twice cursed mage 05 - claimed (13 page)

“You might be able to see the future, but you’re no match for my click, boom style,” I said and pulled the trigger. She dodged because of course she did, and as she did, the bullet hit the glass behind her, shattering the window into a rain of razor sharp shards that cascaded down around her.

As she started coming forward, I fired again while kicking outward with my right foot. It wasn’t a solid hit thanks to recoil being what it was, but my boot caught her in the side of the jaw, snapping her head sideway and sending her stumbling toward the window. She hit the sill as her right hand closed around my pant leg. She jerked hard in an effort to keep from tumbling outside, but since I was off balance, all that did was pull me along with her.

I scrambled for grip, but all I succeeded in doing was grabbing hold of jagged glass and slicing open my hands. Pain stabbed at me as her weight jolted me from the window twenty stories in the air. As we fell down toward the pavement, she released me and laughter burbled up from her throat and filled my ears.

“This is where you die, Mac Brennan,” she said, and like fucking magic, she turned into an osprey. You know, those birds of prey with the pointy beaks?

I had half a second to realize what had happened as she hovered there, wings flapping easily in the wind before I plummeted past her to my doom. Fuck.

Chapter 16

Since there was no way in fucking Hell Mac Brennan was going to die by being thrown out of a twenty-story building by a chick wearing a kimono, I spun in midair and aimed my free hand at the guardrail on the roof.

“Necto!” I cried, and as the word left my lips, a scarlet tendril of energy shot from my hand like I was the goddamned Spiderman. The osprey dodged by my lifeline, evidently thinking it was an attack of some sort, which was fine with me because my tendril smacked into the building near the roof with an audible thwip. I had half a second to breathe before the line snapped taut, jerking me violently to a stop. My feet dangled over empty air as momentum being the bitch that she was, slammed me into the white stucco side of the building. Still, I wasn’t dead via a hard stop at the bottom. I mean, what was I, a werewolf?

Cop cars screamed on the ground far below me, and it wouldn’t be long before someone looked up and saw my happy ass dangling like a crazed jumper. I wanted chaos, sure, but not if it wound up getting me shot at or locked in a jail cell. Neither of those would be particularly awesome, and let’s be fair, news footage of me tearing the wings off a fucking osprey probably wouldn’t go over well.

Still, first thing was first. I needed to get the situation under control. I gritted my teeth together while my shoulder screamed in pain. Somehow, I managed to get my sandaled feet underneath me, planting them against the side of the building. I reached up, gripping my right wrist with my left hand in an effort to pull some of my weight off my shoulder and concentrated past all the craziness going on around me.

Which, of course, was when the osprey dove at me, talons wide and glinting in the sunlight. So what did I do? I called upon my power and tried to pretend I was Batman. Because let’s be honest, if you can be anyone, you should be Batman.

Just as the Osprey’s talons tore into my back, the tentacle attached to the building pulled me up just like Batman’s grappling cable. Pain and blood ripped across my body as I was jerked violently upward and out of the bird’s reach before she could bury that sharpened beak into my throat.

Granted, it hurt like a sonofabitch, and I’d be lying if I didn’t let out a choice word or two, but by the time I slammed into the top of the building, most of my pain had drowned in a sea of adrenaline as I struggled to keep myself alive. My shoulder ached like I’d gone ten rounds with a world class arm-wrestling champion, but I did my best to grab ahold of the roof with my left hand. As my fingers closed around the guardrail, and I started to haul myself upward, a yellow blur caught my eye.

I turned toward it in time to see Bruce running toward a helicopter in his stupid yellow jumpsuit with a determined expression on his face. He had one arm around Maya’s waist, and if she was conscious, it wasn’t apparent.

“What have you done to my wife?” he asked as he caught sight of me. His words carried an edge of menace to them that made a snake of fear wriggle in my gut, especially since I’d seen him kick through solid steel before. Not that it mattered. I was barely hanging onto the building, and I had no idea what had happened to his wife, the fucking bird of prey.

“It’s a building. What do you think happens when people fall out the penthouse window?” I asked while trying to climb up onto the roof. It was harder than I expected in flip flops because they didn’t have much in the way of grip.

Relief flashed across his aged features. “You had me worried, but my wife can fly.” He smirked and shook his head. “Dumbass.” With that, he climbed aboard the helicopter and tossed Maya’s unconscious form into the passenger seat. Damn. That was no good. I couldn’t let him escape. If he did, who knew where he’d take Maya. Another thought struck me, and Jack had said we’d need Maya to save Ricky. No. No. No. I couldn’t let him escape. I couldn’t!

As the big blades atop the vehicle began to spin through the air, I clambered up onto the roof as quickly as I could and wound up sheering off some skin in the process, but I didn’t care. I had to hurry. It was windier than I expected, probably due to the force coming off the helicopter, but I ignored it as I sprinted toward the whirly bird while hoping a kung fu osprey didn’t make an appearance.

The helicopter began to lift into the air. Fuck. If he got away now, who knows where he’d take Maya? That couldn’t happen.

I leapt toward the vehicle as it lifted and my fingers just brushed the helicopter’s footing before I began to tumble back down toward the building. As my feet touched the ground, and I stumbled forward, I let myself fall while twisting my body and reaching toward the escaping vehicle with my cursed hand.

“Necto!” My tattoos flared as the tendril shot from my hand for the second time in as many minutes. It slammed into the underside of the helicopter with a thwip and stuck there like a blast of webbing from Spiderman’s web shooters, and as relief flooded through me, because it’d actually fucking worked, it was immediately replaced by absolute fucking horror as I was jerked over the edge of the building.

My feet kicked frantically in the air as I dangled twenty feet beneath a helicopter as it flew through the city. My shoulder screamed in protest as I whipped through the air. Thankfully, I didn’t see the osprey anywhere, but I still had a big fucking problem. I wasn’t sure if Bruce knew I was hanging on to the helicopter’s underbelly like an unwanted spider, but either way, I was headed straight toward the side of the building. Even my rudimentary understanding of physics told me that despite my naturally hard head, it was a losing proposition.

I sucked in a breath and willed the tentacle to retract with all the speed it could muster. I slammed into the underside of the helicopter hard enough for my teeth to rattle in my skull as the roof of a skyscraper passed harmlessly beneath me. I had half a second to suck in a relieved breath before my entire body fell backward, welded to the helicopter by my fingertips alone.

My muscles shrieked in agony as I was carried through the city in a way that made me immediately think every Spiderman comic ever was full of shit. This hurt way too much for it to be practical. Well, it was time to stop modeling my actions after comic books. So what did I do? Made a bad situation way the fuck worse.

I unslung my Desert Eagle, aimed at the tail rotor, and emptied to gun. Let me just say this. Shooting at the tail rotor of a helicopter you are riding is a fucking stupid idea. The first thing that happened was the rotor blew apart in an explosion of shrapnel that damned near skewered me, and then because there’s always an “and then,” the helicopter went into a death spiral.

My body was flung sideways as we began to spin, and the Desert Eagle slipped from my grip and fell to only God knows where. As my back slammed into the hardened underbelly of the helicopter, I knew I only had one chance. I shut my eyes, hoped like hell my plan would work, and took a deep breath. Then I released my Spiderman hold on the underside of the helicopter.

I was immediately flung sideways, and as I arced through the air like a badly hit baseball, I flung my hand toward the helicopter and called upon my power.

“Ignis!” A ball of flame exploded from my hand and streaked through the air like an angry red comet. It smashed into the cockpit of the helicopter as Bruce fought to right the damaged aircraft. The windshield shattered in a spray of molten glass and debris as I reoriented my hand on the helicopter’s new entrance.

“Necto!” The tendril shot from my hand, and as it did, my vision tunneled. I was running low on power, but even still, my aim was true. I threaded the tendril through the hole in the glass. My shoulder was instantly jerked out of its socket, but I ignored it, recalling the tentacle as quickly as possible.

My body was ripped forward through the air in a modified spin, and as I slammed through the hole in the helicopter’s face, Bruce decked me in the jaw. The momentum made me black out for a second, and by the time I blinked myself awake, Bruce was wearing a parachute and had Maya strapped to him.

Instead of saying any cool supervillain lines, he popped the pin out of a grenade, tossed it in my general direction, and leapt from the crashing helicopter. While I struggled to orient myself to my new reality, I heard his chute open, and as it did, I gritted my teeth, released my magical hold on the helicopter, and threw myself backward into the air. I angled myself, just like I had when I’d gone after Ricky when she’d been thrown from the plane, turning my body into a bullet.

The only upside was that Bruce wasn’t far from me and I reached him a second before the helicopter exploded. The shockwave threw me forward into him, and as he drove his elbow into my chin, I somehow managed to grab onto his harness.

He reared back to punch out my lights, but I whirled around him, clambering onto his back and wrapping my arm around his neck in a chokehold. As we careened through the air, he tried to swat at me, but even though his punches were like sledgehammer blows, I hung on until we slammed into a big plastic cow attached to a billboard telling me to eat more chicken.

My breath shot from my lungs as I collapsed backward onto the billboard’s platform. Bruce was less lucky because his parachute snagged on the hooks at the top of the advertisement, stringing him up. It gave me enough time to get to my feet, but as I did, my entire world swayed dizzily and the taste of blood filled my mouth.

Bruce sucked in a gulp of air as I took a step toward him before releasing his harness and dropping lithely to the ground, Maya still strapped to his body.

“Let her go,” I growled, and while I’d meant to sound tough, the wind carried away most of the force of my words. I settled for fixing him with an icy glare which he ignored.

“Why do you care for my son so much?” he snarled at me while gesturing to Maya. “Are you some kind of freak too?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” While I tried to figure out why he’d just called Maya his son, I took another step forward and nearly slipped. My hand went out, catching hold of the plastic cow, and I steadied myself. Barely. Fuck, I needed to concentrate. The ground below looked both too far away and too close for it to be good. If I fell from here, I probably wouldn’t die, I’d just be crippled for life. That didn’t exactly seem fun. “What do you mean by your son?”

“This is my son.” He made a disgusted snort at Maya. “No matter how much surgery he gets, he’ll never be able to take my daughter’s place.”

“Wait,” I said as a strange realization washed over me. “Maya’s a boy?”

“His name is Tom.” Bruce unsnapped the restraints holding Maya onto him and dropped her to the platform behind him. He rolled his neck, eliciting several cracks before raising his hands in front of himself like a European boxer. “Maya died in a car accident years ago.” He glanced toward Maya. “That is not Maya.”

I took a deep breath as I tried to wrap my head around what he was saying. The idea that Maya was a boy didn’t make any sense. I mean, she didn’t look or act like a boy. I shook my head, trying to clear away the confusion. My head was pounding way too much for this conversation, and even if it was true, part of me wasn’t even sure why he was telling me. “What do you mean, Maya’s dead?”

“My daughter Maya died a few years ago. My wife fell into depression. One day, Tom came out of the bathroom wearing a long shirt like Maya used to wear to bed. From behind, he almost looked like her because of his long hair. My wife saw him, and well,” he made a “well, you know how things are” gesture. “The rest is history.”

“So you turned your son into your dead daughter?” I asked, barely able to comprehend that. I’d heard about fucked up shit, but this? This took the fucking cake. “Do you know how fucked up that is?”

“I did not turn him into anything,” he replied, shaking his head. “That was all Tom’s own doing. I did not tell him to assume his dead sister’s identity.” He let out a slow breath. “I only allowed it to continue because it made Martha happy. You wouldn’t understand.”

He was right. I didn’t understand, but that was fine. I didn’t have to understand. I was going to kick both of their asses either way. If Maya felt like explaining herself to me after, well she could do that, and if she didn’t want to tell me a damned thing, that was fine too. I didn’t judge.

That said, I’d learned one piece of valuable information from his diatribe. Maya’s mother was named Martha. I guess that made sense since all female mothers were inevitably named Martha, but still, I wasn’t sure I could handle any more information about her family at the moment. There had to be more to the story, but right now, I didn’t really care because my only concern was saving Maya from this fuckstick. If it turned out she had some extra bits down there, well, that was her business.

“Yeah, I don’t care,” I snarled, bringing my own fists up because it totally seemed like fist fighting this Bruce Lee wannabe on top of a billboard hundreds of feet in the air was a good idea. “Come on, Dragon. Let me tell you a story.”