering the amount of metal armor that adorned its torso, wasn’t that far off.
Cave trolls are mean and nasty, and enjoy murdering people so that they can feast on their remains. They can also take an incredible amount of punishment before going down. The day wasn’t going to be a fun one.
“I’ve killed cave trolls before,” Zamek told me as we stopped beside a car close to the troll. “We need to get above it. They have a weak spot just behind the neck. If you can keep it occupied, I can get up there.”
“I think I can do that.” I stepped out from behind the car and threw a ball of fire at the troll’s head. It roared in anger and took a ground-shaking step toward me. “That’s right, you big bastard. Come fight me.”
It took another step and roared again, the stink of decay on its breath now able to reach me. I ran to the side, forcing the troll to turn its back on Zamek. I walked back, throwing the occasional ball of fire at the troll to keep the attention on me while Zamek climbed on top of a nearby van and launched himself toward the troll.
For a second I thought that Zamek was going to make it, but the troll must have sensed the dwarf, as it moved quicker than I thought a troll could move, swatting Zamek out of the air and sending him crashing into a nearby wall. The troll turned back to me with rage in its eyes.
Dozens of shadows tore out of the ground, wrapping themselves around the troll, who roared in defiance and continued to walk toward me. I tried wrapping the shadows tighter and tighter, but with every step he made, one of the shadows snapped, forcing me to re-create it. My magic was not an infinite source of power, and even with the boost I’d had from the wraith, I wouldn’t be able to keep up the newly re-formed shadows indefinitely.
I removed the shadows in one go, causing the troll to stagger forward, where I hit it with a blast of air powerful enough to knock the off-balance troll to the ground with an almighty crash. I ran toward the troll, my fist wrapped in dense air, and struck the beast in the side of the head, darting aside a moment later to avoid the swipe of its arm.
The troll climbed back to its feet, and I readied a sphere of spinning air in the palm of one hand, using my fingers to spin the ball faster and faster, until it was a blur of magical power. Only then did I pour my fire magic into the sphere, mixing it with the air and creating a ball of pure magical lightning. It crackled, and air around my hand became superheated as the sphere moved at an incredible speed.
When the troll was up on one knee, I sprinted forward, dodging the poorly swung punch, and drove the sphere into the troll’s chest, where I released the magic it contained. The metal armor that adorned its body did nothing to stop the furious power I’d unleashed. But when it was all over and the magic had dissipated, the troll remained on its feet, albeit unsteadily.
“What do I have to do to kill you?” I said, feeling frustrated. If I used all the magic at my disposal, I was likely to kill the troll but could possibly hurt people who were already injured and being tended to by Grayson’s team of medics.
I cracked my knuckles and raised a hand to the heavens as the clouds above me darkened. There was a clap of thunder. I was about to call down real lightning and mix it with my own magic, creating a power so vast that it caused me physical pain to do it, when Tommy smashed into the troll, taking the creature off its feet. Tommy was still in his werebeast form, and while he was shorter and considerably less bulky than the troll, he was also faster and probably not far off in terms of strength.
The troll tried to push Tommy away, but Tommy avoided the creature’s massive hands and launched himself up at its head, sinking his razor-sharp claws into the flesh and skin of the troll. For a second I thought that Tommy was going to try and rip the creature’s face off, but with a howl born of rage and anger, he tore the troll’s head clean off its shoulders, ripping the skull in two. Tommy breathed heavily for several seconds, and for just a moment I thought the beast had finally won. I wondered whether or not my best friend was still in control.
“Tommy,” I said, using my air magic to carry my words. I didn’t want to get too close. If the beast inside of Tommy had indeed won out, he would try to kill me just as quickly as he’d killed the troll.
“I’m okay,” Tommy said softly without looking back at me. He dropped the halves of the troll’s head onto the ground, and they made an awful wet sound. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anything like what Tommy had done. I’d certainly never seen a werewolf tear a troll’s head in half before. I didn’t even know that could happen.
I looked over at where I’d last seen the other troll and noticed the huge spikes of ice sticking out of its torso. Olivia was not a woman to piss off if you liked the idea of remaining in one piece. She looked over at me and nodded, and I made a motion toward Tommy. She looked his way and ran toward him. I took a step away and went to check on Zamek.
I found him sitting on the ground next to a large hole in the wall. He was rubbing his head and cursing a lot in dwarven. I’m not entirely sure that any species I’d ever met was as good at cursing and swearing as dwarves were. It was as if it was an intrinsic part of who they were as a people. Zamek didn’t do it often, but he certainly made it count when he did.
“You okay?” I asked him as he got to his feet.
“Bastard troll.”
“It’s dead.”
“Good.” He looked past me. “Tommy kill it?”
I glanced over at my friend and found Olivia beside him. “Yep.”
“He trying to control the beast inside of him?”
“That’s my guess, yes.”
“Never piss off a were of any kind. That’s my mantra for getting through life. I forget that he’s not even a millennium old.”
“He’ll be fine.”
Zamek nodded. “I know.” He looked around at the bodies that littered the ground. “A lot of bad guys died here today.”
It was my turn to nod, but I didn’t take my eyes off Tommy and Olivia. It wasn’t that I thought Tommy’s beast—something all weres had inside of them, ready to take control and kill with impunity—would suddenly cause Tommy to snap and kill Olivia. I knew him better than that. But I wanted to make sure he was okay. Tommy was rarely so emotional that his beast had any chance of being set free, but an attack on those he cared about—employees and friends alike—was always going to cause emotions to run high.
I walked toward Tommy, who changed back into his human form. His naked body was covered in the blood of those who had fought him and died. He looked down at himself and sighed.
“I’m sorry,” he said to me as I got close enough to hear him.
“For what?”
“I should have guessed this would happen.”
“Don’t be daft,” Zamek said from beside me. “You can’t guess that crazed assholes were going to try and kill us all.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened,” I said, fully aware of the shock on people’s faces, as they waited for me to explain what I meant.
I was about to say more when a black car came toward us. We all readied for more fighting, until I realized it was a Mercedes S-Class AMG—one of my cars. I motioned for people to stand down as the car screeched to a halt, the driver-side door opening before it had fully stopped. Selene stepped out, her clothes singed and her arms and face covered with soot. She ran around the front of the car, and then I noticed the blood.
I ran toward the car, getting there as Selene opened the passenger-side door and brought Remy out in her arms. “Helios attacked,” she said to me. “Remy . . . Remy . . . he . . . he . . .” She looked down at the broken body of our friend. “He saved my life.”
Remy’s chest moved slightly, and I turned back to the crowd and spotted Grayson running toward us.
“Lay him on the ground,” the doctor demanded, and Selene did as she was told.
“What happened?” Grayson asked. “What did Helios do?”
“Helios arrived, and I went outside to talk to him. He attacked me, almost killed me.” Selene sounded shocked that her brother would ever do such a thing. “Remy attacked him, but Helios stabbed him in the stomach and hit him so hard I think it broke most of the bones in his chest. I heard them snap. Helios blew up your house, Nate.”
“Will Remy live?” I asked. Remy had at last count nine lives left from the original twelve witches who had cursed him. If he died, Remy would just come back, minus one life.
“Remy’s healing is similar to a human’s,” Grayson said. “This will take him months to heal from, if not longer.” He removed a knife from his belt and passed it to me.
I knelt beside Remy. “You there?” I asked.
Remy opened one eye, the other too swollen. “Hurts,” he managed, although the pain to even say one word was etched on his face.
“You know what I have to do, yes?”
Remy made the tiniest of nods.
“You’re going to kill him?” Selene asked.
“Oh, you don’t know about Remy’s power?” Diana said. “He’ll be back in a few minutes if he dies.”
“I thought he was going to die. Like, for good. I cried over his broken body.”
I placed the tip of the knife against Remy’s chest and pushed, puncturing his heart and killing him almost instantly. I sat back on the ground and rubbed my eyes.
“You okay?” Tommy asked me, placing a hand on my shoulder. Thankfully someone had given him a pair of shorts to wear.
“I know he’ll come back, but I still had to take his life. It’s not exactly a fun thing to do.”
A few minutes later Remy coughed and rolled onto his side, spitting blood onto the floor. “That fucking hurt,” he snapped. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fucking, fucker, piece of goddamn shitting fuckhead.”
“You done?” Grayson asked, getting to his feet.
“Cock biscuit.” Remy sat up. “Now I’m done.”
Selene hugged him. “You saved my life. Thank you for that.”
Remy shrugged and got to his feet. “Aw shucks, I’m just a great person all round.”
Diana laughed, placing a hand over her mouth to stop it.
“You genuinely think Helios would have killed you?” I asked Selene.
She nodded. “I saw nothing but hate in his eyes. He said he was going to leave you a message. And then he blew up your house.”
“This can all wait,” Grayson said. “Right now we have people to help. I need all of you to pitch in.”
“Okay, people,” Tommy said. “Let’s help the injured and make sure any of these assholes who aren’t dead aren’t in a position to cause more harm.”
“If you find any of them able to talk, I’d like to have a few words,” Olivia told us all.
“I don’t think you’re going to be that lucky,” I told her. “These people were sent here with one purpose.”
“To kill us all?” Zamek asked.
I shook my head. “They were sent here to die.”