Magic Strikes (34 page)

“I said, I know why you’re afraid to fight with me.”

“And why is that?” If he flexed again, I’d have to implement emergency measures. Maybe I could kick some sand at him or something. Hard to look hot brushing sand out of your eyes.

“You want me.”

Oh boy.

“You can’t resist my subtle charm, so you’re afraid you’re going to make a spectacle out of yourself.”

“You know what? Don’t talk to me.”

The gong boomed.

Memories smashed into me: heat, sand, fear.

The lamia’s magic snapped like a striking cobra. I jumped up and to the left, just in time to avoid the pit in the sand that yawned open beneath my feet.

The Swordmaster was on me like white on rice. He charged in and struck in a textbook thrust of wrath, a powerful diagonal thrust delivered from the right and angled down. I jerked back. His blade whistled past me, and I grabbed his leather and smashed my forehead into his face.
There you go. Sloppy.

Red drenched my face. The swordsman’s eyes rolled back in his head and he fell.

Not good.

I turned in time to see the werebison arrive. It took him a moment to build up his speed, but as he ran now, massive, huge, blowing air from his misshapen nose, he seemed unstoppable.

Curran watched him come with a slightly bored expression. At the last moment, he stepped aside and stuck his foot out. The shapeshifter tripped and Curran helped him down by pushing none too gently on the back of his neck. The werebison flipped onto the sand, hitting the ground like a fallen skyscraper. He shuddered once and lay still, his neck bent in an unnatural angle.

He must’ve broken his neck in the fall. His chest was still moving. At least he didn’t die.

Curran stared at him, perplexed.

Dali barked a sharp command in a language I didn’t understand and tossed a piece of rice paper into the air. There was a quiet plop and the paper vanished.

We looked at the lamia expectantly. Nothing. She waved her arms, gathering magic for something nasty.

I guess the spell was a bust.

A spark of bright magenta shone above the lamia’s head. It flared into glowing red jaws with demonic needle-teeth. The jaws chomped the lamia—neck, elbows, waist—and vanished. There was a loud crunch and the lamia twisted: her head turned backward, snapping her neck, her elbows protruded from the front of her arms, and she bent to the side like a flower with a broken stem.

I turned slowly and stared at Dali. She shrugged. “I guess it worked. What?”

The crowd went wild.

Jim waited for us at the Gold Gate. His teeth were bared. “What happened to barely winning?”

“You said sloppy! Look, I didn’t even use my sword; I hit him with my head, like a moron.”

“A man with a sword attacked you and you disarmed him and knocked him out cold in under two seconds.” He turned to Curran.

The Beast Lord shrugged. “It’s not my fault that he didn’t know how to fall.”

Jim’s gaze slid from Curran to Dali. “What the hell was that?”

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“Crimson Jaws of Death.”

“And were you planning on letting me know that you can turn people’s elbows backward?”

“I told you I did curses.”

“You said they don’t work!”

“I said they don’t
always
work. This one worked apparently.” Dali wrinkled her forehead. “It’s not like I ever get to use them against live opponents anyway. It was an accident.”

Jim looked at us. The clipboard snapped in his hands. He turned around and very deliberately walked away.

“I think we hurt his feelings.” Dali looked at his retreating back, sighed, and went after him.

Curran looked at me. “What the hell was I supposed to do, catch the werebison as he was falling?”

BACK IN THE ROOM I GRABBED A CHANGE OF clothes and showered. When I returned, dinner had been brought in by the Red Guard: beef stew with fresh bread. Raphael had vanished right after dinner, and the shapeshifters invited me to play poker.

They killed me. Apparently I was made of tells: they could hear my heartbeat and smelled the changes in my sweat, and counted the number of times I blinked, and knew what cards I had before I looked at them. If it had been strip poker, I would’ve had to give them the skin off my back. I finally gave up and went back to my bed to read one of Doolittle’s paperbacks, since he was otherwise occupied. The good doctor turned out to be a card fiend. Once in a while, I glanced at them. The six shapeshifters sat like statues, faces showing nothing, barely lifting their cards to steal supernaturally fast glances. It felt weird to fall asleep with someone else there, but there was something almost hypnotic about their absolute stillness that lulled me into sleep.

I dreamed that Curran and I killed a dinosaur and then had sex in the dirt.

AT ABOUT NINE, CURRAN, DALI, AND I MADE OUR way to the Gold Gate to see Andrea, Raphael, Jim, and Derek take on the Killers.

The magic was up. Andrea grinned as she passed me by. She carried her SIG-Sauers in hip holsters and a crossbow in her hands. With the magic up, the guns wouldn’t fire, but she must’ve wanted to be prepared for the shift.

Jim and Derek carried nothing and wore identical gray sweatpants. Raphael carried two tactical knives, both with oxide finish that made the blades Teflon-black. The knife in his left was shaped like a tanto.

The blade in his right was double-edged and slightly leaf-shaped: narrow at the handle, it widened before coming to a razor-sharp point. Raphael wore black boots, fitted black leather pants that molded to him with heart-shattering results, and nothing else.

As he passed me, he leaned to Curran and handed him a paper fan folded from some sort of flyer.

Curran looked at the fan. “What?”

“An emergency precaution, Your Majesty. In case the lady faints.”

Curran just stared at him.

Raphael strode toward the Pit, turned, flexed a bit, and winked at me.

“Give me that,” I told Curran. “I need to fan myself.”

“No, you don’t.”

We took off to the stairs for the better view. When the three of us settled on the staircase, Andrea was drawing her crossbow in a businesslike fashion. The three shapeshifters spread out in front of her.

Across the expanse of sand, the Killers waited in a two-by-two formation.

The Killers gave off a distinctly Japanese flair. Their Stone, a huge, towering monstrosity, had to weigh close to four hundred pounds. Dark indigo, he stood eight feet tall, with arms like tree trunks. A big, round gut protruded above his kilt, as though he’d swallowed a cannon ball. Two horns curved from the coarse mane of dark hair dripping from his skull, and two matching sabertooth-like tusks protruded from his lower jaw. His brutish, thick-featured face communicated simple rage, and the huge iron club in his
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hand signified his willingness to let it loose. An oni, a Japanese ogre.

Next to him crouched a beast bearing a striking resemblance to the stone statues guarding the entrances to Chinese temples. Thick and powerfully muscled, it stared at the crowd with bulging eyes brimming with intelligence. Its flanks were dark red, its mane short and curled in ruby ringlets. It sniffed the air and shook its disproportionately huge head. Its maw gaped open, wide, wider, until its head split nearly in half. Lights glinted from brilliant white fangs. A Fu Lion.

Behind him a thin-lipped redheaded woman in a white shirt and flaring black pants held a yumi, a two-meter-tall, slender, traditional Japanese bow. By her side stood an Asian man with striking, pale green eyes.

The archer began drawing her yumi bow. She stood with her feet wide apart, the left side of her body facing the target—Raphael. She raised the bow above her head and lowered it slowly, drawing as it came down, wider and wider, until the straight line of the arrow crossed just under her cheekbone.

A silver spark ignited at the tip of the arrow and ran down the shaft, flaring into white lightning.

Across the sand Andrea waited, with her crossbow down at her side. Raphael casually twirled the knife in his right hand, turning it into a metal blur.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, hands braided into a single fist.

“They aren’t children,” Curran said to me. “They know what they’re doing.”

It made no difference to me. I would rather walk a hundred times into the Pit than see one of them die in there.

The gong struck.

The archer fired.

Andrea snapped the crossbow up and fired without aiming. In the same blink Raphael slid out of the way of the fiery arrow, as fluidly as if his joints were made of water, and struck it down with his knife. Pieces of the arrow fell to the sand, sizzling with magic.

The archer’s head snapped. The crossbow bolt sprouted precisely between her eyes. Her mouth gaped open in a black O and she toppled back like a log.

The man next to her closed his eyes and fell back. His body never touched the sand. Thin strands of magic caught and cloaked him, knitting into a gossamer web, cradling his body like a hammock. His face turned placid. He appeared asleep.

The Fu Lion roared, sounding more like a pissed-off wolverine than a feline. Plumes of reddish smoke billowed from its mouth. It charged.

It covered the distance to our line in three great bounds, each strike of its clawed feet shaking the sand like the blow of a huge sledgehammer. Derek lunged into its path, ripping the sweatpants from his body.

Skin split on his back, spilling fur. Muscle and bone boiled and a seven-foot-tall werewolf grasped the Fu Lion’s head. The nightmare and the lion collided, raising a spray of sand into the air. The impact pushed Derek across the sand. Derek dug his lupine feet into the sand, grinding the lion’s charge to a dead halt.

Sinewy muscle played along his long back under the patchy fur.

The Fu Lion jerked his head, trying to shake off the half-beast, half-man. Derek thrust his claws into the creature’s massive neck. To the left Jim became a jaguar in an explosion of flesh and golden fur.

The Fu Lion reared, trying to claw. The moment it exposed its gut, Raphael and the werejaguar darted to it. Knives and claws flashed and the slippery clumps of the beast’s innards tumbled out in a whoosh of blood. Derek tore his claws free and leapt aside. The Fu Lion swayed and fell.

The shapeshifters rose from his corpse, silent. Derek’s eyes glowed amber, while Jim’s were pools of green.

“Jim improved his warrior form,” Curran said. “Interesting.”

Behind the shapeshifters Andrea loaded the crossbow and fired. The crossbow spat bolts, one after another. Three shafts punctured the oni’s chest, but the ogre just bellowed and brushed them off the massive shield of flesh he called his torso.

Andrea landed a shot to the forehead. The bolt bounced off the ogre’s skull.

Magic grew behind the oni, blooming like a flower around the sleeping man. Long, translucent strands snaked past the oni’s legs, like pale ribbons.

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“Bad,” Dali murmured behind me. “Bad, bad, bad . . .”

The strands knotted together. Light flashed and a creature spilled forth. Ten feet tall, it resembled a human crouching on frog legs. It squatted in the sand, leaning on abnormally long forelimbs, the magic ribbons binding its back and legs to the sleeping mage. A second set of forearms sprouted from its elbows, terminating in long, slender fingers tipped with narrow claws. A huge maw gaped where its face would have been, a black funnel turned inward. Its hide shimmered with a metallic sheen, as if the creature were spun from silver wool.

The Arena fell silent.

The shapeshifters backed up. Andrea reloaded and sent a bolt into the creature’s maw. It vanished and emerged from the aberration’s back. The oni danced behind it, stomping the sand.

The creature reared slightly, its sallow chest expanded, and it belched a glittering, silvery cloud.

Fine metal needles rained into the sand. One grazed Jim and he snarled. Silver.

The shapeshifters retreated. The monster kept a steady stream of metal vomit, and began crawling forward, slowly, ponderously, chasing them back to the fence.

The cloud caught Derek, slicing through his torso. He jerked as if burned, and leapt away.

“Take out the sleeper,” I murmured.

Jim barked a short order, barely audible behind the hiss of needles slicing the sand. Derek ducked left, while Raphael darted right, trying to flank the creature. A second mouth bloomed in the side of the creature’s chest and the new flood of needles cut Raphael short.

I clenched my sword. Curran watched with no expression, like a rock.

Another command. Raphael and Jim fell back, while Derek backed away slowly, just out of the monster’s reach. The two shapeshifters grasped Andrea’s legs and heaved. She flew straight up, squeezing off a single shot.

The bolt punched through the sleeper’s chest, emerging through his back. He awoke with a startled scream and clawed at the shaft. The threads of translucent magic ribbons ripped and he crashed into the sand. The ribbons shrank, breaking from the monster’s skin, leaving deep black gaps as they tore. The gaps grew, and the creature began to melt. It whipped about and backhanded the oni out of the way.

The blue brute crashed into the fence. The silver aberration crawled to the sleeper, dragging itself faster and faster across the sand. Its back and hips were gone, melted into nothing, and yet it continued to crawl. In a moment it loomed above the flailing human, bent down, and gulped him in a single swallow.

The mage’s screeches died and the beast vanished.

The crowd exploded. A hundred mouths screamed at once. To the left some hoarse male voice yelled,

“Gooooooal!” at the top of his lungs.

The oni stumbled to his feet and met three shapeshifters. It was short and brutal.

I opened the door and took off down to the gate. Curran and Dali caught up with me.