Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Kit
How directionally challenged was this lady?
Even as the thought ran through my mind and I sprinted back the way I’d come, I knew our stalker hadn’t made a mistake. I wasn’t the only one with a bounty on my head—and Lienna’s didn’t require her to be breathing when it was collected.
It was too soon. Way too soon. Her bounty had only been made public a few hours ago, and this would-be assassin had been waiting for us. How was that possible?
Slowing as I reached the stairs’ bottom landing and its cheerful band of sunlight, I stretched out my psychic senses in search of Lienna. Instead, half a dozen pings registered on my brain radar—and I had no idea what they were. They were minds … ish? Maybe? What the hell was going on?
I yanked off my sunglasses, but all I could make out beyond the doorway was darkness.
Screw caution. If this was a trap, I’d deal with it.
I threw myself into the thick shadows of the room. For a moment, I couldn’t see a damn thing. Then my eyes adjusted, and I slid to a stop.
My neck craned back as I looked up at the palm fronds casting dappled shadows across the floor. A lovely little fountain burbled in the center, the basin surrounded by leafy green vines. More vines crawled up the walls adorned with intricate carvings.
The air in here tasted different in a way I couldn’t put my finger on. The sunlight seemed looser, as if it staggered when it hit the oxygen around me.
As unnervingly tranquil and beautiful as this room was, it did not contain Lienna, the needle-flinging assassin, or even a door they could’ve escaped through.
Also, I hadn’t noticed any tall trees like these inside the fort on our way in, but that bit of what-the-fuckery would have to wait, because where was Lienna?
With burgeoning anxiety inflaming my nerves, I retraced my steps and exited the unsettling arboretum. Had Lienna left her ambush position and continued down the hallway? But then, where had the assassin disappeared to? I’d seen her enter that room.
I sprinted down the corridor, which narrowed into a slim passage lined with shelves and nooks carved into the stone. The passage soon dumped me into a chamber with stone pillars, a wooden ceiling, and arched alcoves in the wall—but no Lienna. No anyone.
Multiple doorways branched off the large room, all filled with shadows.
I held perfectly still, focusing hard on my psychic senses—there!
Locking onto Lienna’s mind, I ran through a doorway.
But as soon as I rushed through it, her mind blinked out.
I stopped dead and searched again. I sensed more mind-like pings, all distorted by a weird fuzziness, like radio static obscuring my usual clairsentience signal.
As my anxiety metastasized toward full-blown panic, I desperately wanted to shout Lienna’s name, but that was a terrible idea on multiple levels.
I reversed course, tried another doorway, raced through several empty rooms, then backtracked again, only to find myself at the top of a staircase.
What happened to the room with the pillars? Was I losing my goddamn mind?
Breaking into a fast jog, I descended the steps and jumped through a large window-shaped hole in the wall at the bottom, landing in a courtyard flooded by blinding sunlight.
Chunks of the stonework had broken and fallen away, leaving fissures along the walls and nasty tripping hazards on the uneven ground.
Breathing hard, I shut my eyes and focused on the warm spot inside my skull that housed my powers. I flipped through each of my psychic lenses, searching for a hint of Lienna …
This way.
My eyes snapped open as shock fired up my spine. Those two words had slipped into my brain like the whisper of chimes in the wind. They sure as shit hadn’t come from Lienna.
I spun in a circle, but I was utterly alone.
This way, the voice hissed through my skull. We have something you want. Just a little closer.
We? I did not like the implications of that “we.”
Having a firm policy of not doing as creepy telepathic voices suggested, I didn’t take a single step forward.
Instead, I jumped straight into the air.
As I levitated myself to the top of the twenty-foot wall that surrounded the courtyard, I released a widespread invisi-bomb, hoping to spare any passersby from seeing a random white guy flying around the allegedly haunted fort.
This place had enough ghost stories already.
I got in one sweeping glance across the absolute labyrinth that was Bahla Fort—“space planner” clearly hadn’t been a job five hundred years ago—before my clairsentience locked on Lienna dead ahead.
I sprang across a six-foot gap to a nearby boxy building. My shoes landed on the timber roof with a thud, and I ran full tilt across it toward the wall of an even taller sandcastle-esque rectangle.
Violet light flared, shining through the narrow, second-story windows in the building ahead—and an explosive concussion sent vibrations through the wood under my feet.
My blood ran cold despite the waves of heat reflecting off the sunbaked rooftop. With another wild leap to the neighboring building, I landed on the sill of an open-air window, my shoulders scraping against the stone frame. Releasing my invisi-warp, I looked down.
My perch was high on the wall of another large room with a soaring ceiling and massive pillars.
Lienna was crouched inside her dome shield, the assassin positioned near a doorway across from her.
The space between them was strewn with debris—fresh, still smoking debris blasted from the solid stone walls, pillars, and floor.
Relief flooded me, so potent it left me giddy. Not only was Lienna alive, but she and her satchel had the assassin and her beach bag perfectly distracted. It wasn’t the ambush we’d intended, but hey, whatever worked.
Before I could decide what magical move best embodied flying over the top rope with a steel chair, the assassin pointed something at Lienna. “Ori inicio ballistam!”
A violet dart the size of a grenade launched from her artifact, flew across the space with the speed of an actual rocket-propelled projectile, and hit Lienna’s shimmering shield.
The barrier shattered, Lienna dove to the floor, and the spell barely missed her, hitting a pillar with explosive force.
Stone shards sprayed in every direction, peppering the walls with shrapnel.
Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, what kind of overpowered Arcana was that? My giddy relief burst faster than Lienna’s shield.
I couldn’t see the miniature artillery artifact in the assassin’s hand to yank it away with telekinesis, so I bent my concentration toward my own hand and imagined a fireball the size of a watermelon with writhing orange flames that licked hungrily toward the ceiling.
It ignited on my palm, heat shimmering around it and its flickering glow pushing back the shadows.
The assassin broke off mid-incantation to look up at me. Her eyebrows rose above her oversized sunglasses.
I hurled the fireball. It whooshed down, trailing dancing flames.
The assassin yanked her big bag up in front of her head and chest, and the fiery orb smashed against it, engulfing the bag.
She dropped it and gaped at the smoking bag, probably wondering how in the name of all things magical I’d gotten that warp past her psychic protection.
“Surprise,” I growled, visualizing another pair of fireballs. Flames ignited over my hands.
Her face snapped toward me again, and she flipped her hand up in that same tossing motion as before.
Dousing the fire on my fingers, I careened backward out the window and swung behind the wall, using levitation to keep from plummeting to the ground. A trio of needles flew past like tiny, sharp bullets.
“Ori inicio ballistam!” the assassin chanted from inside the building.
“Ori repercutio!” Lienna shouted.
I jumped back onto the windowsill just as the ring on Lienna’s finger flashed, deflecting the assassin’s spell. The blazing dart flew off at an angle and blasted a gaping hole in the wall.
But the assassin hadn’t stood around waiting to see if the attack would land.
With her half-charred bag back on her shoulder, she sprinted across the distance between her and Lienna.
Wreckage from her diverted spell was still scattering through the room as she tackled Lienna around the middle and slammed her into the sandy floor.
I leaped from the windowsill. Levitation slowed my fall, and I hit the ground running. The two women grappled with unbridled violence, blows landing with painful thuds—then green light erupted beside them, swirling in a ferocious maelstrom like a celestial body caught in a rapid tailspin.
I’d seen a green swirl like that before—but there was no way it could be the same magic. No way in hell.
Twisting Lienna’s arm behind her back, the assassin hauled the shorter woman up and shoved her toward the swirling light.
Panic jolted through me. Lienna writhed, her feet scraping over the floor inches from the spell. The assassin grabbed the base Lienna’s ponytail and pushed her face toward the unstoppable suction of that spiral.
Gathering every ounce of strength I possessed, I seized Lienna with telekinetic hands and wrenched her toward me. Intangible strain pressed on every muscle in my body—and Lienna tore from the assassin’s hold to fly through the air toward me.
She slammed into my chest, almost knocking me off my feet. Clamping my arms around her, I stumbled back a step.
The assassin’s sunglasses had fallen off during her wrestling match, and she looked at me and Lienna with cold, calculating eyes, unbothered by the blood streaming from her broken nose.
Then she stepped sideways into her spell. The vortex of light sucked her in, consuming her in a single cosmic gulp. The green glow collapsed in on itself and disappeared, leaving in its place a black CD-shaped object etched with Arcana spellwork.
“There’s no way,” Lienna muttered, echoing my thoughts as I tipped her out of my arms.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked, my brain scrambling for alternative explanations.
As soon as her feet touched the ground, she rushed to the artifact. “A portal. It looks like the same array as mine. Except for …”
She reached for the disc—but before her fingertips could so much as graze it, the artifact disintegrated into fine black dust atop the pale desert sand.