twice cursed mage 05 - claimed Read online

  “You forget who trained you,” Bruce said as his nunchucks slashed through the air in a blur of steel, beating back tentacles as he took a step toward me, not completely focused on Maya, who had a look of horror and concentration on her face. That look told me a story I didn’t understand entirely because I didn’t know the whos and whats of her circumstance. It was a look reserved for someone who had known this day was coming but at the same time hadn’t actually expected it to happen. It was weird because I’d literally seen her disembowel a demon without batting an eye before.

  Either way, I could see where this was going. Between Yosemite Sam beating the tar out of Jack and Bruce Lee’s wicked nunchuck skills, we had precious little time before things got really bad. So what did I do? The only thing I could.

  I pointed the Walther at Bruce and pulled the trigger as quickly as I could, emptying the gun at the nunchuck-wielding psycho’s face, knees, and heart. He did exactly as I expected him to do. He whirled toward me swinging his nunchucks around to deflect the bullets, and as he did, I tackled him.

  A grunt of pain tore from his lips as the fire surrounding me, crawled over his clothing and melted it against his body armor. Unfortunately, that was about all it did. I wasn’t sure why, but my Hellfire was about as effective as spit wads and bubblegum against that armor.

  As we landed in a heap on the ground, I reared back and brought my fist down in a haymaker that shattered his nose in a spray of blood.

  “Maya, help Jack,” I called as Bruce curled his hand into a fist and let loose with a one-inch punch that nearly shattered my ribs through the magic shield of fire covering my body. I flew upward into the air, and as I hit the ground a few feet away, my vision hazy, I watched him hop to his feet, patting out the fire on his clothing with less concern than I’d have swatting away a dust mote.

  He eyed me coolly and rubbed his nose with one burned fist before reaching out and making a “bring it” gesture. As he did, it felt like someone had doused me in cold water. My shield winked out, but thankfully, I could feel the spark of my power beneath the surface, ready to go. Whatever he’d done had brought down my defenses, but it was only temporary.

  “Oh, it’ll get brought, motherfucker!” I cried, scrambling to my feet and calling upon my magic, but before I could restart my shield, Maya’s tentacles lashed out toward Bruce, wrapping him up in darkness like a tar baby. He struggled, and as he did, Maya glanced at me.

  “I’ll take care of Pops,” she said, leaping down from the hood of the F250 and picking up his nunchucks. As she brought them up like she knew how to use them, the darkness around Bruce exploded in every direction as did the candle in Maya’s hand. She stood facing the guy, an annoyed look on her face.

  “Get out of here, boy,” Bruce said, rearing back like he was going to backhand her across the face. Before he could, Maya lashed out with the nunchucks. The steel cracked against the back of his hand, and the nunchucks bent in half.

  “Fuck!” she cried, and as I took a step toward her, Jack’s monstrous form flew past me and slammed into the driver’s side door of the Ford, cratering the metal and pushing it up onto its passenger’s side wheels.

  I spun on my heel in time to see Sargent leveling his colt at me.

  “Bang!” he said and pulled the trigger.

  Chapter 8

  Jack snatched the bullet out of the air millimeters from my forehead and before I could even blink, threw it back at Sargent. The Texan swatted it out of the air like he was smacking an annoying fly and grinned.

  “Catch this,” Sargent said and emptied the Colt at us.

  As Jack held up his hand to Neo the bullets, I dove to the side out of reflex. It was a good thing I did because none of the bullets stopped. Instead, they perforated the vampire. Silver flame sprang from Jack’s wounds as he slumped forward onto his knees, confusion spread across his face. Jack’s vampire form began to fade, sloughing off of him like wet clay as he tried to stand and failed. Damn.

  “Here’s the thing about vampires. They always stand there like dumbasses thinking they can ignore bullets.” Sargent smiled and calmly began to reload his Colt like he had all the time in the world. Well, fuck that. “That’s why I warded my rounds. You can appreciate the irony, I’m sure.” He winked at me. Damn, news of how I’d dropped Baal with a warded bullet had spread.

  Before he could finish reloading his Colt, I sprang to my feet and pulled myself onto the back of the Hummer. Maya was still fighting Bruce, but fighting might have been a subjective term. She was mostly dodging as Bruce punched dents into the front of the Ford. Still, she was holding her own in a way that suggested she had some ninja skills of her own. Good to know.

  I grabbed hold of the Browning M2, spun, and let loose a blast in Sargent’s general direction. The Browning tore apart the asphalt behind him, along with a parked Dodge Neon and an abandoned ice cream shop as he leapt out of the way. He rolled across the pavement. As he came to his feet, his Colt came up. I swung the machinegun toward him, still holding the trigger down. Bullets sliced through the air where he’d just been as he sprang sideways, dodging my shots once again. It was like trying to hit a ghost.

  “What sort of fuckery is this?” I cried right before Bruce back flipped onto the Hummer and swung a roundhouse at my head. I dodged, and it was a good thing I did because his foot demolished the Browning in a screech of shattered metal on its downward arc.

  “Yata!” he cried, dropping down in front of me with his fists at his sides. He seemed to blur as he came forward, but before he could punch out my lights, Maya emptied her MAC-10 into his back. The shots tore through his yellow jumpsuit, revealing the body armor beneath and pitching him forward off balance.

  “You should know better than to turn your back on me, you bastard!” Maya called as the gun clicked empty.

  He spun his head as he stumbled forward, fixing Maya with a death glare. I took advantage and drove my elbow into the underside of his chin with the full force of my body. His head snapped backward as he fell off the Hummer and hit the ground with a wet smack.

  Bruce had barely struck the pavement when my spidey sense went berserk! I threw myself backward Matrix style as a bullet zipped through the air beside my ear. Sargent was coming toward me, sighting me down the center of his Colt.

  “No one to catch this one for you,” Sargent said, gesturing at Jack’s sprawled, bleeding form with his free hand. “Too bad, so sad.” A tiny tremor of fear lanced through me, partially for my own safety, but mostly for Jack. I wasn’t sure what was going on with the vampire, but he definitely seemed down for the count.

  A grin spread across Sargent’s mustached mouth as he started to depress the trigger, which was when a tie dye VW Bus struck him in the side at over fifty miles an hour. The impact sent him bouncing across the street like a ragdoll. The passenger door flew open to reveal Ramon leaning over from the driver’s seat.

  “Come on,” he cried, glancing at me from around a pair of pink fuzzy dice before gesturing toward the back of the van with his thumb. “We don’t have all day.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I jumped off the back of the hummer while Maya paused long enough to soccer kick Bruce in the head as he tried to get up. He slumped bonelessly to the pavement, and for a moment, it looked like she was going to kick him again, but before she could capitalize on it, Sargent started to get up, which seemed all sorts of unfair. As much as I hated to admit it, if we didn’t run like hell, he’d put a whole mess of holes in us. Call me crazy, but Swiss cheese wasn’t a good look on my delicate body.

  “Maya, time to go!” I cried, scooping up Jack’s battered, bleeding body. The vampire was much lighter than I expected, which made dragging him toward the VW surprisingly easy. As I flung open the blue tie-dyed side door and leapt inside, a bullet punched through the side-view mirror, spraying bits of debris across my body.

  “Hurry up, Mac!” Ramon called as another bullet smacked into the driver’s side of the windshield, punching a hole throu
gh the glass and turning the rest into a mishmash of spiderwebbing cracks.

  Ramon’s head snapped backward in a spray of blood, but before I could be horrified about our getaway driver being turned into a headless corpse, Ramon reached up, plucked the bullet from beneath his eyes and flung it like Orel freaking Hershiser. It passed straight through the bullet hole in the windshield and caught Sargent in the chest before he could fire again. The force of the bullet threw the Texan from his feet as he slid back across the gravel.

  “Fucker,” Ramon growled, turning to look at me. Blood dripped down his face, but the wound was already closing over the metal plate embedded in his forehead so it sort of reminded me of Wolverine. “I really hate getting shot. Really screws up the reception.”

  Maya leapt into the passenger seat next to Ramon as Sargent got to his feet and pointed the gun at her. Judging by the look on the Texan’s face, he wasn’t about to stop shooting so he could figure out why Ramon had warded off the first shot. No, instead, he’d pulled a second Colt free and was coming toward us looking all sorts of pissed off hillbilly.

  I slammed the van’s side door shut and dropped down onto the forest green shag carpet covering the floor. As bullet shattered the windshield, Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival came blasting through the bus’s strangely state-of-the-art sound system.

  The VW’s tires screeched as we took off, and I looked up in time to see Sargent leap out of the way of our oncoming hippie-mobile. I was pretty sure we didn’t have long before he came after us, and as I turned to glance out the back windows, I saw the hummer explode into a shrapnel-filled fireball.

  “Whoa,” I said, spinning back around as Ramon caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. Then he tossed the spoon of a grenade to me. Had he thrown a grenade at the Hummer? Points for him.

  “I’m counting this as two saves, Maya,” he said, a smirk playing across his malformed features. I’ll be honest, my stomach turned as I thought about what those saves might cost. Ugh.

  “I’m counting it as zero saves unless you escape that,” she said, stabbing one well-manicured finger at the passenger window.

  I looked toward where she was pointing. I shouldn’t have, but I was a sucker. Still, there was something about a giant parade float of Peppa Pig barreling toward us that made me doubt my sanity. Even worse, bloody carnations trailed behind it, reminding me of a macabre flower girl at a wedding. Yeah, there was no way this was going to end well.

  Gunmen stood all over the float, pointing an impressive variety of assault rifles at our suddenly inadequate seeming van. As I opened my mouth to protest the absurdity of the situation, bullets slammed into the van’s side panel, punching through the steel and bouncing around inside like angry hornets. Sunlight streamed through the holes in the side as Ramon stomped his foot down on the accelerator, sending us lurching forward.

  “Well, you don’t see that every day,” Ramon replied just before a bullet smacked into the side of his head and bounced off with the hard twang of metal on metal. “Goddammit.”

  “Well, Mac, if you have any mojo left, now would be the time,” Maya said, scrunching herself in the foot space in front of her seat as the float swung widely off the main street, slammed partially into a light pole that ripped off Peppa’s ear, and came barreling toward us.

  “Seriously?” I asked as flowers streamed off Peppa’s face, and I realized I could see what looked like a fucking missile launcher inside. The mechanism inside the float groaned. Hydraulic presses moved and gears spun, pushing the tip of the missile through Peppa’s open mouth. In moments, it’d be aimed at us, and because I had no desire to be here when that happened, a sudden, stupid idea popped into my head.

  “We’re definitely up to three saves,” Ramon said, taking a hard right onto a crowded street filled with fruit stands and people hocking piñatas stuffed with candy instead of death. Ramon leaned on the horn, causing it to blast God Only Knows by the Beach Boys at the people in front of us while throwing the van into reverse and stomping on the accelerator in an effort to get us out of here.

  The people in front of us glanced up and mostly ignored us. I say mostly because a kid started sprinting toward our van with an armful of chiclets. Yeah, this was going to end horribly. So what did I do? I proceeded with my Really Bad Mac Brennan Plan ™.

  As the float came skidding into view in a hail of pink and white carnations, I threw open the VW bus’s back door and called upon my magic. I’m not sure why, but as I did it, Sabotage by the Beastie Boys started playing in my head.

  “Ignis!” I cried at the top of my lungs. Crimson Hellfire sprang to life in the palm of my hand as the inside of the van filled with scarlet light. I reared back in my best Randy Johnson imitation and hurled my magical fireball straight at the scud missile angling toward us.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t quite see the aftermath because I was too busy jerking the door shut and flinging myself toward my companions while calling up every last ounce of power I could. My tattoos went radioactive as I landed hard on Jack’s chest. I scrambled forward, grabbing Maya’s and Ramon’s shoulders and hanging on for dear life.

  “Tueri—” my cry was cut off as an explosion unlike anything I’d ever seen before sent the van flying in a burst of flame and shrapnel. As my own special brand of flame leapt out of me and spilled the entire inside of the van, a wave of heat washed over me, searing my nerves and making my vision splinter into fragments of shattered stained glass.

  My head smacked into the ceiling as the VW lifted into the air and tumbled end over end in a wash of fire and debris. I slammed into the front seat as I struggled to keep the inside of the van from being melted into slag along with the molten windows spattering against my shield. Hopefully filling the inside of the van with a magical shield would work, after all, It had shielded Jenna when we’d been adventuring through Hell, but as my vision started to go spotty and everything around me faded into a distilled point of darkness, I wasn’t sure my plan had worked. Then again, we weren’t dead so that portable missile silo could suck it sideways.

  Then the van slammed into a brick building, shattering the fire escape and crashing into the living room of an old guy wearing boxers and watching Jeopardy at full blast. He leapt to his feet in time for the van to fall completely on its roof. I smashed into the hard steel ceiling a moment before Jack’s unconscious form landed on top of my gut, causing the air to burst from my lungs.

  I lay there, unsure I was alive as my flaming shield died with a whimper rather than a roar. I couldn’t hear much because it felt like my head had been dipped in cotton, but I struggled to my feet anyway. Maya was hanging upside down in the front seat, suspended by her seatbelt. Despite the cut on her forehead, she seemed relatively okay. Ramon was nowhere to be found, but judging by the hole in the driver’s side door, I was pretty sure he’d either been splattered across the pavement outside or leapt to safety. Given his healing factor and metal insides, I was giving him fifty, fifty odds.

  Either way, we had to get out of here before more guys with missiles showed up. I shot a glance at Jack and sighed. I was going to have to carry him out. Damn.

  “You better be fucking broken,” I said, hauling him to his feet because there was no way I was going to leave him here to die. “Because otherwise, I’m going to be pissed.” He didn’t even have the decency to respond, the bastard.

  I wasn’t sure what we were going to find outside, but if we stayed here, the likelihood we’d wind up leveling the city on top of a bunch of civilians Avengers style was too high to contemplate. I wasn’t Speedball or anything so I’d get over it long before I turned my cat into a penitent puss.

  Then and there, I decided, it was time to stop running around playing by their rules. No, I was going to take this opportunity to change the game Mac Brennan style.

  Chapter 9

  “Fancy a reclaimed cat skull full of cider?” the old man who had been watching Jeopardy in his boxers asked as I emerged from the scorched van carrying a
comatose vampire. “Or are you more of an IPA type of guy?”

  “Say what?” I asked, looking at him completely dumbfounded. Sure enough, he was standing in the small kitchen attached to his now ruined living room with a goblet made from a fucking cat’s skull in one hand and a jug of cider in the other.

  “Do you want a drink?” he asked, fixing me with a steely-eyed glare as his caterpillar-like eyebrows narrowed. “I mean if you’re going to go and fuck up my shit, we may as well have a drink.”

  I wasn’t quite sure what was going on with him because this seemed like a somewhat atypical reaction to us suddenly arriving in his living room as the result of me blowing up a missile with Hellfire.

  “Is it organic?” Maya asked, crawling out from the now broken windshield. She stood, brushing bits of safety glass off of her clothing. “Because I only drink organic cider from cat skulls.”

  “Do you honestly think I’d have gone to the trouble of getting reclaimed cat skulls if I was going to pour non-organic, GMO-laden crap into them?” the old guy asked, shaking his head angrily as he approached her with one of the skulls. Amber liquid frothed from within. “Honestly, kids these days.”

  “Fair enough,” Maya said, accepting the goblet from the old guy as he looked her up and down without any effort to hide himself doing it.

  “Nice window dressing, but you’re not really my style. No offense,” he said after a moment. Then as she stood there mouth open in shock, he walked right past her and up to me. “Here’s your cider.” He shoved the cat’s skull into my right hand and some of the cold liquid sloshed over the side and onto my blackened flesh.

  Pain unlike anything I’d ever felt surged through me as my skin began to fizz like it was made of fucking baking soda and I’d been doused with vinegar. The smell of rotting flesh hit my nose as I stumbled backward, flailing and wound up dropping Jack in the process. The Indian vampire hit the ground with a heavy thunk as I tried desperately to wipe the cider off my dissolving skin. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to burn my left hand any. Was it Cursed specific?