Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Robin
Before the tremors in the floor had settled, I knew Zylas’s magic had failed to break through the archive door.
“It didn’t work,” I said in an undertone.
Darius stood with his back to me. We were positioned at the top of the double-ended stairs that led down to the archive, and I was looking across the void at the countless screens and monitors, their blinking “ALERT” message adding to the chaos of the flashing red emergency lights, which left so much in shadow—the interiors of offices, the gaps under desks and tables, the narrow hallways between meeting rooms.
A muffled clatter sounded from the other side of the floor.
“Don’t move from that spot,” Darius whispered. “I’m bending the light around us.”
Keeping my shoes on the same square foot of floor, I turned just enough to see past Darius.
SI agents streamed into view from the direction of the main stairwell.
Their clothing and gear didn’t have the gritty, mix-and-match streetwear look of guild combat apparel.
With black and gray camo, armored vests, helmets, and yellow-tinted eyewear, they exuded the identical sameness of soldiers—including their weapons.
All of them carried steel bats, batons, or staves. The artifacts were polished steel etched with Arcana, heavy and unwieldy in a way that made fear curdle in my stomach. No sorcerer would carry an artifact that large and awkward without good reason.
Eight agents arrayed themselves in two clusters twenty paces from the archive stairs. Last to appear was an older man, broad-shouldered with a nonexistent neck and a crooked nose, garbed in the same uniform but with black handguns holstered at his hips instead of a heavy steel artifact.
“Griva,” Darius whispered grimly. “My intel was wrong.”
I sucked in a breath.
Like the SI soldiers, Griva wore the same curved, yellow-tinted glasses, and in the flash of the emergency lights, I glimpsed etchings on the eyewear’s top frame. Were the glasses also an artifact?
And were the agents looking right at us even though Darius was making us invisible? It really seemed like they could see us.
Darius slid his daggers from their sheaths. “We can’t let them reach the stairs.”
Blue magic lit up the artifacts of two agents. They began chanting, their lips barely moving—and I realized they weren’t aiming at Darius. They were aiming at me.
I dove sideways.
Magic blasted from artifacts in bright blue beams. One hit the far side of the double-ended stairs and exploded. Chunks of debris ricocheted in every direction. The second blast ripped through an office wall and tore apart unseen obstacles inside the room.
I hit the floor and shoved back to my feet in the same moment. Arcana was the most powerful magic class because it could scale to near infinite levels, but extremely powerful Arcana wasn’t portable—or so I’d believed until now. There was no way those spells were legal.
The next man on each team was already chanting. One was aiming his artifact at me and the other was tracking an invisible target—Darius. Magic swept down the artifacts, gathering at their firing ends.
I thrust my hands outward. The heat of Zylas’s magic rushed through my veins and glowed across my palms. Two simple runes appeared on the floor in sizzling crimson, one beneath each group of agents.
“Impello!” I screamed.
Their spells fired in the same instant my push runes hurled all the agents upward. Matching blue blasts demolished a portion of the ceiling and one of the huge display screens with a thunderous boom.
While the men were still airborne, Zylas streaked past me. Incandescent claws extended from his fingers, and they tore through an agent’s neck before he hit the floor. Zylas rammed his deadly claws into the thigh of another man, who screamed as blood spurted from the wound.
“They’re demon mages!” someone roared. “Take ‘em out!”
Zylas launched toward another agent with inhuman speed.
His target barked a short incantation and a pinkish shield shimmered into existence in front of him.
Zylas slammed into it, his claws unable to pierce the magic.
Purple light erupted from another agent’s steel bat in a rapid-fire blast like an arcane machine gun.
He swung it in an arc, forcing Zylas to dash away.
A cobalt glow ignited—an artifact aimed at me. I spun to face the attacker, but a man on my other side was chanting as well.
“Ori te formo cupolam!”
Lienna was still shouting the final syllable as she collided with my back, a cube-shaped artifact outstretched in one hand.
A watery blue shield rippled over us an instant before the first blast hit it.
The attack deflected sideways and obliterated two dozen workstations before colliding with a bulky Xerox machine.
The office equipment atomized in a burst of toner and shredded paper without even slowing the spell down.
It annihilated an office wall before hitting something on the other side with the biggest detonation yet.
Tearing metal and shattering glass pierced my ears.
The second attack smashed into Lienna’s shield head-on, and it disintegrated. The world spun, and I slammed into a wall. Pain burst through my body, leaving me gasping.
A garbled scream sounded as Zylas ripped through another agent.
Breathing hard and trembling, I pushed onto my hands and knees. Beside me, Lienna scrabbled for her cube artifact, one arm pressed against her stomach.
“Are you okay?” I asked, pushing the cube into her hand.
“Yeah,” she panted, “just my arm—”
Gunshots rang out—not the pop of potion balls but the crack of bullets. Jerking my head up, I scanned for Darius or Griva, not seeing them.
“If I get them all into one spot,” Lienna said, wincing as she grasped the cube with both hands, “can Zylas finish them?”
I scarcely registered the question, distracted by her twisting of the artifact. The runes and spell components on each of the squares moved, realigning into new combinations as she turned it. How many spells could she create with that cube? How did the components interact? How did it charge? How—
Vayanin, Zylas snapped. Focus!
I hastily stepped in front of Lienna. “I’ll cover you.”
Five agents remained, all of them scattered across the level amidst the debris, three firing spells at Zylas, the other two advancing on me and Lienna. Drawing on more of Zylas’s magic, I felt the chill of his fatigue. He’d drained himself blasting through armored doors.
The agent pair coming at us had exchanged their artifacts for smaller ones. One of them raised his hand, pointing his artifact at me.
I mirrored him, conjuring a rune in demonic magic.
“Ori telum immit—” he snarled.
“Rumpas!” I shouted.
The rune flashed—and red light shone from within the man’s chest. His torso pulsed with a grotesque crunch, and blood burst from his mouth as he collapsed to the ground. His partner jolted sideways, shock breaking through his battle-hardened stoniness.
Lienna raised her wooden cube. “Ori gravitatis maximum inicio globum!”
A sparkling, fiery dart launched from her artifact. It arced overhead, then plummeted downward, a good six feet away from any of the agents.
The instant it touched the floor, it expanded into a black orb the size of a small car, and everything within twenty-five feet of it was sucked toward the spell—chairs, monitors, debris, and the agents.
They crashed together in the center of the orb, limbs thudding and cracking.
It tried to pull me in as well, and I lurched backward, almost tripping over Lienna.
Crimson magic glowed across the floor beneath the orb. As Lienna’s spell blinked out and the agents fell, darkness plunged over us.
Zylas’s eyes burned bright red through his sunglasses, the only spot of light besides his spell.
Evashvā vīsh. He growled the demonic incantation, and half a dozen crimson blades curved up from his spell. The agents didn’t even have a chance to scream as they were dismembered.
Quiet fell for a single, breathless heartbeat—then three more gunshots shattered it.
Lienna was a second faster than me, leaping up and sprinting toward the sound. I ran on her heels, and Zylas followed.
I careened around a corner, and ahead were Griva and Darius. Both men were moving nonstop in a chilling, unnatural dance—Darius blinking in and out of sight as he slashed at the air, Griva lurching and sidestepping, unable to line up a shot without exposing himself to Darius’s blades.
Blood splattered the floor around both men. I couldn’t tell who was injured or how badly.
Zylas streaked toward Darius and Griva, his glowing claws curled. More hh’ainun are approaching. Many of them.
“What?” I gasped, spinning to face the main stairwell door that Zylas had demolished on our way in. I threw my hand up, conjuring a rune in front of a large, overturned table. “Impello!”
The push spell hurled the heavy wooden table toward the jagged opening. It slammed into the wall, blocking the doorway and the agents on the other side.
“Impello!” I repeated, conjuring the rune again as the table was shoved away from the stairwell.
“Ori eradendi torrens!” Lienna chanted, her voice overlapping mine.
An azure-tinted wall materialized from her cube artifact and swept toward Griva just as he dodged Zylas’s slashing claws, the crimson magic tearing across the front of his combat vest. Before the wall struck Zylas, he dissolved into red light that streaked through Lienna’s spell and into my infernus.
The barrier hit Griva, shoving him away from us.
“Hurry!” Lienna yelled. “Before the spell runs out and he starts shooting us!”
“Down to the archive!” Appearing beside me, Darius seized my arm with a blood-slicked hand and hauled me across the floor. Lienna ran after us, twisting her cube.
Ramming the table out of their way, agents poured out of the main stairwell, their shouts chasing us around a corner. The archive stairs waited, rubble strewn everywhere.
Darius and I started down the steps, but Lienna stopped. I looked back as she raised her cube, breathing hard.
“Ori gravitatis lapido pilis!” she chanted.
Orange fireworks launched off the artifact, dropping in a swarm as the first agents rounded the corner.
Turning, Lienna sprinted down the steps, and I ran with her. We reached the bottom just behind Darius, and I took in the empty landing with a wild glance. Goosebumps prickled down the back of my neck.
“Where’s Kit?” Lienna gasped.
The archive door rippled—then waves cascaded across it.
I lurched backward, blinking to clear my vision, but the impossible undulation of the steel only increased.
Kit appeared, stepping through the wavering door. As if it was water. As if it was nothing.
All sense of reality left my body in a dizzying sweep. I’d watched Zylas pass through solid objects in incorporeal form, but he was a demon. Humans could not walk through steel doors—a door that had now returned to its previously solid and impenetrable state.
Grinning from ear to ear, Kit held up a rectangular bag made of stiff, glossy gray fabric with a handle at the top.
“Mission accomplished! The documents are even juicier than we hoped, and they came in this nifty bag—fireproof and waterproof. Shockproof would be handy too, now that I think about it. Do you think the lining is rubber?”
My mouth hung open, and I couldn’t seem to close it. The thud of footsteps on the floor above was growing louder.
“Kit.” Darius stood beside the elevator, a hand pressed against his lower abdomen. “Do you have the keycard?”
Kit flipped the bag open, pulled out a white keycard, and tossed it to Darius. “This one?”
Darius caught the card and slapped it against the security panel. A light blinked green and the elevator door opened.
The first agents appeared at the top of the stairs. Footfalls thundered downward.
I dashed into the elevator, Lienna behind me, Kit and Darius rushing in last. Almost all the buttons on the panel had been blacked out. The only ones that remained were “G” for ground level, the five basement levels, and “S.”
Darius pressed the S button.
It lit with an ominous red light, and the door slid shut. As shouts of disbelief and frustration filled the landing, the elevator began its swift descent.