The woman was still breathing heavily, panting, her hands on her knees as she gasped for air.
“Nick…” Parker pointed, and Nick saw it, too. The familiar pulse of magic under her skin.
He immediately threw up a circle, the draw of magic pulling at something deep inside him. He’d overextended himself, and it felt like drawing water from a well long since run dry.
“What’s going on?” The woman screamed, staring at her own flesh. In the hallway, it was dark, the only light ambient from the rooms around them. Nick couldseethe green circles under her skin, where they met each other.
“No.” Parker’s voice was firm. He flashed gold, so bright in the dark that it left an afterimage on Nick’s eyes.
Then he was crouched down, talking at the woman but nottoher. “What’re you doing? You’re all packed in on her arm. You don’t have any breathing room there. What are youdoing? If you all pack in there, you’ll explode faster, you’ll tear yourselves apart. Still, it’s pretty cool how you kept yourself off the rest of her. That’s incredible control, to just be on her arm.”
Nick watched and the circles on the rest of her shifted, moving to her arm, the scrape of circle against circle nearly audible, flaring green, as brilliant as Nick had ever seen.
“Nick! Cover her arm!” Parker didn’t have to tell Nick twice, and he threw the circle he’d been about to wrap around him and Parker over her arm, covering it so tight that when it vaporized, not a single drop of blood got anywhere else.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The employee staredat her arm, eyes going wide, her mouth open but no sound coming out.
“Are you okay?” Parker asked intensely, his hands on her shoulders.
Nick pulled his belt loose, handing it to Parker, who wrapped it around the woman’s shoulder, cinching it tight enough that it cut off circulation. Mid-bicep, the woman’s arm was simply… gone. It looked like someone had chopped it off, removed bone and flesh and everything else. The injury looked so clean it was as though someone had come with a knife and cut it.
On the ground, Nick’s spell held everything left of her arm.
The employee turned to look at him and began to scream. The noises in the rooms all around them stopped, and people began calling out.
“Is this part of the game?”
“Someone is hurt out there. How do we get out of here?”
Nick pulled out his cell phone, a 911 operator coming on at the first ring. He gave their location and the description. The 911 operator asked him to check her vitals, make sure the tourniquet was working. He kept his mind on the tasks at hand.
When he heard sirens, he went out front and waved them down. He passed a desk displaying a dozen camera feeds on a large monitor. The people in the escape rooms were all panicking, but he didn’t dare release them until the employee was gone. They’d need to be checked for circles, and an increase in frightened people never helped a situation.
As he directed the fire department in, the ambulance screeching in behind them, he caught sight of a notepad filled with writing. The pen marks had been dug into the pages, cutting two, three pages deep. He snapped on a pair of gloves and brought it back.
The fire department was checking her, Parker standing back and observing with a frown. Nick said, “I need to ask her a question.”
Annoyed, the EMT wearing a fireman’s uniform looked over his shoulder. “Are you kidding? We need to get her to the hospital now.”
“It’s fast.” Nick knew he looked like an ass. Who was more worried about cop work when someone had just lost her arm? “It’s critical.”
The fireman shook his head. “No.”
Pinching his lips, Nick almost stepped back but then shook his head.
“What does this mean?” He held the pad out to the woman. “‘I was made to hurt’? Who made it?”
Dazed, the woman shook her head. “It didn’t want to. I knew it didn’t want to hurt me, but it was supposed to hurt everyone. It didn’t want to.”
She began to cry, and Nick stepped back as the ambulance techs pushed through, their gurney taking up most of the hallway. Another set of sirens arrived, and Nick looked at Parker, mouthing,Police.
As the EMT and ambulance techs rushed the woman out, the other firefighters frowned at Nick.
One asked, “What the hell happened?”
Nick sighed. “Did you hear anything about the station being locked down earlier?”
