Prince of Blood and Thunder_An Urban Fantasy Novel Page 14

  If we put a stop to all this, she wouldn’t have to grow up like me. No, she was little and her world was too big, too open, for this to be all of it. I would not let that happen. I was going to save her, and after I saved her, I’d live vicariously through her!

  “Hey, you got any more of those cards?” I asked, glancing at her as I watched the tornado moving closer to the central district. It would take a while to get to central, but at the same time it was carving up the place like no one’s business. Someone had to be controlling it from within, and if I put a dent in their plans, they’d come out. At least, I hoped they would.

  “Yeah, a few.” She shrugged. “Most of them are wet, but the ones in plastic are okay, mostly.”

  “You have anything to deal with that?” I asked, pointing at the tornado. “We need to stop that double quick.”

  “Who the heck says double quick?” she asked, fishing a pack of cards in a bright pink plastic case out of her pocket. She thumbed the lid off and began looking through them which was good. It meant she might have a way. Otherwise she’d have just been like “Bitch, you cray,” which is what I’d usually told people.

  “Russians mostly,” I said, shrugging as glanced around Atlantis. The place seemed pretty deserted, but why would it be deserted if Madisyn was out here? “So, why were you out with the goats?”

  “Morgan told us all to take shelter in central, so everyone went. Well, everyone but old man Hodges who shook his fist and was like I’ve lived here for five thousand years, and I’m not leaving now, so get off my lawn.” I briefly recalled seeing the spindly old man who reminded me of the guy from Up! with his house sitting amid towering skyscrapers as Madisyn pulled out a card and showed it to me. “I think this will work, but I’ve never gotten it to animate. The monsters I can do, but effects? Not so much. I don’t have the juice.”

  “What if I give you my power?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at her as I took the card from her and stared at it. Imperial Order. I shrugged. It didn’t mean anything to me, but the message concerned me.

  “This says you have to pay seven hundred life points to destroy the spell,” I said, staring at her as she bit her lip and nodded.

  “Yeah, in Yu-Gi-Oh! spending life points to do stuff is pretty normal since you have a basket of four thousand health points when you start a battle…” She shook her head. “That’s why I’ve never gotten those to work. I don’t know how to use that resource.”

  “I can’t let you use this, there has to be another way.” I shook my head and handed the card back to her.

  “Well,” she said, taking the card and sliding it back into her pack. “Unless you want a Mystical Space Typhoon inside here, this is the only way I’m going to stop that!” She pointed at the raging tornado. “There’s no way for me to stop it, but…” she smiled as a realization hit her. “It will also stop that.” She pointed at the magic assault on the dome. “If we can get enough power.”

  I sighed and shut my eyes. I wasn’t sure what activating a card like that would do to us, but I knew what would happen if the dome broke for reals or that tornado hit central. People would die. God fucking damn it.

  “Give me the card. I’m doing it then, lend me your power,” I said, snatching it from her as she offered it up. The relief on her face made me want to die for having even considered asking her to do it. No, this job wasn’t for a child. It was for an adult, and unfortunately, I was the only adult-like person around.

  I reached out to the Imperial Order card with my magic. As green light flowed from my hand and into the card, I felt for the power within it. I’d never used a card like this before, but Madisyn said she couldn’t really do spells since they cost life points. Monsters made sense since they didn’t require anything in particular, which was fun to know since I’d grown up with Magic: The Gathering and had never had the requisite mana to call those creatures into being. Life, I could spend though. For her, and everyone else, I could spend it.

  As I shut my eyes and took hold of the magic within Imperial Order, Madisyn took my other hand. Her strength surged into me, rippling up my arm like warm bathwater. Only, it ended suddenly, and as I started to open my eyes, more power than I could have ever asked for slid over me like a thousand icy slugs. It was so unlike what I expected, I gasped aloud. I’d shared power with my brother before, and while it’d always been a bit weird, it hadn’t felt like fucking poison.

  Something was wrong.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and as I said it, the power in the card exploded to life.

  The metallic tang of blood filled my mouth and everything inside me slid from “not too bad” to “completely fucked.”

  19

  My grip on Madisyn slipped away as I collapsed forward onto the grass. The strange power the girl had fed me erupted from the card and exploded outward in a flare of heat and sound that shook the whole of the world. The ground beneath me shuddered, and for a moment, I was worried I might fall off of it.

  A wordless scream tore from my throat as the whole of the magic city crackled and popped. Magic from everywhere and nowhere hit me all at once, slamming into my body and pitching me across the commons. It surged through my veins like molten lead and into the card, which in turn, magnified the effect.

  My teeth clamped together, and the smell of burning meat and hair hit my nose as I lay flat on my stomach in the grass, fingers digging furrows in the soft earth. My left hand felt superglued to the card, and as the dome above shrieked in agony, the rushing wind of the tornado vanished. The sudden silence of it was practically unnerving. One moment there had been a raging storm of air and wind, and the next? Nothing.

  I tried to move, tried to do more than lay there as the sounds of the gemstones on the magical pylons crumbling to dust hit my ears. Something was wrong. Very, very wrong. I tried to pull back the power, to shut it off, but I wasn’t even fueling the card anymore. It seemed to be caught in a self-expanding loop as it sucked magic out of the air so I didn’t know how to stop it. Turning off the spigot for my own meager magic did less than nothing. It was like pulling a thimble full of bathwater from a Jacuzzi.

  My fingers finally lost their super-glue grip on the card, and as it fluttered to the ground beside me, a torrent of magical energy funneled downward into the card. As it did, I realized I’d been a fool because the dome was breaking down all around the city.

  The card’s language was crystal clear. Negate all spell effects on the field. I wasn’t sure what that actually meant in a practical way since I was pretty sure the tornado and steam hammer hadn’t been cast from Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, but either way, I was an idiot because we were in a magical city beneath the fucking ocean. And I’d just negated the whole thing by empowering a card that was going to suck down the barrier along with the stupid tornado and steam hammer. Man, when I fuck shit up, I really go whole hog.

  “Fuck!” I croaked, glaring at the card as it greedily sucked down more power like it was a Friday night happy hour. My guts felt like they were on fire, and my vision wouldn’t quite focus. The taste of blood was familiar in my mouth as I rolled to my hands and knees and looked for Madisyn. My heart leapt into my throat as I found her, which was also when I realized why her power had felt weird.

  It wasn’t hers.

  Madisyn lay unconscious on the ground a few feet away. Her frizzy black hair was matted to her skull from the blood leaking from her ears as she lay at the feet of old man Hodges.

  He was so freakishly tall he would make Shaq seem tiny if he wasn’t just skin and bones. He wore black from head to toe and had pale skin with freckles. His mop of flaming red hair was spiked out like he was Crono from Chrono Trigger, and as I stared at him, he grinned, revealing a mouthful of teeth that had never, ever seen a dentist.

  “I hope you don’t mind that I leant you some power, instead,” he said in a voice so deep it rumbled through my guts like a bass solo. “As I watched the two of you, I got a premonition. She would not have the power to help you so I stepped
in.” He glanced from Madisyn to me and back again as he held out his hand again. “Good job on stopping the tornado.” He gave me a tiny clap. It made me want to hit him so hard his future progeny would feel it.

  “What the fuck did you do?” I asked as I scrambled to my feet, ignoring the dome cracking like cheap safety glass overhead. Soon it wouldn’t be here at all. Then we’d be dead. I wasn’t sure how we would die, whether it’d be from sudden, intense pressure, drowning, or from simply having a billion tons of water falling on top of us, but it was probably six of one, half a dozen of the other.

  “I lent you the power to stop the attacks,” the man replied, watching me as I scooped up Madisyn. “I already told you that.”

  Madisyn was still breathing, but barely. Her body was so cold, so lifeless, I instantly knew what had happened. Hodges had stolen her power. I turned my glare on the man.

  “Siphon…” The word erupted from me as I tried to melt him with my eyes. It wasn’t super effective. “You took her power.”

  “Of course. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to tune in on your magical frequency and give you mine. I stole her power so you’d have enough to stop the hammer and the tornado.” He waved his hand at the dome as he walked past me. “I’m starting to think you’re slow.”

  “She’s just a little girl,” I said as he pulled a zippo lighter emblazoned with the Mickey Mouse from Fantasia out of his pocket and snapped it on. Flame spat from the top, and as it did, he called it forth from the lighter with his other hand, pulling the fire into the air like taffy until it sat in front of him like a tiny disembodied sun.

  “Yes, which is why she wouldn’t have had enough power to help you stop the attacks.” He shook his head as he sent the tiny spark flitting through the air. “I thought we went over this.”

  His seemingly insignificant fireball struck the card. As its edges burned, the power funneling from the dome into it began to dissipate. The pylons stopped flaring. It was as though the entirety of Atlantis let loose a breath it’d been holding. As fire curled around the card and turned it to blackened ash, the dome overhead sprang backward with a resounding crack.

  “How did you know that would happen?” I asked, half in shock and half glad as hell we weren’t all going to die.

  He turned to regard me with an upraised eyebrow while I held Madisyn’s cold body against my own sodden flesh. I didn’t know who he was or where he’d come from, but I was going to hurt him even if he had saved us.

  “I’ve been around a while,” he said, reaching a hand out toward me like he wanted to help me to my feet. “You might say I’ve seen a thing or two.” He gave me a wink that made me want to deck him. I didn’t. Instead I sat there as silence of magic not trying to kill us anymore filled my ears. “I’ve seen my fair share of animators, and always, without fail, there’s a flaw to their power. It relies on a prop.” He gestured at the small pile of ash on the grassy knoll. “Now there’s no prop.” He didn’t need to say “duh” but he might as well have because I should have thought of that.

  “We need to get her to a healer,” I said, and he nodded at me.

  “Yes, that is true. She’ll recover soon enough, and her power will return soon after. I didn’t take very much from her.” He shook his head, dismissing the thought. “You seem rather concerned about her plight though. I thought animators were tough, but you don’t seem to be.” He leaned down to look at me as he put a spindly hand on my shoulder. As he touched me, his eyes narrowed in anger. “Why haven’t you flipped your switch?” The way he said it made me think I’d offended him, but before I could reply, he shook his head and continued speaking, a harsh edge tingeing his words. “I will speak to your master about this. The shoddy training you’ve clearly received will not abide.”

  Before I could do something productive, like oh, I dunno, call him a jackass or punch him in the groin, the world exploded into white light. I blinked, trying to dash away the sudden glare of a billion bright halogen lamps from my eyes.

  Once I’d done that, I found myself on my knees in the medical bay with people in scrubs rushing toward us.

  “Madisyn!” A thin black man with a shiny bald head cried as he pulled Madisyn away from me, and I didn’t fight him on it because I was tired, hurt, and they were the professionals. At least I hoped they were. I really had no way of knowing what they’d do. Besides, hadn’t Madisyn said her father worked at the hospital? For all I knew, this was him.

  “She’s been siphoned,” the man with his hand on my shoulder said, glancing at a pudgy clipboard-wielding nurse rushing toward us. She looked so out of breath I felt bad for her. Who knew how long she’d been on duty what with the werewolf attack and the tornado. God, I really need to stop going outside because at this rate kaiju were going to attack the city.

  I mean, seriously, if Blair had tried to pull a tornado in an underground city in one of our D&D games, I’d have laughed at her for being so ridiculous. Then I’d have died from a GM bolt of righteous fury.

  “Of course she’s been siphoned,” the nurse growled with an edge that was annoyance, anger, and a little bit of fear, though not a lot. It reminded me of a lion tamer who was annoyed with his prize kitty, but hadn’t forgotten the thing could crush his skull in a single chomp. “You’re involved.”

  “Did you teleport us?” I asked the guy with his hand still on my shoulder. It seemed likely, but I wanted to confirm because I hadn’t known people could do it like that. At least, I hadn’t heard of anyone being able to do that in a long time. Then again, Morgan had sent me to Justin easily enough… Maybe it was a similar power?

  Speaking of which, where was Justin? I’d have thought he’d be in the restaurant, but he hadn’t been. Had he been returned to the spot he’d teleported from too? If so, how was I going to find him?

  Before I could follow that train of thought all the way to the station, the tall guy in black lifted me to my feet with one hand and half dragged me out of the room. I thought about struggling or grabbing the doorframe like an angry toddler, but his grip on my shoulder was so strong, it was just easier to go with him. We passed through the doors and were halfway down the hall before he let me go.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked, glaring at him as he stood there, annoyance filling his face.

  “Taking you to Sheev so you can both be disciplined. Him for not training you well enough, and you for not flipping your switch. I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you can actually do it. If not…” He snorted derisively. “There’s a reason animators have that switch. Honestly, to think you went into battle without it on is abhorrent…” He trailed off into muttering then, which was fine because I was so angry I nearly punched him. Instead, I let out a slow breath and counted to ten because really, I wasn’t a violent person, and my constant desire to hurt him was making me feel like one.

  “Are you being serious right now?” I cried, fixing him with a +5 glare. He raised an eyebrow at me, not even slightly concerned by my mean look. Bastard must have made his reflex save.

  “Annie?” Justin said from behind me. I turned toward the sound of his voice and saw him standing there with Gordon. Only my brother looked a lot less excited to see me than Justin did. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but judging by the guilty look on Gordon’s face, I was willing to bet he was up to something I wouldn’t like.

  Justin seemed happy enough to see me, and as he started forward, the color drained from Gordon’s face. Only… only he wasn’t looking at me. No. He was looking at the giant behind me. A sense of dread welled up inside me because I’d seen Gordon face down a fucking werewolf king with a lot less terror.

  “Merlin,” my brother whispered, dropping into a bow so low, his nose practically touched the floor. “To what do we owe the pleasure of your company?”

  20

  “Um… why are you calling him Merlin?” I asked, glancing from my still bowing brother to the tall jackass behind me. He was staring at my brother like he
’d seen a particularly revolting bug. Guess the feeling was mutual.

  “Because that is my name,” Hodges said, and I laughed.

  “Where’s your beard and pointy hat?” I asked, wiping the tears from my eyes with the back of one hand while I slapped my thigh with the other because there was no way he was Merlin. I mean, that dude was definitely made up. Wasn’t he? I’d have been willing to go with the whole Morgan Le Fay thing, but Merlin too? That was ridiculous on a level I couldn’t handle at the moment.

  “I shaved,” he replied, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Have you ever tried to eat chicken wings with a long white beard? Afterward it looks like I murdered a saucy minx with my teeth.”

  “Dude, what’s next? Voldemort and Gandalf showing up?” I asked as a bad feeling settled over me. If this was, in fact, the Merlin, and he was also a siphon, who knew how many people he’d stolen from over the years. He might have so much power, he was unto a god. So why hadn’t he stopped the tornado on his own? Why had he needed me or Madisyn to do it? Or was that why he’d been out there to begin with? Maybe he’d been about to stop it, but then decided to let me do it?

  “I doubt we’ll be seeing either of them,” Merlin said, shaking his head. “They’ve got some long term contracts and aren’t allowed to play with us for legal reasons.” He smirked at me, and I was almost about to ask if he was joking, but I didn’t because if Voldemort was real, I was going to be really upset with Hogwarts for never sending me my letter. Either way, I was so going to London to visit King’s Cross Station. I had a date with platform nine and three-quarters.

  “Annie, are you okay?” Justin asked, and it was only then that I realized he’d walked up to me and stood only a couple feet away. He hadn’t exactly entered my personal space, but it was a near thing, let me tell you. It was weird because I was both glad and sad simultaneously.