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Chapter 23

gesturing for Sam to be quiet as we reached the building, I listened, then tasted the magical fields around the door. Seeing no sign of a trap, I opened it as silently as possible, let Sam enter, then followed and quietly closed the door behind us. Every sense, both magical and normal, was on alert. I didn’t know what floor the killers were planning to use for the sacrifice, so I had to pay attention and find them.

The building was a four-story walkup, with a staircase of twelve-step flights between landings, but a solid wall in the middle that would cut off all visibility beyond the landings above and below. The apartments were off a corridor every other landing. I heard footsteps as the two suspects moved up the stairs, maybe a floor and a half above us.

I motioned for Sam to follow, but keep some distance, then started up the stairs after them, slowly and carefully. My shield was primed, focused on the ring on my left hand. I held my Glock in a two-handed grip, aimed up the stairs, elbows tucked into my sides in a compressed ready position. Walking around with your gun extended just tires out your arms and doesn’t make you any faster in getting the sights on the target when it’s time to shoot. No one does that but idiots and actors.

I reached the first landing and stopped to listen. The sounds from above had stopped. I hadn’t heard them open a door to one of the residential floors, meaning they were still in the stairwell. They must have heard something.

I looked back to see Sam’s encouraging face behind me before I cautiously made the turn around the blind corner, slicing the pie as I rounded the edge of the wall, ready to react to anyone lying in ambush. The landing was empty, as was the next flight of stairs. Nothing to do but keep moving up.

I headed toward the second landing the same slow, cautious way. I wasn’t afraid—I’d seen too much and lived too long to be afraid. But it had been a long time since I’d been in real combat. The fight at the Market had been a surprise, but this time I had plenty of time to anticipate what was coming. Adrenaline was flowing, my heart was pounding, and it took everything I had to keep my breathing under control and my hands steady. I desperately wanted to go get a drink. Instead I kept moving up the stairs.

Once again, I looked back at Sam before carefully making my way around the blind corner of the third landing. She gave me a nervous smile and a nod, as if to let me know she had my back. I nodded and turned back ahead, focusing on the corner ahead of me.

As I started to make the turn, my necklace flared into heat, but as I instinctively pulled back from whatever was coming, something slammed into me from behind, knocking me forward. I was stunned, face down on the landing, exposed in both directions. Without thinking or taking any time to assess, I let the shield spell activate around me, walling me off from the stairs below and above. Just in time—another heat spell hit the shield from the stairs to my front. The two must have heard us behind them and split up, one on the first or second floor and one on the fourth, to pin us between them.

As I regained my senses, I looked to see what had attacked me from above, and saw, hazy through the energy of the translucent blue shield spell, the outlines of two people standing on the next landing up. One tall and one short. Which meant there had to be a third. Had the bundle they’d brought actually been a friend of theirs in disguise? Had they been expecting us?

I focused on the spell and put extra effort into it to make it transparent, like a blue sheet of glass, so I could see what was around me while still being protected. And then I turned to look down the stairs. I’d been afraid they’d pinned us and Sam was already in trouble, if not dead. But there she was, halfway down the flight of stairs, standing exactly where she’d been when she’d smiled at me. Her hand was stretched out toward me, flickering with silver energy, ready to cast another spell as soon as my shield dropped.

“Oh, hey there, Quinn. Sorry, did I startle you?”

I grimaced. I still had sensation in my legs, so the blast probably hadn’t done too much permanent damage. But it hurt. I was going to have a wicked burn right in the middle of my upper back, even if the protective enchantments woven into my coat had protected me from dying. It seemed to be the same heat spell that had singed my arm outside the Faerie Market.

“You know,” Sam continued, “even considering our history, it was really easy to convince you to trust me enough to let me watch your back while you focused all your attention to the front. That was dumb of you.”

“Yes,” I hissing through the pain as I struggled to a sitting position. “Yes, it was. My mistake. So these two are your friends?” I asked, nodding to the two silent figures upstairs.

“You might say that,” she replied. “Though I’ve got plenty of other friends, too. I’ve been busy the past twenty years.” She gave me a wink. Then the silver energy around her hand coalesced and shot straight toward me, splashing into my shield with a bright flash of light. Even through the barrier I could feel the heat.

It must have been a signal, because as soon as she resumed the attack, so did the two upstairs. That was problematic. I was drawing energy straight from the ley-line node under the building to power the barrier. The ring allowed me to focus the power and avoid draining my own reserves, but it still took a lot of mental effort. Magic is tiring. And with all three of them attacking my shield—which had reverted to near-opaqueness with the strain—it was only a matter of time before I could no longer maintain it and one of them got through.

Being injured certainly didn’t help. Those who have never been badly hurt don’t realize how much strength it saps—it was distracting, it was painful, and it was tiring me out much more quickly than I’d have been otherwise. I could just imagine Sam on the other side of the shield, not ten feet away, with that grin on her face and not a care in the world as she casually flung her energy bolts my way until I lost control of the shield.

And there was no one coming to save me. I’d told Lajoie and Connors to wait outside. I could signal them, but that would merely be inviting them to die with me.

But goddamn it, I was Thomas Quinn, Sorcerer of the First Rank of the Arcanum, one of the most powerful human mages on the planet. I had killed demigods and demon princes. I was the last man standing on the Fields of Fire, when I’d ripped the flames from the Earth itself and burned Kigatilik’s hordes down around him. Samantha Carr and her companions stood no chance, should I let loose. They’d never even know what hit them until they reached whatever afterlife there may be. It would be so easy just to go deep, to that place the Immortal had showed me, where the whispering voice at the back of my mind lay inviting me to let it loose, to call on the power like I’d done in Canada…

No, I told myself. I wasn’t that man anymore. I knew what it meant now. I knew what I’d be doing. I wouldn’t do that to save myself. I couldn’t do that. I’d rather die.

But then the assault on my shield suddenly stopped, from both directions, as if Sam had sent the other two a signal. As I caught my breath, I heard a noise. Banging on a door downstairs.

“You hear that, Quinn?” Sam called to me. “It seems your cop friends decided to ignore your order to stay put and are trying to charge to the rescue.”

Sam must have magically sealed the door behind us—from the sound, the detectives were trying to break the damn thing down.

“I could let them in, you know. See how far they make it. Then you’d have a choice: sit there in your safe shield and watch me kill them, or drop it and kill me first—but then my friends would take all three of you out and be free to finish the rites. And then Connors wouldn’t be able to call your precious Rector to stop them. Yeah, I kind of like that idea.”

I struggled to control the flash of rage I felt at her casual mention of killing Connors and Lajoie, that voice at the back of my mind urging me to show her what it means to challenge Thomas Quinn to battle.

It wasn’t even that I thought of them as friends. I certainly liked them more than most people I knew, but the Hermit Sorcerer didn’t have friends. No, what angered me was that Lajoie and Connors were still under my protection, and I took that obligation seriously. I’d brought them in to this world of magic, and I was responsible for their safety in it until I took those bracelets back. I’d be damned if some pissant little Third Rank made me go back on my word.

She was obviously waiting for a response.

“Why are you doing this, Sam?” I asked, my voice weak from the exertion and pain, as the pounding continued downstairs. Having recovered some energy with the pause in the attack, I focused again and made the shield transparent so I could see her. “You’re a member of the Arcanum. You swore the same oaths I did, to protect the world of man, to uphold the treaties. To serve.”

“Why?” She let out a short, almost hysteric laugh. “Why? I told you the truth about how I discovered I was a sorceress, Quinn. I accidentally killed my parents. I was six! And what did the Arcanum want to do to a scared child who had just lost her mom and dad? What did the Rectors—the Arcanum’s official representatives—want to do? They wanted to put me down. Like a rabid dog, Quinn. Do you have any idea what that’s like? To have three terrifying men you’ve never met arguing whether or not you deserve to live? Hours after both your parents just died, and you know it’s your fault? Do you think I’d love the Arcanum after that? That I’d be fucking thankful that one chose to spare me?”

She laughed again. “No, Quinn. When I realized what the Arcanum was, how little the Arcanum cared for me, how they’d rather kill a potential problem than help a terrified child, I made a decision. I would learn everything I could from them. And then I would use that knowledge to destroy them in any way I possibly could. Fuck my oaths—my friends helped me break those bonds years ago. I intend to bring everything crashing around the mighty Arcane King and Court while they sit on their high thrones in judgement of us all.” She paused to catch her breath. “But I need you to do it. Don’t worry, we don’t want to kill you. Not yet, anyway. We’re under strict orders to make sure you stay alive, but out of the way until we need you.”

She giggled as she looked me the eye. I realized with a sinking heart I no longer heard pounding and shouting, just heavy footsteps as multiple people ran up the stairs—she’d already released the door.

“Your choice, Quinn.”

Just then Lajoie appeared around the corner on the landing below Sam. He paused as he saw her, confused, obviously still thinking she was on our side. She winked at me. I watched, almost in slow motion, as she turned and extended her arm toward him, the energy around her hand coalescing. I shouted a warning at Lajoie and threw myself to my right, out of the line of fire from upstairs.

Sam released her attack and I watched it track toward the big Haitian, whose instincts kicked in as he tried to jump out of the way. It caught him on the left arm, but I didn’t see the damage, as I was still moving. I dropped the shield and raised my gun into a two-handed grip, squeezing the trigger as I pressed the gun out.

Sam was turning back toward me, that infuriating grin still on her face. I could see a slight shimmer in the air between us: she was anticipating a magical attack and had a shield already prepared. Regardless of what she’d said, she had no intention of dying today.

That was unfortunate for her. The trigger broke just as the front sight lined up with her head. The Glock barked in my hand, impossibly loud in the confined stairwell.

Her shield was almost certainly good enough to have stopped any magical attack I’d thrown at her, at least long enough for her to get out of the way and let her friends distract me. But she hadn’t counted on my bullets. She knew about the gun, of course. But our mysterious attacker at the Market, whether it had been Sam herself or one of her friends, hadn’t been using a shield when I’d shot them. She didn’t know about my custom rounds with the spells bound to them, spells that let them slip right through a variety of magical defenses. And after so many years of practice, my aim was true.

The bullet hit her in the temple and exploded out the other side of her skull in a shower of blood and brain and bone, a pink mist spreading through the air.

What had a millisecond before been the Sorceress Samantha Carr dropped on the stairwell, a lifeless sack of meat and bone. But I’d seen her hit Lajoie. I’d failed to protect him. I was a coward, and I’d let him down. And there were still two threats—I still needed to deal with Sam’s friends on the next landing up.

But before I could turn to confront them, I saw a bright flash and was hit by the pressure wave of a large explosion from upstairs. The concussion threw me into the wall. My head struck the concrete, and the world went black.


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