Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Kit
Darius was either a genius or a maniac.
Standing on the roof of a skyscraper some seven hundred feet off the ground, I chanced a look over the edge and held my breath, my intestines threatening to jump through my chest to strangle my heart.
A cold gust of wind sent a shiver down my neck.
Cars the size of misshapen raisins were visible only by their headlights and taillights, and the SI evacuees milling around in front of their building were barely distinguishable dots. Nothing seemed out of place.
“I don’t see them,” I said.
Beside me, Lienna pulled her balaclava down over her face. “That’s a good thing.”
Sure. It meant that Darius, who was doing his invisibility-by-light-manipulation act, was in full control of his mage magic. If I’d spotted him, it would’ve been because there was a Darius-sized dent in one of those misshapen raisins.
“I guess it’s my turn,” she said.
When Darius told us that the SI building was too difficult to breach at the ground level, his brilliant alternative had been to approach from above. And by that I mean hurling ourselves off the neighboring structure and praying we landed on the SI building’s roof.
We had some technological assistance in the form of military-grade low-altitude BASE jumping parachutes that the silver fox had acquired from god-knows-where.
Darius had given us an entirely inadequate rundown of “how not to die whilst parachuting,” then leaped into the abyss with Robin riding tandem.
Zylas, the lucky bastard, got to experience the ride from inside the safety of his infernus, which, I will wholeheartedly confess, made me jealous.
Sadly, I was pretty sure converting my mass into glowing energy and possessing a small object wasn’t in the archmythic repertoire.
Vertigo swirled through my head as I took in the four-hundred-foot difference between our vantage point and our landing zone.
“Are you sure about this?” I asked Lienna as she swung a leg over the railing and opened the pouch on her right shoulder strap.
“No.” She blew out a breath, presumably to steady herself but with so much force she must’ve emptied every last air molecule from her lungs. “I’ve skydived a few times before. I can do this.”
Her first and last statements didn’t exactly agree.
She carefully pulled her other leg over the barrier and faced the nightmare drop.
“Lienna,” I began.
“No, no, no.” She shot me a look, the whites of her eyes showing all the way around her irises, the rest of her face hidden by her balaclava. “If you say anything, I’m going to chicken out. Are you ready?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m going.” Her eyes widened a little more, pupils dilated with adrenaline. “I love you!”
With that proclamation, my girlfriend flung herself off the edge of the building.
“Shit!” My heart jammed itself into my throat. I created the largest halluci-bomb I could, invisifying her as she plummeted into the darkness. Time stretched into the most agonizing eternity of my life as I watched her fall, my mind racing through a hundred worst-case scenarios.
Her parachute deployed, the dark canvas snapping into form. I sagged against the railing, remembering to breathe as she glided toward the tiny lights marking the flat rooftop of the SI building four hundred feet below.
I tugged my pilot chute out of the small pouch on my right shoulder strap, then pulled the balaclava Darius had insisted we all wear down over my face.
Another wave of vertigo hit me as I hauled myself over the railing.
I, unlike Darius and Lienna, had never skydived before, but I had a particular advantage—the singular reason Lienna hadn’t been as terrified for me as she’d been for herself.
If this went wrong, I could levitate myself to safety—assuming I didn’t run out of psychic juice at five hundred feet—but the sheer distance between me and the ground made my brain scream at me to back away, you fool!
But if Lienna could do it with no gravity-defying magical abilities as backup, I sure as hell could.
So I jumped.
The cold English air smacked me in the face as I fell, tearing at my eyelids and forcing me to shut them.
I counted in my head—one Mississauga. I threw the pilot chute to my right as hard as I could—or I tried to.
Pain stabbed through my broken metacarpal, making my fingers spasm and my grip go slack.
Two Mississauga. Every inch of my large intestine flipped and flopped like a convulsing tapeworm. For a heart-stopping second, I thought I’d be endurance-testing my levitation after all.
Three Missi—
WHUMP!
Gravity broke and the sudden drag of my main chute jerked against my shoulders, kicking my feet up like a kid on a swing set.
I scrambled to find the steering handles or toggles or whatever Darius had called them and located them right beside my ears.
Spotting Lienna in front of and below me, on a perfect trajectory to land on the SI building, I followed her—a little yank of the toggle here, a little prayer to the skydiving deities there.
Far below, the number of milling carpenter ants had decreased; only a portion were waiting for permission to reenter the building.
The rest had presumably gone home for the day.
Lienna touched down on the rooftop, and as I swept in after her, I sucked in a breath and stretched out my feet. At the fifteenth “Mississauga,” my shoes hit with a bone-jarring thud and skidded across the asphalt roof.
That was one extreme sport to check off my bucket list and another item to add to my “never doing again in a gazillion years” catalogue.
I spotted Darius and Robin nearby, which meant the luminamage had ceased his light magic, so I dropped my invisi-warp.
Robin rushed over to help Lienna stuff her parachute back into its compartment, and with Darius’s assistance, I got unbuckled and stowed my parachute.
We weren’t taking them with us, but we couldn’t leave them loose to be blown off the roof.
The moment I was free, I pulled Lienna into my arms for a brief, adrenaline-spiked embrace. I was probably squeezing her too hard, but her arms were locked around my middle, making my ribs creak.
“We need a new rule,” I said in her ear. “No ‘I love yous’ before death-defying stunts.”
“Ah.” She unclamped her arms and leaned back. “Did it feel like my final farewell?”
“A bit, yeah.” By which I meant a whole hell of a lot.
“Sorry. Next time, I’ll shout it back to you after my parachute deploys.”
I resisted the urge to perform one of her patented eye rolls.
We hastened to catch up to Darius and Robin as they joined Zylas at the rooftop access hatch.
The demon was a dark specter, his face, hair, and horns covered by a ski mask just like ours, with the stylish addition of sunglasses to hide the infernal glow of his irises.
In his black clothing—and with his tail hidden somewhere under them—he was indistinguishable from the rest of us.
Compared to the security system of the building we’d just jumped off, the rooftop access into the SI headquarters wasn’t screwing around.
There was a number pad, some sort of biometrics scanner, and if I wasn’t mistaken, a rune-marked slot into which something magical was intended to be inserted.
The hatch itself was thick steel engraved with more Arcana, and the bolts around the frame were as large as my fist. A red light on the panel was blinking rapidly, probably in response to the alarm that had sent a good portion of the building’s staff running for the exit.
For a moment, our team of five stood in silence, the weight of what we were about to do pressing down on us. The very definition of “high risk, high reward.” Putting everything on the line to expose the Consilium. There was no going back now. No cold feet. No half measures.
Darius nodded at Robin and Zylas.
The demon stretched a gloved hand toward the hatch. Red magic flared over his fingers and ran up his arm, shining through the fabric of his clothes. Magic appeared on the hatch, the glowing lines forming overlapping circles and trapezoids interspersed with spiky, otherworldly symbols.
He flexed his fingers.
A blinding crimson flare burst across the hatch, metal screeched, and a deafening clunk banged against my eardrums. The four-inch-thick steel hatch collapsed inward, pieces of metal clattering into a narrow concrete stairway lit only by the flashing red emergency lights lining it.
“Smash and grab,” I muttered to myself.
We descended into the dark opening where, I hoped, the Consilium’s demise awaited.
My ears were ringing like someone had set off firecrackers inside a timpani ensemble beside my head—not because of the clamorous alarm, which someone had the wisdom to shut off sometime before we broke in, but because Zylas had just wrecked another high-security door.
Our team zipped through the gaping hole and into a surprisingly posh hall.
The building’s top floor clearly catered to SI executives; the MPD didn’t waste pricey décor on peons.
Gray tiles covered the floor, and the walls were paneled in a glossy material that reflected our silhouettes as we raced past oversized offices and boardrooms with glass walls.
The sleek, expensive look was ruined somewhat by the nonstop flashing of red emergency lights. Although the auditory alarm had been silenced, the building remained in lockdown.
Darius bypassed the elevators in favor of a door marked with a stairwell sign. Being a standard emergency exit, we were able to open it without any additional demonic destruction.
“Fourteenth floor,” Darius called back as we descended from the twenty-third level at a rapid jog. “That’s where we’ll find the access to the thirteenth-floor archive.”
Lucky number thirteen. I hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.
I had my clairsentience going at full power, but as the shitshow in Barcelona had proven, it offered no guarantees. There were minds below us, a lot of them, and some definitely closer than ground level, but I couldn’t distinguish individuals yet.
We kept running downward, the stairs doubling back over and over. The thundering of our steps reverberated through the concrete shaft.
As we neared the sixteenth-floor landing, I sensed a trio of minds approaching the door with unpleasant intent beaming from their brains.
“Incoming through the door!” I yelled as I hit all three with a Funhouse warp.
Their momentum carried them into the door despite the warp, and Robin dodged sideways just as it whipped open, missing her by inches. Several steps down from her, Darius and Zylas whirled around, but Robin was already shouting an incantation.
“Ori impello cylindrate!!”
A ripple of magic blasted the lead agent—and the other two behind him—back into the hallway from whence they’d come with the approximate force of a speeding smart car.
I leaped down the last few stairs and shoulder-checked the door shut. “Keep going!”
They went. As Lienna rushed past me, I faced the door. The agents on the other side were recovering from their magical punting, and there was no way to barricade the door or block the concrete landing.
But concrete was mostly sand, and sand was earth, and terra magery could manipulate earth. Right?
Since there was no one to tell me it wouldn’t work, I visualized a neat rectangle of concrete floor rising to form an immovable doorstop.
The concrete cracked. Fatigue washed through my adrenaline-saturated muscles as the floor heaved up three inches—but three inches was all I needed to keep that door permanently closed.
Someone rattled the handle, then slammed against the door. It didn’t budge.
Grinning tightly, I raced after the others and caught up to them at the fourteenth-floor landing.
The door wasn’t merely constructed of steel, but it was also engraved with Arcana and had the same kind of keypad, biometric scanner, and artifact slot as the roof access.
This wasn’t a level just anyone could enter.
“That’s abjuration,” Lienna said, eyes scanning the barrier. “It’s designed to diffuse all magic. I can’t tell if that includes demonic magic.”
Robin nodded. “Zylas will try a more powerful spell. We should give him some space.”
That seemed like a good idea. The four of us descended half a level to the landing where the stairwell doubled back.
Raising both hands toward the steel door, Zylas spread his gloved fingers. Intricate arrays of overlapping circles appeared in glowing red, spanning the entire door and the wall. The temperature in the stairwell dropped.
A ping registered on my clairsentience.
I jerked around as a pair of agents appeared half a flight of stairs below us, the nearer one already summoning a fireball. I delivered another Funhouse warp straight into their cerebrums, and they both tripped on the stairs, cracking their shins against the concrete. Ouch.
“Duck!” Robin yelled.
I dropped to the floor and covered my head with my arms, Lienna doing the same beside me.
Crimson magic detonated and an explosive shockwave rocked the stairwell. Debris pelted me as the fluorescent lights blinked out, leaving only the emergency lights to provide illumination.
I raised my head. The ultra-secure door was no longer a problem. In fact, it was no longer a door. All that remained was a jagged opening, water pouring from a burst pipe in the ceiling.
Zylas stood in front of the destruction he’d wrought, shoulders rising and falling. He was winded. It was comforting to know that his power wasn’t infinite.
It was also concerning—because his power wasn’t infinite.
Beside me, Lienna whipped a stun marble down the stairs—right, the agents. I whirled around as the pyromage collapsed. With telekinetic fingers, I yanked an artifact out of his partner’s hand. Lienna hit him with a stun marble too. I caught it on the rebound and floated it back to her.
“Let’s go,” Darius ordered, disappearing through the demonically constructed hole where the door had been.
Zylas and Robin followed him, Lienna on their heels. I brought up the rear, and as I stepped over the rubble, my eyes widened.
“Whoa,” I whispered.