8. Max
Max
Neither my sister nor the Oracle was on the tenth floor.
A single column stood at the center of the room, bigger than any below it, and inside it stood an angel. Massive wings folded down his back, feathers dimmed to tarnished silver.
Fucking Xander had caged an angel.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t beg. He just watched us, and then he cut his lemon-colored eyes toward the broad stairs behind him.
Nine war mages were already spread through the stairwell in ranked pairs, spaced so no spell blocked another’s line.
The elites.
Caspian shifted mid-stride into his warrior form, wolf and man fused into muscle and claw, and hit their left flank. Nikolai took the right with the ax. Both princes caught the first volley on their Coldiron armguards, and my metal shrieked with joy as it ate the enemy spells.
Then the elementals opened up. One mage seeded the steps with ice, jagged spears erupting straight out of the glass. Another forked lightning across the whole stairwell, and my hair lifted with the charge as I threw myself flat under it.
Close range. No room to throw the chakrams. My Coldiron flowed into twin sanjieguns just as a tall war mage met me on the landing, and my staffs slammed into his paired daggers.
He was fast with them. I was faster. I’d grown into my power since the last time a man had underestimated me. He blinked in the middle of a parry, not expecting a woman my size to move like that.
Most men are raised with that attitude. Very few get to update it.
Blades aren’t what make war mages dangerous, and he knew it. He gave ground toward his partner, buying the two seconds a spell needed to finish forming.
I didn’t give them to him. I let the outer section fly, and the chain sang out long, whipped around his guard, and cracked into his temple from an angle no blade could reach. Bone gave. He dropped, and the spell died in his mouth.
“Surprise,” I said.
Surprise! my Coldiron chirped. Surprise!
His partner threw a vial instead of a spell. It burst against the step at my boots and boiled up green, and the glass underneath went white and pitted. The fumes hit my throat like a fistful of nails.
I swung blind through the smoke, felt the sections wrap something solid, and hauled. The potion master came out of the cloud off her feet, and I brought her down onto the stairs hard.
A ward slammed across the flight above us, and four mages behind it started a chant in unison.
“Nikolai!”
He was already moving. His armguard went into the ward before it could set and tore the whole thing down, and he was through the gap, his ax biting into the first war mage at the collarbone. He ripped the ax free and buried it in the second on the backswing.
Caspian threw a mage over the rail, and the fall broke his neck.
An ice spike opened my thigh. I paid that mage back with a low strike that folded his knee the wrong way.
Lightning caught Nikolai across the shoulder and burned his jacket to lace.
A spell got through Caspian’s guard and drew a red line down his forearm, and his claws answered, ending the round-cheeked mage where he stood.
We carved our way up. By the time we reached the eleventh floor, six of the nine lay dead behind us, and all three of us were bleeding.
The survivors didn’t follow.
They stopped at the threshold like it was a cliff edge. One of them tried a killing spell at our backs, and it struck the boundary and burst into sparks and steam that never reached us.
The top two floors were forbidden to them too.
Peachy.
“Keep coming, assholes.” Caspian beckoned them with his middle finger.
From here up, every pane was darkened. A tower built to display everything, and Xander had blacked out the last of it.
The eleventh floor held nothing except a dark mass rolling slowly over the center of the room, swallowing lights.
Child. A pause, and the voice came again, thinner. Hurry.
We gave it a wide berth and made for the last flight of stairs.