I struck him hard enough to crack his defense, not with a spell but with my joined fists, and then took him down like a hungry vamp.Except I wasn’t feeding.I was tearing and rending and shredding—with my teeth, my good old human teeth—and clawing with human hands that were somehow far, far stronger than they should have been, even with my Were lending me strength.
It was all over in seconds, and I looked up, a blood-covered savage with wolf eyes and a gory mouth, and it was enough to get even a dark mage’s attention.The nearest one’s eyes widened in terror, and he tried to break and run, which was completely the wrong move.That activated my wolf’s prey drive, which was already supercharged, and we leaped, taking him down by the neck like a rabbit, and shaking him until I heard a crack that told me whatever this guy was on would no longer help him.
Fortunately, that had sent us back to the floor, because the next second, Sophie, who had been standing in front of the attacking mages, letting her power absorb their spells, got into the fight.She sent everything she’d taken in, dozens and dozens of hexes, jinxes, and nasty curses, back at them at once, hurling a barrage as fierce as a tornado.It screamed through the air overhead like a hundred banshees, slicing one mage in two, immolating another, and sending several more flying toward the far wall of the room, where it took out the ward holding up the ceiling in that area.
That caused an avalanche of what looked like a mountain’s worth of dirt, falling from the wall and ceiling both, cascading over tables, burying tents, and spilling across the floor.It covered a quarter of the entire space, sending dust billowing everywhere.And knocked down several of the plywood bars that littered the market and provided a lot of the light, plunging that part of the room into gloom when the cheerful, Christmas-light-draped façades winked out.
The mages who hadn’t been obliterated by their own spells hit the floor, looking more than a little freaked out.Apparently, they hadn’t been expecting that.But they didn’t stay there for long, because someonehadtrained them.
But not well enough.
Self-preservation took over, and rather than regrouping to fight us while Sophie’s reserve was spent, they decided to break and run.Keenly aware, as we all suddenly were, that having a magical battle in what was essentially an unstable cave was not the best plan.But they’d forgotten something.
Or, to be more precise, someone.
Quiet little Kimmie had gotten behind them, too, skirting the battle unobserved in the midst of the chaos, and coming up beside me.And unlike the freaked-out mage, she didn’t seem weirded out by my current state.She didn’t seem worried about much at all as she held out a hand.
“Spell.”
“What?”I stared at her, gore dripping from my mouth onto the floor below.
“Nasty one.Now.”
I didn’t fully understand what she meant, but we had a panicked bunch of dark mages scrambling back to their feet and preparing to run us down, as we were now in front of the only passage out of there that wasn’t blocked by avalanches or zombie battles, so I had no time to ask.I produced said spell, a vicious acid bomb from Gerald’s stash, because I was too rattled to conjure up anything.And I guessed it was good enough.
“Thank you,” Kimmie said, delicately taking the small orb.
Which, a second later, had become ten small orbs, hovering in the air in front of her, and then twenty.Because Kimmie was a multiplier, wasn’t she?One who sent the barrage at the scrambling mages with a slight flick of her hand.
“Another,” she said, as their shields took the pounding of what was basically a wave of acid suddenly crashing over them.
But they did take it, as their protection, unbelievably, held.So I handed her a Pile Driver, capable of delivering a shock specifically designed to compromise shields.But when shields were already compromised, it did something else.
Namely that, I thought, as a hailstorm of shuddering blows struck hard on the heels of the acid wave, and two mages stopped, vibrated madly for a second, and then blew apart as if they’d swallowed grenades.
The meaty chunks pelted us as well as the remaining mages, who were absolutely panicked now.Especially when Dimas, who didn’t have anybody left to shield, dropped his own protection and used his power to compromise theirs, instead.The remaining shields went down, and the mages screamed in terror, trying to flee, slamming into each other, and viciously attacking everything that moved, because there was nowhere to go.
And damn, I realized.We’d committed the cardinal sin, one Sun-Tzu warned about in hisArt of War: “When you surround an army, leave an outlet free.Do not press a desperate foe too hard.”But we had the mages surrounded, and there were eight still on their feet, which, with their strength, was more like three times that number, not counting the bastard who had Jace.
And he hadn’t been standing idly by.Out of the hall behind us thundered what had to be a hundred reinforcements, and they weren’t ours.They were Black Circle, drawn from the other markets down here at a guess, where they’d probably been rounding up even more people, until sent for when the zombie battle broke out.
They arrived at the worst possible time, and not just for us, but for Jace.Because he wasn’t in the desperate knot of men fighting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by burning debris, smoke, blood, and meat.He was somewhere else, but I didn’t know where, because the mage holding him had disappeared.
But I knew he was here somewhere; I heard Jace whimper as the knife slid in a little more because of the mage’s agitation, just a tiny sound.Felt it when his heart hammered in his chest in time to my own.Tasted his fear and pain and anger and humiliation in the air.
It was all as clear as if it were happening to me.And suddenly, the vicious spells being flung around, the magical snares catching Caleb and throwing him to the ground, the screams from Dimas to “get behind me, get behind me now!”all faded into the thunderous beat of my heart.To the point that the rest of the room practically whited out, as I felt Jace being dragged forcibly back across the space, while some paralytic rendered him helpless.
Felt him being taken from me, just as his brother had been.
A sound clawed its way out of my throat suddenly, not a howl but a soul-deep cry of pain, fear, and fury, so loud and so long that it resonated in the room’s excellent acoustics like thunder.
Abruptly, there was almost silence in the midst of the battle, a pause as there had been when the avalanche happened.A hundred battling pairs looked up, each face as startled as the last, and the reinforcements barreling this way broke stride, staring around as the cry resonated and came back at them from all directions, leaving them unsure where it had come from and what it meant.For a second, there was only the sound of crackling fire and thethud, thud, thudof dismembered zombie parts slapping the floor as the room held its breath.
And then a lone voice answered, a distant howl from the very edge of my hearing, what had to be close to a mile away.It was thin on the air, a faint, reedy sound, but beautiful nonetheless, like a wolf glimpsing the last ray of sunlight before darkness swallowed the Earth.And soon, it wasn’t alone.
More and more voices took up the song, chiming in from all corners of the room and beyond, far beyond.Until it was a chorus, like a pack released under a full moon, only they weren’t my pack.But they were answering nonetheless, even those who had almost escaped and now hesitated, turned back, came running.
Unearthly howls echoed around the space, raising the hair on my arms with the power behind those voices.Clan power, although none of them were clan anymore, but they had the same blood in their veins, the same heritage, the samemagic.And it was everywhere now, dozens and then hundreds of cries, wild, eerie, and resounding from as far as my voice could reach.
