“Motherfucker!” I screamed, twitching sideways in fright, hand coming up, fingers twisting into a gesture.
Standing behind the SUV with his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, was the man who’d put three bullets in me. My unwitting co-conspirator in the clusterfuck that had led to the world going beyond crazy.
The stasis field snapped on around him. I chanced a look behind me. The monster was still wrestling with the car. I locked my eyes back on the Hunter. My magic was draining, fast. I couldn't hold him in the field for long. What the fuck did I do here?!
The Hunter's eyes rotated, taking in the field, then a pulse of magic surged out of him, and my trap abruptly died.
Oh shit.
His pistol came up far faster than I could move, and it was trained straight at my forehead. My heart was practically beating its way out of my chest — trying to escape the crushing weight of my terrible decisions.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his eyes running up and down my form critically. “Completely different look. Fur isn't in any known pattern. You're wearing a glamour — a good one. I can't see through it. How?”
I frowned and my tail swished into view, waving like, hey dumbass.
“Right, right,” he nodded, as if I'd just told him that it was going to rain tomorrow. He tilted his head. “How'd you do it? The leyline?”
“Don't tell the fucker nuthin’!” Saoirse's voice called from under the SUV.
“He has a gun to my head,” I said, my voice rising in pitch. My arm was wobbling — I'd frozen in place when the gun got levelled at me.
The Hunter was staring at the gap under the SUV, an extremely perplexed and slightly annoyed expression on his face. “Who is that?”
“Your mum!” Saoirse shot back. Then I heard her start muttering, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Lette’s gonna die. The only person even remotely related to the clan, that I can find. Dead. This sucks. She's really nice, and funny, and she puts up with my stupid mouth, and—”
My little foxy friend was panicking, which was fair. I was too, to be real for a moment. When I was truly panicking though, my brain entered this weird zen state where I could still act and make rational decisions. It was only after the fact that I broke down into little chunks of terror.
The Hunter grunted, then seemed to decide that the little panicking animal wasn't worth his time. “The leyline.”
“If I had to guess? Blood of a spirit,” I said, nodding slightly at him. “I didn't do it. You did.”
“The blood of a—” I could hear the creak of his teeth as he gritted them together when he realised what I meant. The same key that locks a door, can be used to unlock it. Simple logic. Something occurred to him after a second though, and his eyes narrowed. “That would only unseal that one singular leyline. The cascade burst the whole world open.”
I winced. I was hoping he wouldn't realise that part.
Behind me, I heard metal scream as it broke. The Hunter's eyes flickered over my shoulder. “You have ten seconds to tell me something useful.”
“Artemis and Apollo,” I said, throwing the gods under the bus. Knowing them, the bus would get ripped apart by a supersonic arrow, then melted into slag by the full concentrated power of the sun. In other words, they could take it.
“The marble,” he said, anger flaring in his eyes. His finger tightened slightly on the trigger, and his hand was quivering slightly.
Please no. Please… I liked my new body, I didn't want to—
The gun lowered, mostly because the tension suddenly left his arm. “You're lucky that the rules have changed, Gauntlette. The APA has been forced to change gears. Ah, and then there's the three different cellphones recording us currently. They got you helping us on camera — the optics would be difficult to control.”
His eyes flicked upwards when he said that — towards the nearby apartment building above the McDonald's.
Relief flooded my body, and I let my hand drop with a gasp. “Nice to know you care. Now… about the monster?”
“I see two and have heard a third, which one?” He asked in a monotone, but he stepped aside and—
His entire magazine was dumped into the monster behind me before I could react, a manic snarl twisting his features. Jesus!
I screamed and twisted as far away from the stream of bullets as I could, even though they were already spent by the time I was moving. The burdenbug didn't appreciate the Hunter's little attempt at kinetic anger management, and lunged at us — attached car or no.
The only warning that I got was a startled yelp from Saoirse as she scampered away, claws clicking rapidly on the pavement. I pulled myself up into the air, my speed only enough to dodge the flailing attack because of all the adrenaline pumping around in my veins.
The Hunter wasn't so lucky, and the burdenbug hit him like the family wagon that it still had two feet stuck in. I mean, it also hit him with the car, but it was like the car had been speeding, and—
I landed pretty much where I'd been standing before my dodge, but the SUV, the Hunter, and the monster were embedded in a storefront several yards away. With a screech, the burdenbug tore itself free of the carnage and whirled, searching for more prey.
The SUV rocked slightly, then was somehow shoved out of the storefront to roll onto its roof in the street. The Hunter stepped out of the spot the vehicle had just vacated, his body bloodied, his suit and jacket ruined. How the heck did he just survive that?
“Wow, this is intense, huh?” Saoirse said from beside me, her ears all the way back and her eyes wide. Good, she’d dodged the car crash.
I was about to reply, when the Hunter’s eyes landed on me. I don’t know if it was the shock of the hit he’d just taken, or whatever, but I could see that the proverbial mask had slipped. His eyes were just… empty — like, there was intelligence behind them, but man… empathy was a myth to this guy. It reminded me of when he killed me.
Panic flooded my veins like hot ice, and I took a step back as the images and sensations of my last moments ran through my thoughts again. His disinterested words, the way he shot me like it was an afterthought, and the way it felt to feel my body slowly drain of warmth—
“Hey, cousin?” Saoirse squeaked, gently nipping at my heel with her teeth. “Do something.”
Ow. What?
The burdenbug screamed, and my heart hitched like a car being jump-started. Before I could think, I raised my left hand, and pulsed out a small shockwave, then immediately followed it up with a heavier one from my right gauntlet. The first was targeted right at one of the horse-legs, while the other slammed into it, keeping it from running me over.
As far as gore explosions go, this wasn’t Hollywood level… but it was disgusting anyway. My focused shockwave caught on a wide hole that the cops and shot in one of the horse bodies, and it was like an air cannon had been fired into the wound. Bits of gunk flew everywhere, and I grimaced even as I stumbled away from the thrashing monster.
Inside the now partially disassembled horse torso, I saw this awful black worm-looking thing with long black hairs that were extended throughout the flesh of the horse, except where I’d blow bits away.
“Ew!” I squealed, looking away.
The beast lunged at me again, mandibles snapping out. Twist, reach out, curl fingers. My stasis field caught it as it was coming, barely in time, too. If I were even a little slower on the draw, it would’ve bitten my head off.
I continued limping away, holding the stasis field up with all of my willpower while my reserves of magical power drained rapidly. If this were a video game, my blue mana bar would’ve been racing to the bottom of its little rectangle.
The Hunter, for his part, threw his arm up, and a little orb at his belt began to crackle with energy. A shield shimmered to life around him, and he pulled some sort of bottle out of a pouch on his belt. He downed the liquid like a ‘cool person’ in a TV show — throwing it back in one gulp. It didn’t have any immediate effect, and I wasn’t exactly keen to inspect him closely to see what’d changed.
My energy reserves reached the level where if I wanted to have enough to escape into the air, I needed to let the field fall. So, I pulled all the kinetic energy that I could out of the monster, stored it in my gauntlet, then dropped the field.
The anticlimactic way it just sorta plopped down to the ground, after the how fast it’d been going when it entered the field, was pretty funny, and I let out a snort before I could stop myself.
An obscenely loud growl ripped through the air, drowning out even the wind, and I flinched, expecting another monster to come at us. Instead, a different sort of beast hurtled into the scene.
Riding on a motorbike that looked like it could drive faster than a jet could fly, came a man wearing a red and white skin-tight suit, with a cape in the same colours billowing out behind him. He did the full slide sideways on the bike, then leapt off and floated into the air like gravity had forgotten about him for a second.
As he surveyed the scene, I got a good look at the patterns on his suit. His cape had chevrons on it, ending in the point of one that was thicker than the rest. His suit had stiff plates of armour sewn directly into vital areas, all of which were red, while the base material was white. He looked like a discount marvel superhero — the ones they tried to make look cool, rather than the older, campy ones.
On his wrists, he had two small bracers that were thicker than the rest, because they obviously contained some sort of magically charged crystal. It was those two arcane foci that made me realise he was a mage — the first I'd ever met, except for maybe the Hunter.
“Legs are soft targets, once you get through the horse-meat socks!” I called, summoning my energy shield with a flicking, jerking movement that incorporated my entire arm.
I was damn glad I did too, because the burdenbug’s mandibles skittered across the humming energy barrier, throwing sparks everywhere. Well, there goes all the energy I just stole from it. I really needed to do more testing with the world the way it was now — figure out how many spells I could cast.
The newly arrived superhero spoke up, calling out to me, “Fascinating shield spell! I've never seen one structured in that way. Where were you taught?”
“I wasn't!” I yelled, gritting my teeth through the pain as the burdenbug rammed at me again, causing my leg to buckle. “Some help, please?”
“Oh, yes! Of course,” the superhero agreed cheerfully.
A complex series of arcane-looking glyphs crawled up his arms in a flash. They vanished just as quickly, then his eyes shimmered and his whole body was abruptly surrounded in a thin barrier of red energy.
His flight cut out, and he dropped to the ground and rushed the monstrous spirit that was trying its very best to murder me. Kinda funny, considering my actual murderer was getting ready to pump more bullets into the creature.
The superhero man slammed his shielded fist into the swollen abdomen, and a crack echoed through the street. The burdenbug let out a chittering scream and abandoned its assault on me to turn on its new attacker. He didn't wait for it to start testing his defences. He spun in place and delivered an intense roundhouse kick to the same spot he'd just punched. This time, the cracking sound was joined by a nasty squelch.
The bug tried to wriggle and flee sideways up a building, but I pumped some of my reserve power into a targeted shockwave that caused it to stumble and lose its footing.
That's when the Hunter zipped in at a speed that wasn't quite a superpower and jammed his sword into the gaping hole in the bug's carapace. Leaving it there, he pulled back a couple of yards and gestured to the sword. It pulsed with magic, then crackled and sparked electricity everywhere. The broken SUV's still sputtering lights exploded, as did the street lamp above us and all the lights in the adjacent storefront.
The street was quiet when it ended, and slowly, like the statue of a toppled dictator, it fell to the ground. The monster was dead. Thank. Fucking. God.