“Stop!” she called out quickly. “Don’t go down there yet, or you’ll be trapped like Connor and the rest of them. I need to break the rune first.”
The three alpha werewolves stared at her like she was speaking a foreign language. Which, from their perspective, she probably was. Instead of trying to explain it, Kat reached out with her senses and searched for the flow of magic through the rune on the wall.
She grimaced the moment she encountered the energy powering the twisted protection spell. In its raw form, magic was clean and pure, kind of like a crystal-clear waterfall running down a mountain stream. But the stuff she was touching now felt oily, leaving a bitter tingle in her mouth. Like she was chewing on aluminum foil.
Not that the magic itself was actually repugnant, of course. That couldn’t happen. Magic simply existed. It wasn’t good or evil. But the people who used magic could sure as hell be good or evil. And they could have intent for the magic that would be construed as good or evil, too. That’s what Kat felt in the rune spell. It was put there with the intent of trapping and killing people. That kind of act could taint the magic around it for a long time, the same way that dumping a barrel of toxic waste in a clean, pure stream could contaminate it for decades.
She closed her eyes, letting herself see the tainted magic with her heightened senses. It ran all over the building like greasy spiderwebs but was concentrated most heavily over the doors at the bottom of the stairs. The web practically pulsed with the magic they drew on from all across the local area. If she wasn’t mistaken, quite a lot of the magic currently powering the spell was coming from inside the building. That meant it was slowly draining the life from Connor and everyone else in there.
The thought suddenly made it hard to breathe, and she had to force herself to focus. To disable the spell, she had to disrupt it. Now, she had to find the least taxing way to accomplish that. Because she definitely wasn’t in any shape to channel a buttload of magic at the moment. Not unless she wanted to face-plant right there in the overgrown weeds surrounding the building.
In the end, it wasn’t as difficult as she’d feared. Magic could be twisted to do all kinds of unsavory things, but that didn’t mean it liked it. Water could be forced uphill, but it would always try and find its way back down. All Kat had to do was reach out a hand toward the bloody rune and wiggle her fingers at the offensive parts of the symbol while channeling a line of clean magic into it, willing it back to its intended protection purpose. While it wasn’t sentient, the magic helped her a little bit since that was what it was supposed to be doing in the first place.
She still got a little weak-kneed from the effort, but the results were exactly what she’d been going for, if a bit more dramatic than she’d expected. The pulsing, tainted spiderweb began to ripple, visible sparks and embers cascading down the walls and doors at the bottom of the stairs. When the spell finally collapsed completely, it was with an extremely loud snap that sounded like a gunshot.
“What the…?” Cooper started to say before being interrupted by the cacophony of real gunfire from inside the building, along with shouts and more than a few fierce growls. For a moment Kat wanted to sayI told you so, until she remembered Connor was down there among all that commotion.
“Go! The spell is broken,” Kat yelled even as Cooper, Rachel, and Becker raced down the steps.
She’d seen how fast werewolves could run, but even she was surprised they were a blur as they slammed through the double doors at the base of the stairs.
A little voice in the back of her head suggested waiting until the werewolves could check out the situation and get a handle on things. But then her heart pointed out that those could have been shouts of pain she’d heard from beyond those doors. What if one of those shouts had come from Connor?
Kat ran down the steps into the darkness without thinking further, weaving around piles of trash and stacks of boxes as she moved deeper into the basement, following the sounds of gunfire, shouts, and growls. She liked to believe she could recognize Connor’s growls from among all the others, but maybe that was simply wishful, romantic thinking.
In the darkness her feet hit something that made a metallic clatter as it bounced across the floor. She was certainly no expert, but she thought the things she’d almost stumbled over were bullet casings. A lot of them.
Her heart pounded like a drum as she tried to move faster. After she’d run through a dozen rooms, each one dirtier and more cluttered than the last, Kat finally stumbled into a large open area where Connor and his pack mates were, along with…well, hell…at first, she wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like nothing more than a pile of moving debris. But then she made out the vaguely human forms and realized she was looking at some kind of simulacrum—a collection of random debris shoved together to look like a person and then magically imbued with movement and behaviors meant to imitate true life.
She’d never had a reason to try and make a sim like this herself, but what else would be made of wood, metal, and trash, running around, trying to kill a pack of werewolves?
It took several seconds for the reality of that last part to sink in—along with the image of Connor standing over the unconscious bodies of Zane and Alyssa with blood soaking his uniform—before she started running forward to help.
One of the sims was plodding ponderously toward Connor and the two injured people he was trying to protect. As she watched, her favorite belly-scratcher put a bullet through the thing’s head. As expected, it didn’t do much. Then again, shooting something in the head when it didn’t have a brain was a waste. Why did people want to treat every supernatural thing they met like a zombie? It was almost offensive.
Then she realized Connor seemed to be out of bullets and had dropped his weapon to extend his extremely long claws. While she had to admit they looked good on him, Kat felt the urge to point out that if putting a bullet through the creature’s head didn’t do anything, a set of claws probably wouldn’t be any more effective.
Wiggling her fingers, Kat solidified the air around the sim and sent it flying toward the nearest wall as fast as she could. Channeling that much magic in her exhausted state damn near knocked her off her feet, but it was still nice seeing the thing explode into chunks of kindling as it impacted the concrete wall. Unfortunately, as soon as the wood, metal, and cardboard stopped drifting to the ground, the sim began to re-form. That positively sucked. But seeing the bits of cardboard fluttering around abruptly reminded her that there was a way to end this before anyone got hurt.
Or at least, more hurt than they already were.
“There’s a stone token in the center of their chest!” she shouted, taking another wobbly step forward on legs that were suggesting she sit down right where she was. “You need to rip them apart and find the token. Once I destroy it, they can’t reform.”
Connor and the rest of his pack mates who’d been trapped there all turned and stared at her. In between fighting the sims, of course. Kat could see the doubt on their faces and had no idea how to resolve the situation in the short amount of time they had.
“Do what she says! She knows what the hell she’s talking about!” Cooper yelled before turning on the creature closest to him and unloading an entire magazine of bullets straight into the thing’s chest.
While painfully loud to Kat, the hail of bullets was effective, wood bits flying as the creature’s upper torso turned into Swiss cheese. The sim was close to completely breaking in half and stumbling backward when Cooper surged forward and shoved his clawed hand into its chest and started rooting around. A few seconds later, he came out with a flat, round piece of stone two or three inches in diameter, dozens of bloodred runic symbols carved into both sides. Cooper studied it for less than a second before turning and tossing it in her direction.
Kat didn’t pause to think about the possibility of being too weak to do it but simply reached for the magic around her, then pushed it out toward the token.
“Perdere,” she murmured softly.
With the simple destruction spell, the air between her and the fast-approaching piece of stone began to ripple and swirl with darkness, thickening until it slowed and then stopped, hanging there in midair. It began to vibrate as Kat poured more magic into the stone even as her vision started to dim.
A moment later, the token shattered into a hundred pieces, the remains drifting to the ground, leaving little more than dust on the floor. Half a second later, the sim who’d been trying to re-form collapsed into pieces, the chunks of metal inside it making a loud clanking sound as they struck the concrete.
The rest of the werewolves went after the three remaining sims, the violence they displayed almost terrifying. But then stone tokens came flying at her all at once, and she stopped worrying about how dangerous werewolves could be.
