Chapter 43
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Lienna
My foot crashed into the jaw of an SI agent. His head snapped back, and he pitched over, hitting the ground with splayed limbs.
On my left, Darius pulled a dagger from another agent while Blythe telekinetically retrieved her blades from the bodies spilled across the road that bordered the Coliseum’s staff parking lot.
Behind us, my father pocketed the artifact he’d used to take out two other agents.
The combat armor strapped to his chest and arms had transformed him from a wan cancer survivor into the powerful man I remembered.
We scooted along the back wall of a small, single-story building just large enough to hold a few offices. Darius leaned out to look toward the Coliseum, then waved the final member of our group forward.
The tall, willowy young woman glided to Darius’s side, a few strands of her silver-white hair peeking out from her hood. She carried no weapons or artifacts.
“Target confirmed?” Darius murmured.
The woman didn’t lean out to look into the parking lot. She stood unmoving, her head tilted slightly. She nodded.
“Thank you, Blair.” He touched her elbow. “Get to safety now.”
Without a word, she turned and ghosted down the street, vanishing into the darkness.
“Lienna,” Darius said. “I’ll hide you.”
With my Rubik’s cube in hand, I stepped past him and out into the open.
On the other side of the parking lot, twenty SI agents, their faces covered by scarves and bandanas, guarded a large white trailer set up beside an open overhead door that led into the Coliseum’s underbelly.
Satellite dishes crowded the trailer roof and a mass of thick cables ran out from under it.
The SI’s mobile communications station—and Director Stavros Griva was inside.
I triple-checked my cube’s configuration. The new rune Kit had helped me create glowed in its center. Then I aimed it at the trailer forty yards away and chanted, “Ori calamitatem incutio maximam!”
Lines of orange and yellow crackled around the cube—and the trailer’s door flew open. The sizzling light coalesced into a glowing pyramid twice the size of my fist as a man bolted out the door and down the steps. The SI guards turned in confusion—and the luminescent pyramid discharged from my cube.
My spell barreled into the trailer, punching right through the side.
Then it exploded, rays of orange magic bursting outward.
A wave of roaring fire followed, splashing onto the agents and spilling over the pavement.
As the flames died, all that remained of the comms trailer was the blackened steel chassis.
Darius, Blythe, Dad, and I were already sprinting across the parking lot toward the blast zone.
Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, Griva had avoided the worst of the explosion, the deadly shrapnel, and the magical flames.
Scrambling to his feet, he didn’t waste any time assessing the situation or worrying about the wounded and the dead.
He dashed through the open overhead door into the Coliseum.
The four of us ran after him, entering the concrete corridor that circumnavigated the building’s lowest level. Dimly lit by fluorescent lights interspersed throughout the pipes and conduits covering the ceiling, the passageway was as wide as a country road.
“Keep close to me!” Darius ordered.
We clustered more tightly around the luminamage. Ahead, Griva started to swerve toward a squad of agents running straight at us, likely intending to investigate the explosion.
Darius pulled two daggers from their sheaths, as did Blythe.
“Director Griva,” an agent called, “what—”
Griva jerked away from the troop, foreseeing that slowing his headlong sprint wouldn’t end well for him.
“They’re inside!” he shouted as he veered around them, legs pumping. “Call for reinforcements!”
We sped after him. No one looked our way. Darius was bending the light around us, and with none of his agents able to see who was chasing him, Griva had no choice but to keep going.
Droves of agents streamed out of a wide tunnel that connected the concrete corridor to the arena floor, and Griva streaked for the obvious escape—then abruptly slid to a stop.
Ice rushed across the tunnel, spreading into a thick, glistening wall. The crack of gunshots rang out as Griva backtracked. Bullets that glowed with fuchsia light just missed him, pinging against the wall with unnatural bursts of pink sparks.
From out of the shadows, four mythics blocked Griva’s path.
Three of the Crow and Hammer’s most dangerous combat mythics: Girard, his Arcana pistols in hand; Tabitha, black batons spinning; Alistair, a stocky, tattooed mage with a quarterstaff in his grip—and Vinny, the multi-tool that doubled as his switch clutched in his fist.
Griva turned left and bolted through a set of open double doors.
Alistair and Girard followed him, and as Darius and Blythe drew ahead of me and Dad, I glimpsed the room Griva had fled into—a large storage area that the SI was using for weapons and gear.
Crates packed with steel Magna Potestas artifacts waited.
And a swarm of agents was already in the room.
“Kill them!” Griva shouted at his inferiors. “Kill them all!”
Darius and Blythe vanished from sight—meaning Darius was no longer making me and Dad invisible.
A concussive boom had me whipping around. The frozen wall blocking access to the arena floor shattered, chunks of ice flying across the corridor, and a pack of SI agents charged toward us.
I stopped in the doorway and adjusted my cube. The new rune glowed reassuringly. “Dad, get in there.”
He crossed the threshold but didn’t go far, positioning himself to protect my back.
The SI agents bearing down on me launched their attacks—radiant Arcana, fireballs and rippling blades of wind from mages, deadly projectiles guided by telekinetics. They hurtled toward me with enough combined magical firepower to reduce me to ash.
“Ori eradendi torrens!” I chanted.
A pale, blue-tinted wall shimmered into existence in front of me, and it was five times larger than it had ever been before.
It swept forward, attacks bouncing off it, and slammed into the oncoming agents, shoving them ahead of it like a snowplow.
It was unstoppable, fueled by my new rune—the archmythic boost I could incorporate into any spell on my cube.
But it could only block so much of the corridor, and more agents were already skirting around it.
With a flick of his stainless-steel multi-tool, Vinny conjured a layer of ice on the floor in front of us. On my other side, Tabitha pointed one of her batons at the floor, adding her kryomagery skill to Vinny’s.
I shoved my cube into my satchel and pulled out my wooden knife. “Ori consistere!”
A glowing ripple whooshed outward at waist-height, paralyzing every agent it hit from the hips down and sending them slipping across the newly formed skating rink. Vinny and Tabitha switched to offensive magic, flinging ice shards at the helpless agents.
“Look out!”
I couldn’t tell who had shouted the warning, but I dropped. A magna-beam blasted through the open doorway, just missing Vinny, and hit the wall across the corridor in an explosion of shattered concrete.
I jerked upright, and the rush of Griva’s minions who still had functioning legs was on us. Ducking and twisting, I lashed out with fists and feet, yanking stun marbles from my pockets between opponents’ strikes.
Then an Arcana spell knocked me off my feet, the magic infusing my limbs with numb weakness.
A hand seized my arm. As another magna-blast flew out of the weapons room, my father pulled me onto my wobbly legs.
Tabitha sent a barrage of ice into the faces of all the agents around us, and we backed inside.
I throat-punched one of them and Vinny hurled more ice, clearing the threshold just long enough for Dad and Tabitha to slam the doors shut.
“Freeze the handles and hinges!” I yelled as I pulled an alchemic marker from my satchel. Ripping the cap off with my teeth, I started drawing—place a circle in each corner, connect with triangles, inscribe the hardening rune.
In my periphery, I saw Dad drawing the same array on the other door. Together, we chanted the incantation. The lines glowed not a moment too soon as something hit the door hard enough to shake the walls.
Pivoting, I finally looked upon the wholly separate but equally violent struggle I’d been missing.
Bloody corpses littered the room. Girard’s magic-enhanced ammo had left glowing marks across the walls, and crevices in the floor bubbled with lava from Alistair’s volcanomagery. Both men were surrounded, drawing the focus of the agents still capable of combat.
Griva jerked and twisted, driven in a circle around stacks of gear, evading Blythe’s seemingly autonomous daggers. Their movements were so swift I couldn’t tell if there were three, four, or five of them, and Darius’s knives also appeared in the briefest flickers and glints.
Vinny and Tabitha rushed to help Girard and Alistair. Dad went after a pair of SI agents dragging steel bats from a crate. I reached into my satchel.
Griva swung the pistol in his hand toward me, and I dove sideways. He fired once, then pointed the barrel to shoot twice more at an invisible target.
Darius appeared and disappeared again, his dagger just missing Griva’s outstretched wrist.
I pulled out my Rubik’s cube.
Ostensibly of its own volition, a heavy table full of combat gear launched at Griva. He dodged the oversized projectile, the movement bringing him closer to me.
The wooden blocks spun under my fingers to form a spell.
As ice met lava, filling the room with hissing steam, more gunshots rang out, and the last of the SI agents died, I turned the final spell component into place. “Ori te formo sagitta!”
A sparkling green dart shot straight for Griva’s face. He sidestepped. My spell whipped past the spot where his head had been.
And one of Blythe’s knives plunged into the muscle above his knee.
Her second knife pierced his other leg.
Her third, his abdomen below his armored vest.
And then, blinking into sight, Darius drove his dagger into the base of Griva’s skull.
With that, Stavros Griva, Director of Special Investigations, the man who’d put a DOA bounty on me, who’d threatened my family and stolen my artifacts, who’d kept me and Kit on the run for months, joined the other Consilium leaders in hell.