Page 77 of Runaway Magic
Cym’s insides turned to ice as he saw how utterly and completely trapped they were. He couldn’t let his brother and Fourteen die here—not because of him. It was incomprehensible the gods would bring them into his life only to take them away so brutally.
“Let them go!” Cym shouted over the rising wind, but his words were whipped away from his lips and they came out sounding small and puny. “You can have me. I won’t fight.”
The monster smiled, a mockery of an expression that stretched grotesquely across his aunt’s face.
Behind him Fourteen growled. “Like hell.” He snatched Hester away from Sterling and put a gun to her head. “Let us all go, or she’s dead.”
Sterling made an urk of protest.
“Stupid child, there is nothing of your mother left inside that husk. Why do you think we wanted Cymbeline? We needed another body to sustain us.” Stella’s arm flopped back and forth like a puppet trying to make a shooing motion. “Kill her. That woman’s body means nothing to me. But a willing body with your kind of power? That means something. What do you say, Cymbeline? Want to make a deal with me like your great-grandmother did a few centuries back?”
The idea of sharing his body with the thing inside his aunt caused Cym’s bravery to shatter, leaving him an exposed, quivering child screaming for his mommy to make the monsters go away. But the monsters had eaten his mother, and Cym was so paralyzed with fear that he couldn’t respond.
A warm body pressed against his back.
It was Fourteen.
He wouldn’t leave Cym to the monsters unless he was ordered to, and even then, Cym had a feeling Fourteen would find a way around it. And if he wouldn’t leave Cym, Sterling didn’t have a chance on his own, so he might as well do something stupid.
Reaching back, he gripped Fourteen’s bare wrist, feeling his comforting energy mingling with Cym’s, and said to the nightmare, “Fuck you.”
Throwing back Stella’s head, the monster laughed, a horrible, howling laughter sounding like dozens of voices screaming in unison. It raised a hand toward the mercenaries above it and said. “Kill them, but don’t touch Cymbeline.”
Fourteen dragged Cym behind him and jerked them both to the ground, but nothing happened. Cym looked up at therooftops in confusion. All the mercenaries were slumped over in sleep.
But before he had a chance to react, the world dropped out from under him.
Chapter 19
Marshall
“You know, I wasn’t expecting our soldier to…” Marshall trailed off as he surveyed the destruction before him.
“What? Tear through the compound like a spicy burrito through an octogenarian’s digestive tract?” Jack added helpfully.
“...Sure.” Marshall noticed his hand running through his hair, and he stopped, not wanting to make himself look like a mad scientist. He barely resisted the urge to use magic to check if he’d messed his hair up. He was still too close to the wholenearly dying inside the ‘Scape from magic drainincident to use magic carelessly right before a potential battle.
It was fortunate for Fire that Fzzt had been curious about their mission. The excitement from the day before had sent the sprite back to the chapter house time and again to check and see if anything new had happened. When Samantha’s blanket spellhad alerted them something may or may not be happening near the marina, Fzzt had noticed and decided to follow them.
As soon as the soldier had dropped his strange smoking device and run, Fzzt had followed him without prompting. Adelle had managed to attach a passenger spell to the air sprite before it took off, allowing Fire to experience everything the sprite did.
The team watched avidly as Cymbeline’s champion evaded capture and secured help, offering to give a set of armor to The Company—whatever that was—in return for help in releasing his friend. Marshall learned enough about Agent Fourteen to decide he had made a grave error trying to keep the norm on the sidelines.
After much debate, Marshall decided to allow Fourteen to go through with his plan. The family estate they had visited previously had been vacated, and they had no new leads to find where the Blaike family had holed up.
Normally Marshall wouldn’t allow a norm to be used as bait, no matter how resourceful, but his anger over the near-loss of Jack had changed things. He kept flashing to the echoing void he’d encountered on the beach. His gut would clench painfully, and his mind would race to find a way to prevent something like that from ever happening again. The lines between what he knew to be right and wrong became blurred, and the phrase acceptable risks kept popping up into his speech more often than he liked.
The looks he kept getting from both Jack and Adelle told him his behavior hadn’t escaped their notice, but he chose to ignore it. Once this was over, he would calm down and things would go back to normal—or whatever passed for his normal these days.
So his team had followed the man and watched in fascination as Fourteen had plunked himself down in the middle of a parking lot and taken off his jacket. The strange nothingnessthat he gave off had been stripped away, and Marshall had been able to fully witness the deep black of his essence. The confusion Marshall had felt when listening to the discussion between Harper and Fourteen about new tech and armor that could negate it lifted.
His armor repelled magic.
Curious, Marshall had reached out a tendril of his own magic to learn more about the man and discovered another puzzle. Once inside the man’s head, he found only scattered fragments of a person. Delving deeper, Marshall saw that the fragments were knitting themselves together slowly, and the person who was emerging from the fragments was someone Marshall wanted to know better.
After a few minutes, Fourteen put his jacket back on, removing himself once again from magical sight. Shortly afterward, two black vans arrived, bursting with people, but instead of fighting, he put his hands on his head and allowed himself to be searched, bound, and stuffed into the back of one of the vans.
It was a simple matter for Fzzt to follow the convoy north, right over the border to New Hampshire, with Fire trailing close behind.
