Chapter 7 #2
She tried to breathe, but there was a steel band around her chest, and it couldn’t expand.
A solid clump blocked her throat. Tears blurred her vision, and the world faded into a haze of red that cut like broken glass.
A dark chasm opened by her feet, and she teetered on the precipice.
If she fell, she would come apart, unravel like a tattered cloth, melting into the two dozen animals scrambling for her magic.
She heard something, a voice, words, but she couldn’t make them out. Something wrapped around her, solid, protective, pulling her back from the bottomless pit of pain.
“Diana, come back to me. I need you here with me.”
Augustine.
She locked her hands on his arms, still blind, and held on until she could breathe again. His scent washed over her, a barrier to all others, and she locked onto it and took a small step back from the edge.
Gradually, with agonizing slowness, her inner world reasserted its balance. Her mental defenses rose, shielding her from the sparks scraping at her with their claws, begging for connection and safety.
A slow breath.
Another.
She had almost lost herself. It was the fate feared by every animal mage. She had come this close only once before, when she had been young and inexperienced. She was no longer an unsure 13-year-old, she knew the risks, and she ought to have made preparations.
It was Kitty, the timer on her phone warning her that too much time passed since the cub last fed, Celeste’s suffering, Kayson’s and Aleah’s loved ones’ grief, and Woodward’s imminent return. They had all combined inside a pressure cooker, and it nearly broke her.
And then there was Augustine, both making it all worse and infinitely better. If it weren’t for him, when Woodward did return, he would find her on the floor, catatonic, a living husk without will or reason.
“Diana…” Augustine’s whisper was like a velvet caress.
She squeezed his arms tighter around herself, savoring his touch for the last time, and then pushed free.
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
She didn’t look at his face. She didn’t know what she would see. Concern? Revulsion? Pity? She couldn’t risk it. Not now.
The scents still clamored for her attention, but she sorted through them with confident ease.
There it was, the familiar warm scent, like a dandelion made of sunshine. The moment her consciousness brushed it, a surge of magic focused on her, insistent, demanding a connection. She forced herself to rebuff it, walked toward the cage on the far left, and stopped before the bars.
Kitty pawed at the bars with her fuzzy, blue murder mittens. “Meeya!”
It wasn’t even a meow. It was a demand that said, “Well? Aren’t you going to get me out? What took you so long?”
A padlock secured the door. She almost panicked for a split second, and then Augustine reached over and unlocked it. She blinked at the keys in his hands.
“It was hanging by the doorway,” he said. “They’re numbered.”
She swung the door open and scooped the cub into her arms. The tiny blue tiger licked her face. They were not bonded, but the cub sensed the magic that connected her and Celeste. She knew that she was with her other mother.
Augustine spun around and fired. A stream of bullets tore through the Menagerie and bit into a construct by the doorway, a large feline shape crafted with metal and magic.
Strangely shaped parts rained onto the floor.
The construct sank. Blue magic pulsed, and the scattered parts flew back to it, sliding seamlessly into place.
A second construct stalked through the doorway and paused next to the first, its lines sleek.
Panthers. He dared.
The beginning of a growl rumbled in her throat, and she hid it. Some people might have found the metal cats beautiful. But she saw them for what they were—tortured imitations of the original, striving to capture the grace and lethal force of the true creature and hopelessly failing.
A dark-haired man stepped through the doorway.
He was of average height, with an unremarkable build and a forgettable face, just another man in his early fifties.
He had a narrow face, a prominent nose, and dark eyes under low, thick eyebrows.
He smelled odd, like a tree scorched by lightning, the hints of familiar human sweat and skin oils mixing with the sharp tinge of ozone.
She had met him only twice, but his face and his scent were branded into her memory, because she had realized that he was a threat the moment he tried to buy Zeus.
“Trespassing. Vandalism.”
His voice had an odd echo as if he were speaking into a hidden microphone. It filled the space around them, and the hairs on the back of her arms rose in response.
“Destruction of property. Breaking and entering, or is it burglary?”
Woodward’s tone sounded calm and methodical, devoid of emotion, but the echoes of his words bounced around her like rocks tossed onto hard concrete.
That eerie sound combined with his scent tripped some sort of alarm deep within her.
She knew with complete certainty that Death was here and he was staring into her eyes.
“I had expected such foolishness from Prime Harrison. Her magic clouds her judgement, and her thought patterns are primitive and short-sighted. Much like the other creatures here, she doesn’t understand consequences.
But you, Prime Montgomery, are a man of logic and reason.
You should have realized how futile this venture would be.
It couldn’t have been money. Was it hubris?
Or was it the promise of sex? I really must know. ”
The metal panther had finished reassembling itself.
Talons the size of steak knives, razor-sharp metal teeth, and advanced response protocols.
Augustine lowered his gun. He had been aiming at Woodward.
The construct had thrust itself into the path of the bullets, but not before the first few had hit Woodward.
The man had blocked them with his arm.
There was no blood. No obvious shield. No telltale thickening of magic signifying the presence of an aegis, a shielder mage.
How? He had shot enough bullets to amputate his arm at the elbow. A shiver of worry squirmed through Augustine. This was outside the expected parameters of Woodward’s power.
He forced himself to concentrate on the immediate. The known. Two constructs, clearly slaughter class, designed to rapidly murder anything in their way. One animator. Augustine scrutinized the doorway, but nothing else came through.
Woodward himself appeared less of a threat at first glance—lean, wearing black trousers and a thick black turtleneck that had become the uniform for aging tech entrepreneurs.
But there was something odd in the way he moved.
A heaviness to his steps… He was standing still now, and still, he held himself in an unnatural way.
It wasn’t readily apparent. Augustine had to focus, and even then, it kept eluding him.
Time was short. He had seconds to figure this out.
Looking for the source of the wrongness, Augustine replayed Woodward’s entrance in his head, the way he emerged step by step through the doorway.
There.
A human body was a collection of unified parts, bone connected by cartilage and powered by muscle.
He’d spent a lot of time studying human bodies.
He knew how they moved, how they were put together, and how to break and tear them apart.
There were several muscles that connected the legs to the rest of the body and enabled bipedal motion.
When humans walked, these muscles tugged on the torso, causing a slight turn.
If you attached a light to a person’s breastbone, the light would shift side to side with each step.
It was a minute movement, but crucial to evaluating one’s gait.
Woodward’s torso didn’t shift. It remained perfectly straight, as if set atop his legs yet still separate from them.
And now he stood with unnatural stillness.
Even disciplined, focused soldiers locked into the position of attention couldn’t stay perfectly still.
The human body constantly made minor adjustments to balance.
Human chests rose and fell. Blood pulsed through veins, and muscles contracted and twitched.
The implications sank in. Alarm struck him in a flash, as if someone injected ice straight into his bones, and then he was calm. Fear, anger, and doubt vanished. He dropped into a familiar empty space, where only he and the target existed.
In a prolonged fight, Woodward would have the advantage. He wouldn’t get tired. This would have to be done fast. And it would take everything he had. There would be no do-overs.
Every mage saw their magic differently. For Augustine, it was a translucent flame.
A nearly invisible fire that coated his form, constrained by his will into a uniform sheath and constantly fueled by his body.
If he didn’t bleed some of it off by maintaining a constant illusion, it would grow too dense and break its cage.
When he activated his field, that phantom fire swelled, and he punched the ground with it, detonating his power like a grenade, with illusions sprouting in the wake of the blast.
But right now, he gathered it all and sent it inward, a torrent of ghostly flames swirling into his chest, through his body, and down his back, into the seal branded there.
The scars ignited.
Agony.
Familiar. Welcome. The price he paid. It hurt the same every time, never less than the first moment the brand had sizzled as the white-hot wires burned their way into his flesh.