Chapter Twenty-One
Van
“Everything okay?” I ask through the comms.
“All good, we’ve got someone with us called Trip, Rana told us about him, well, she told Neith, and we overheard. He’s fucking good at what he does, send the word out he’s one of ours,” River replies.
“On it, one second,” I reply as I punch someone in the face, securing his hands behind his back as I switch over to the other channel. “There’s a supernatural covered in tattoos, purple eyes, he’s one of ours.”
“Understood,” comes the reply of several voices.
I switch back, “Done.”
“Thanks, Van,” Nene replies, and I have to admit that my mind doesn’t settle until I hear her.
I should have just asked from the beginning if she was okay.
Someone darts through a door to my left and out into the hallway. I know that it isn’t one of ours going to clear the rooms on this side of the building.
Jumping up, I race after them, they’re heading in the direction of where Reed and the others have gone to locate The Owner. I am absolutely not going to risk this fucker sneaking up behind them and causing an issue.
My feet are silent as I rush through the hallways, hot on the heels of the supernatural that came down here.
She’s fast, that’s for fucking sure. She suddenly stops, spins around, and shoots magic at me.
I manage to duck at the last moment, and the wall right where I was standing a moment ago explodes with the hit of magic, making bricks and debris fly everywhere.
Rolling out of the way of the crumbling wall, I send a stream of water out, wrapping it around her legs and pulling her to the floor.
She counteracts the water with fire, which only seems to piss my magic off, and it doubles down on its attack as I wrap it around her fire, putting it out and suffocating it.
My water is stronger than her fire, and she quickly realizes that, so she changes tactics. She isn’t a supernatural that has fire as part of her magic, like I first thought though, she’s a mage.
That makes things a little trickier and a whole lot more fun.
I can feel it as she starts to build a nasty fucking spell, and I instinctively know that while it may not kill me like she intends for it to do, because I’m stronger than she thinks I am, it is going to put me out for the count, leaving me vulnerable and allowing her the time to escape and help her boss or kill me.
For whatever reason, she holds loyalty to him.
Enough to risk her life in order to help him.
She must know that we’re going to have a team on her boss, which means that she either thinks that she is strong enough to go up against the whole team, or she doesn’t care whether she survives the encounter.
The Owner was clever in that sense. He’s got people working for him who want to work for him. People who like and even respect him.
People who are willing die for him.
It’s smart because it means that they won’t betray him. In fact, they’ll do everything that they can to help him.
It’s a more intelligent way to do it than most of the criminals we come up against do.
Most of them use threats, blackmail, or magical control in order to keep the people working for them in line.
All that means is that when those people get the chance to escape or turn their bosses in, then they do.
There is absolutely no loyalty.
Knowing that she’s preparing something nasty for me, I use her distraction to my advantage and command my water to hit her in the face, hard and fast, knocking her out instantly and stopping the spell from building.
Once she’s down, I move toward her quickly, securing her with magic-dampening cuffs and calling it in to the team who are collecting the people that we secure in areas other than the main arena.
It would be too dangerous to extract people in there at the moment, since that’s where the majority of the fight seems to be happening.
In theory, Reed’s team should have cleared all of the rooms on this side of the building as they headed to find The Owner’s office and consequently The Owner.
We questioned the location at first, it’s a pretty obvious place to be holed up in a raid, but it’s where Rana said he would be because he has a magical safe room in his office.
Fortunately for us, he really didn’t have any intention of ever letting her go, and so wasn’t as careful around her as he perhaps should have been, especially considering that Rana is incredibly observant. Although he may not have realized that.
She knows the code for his safe room and the spells that lace over the door. Ransom gave Reed the premade spells to break through it.
Still, I want to check that we haven’t missed anyone, and I know that the arena is well taken care of now that the rest of my family is in there.
“Heading your way, Reed,” I say through the comms.
“Good, we could need a bit of backup,” he replies, as he grunts.
I immediately pick up the pace, as I change the plan, I’m not going to bother clearing the rooms, helping the others, and securing The Owner is by far the most important thing that we need to do right now.
To be honest, anyone else could escape, and we would simply hunt them down and bring them in, but The Owner poses a threat to one of our own, Rana, and he needs to be brought in once and for all.
I know where I’m going. I spent hours studying the map that Rana had drawn for us to make sure that everything was covered, that I thought of as many eventualities as I possibly could, and that we were as prepared as we could be for each one.
Also, so that I would be prepared in a situation like this, where one of the teams needed backup.
It would waste time if I had to ask directions and cause them unnecessary distractions.
I cautiously approach the room that I know to be his office, and ready my magic.
When I peek around the corner, I see why they need extra help.
The office is in complete disarray, and The Owner is standing on the opposite side of the room behind his desk, with some sort of ward or something around him, as things are flying around the room at his command and launching themselves repeatedly at Reed, Doc, and Coen.
Coen can’t shift in here because he’s too big and would collapse the whole building, and it would also make him a bigger target for the various things that The Owner is launching at them all.
I duck as a chair gets launched in my direction.
Shit, he’s noticed me.
“He can’t move from that spot, so the ward around him is limited, but no matter what we try to do, nothing is able to penetrate it, so it's strong as fuck. He’s been in it since we opened the safe room, and there is no sign of the magic weakening,” Reed explains quickly.
All while dodging and diving out of the way.
“Although he’s a mage, it’s not magic that he should have,” Doc adds. “We know that much for certain. We all felt his magic when he was in the safe. He’s a fucking weak mage. He shouldn’t be able to wield this.”
Doc’s right, but it’s surprising because Rana said that he was pretty strong when she was talking to us about him.
It makes me wonder if he’s somehow managed to buy something that would make him seem stronger than he actually is, and that for some reason, now that he’s triggered the extremely strong ward, it’s made the glamor or whatever he was using to change his power level fade.
That’s my best guess, but it’s not really important right now anyway.
“He must have bought it from someone, and someone fucking powerful at that. My money is on Murray,” Coen replies. He pulls out a knife and throws it with precision at The Owner, only instead of hitting him between the eyes as it should have, it simply bounces off the ward and clatters to the floor.
“That’s the third time you’ve done that with the same result,” Doc points out, “at some point we’re going to switch over into the insanity part of the saying!”
Coen shrugs, a playful smirk playing on his lips as he replies, “Aw, you guys thought I was sane. That’s cute. Thanks, guys.”
I burst out laughing despite the situation and the fact that it really isn’t appropriate timing.
“Does anyone have an idea of what to do?” I ask as we all continue to duck and dive out of the way.
The fact that he isn’t killing us and is only throwing random objects at us gives away his power level, or rather lack thereof. If it were one of us inside a ward like that, then we would have killed whoever was attacking us within seconds.
He hasn’t, and he’s stuck in one spot, so the ward isn’t even made out of his magic.
It’s a spell he’s bought from someone, which means it has limitations to it that it wouldn’t have if it were made from his own magic.
Of course, he is a mage, and you would think that would mean that he would use his own magic to create the ward, so that he can still move around and defend himself, but he hasn’t, which is just another sign of how weak he is.
He still could have weakened us enough to escape even as a lower-level mage, and the fact that he didn’t and instead went straight into the ward is confusing.
I don’t know how he’s managed to accrue the power that he has, but he must be really fucking smart and think strategically. That’s the only way that I can think that he would have managed to gain the non-magical power and reputation that he has.
“We tried our magic, or at least as much as we can do in this small space,” Reed starts to explain, “it’s a really strong ward, and nothing got through.
I can’t unleash my full power, which may be able to get through it, because I can’t risk it reaching any of our people and putting them on the floor and in a compromising position.
There’s no way to know whether if I focused it just on The Owner, whether it would bounce back and hit any of us before I can control it again. I don’t want to risk it.”
“That’s fair enough,” I reply.
He continues, “Coen can’t shift for obvious reasons, and Doc’s hands are pretty much tied.”