Master and Apprentice (14 page)

“Well, now,” he said. “We’ve been looking for you.”

He was definitely talking to us.

Ian stood like his ass was on fire. Akila followed suit. She made a frantic gesture, and the thought-form vanished. “No,” she breathed. “Impossible. The Morai cannot manipulate illusions. Their strengths lie in fire, not air.”

“I think they just did.” I looked at Ian. “Now what?”

He blinked. “I—”

“Gavyn.” Jazz’s fingers dug into my arm. “The mirror!”

I knew what was happening without even looking. Reflective magic only worked when you knew what the place you were aiming for looked like—and of course, the biggest mirror in the house was right behind us. If they’d seen us, they’d definitely seen that.

I turned toward it, and everything south of my throat liquefied. The reflection was gone. In its place stood the scene we’d just been watching, from another angle and with an important difference. The armed and angry guys were on their feet, headed straight for us.

Before I could even remember my own name, much less do a damned thing, a hand thrust through the mirror frame holding a snub-nosed .357 Colt at the ready. And fired.

W
hen Akila flew back and hit the floor, my brain cried foul. That didn’t make sense. Why would they shoot Akila, when Ian was right there?

The guy attached to the gun stepped through and drew a bead on Ian, who looked just as shocked as I felt. But the mirror didn’t change back behind him, and another man came through. Then another. The bridge wasn’t closing.

How the hell could it stay open?

A second shot thundered from the Colt, deafening in close quarters. This one slammed Ian against the wall hard enough to crack plaster and spray puffs of dust. Akila, half risen from the floor, with blood soaking the front of her shirt, made a weak gesture at the lead man and tried to cast a spell that ended in a garbled, choking cough.

My ringing ears prevented me from hearing the second guy fire—but I felt it when the bullet carved a hot furrow into my shoulder.

The pain sharpened my focus.
Jazz.
Had to make sure she got out of here. I whirled and spotted her just in time to back away so the ceramic pig she’d launched like a missile wouldn’t
hit me. It struck the guy with the Colt square in the head. A dull, sickening crack suggested he wouldn’t shoot anyone else for a while.

In the meantime, two more had pushed through the portal. The last was Lynus, sporting a speargun and a lethal expression.

Thug Number Two stepped over his fallen comrade and squeezed off two shots. Both hit Akila at almost point-blank range. A terrible, wounded roar from Ian drew the invaders’ attention for an instant, and held it when he started to glow.

I took the opportunity to launch the nearest piece of movable furniture at them, an end table with a glass top. It caught Three in the chest, cracked, but didn’t shatter. He stumbled back into Four and tripped them both. The mini-pileup wouldn’t stop them for long, though. And Jazz was still here.

“Jazz,” I panted, already looking for another makeshift weapon. “Get Cyrus. Get your gun. Tell him to be shiny and don’t come back down. Shoot anyone who’s not me.”

“I can’t—”

“Goddamn it,
go
!”

She hesitated for half a second, then turned and ran for the stairs. I’d probably regret that later. But I had a better chance of surviving this than she did. The instant she was out of sight, I made myself vanish and tried to take a few seconds to assess things.

I couldn’t see Ian anymore, but I could see the mirror and the impossibly open bridge. Calvin stood on the other side, watching the action here. The white thing he wore was another hooded robe like his black monk’s costume.

There was something else different about him too. I couldn’t put my finger on it. But at this point, it didn’t matter.

To the side and just behind Calvin stood a figure in the same kind of robe, but the hood was pulled up to bathe his face in shadows, like he’d just dropped by from the Ku Klux Klan.

He appeared to be holding a spell. If I had to guess, I’d say he was keeping the bridge open. More troubling was the growing crowd of reinforcements in the room with them. How many of these assholes did they have hanging around? Were they all descendants?

A hundred or so pounds of fur, muscle, and fang exploded over the back of the couch, on a direct course for Two. Lynus, who’d managed to clear the body jam, fired a spear. The shot kicked Ian aside in midair, and the deadly silver shaft passed through the wolf’s body and kept going. Something shattered across the room.

The sound galvanized me. I knew what I had to do.

Ian landed hard on his side, half a foot from me. I crouched and laid a hand on his heaving flank. The glow that infused him was brighter than before, and I felt something pass from me into him. That was new. But I didn’t have time to wonder what the hell he was doing. I left him to fend for himself and concentrated on getting to the mirror.

Two and Three climbed over the couch, headed for the fallen Akila. Lynus chambered another spear and set his furious sights on Ian. That left One still unconscious but stirring, and Four with a big-ass cannon pointed in my direction. He couldn’t see me—but if he started firing, he’d probably get lucky.

I cut left, hoping to get between the thugs and the mirror without incident. At the same time, Lynus fired and missed. The spear thunked into the floor and buried itself, all but the last two inches or so. I heard Ian start a spell. Hoped it was a good one.

Finally, I reached the mirror—and a sick sense of futility washed through me. I’d never realized how big the damned thing was. I had a better chance of winning the lottery in the next five minutes than breaking that glass with my fists.

While I sent a panicked gaze around the immediate vicinity for something heavier than a couch cushion, an awful liquid
sound behind me demanded attention. I risked looking back. The noise came from Lynus. Thick black gunk oozed from his nose and mouth, trickled from his eyes like demented tears.

Shit. I’d kind of hoped that soul-drain thing wouldn’t work on part-humans.

Four swung his cannon around. He blasted away until Ian dropped, then moved to help the spluttering Lynus.

The sight of Ian’s mangled, motionless body made my throat hitch. He’d been hit at least four times, and one of the shots had obliterated half his face. No one who looked like that should be alive.
He can’t die, but you can. And Jazz and Cy can,
I reminded myself. I couldn’t get to him now. I would have to try and heal him later—if there was a later.

In the mirror, Calvin turned to the other robed figure. “Send them help,” he said. “We have … business to attend to at the monastery.” The figure nodded in response.

I had to get that bridge closed. Now.

It was still a mirror on our side, and it’d break if I could hit it with something. But no solid objects, blunt or otherwise, presented themselves in my range. I’d have to make one. Nothing like a little pressure to spark inspiration. I yanked a shoe off and concentrated on willing it into something useful, hoping I wouldn’t end up with just a bigger shoe. Transformation worked best when the thing being changed resembled the desired result. Unfortunately, shoes didn’t have much in common with sledgehammers.

I held it sideways and didn’t so much attempt magic as demand it. Heat flared in my chest and shot through my arms, as if it were eager to escape. I passed a hand over the sneaker and felt it grow heavier, watched the tongue stiffen and elongate. In a few seconds, I had a solid iron shoe mounted on a three-foot curled wooden tongue.

That’d work.

I gripped the tongue with both hands and drew back. The first of the new recruits had a foot through when I swung. Something in me cringed—I knew from experience what happened to body parts stuck in a bridge when it closed—but I didn’t stop. Couldn’t have if I’d wanted to. The hammer struck dead center. Glass shattered, sprayed shards, rained fragments. Warm wetness sprayed my arms along with the slivers, and my gut rebelled when I realized it was blood jetting from the leg stump on the floor.

The breaking noise got Lynus’s attention. He loosed a frustrated shout, and I froze to stare openmouthed at him for so long that if I hadn’t been invisible, I’d be dead. He looked like he’d aged fifteen or twenty years in the last minute. His features were sharper, leaner, and harder. Practically weathered. White streaks marbled his hair, which had grown out from buzz to shag.

Now I knew what a soul drain did to descendants.

“Goddamn thief !” Lynus wiped the last smear of black stuff from the corner of his mouth and glared in my general direction. “Get Theo up,” he said to the thug who’d been helping him. “Get him over here.”

The guy with the cannon came around the couch. Him and Theo, the first one, were both out of sledgehammer range, so I moved away from the mirror in case Cannon Boy decided to take a few potshots. While he maneuvered his groggy comrade up from the floor, the other two resurfaced from behind the couch, bearing Akila’s limp form between them. They’d bound her hands and feet with some kind of moving rope that almost looked like headless snakes. Thick coils of a blue-black fleshy substance wound in slow circles around and between her limbs. A triple band of the stuff encircled her bloodied throat.

Lynus pointed at the picture window across the room. They
carried her toward it, and I realized they meant to take her somewhere. Probably to their base. Why the hell weren’t they taking Ian?

Theo managed to stand on his own. “Ray,” Lynus said. “Drag that ratty-ass carcass over here. They want him left alive, but he’ll live through ’bout anything. And I know you’re listenin’ to this, thief,” he said with a sneer. “You won’t be hiding—or living—much longer. You owe me a life, and I aim to see that debt paid in full.”

Lynus launched into a spell before I could say
Can’t we talk about this?
I didn’t know what he planned to throw at me, but instinct strongly suggested I get the hell away from these guys without finding out.

I rounded the nearest corner, the short hall that led to the guest bedroom, and discovered that for once, my instincts had served me well. Three steps down the hall, I got walloped by a force that felt like someone had jammed a live wire up my ass. No smoke from my hair or sparks from my fingertips, but electrocution might have been preferable to the actual side effects.

The shimmer that said I was invisible vanished—and no matter how badly I needed to not be seen, it refused to come back.

“You gonna find that asshole and kill him. Make sure you get his woman too.”

I had to fight hard to keep myself from rushing out there and trying to brain the country-fried bastard with my shoe hammer. If I did that, the other two’d blast my vital organs into next week. All I could do was stand there and try to figure out how the hell to get upstairs before them without being seen.

A rough
shurr
sound indicated something heavy being dragged across the floor. Probably Ian. “Lynus,” one of the thugs said. “Thought you laid down a snare.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“So where’s the thief ?”

“Not in this fucking room no more. Here, hold him up.” There was a thud, a pause. The metallic snap-hiss of the speargun firing. A nasty wet crunch that had me shoving a knuckle in my mouth to keep from heaving. That had definitely gone through flesh and bone, and probably wall. “All right,” Lynus said. “This more like it.” A click signaled a reload, followed quickly by another firing, another muscle-tearing crunch. I had to wonder if Ian could even feel anything at this point. “I’m headed back to see if Val can fix this mess. Somebody open me a goddamn window. I’m tapped. You two clean house—and find their fucking lamps, if they’re here. Trash the place. We get those, we have ’em nailed.”

I couldn’t wait around to hear the rest of their conversation. Couldn’t even pause to puzzle out what the hell all of that meant. If this snare thing affected invisibility in general, and not just me, Jazz and Cyrus couldn’t hide anymore. My brain took a backseat, and I moved automatically to the guest bedroom and the window I knew was there. My awareness of the layout here was my only advantage. I intended to use it.

I got the door closed and locked with minimal sound, thanks to years of practice. The idea to head outside, up the chimney and in a second-floor window occurred first, before I remembered there was an easier way. It involved blood. I’d lost my knife and I hadn’t mastered Ian’s self-biting trick yet, but my shoulder was still bleeding some. I traced the familiar symbol on the corner of the window and whispered the incantation to open a bridge, concentrating on the upstairs bathroom. The faint moonlit reflection vanished, and near darkness took its place.

I slipped my remaining shoe off before I went through.

Walking around upstairs was risky enough without the added noise of a clomping sneaker. I held the shoe-hammer against my body and climbed through onto the sink. One knee ground painfully against the faucet when I landed. I slid sideways, bit back a yelp—and felt the wind of a bullet pass about a millimeter over my head on its way to blasting the mirror.

I was almost thankful for the shards that sliced at my face and arms. Better than decorating the wall with my brains.

“It’s me,” I breathed after my ears stopped ringing, hoping like hell it’d been Jazz on the other end of the gun. If it was, we’d have about thirty seconds until unwelcome company. And if it wasn’t, I was probably dead anyway.

There was a scant pause, then a whispered, “Oh shit. Did I hit you?”

“Not this time.” She was in the bathtub. Presumably with Cyrus. Most three-year-olds would be screaming bloody murder, but Cy was used to staying quiet when “bad guys” came around. It was a behavior I desperately wished he’d never had to develop—but it had saved his life, and ours, more than once. “Are you guys still … uh, shiny?”

“No. Cy said it went away.”

“Damn.” That snare thing had to be a total anti-invisibility package, then. “Don’t move for now. I need to listen a second.”