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And it might have worked, if they’d been dealing with anyone else. But war mages are a breed apart. And while their shoot-’em-up training is understandable for some of the challenges they face, where a split second of hesitation can get you dead, it can cause problems at other times.
Like now, for instance.
A fireball engulfed
one of the little flying cameras, frying it midair, and a spell clipped another, sending it spiraling toward the ceiling, where it detonated in a burst of expensive parts. But there were a lot of little black balls left, maybe half a dozen, and—predictably—somebody focused too much on the targets whizzing around and too little on what was behind them.
“No!” James ran back in, trying to corral his group of weapon-happy war mages. “Don’t contaminate the scene! Don’t contaminate—”
Too late, I thought, watching a fireball miss a camera, and hit the mountain of crates head-on.
What looked like the Fourth of July went off inside the warehouse’s old walls. The mages promptly shielded, the selkies fled through the open door, and I grabbed part of a pallet as a shield and ran for the side entrance. Because my work was done here. Or it would have been, if I hadn’t immediately gotten disoriented thanks to the thick, white clouds suddenly boiling everywhere.
There must have been a whole lot of fog bombs in those crates.
And a bunch of stupefaction bombs as well, judging by the way I was suddenly staggering around.
Not to mention incendiaries, because something set my shield on fire!
I dropped it and stumbled backward, awkwardly grabbing for another. But my head was spinning, my eyes were trying to cross, and I couldn’t see anything but fog and the multicolored sparks lighting it in patches here and there. Or hear over the firework explosions of more crates going up and some spell-enhanced war mage shouts. And so my hands grabbed something else instead.
Something that had been zooming by and still was, only now it was zooming me along with it.
Because whatever charm the reporters had put on their little camera balls, it was a strong one.
At least enough to tow me through a couple war mages while I tried to get my confused head to tell my fingers to let go. And then into a support column—ow—and then into thin air, as the determined flying camera I’d latched onto decided to kamikaze the ceiling. And the wall. And the floor again.
After which it shot back into the air for no apparent reason—except to try to shake me off, I realized.
Which was why I determinedly held on, even after all the knocking about had cleared my head. Because there was a reporter outside somewhere controlling this thing, and he was pissed that something was interfering with his attempt to get a scoop. If he couldn’t shake me, the next step would be to recall his little device to sort out the problem, which would get me out the door.
Assuming I lasted that long.
Which might be a problem, because the fog covered a lot of sins. And Huey—or maybe Louie; I couldn’t really tell them apart—was seizing the opportunity for some revenge. Only not with magic, because that leaves a trace, doesn’t it?
Unlike fists.
At least, I guessed that was why one of them had just swung for my head instead of throwing a spell. And then grabbed onto my legs when I tried to kick him. Probably assuming that I was too disoriented to fight back, since I was determinedly clinging to the little camera ball.
Which I smashed into his head a couple times, and then used my legs—which had bigger muscles anyway—to hurl him at a column. One he bounced off of and lunged for me again, because yeah. Dumb as a rock.
A rock that went barreling underneath me, because I picked my feet all the way up this time, to the point that I was hugging the camera.
My ribs didn’t enjoy it, but my eyes had fun watching him take out his partner, who’d been creeping up on the other side.
They staggered off into the fog, and I deliberately wrapped my arms around the remaining intact lenses, wanting to end this. It almost ended me when the camera went crazy, bouncing along the ceiling before slamming back into the floor and dragging me across the rough old boards. And out into the night, because the mage had finally figured out that the only way to clear the obstruction was to pry me off.
A guy came running up as the camera flew out the door. I let go, and watched it shoot skyward when a hundred and ten pounds of dhampir suddenly went missing. And detonate against the bottom of a helicopter, because the regular cops had just arrived.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the guy—the reporter, I guessed—yelled over the whup, whup, whup of the copter’s blades. He was a tall, thin dude with a shock of black hair and bright Asian eyes.
Then he looked behind me and his mouth dropped open, and I didn’t wait to find out why.
I grabbed him and took a flying leap behind a cop car, where a couple of New York’s finest were already hunkered down, staring as the warehouse all but exploded behind us, with sound and fury and lots of sharp flying bits.
The next seconds were a little confused. The guy I’d rescued started yelling at what I guess were more reporters, demanding to know if anybody had a camera that still worked. I got myself turned around to see that the building was still standing, sort of, but had crazy, multicolored sparks shooting out everywhere: through areas of missing tile on the roof, spewing toward the heavens; through the open door, cascading over the broken sidewalk; and—most spectacularly, at least from this angle—through the row of rectangular windows, which had shattered and were vomiting great tongues of fire at us, like the front of a dragon boat on Chinese New Year.
The whole building looked like a huge roman candle.
