Sorcerer Rising (A Virgil McDane Novel) (19 page)

“There’s a lot of wildlife out here,” I said slowly, eyeing which way he was jerking the barrel. “Could be you saw a deer or something else. These old clouds can be weird, especially at night.”

“It wasn’t a fucking deer, Sorcerer!” Bob shouted, still eyeing the darkness. “Been hunting plenty. I know what a deer looks like. I know animals too. I know what it feels like to have something hungry watching you.”

He fired off another shot. I didn’t like the look in his eyes.

“Damn it, Bob, calm down!” Alfred shouted, taking a step forward.

Then something blue and luminous, like a whip of liquid light
, reached out from the darkness and grabbed Bob by the throat. He didn’t even have time to shout, let alone fire off another shot, before the blue ribbon plucked him away from the camp and into the darkness.

In an instant, I had Abigail
out and aimed in the direction Bob had disappeared. On either side of me, Alfred had his rifle up and Tiffany her staff.

“I left the damn flashlight in the jeep,” Alfred whispered next to me. “Can either one of you…I don’t know, do something?”

Beside me Tiffany waved her hand, whispering under her breath. Green mist spilled out from her fingertips, forming into motes of light. It was a moment before I realized they were fireflies, or something like them. She created dozens of them, each as bright as a small bulb, and waved them away.

The fireflies illuminated the field to an extent. It was dim, but bright enough to make out some detail. I could see Bob lying on the ground. He wasn’t moving.

Two figures standing over him.

Alfred let off two shots immediately. There were two small flashes of light and my senses were assaulted by the smell of sea foam and salt. Neither figure moved.

“I’m a better shot than that,” Alfred said.

“That’s magic,” I said. “Hang back.”

I had a very uneasy feeling about this. The last time I had felt magic like this was just the night before, in the alleyway…

I raised Abigail
. The figures didn’t even flinch at the weapon.

“Turn around and walk away!” I yelled.

I could feel Tiffany working something beside me, but it was building up slowly. Still the two figures hadn’t moved.

“You know them?”
she asked.

“I was attacked just
last night by something,” I said. “Their magic smelled a lot like these two.”

“Smelled?’ Alfred asked.

Movement ahead of us interrupted anything snarky I would have shot back. The figures darted away from each other, quicker than I would have thought possible. Alfred started shooting and Tiffany dropped something unsettling on the ground. It was small, but hit with such an impact I felt it from my toes to my fingertips.

A bolt of blue light seared the air, narrowly missing my head. Movement attracted a blast from each of Abigail's barrels, but I hit nothing but
grass. I quickly broke her and loaded in two more shells.

Movement again, this time to my right. I darted forward, tracking the shadow as it ducked around a tree. Blue light coursed toward me, slicing through a trunk like it was butter. I dove to the ground, narrowly dodging the falling tree, and fired one barrel. I was rewarded with a wet gurgle and the scent of blood in the air.

I stood up, making my way toward the shadow. A twig snapped behind me and I spun around.

Comin
g face to face with one of the creatures, his yellow eyes burning in the light of the spell Tiffany had cast. He caught the gun in one hand as I pulled the trigger, the blast tearing a divot in the ground harmlessly.

“We remember you,” the creature gurgled slowly, peering into my face.

Then it wrapped wet fingers around my throat and began to squeeze.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

I dug my fingers into the thing’s soft skin
, but it made no difference. Its grip was like iron and if I was causing any pain, it didn’t react. It just glared into my eyes, its own beginning to burn with a terrible blue light. Pressure began to build on my forehead, the thing’s eyes burning brighter, crackling as they were consumed by blue mist. Its skin ripped, its muscles bulging underneath.

Then a thousand voices pressing in on my mind. One voice, louder than all the rest, corralled them, driving them against my defenses.
A nauseating force pressed in on my skull.

The thing said, one voice aloud, the other in my head, all against the backdrop of a thousand others, “You escaped me before. You will not escape again.”

I flexed my left hand, scraping together enough concentration to cast a spell. I focused my mind, honing in on an image, of the forest, of my keep, any spell that would make this guy let go of my throat.

I grabbed hold of his arm; the web was weak, but it would have to do. If I could just...just channel a bit of power…

Darkness began to creep into my vision.

I saw a mountain, cold smoke billowing from its mouth. In my youth, I had named it
Mulciber. Once it had been burning hot, but now it was cold, billowing thick, greasy smoke.

I gritted my teeth, applying as much force as I could against the spell.

Red seeped in through the smoke.

The world exploded. A blast of air and force and just a little bit of fire erupted from my hand, throwing me and the creature away from each other.

I gasped, my vision filled with red and black. My hand was burning, all the way to the bone. My blood felt like it was boiling under the skin. Just grazing the grass with my fingertips sent shockwaves of pain through my whole body. This wasn’t like before with the derringer. Nothing was numb and I couldn’t even move.

The creature was faring better by far. He tossed away a tree I had felled with the blast, walking toward me. The light intensified, spreading through its whole head. For a sickening moment, I could actually see the thing’s brain pulsating through the bone.

And that was it. There was nothing else left. No more tricks, no more magic. I had destroyed my web, dismembered the metaphysical talisman that allowed me any access to my mind. Abigail was out of reach. And I couldn’t even lift my head let alone fight the thing off.

Suddenly, the earth shifted. The creature had just enough time to look down before a great fleshy pod of teeth and vines erupted from the ground. Jaws of wood with thick, vined muscles closed around the things midsection with a loud crunch and the last thing I saw before passing out was the creature’s burning eyes as it was dragged underground.

I woke up next to the campfire. Alfred was pacing back and forth, rifle in hand. Tiffany was walking around the perimeter, placing objects in the dirt.

“What happened?” I asked. Or tried to. It came out more of a moan.

“Bob’s dead,” she said, burying another object in the ground. “They broke his neck. The one that had you is fertilizer right now. The other one, the one you shot, is hanging on.”

I pushed myself up and winced in pain. Looking down at my hand, I realized how badly I’d messed up. Thick, purple veins were throbbing from my fingers all the way to my elbow. It was worse than trying to catch Cruder’s lightning bolt, worse than when had I used the derringer. The rings were intact, that wasn’t the issue, this was deeper.

I tried to flex my hands, to feel the web, but my fingers refused to move.

“I think you have a problem there,” Tiffany said quietly, her attention drawn away from her work for the first time. I didn’t look at her. Whatever her eyes held, it wasn’t something I wanted to see.

“I’m fine,” I said, pushing myself to my feet. It wa
s all I could do to pick up Abigail and stick her back in my pocket without falling down again.

I tucked my arm into my jacket and made my way to the jeep.

“It was a glancing blow,” Alfred said, watching the thing tied up in the back seat. “A flesh wound. Good enough for me to knock it out but it’ll be fine until we get it back to the camp.”

I nodded, watching it squirm under the ropes. For the second time, these things had attacked me.
What in the hell was going on?

“Good,” I said. “We’ll take it back to the camp. Maybe we can figure out why these things have jumped me twice now
. In the meantime, don’t let this thing look at you. You understand?”

He nodded.

I grabbed him with my good hand. “I mean it. If it tries to get free, if it tries to make eye contact, if you see even a little bit of light come from it, you shoot it until you run out of bullets. You got it?”

He nodded quickly.

I walked back to the fire and collapsed in my bedroll.

Tiffany was done with whatever she was doing. She brushed off her hands and moved closer to the fire. “Whatever they are, they won’t be surprising us again.”

“What did you do?”

“Planted some mischief for anyone who tries to sneak up on us again,” she replied.

“What you did before,” I said. “Thank you. I would have been done for if you hadn’t…done whatever you did.”

She looked at me and I saw a hint of sadness in her eyes. “You were trying…you tried to cast something before my spell went off. I felt it.”

I gave her a weak smile “Yeah, whatever those things do, it really throws you off.”

She frowned. “I know that isn’t true. I can tell when a spell goes wrong.”

I grimaced. “Maybe you don’t know as much as you think, Wizard.”

I stood up but she grabbed me by the hand and dragged me back down. She didn’t have to try hard either, the pain that lanced up my arm knocked the breath out of me. I collapsed next to her as the world faded in and out of blackness.

“God, Virgil,” she said, delicately running her fingers over my skin. Even that, which was kind of nice, I won’t mind admitting, burned up my arm. I could feel her looking Deeper, piercing below the skin with her sight, doing what I was too afraid to do.

She gasped. “What did you do?”

I flexed my hand, trying to ignore the pain, trying even harder to feel my fingers. “I was attacked by…by some of those things back in the city.”

Her eyes widened. “One of those things? In Mare? They did this?”

“No,” I replied. “They didn’t survive. But I lost one of my talisman. It’s…I can’t do anything without them. I’ve pushed it to the limit the past couple of days but it’s never been this bad. I broke something.”

She
grabbed her staff, rubbing her hand up and down the rough wood. A fresh bud grew from the surface, forming into a moist, fleshy pod. She plucked the pod from the staff and cracked it open, rubbing the juice on my hand.

I winced but was pleasantly surprised by a cool sensation that ran all the way to my shoulder. She rubbed the juice into my hand, kneading it gently. When the swelling went down she slid the remaining rings off my fingers and rubbed where they had burned dark scorch marks into my skin.

I trembled as she rubbed the ointment in. Tears formed in my eyes, a sickening mix of comfort and humiliation.

I sighed. Or at least that’s what I called it. It may have been more
like a sob. “Thank you.”

That morning when James, followed shortly by Dorne and Tiffany, barged into the tent, they found me sitting in front of the creature. It was tied to a chair opposite to me, a sack over its head. No way was I letting those eyes get a look at anyone. Not yet.

“Everything looks fine,” Sam said. “But I don’t know what I’m looking for, Virgil.”

“What’s going on here?” Dorne asked. “Who is that? What are you doing?”

“Trying to keep it from dying,” I said. “For the moment.”

Tiffany took Dorne by the arm and led him across the tent. They began to whisper furiously back and forth.

Lambros knelt down next to Sam, who was changing the thing’s bandage. “Wherever did you find it? This is extraordinary.”

“It attacked us,” I said. “I’m sorry, James, but Bob is dead.”

His jaw clenched and he squinted, glaring at me. “What do you mean, McDane?”

“Two of these things attacked us on our way back to the camp,” I said, standing to face him. “Before we knew what was happening, they killed him. I’m sorry.”

“You said this place was safe,” he said. “You said you knew better than the Wizards.” He leaned in just an inch closer. “Did you get
one of my men killed for your
politics
?”

I met his eye for just a moment before Diana interrupted. “Calm down, Mr. Baker. This creature is clearly not from the Walter Cloud.”

“She’s right,” I said, trying to ignore the truth in James’ words. “I was attacked by a group of these things back in Mare.”

James didn’t yell, didn’t hit me. He just grabbed me by the collar and slammed me against a crate. “You didn’t think maybe we might need to know about that?”

“I had no way of knowing what they were!” I said, throwing him off me. I winced at the pain in my hand. “When you have my enemies, this is just another damned day of the week. For all I knew-” I snapped my mouth shut but not without a glance at the Wizards. “I didn’t know who sent them or why. I still don’t.”