Earth Awakened, page 10
She followed to where he pointed—another blank expanse of concrete, this one pressed with a clouded stain and a rough patch, as if a vehicle had been regularly parked there—summoned the runes, and focused.
The cat moved her over there before she’d even closed her eyes.
She flinched at the suddenness, and the draft that blew against her face.
Okay. They needed to work on that.
She turned, frowning. “The cat anticipated that, I think. It happened too quick.”
“I agree. That was too quick. Stay there a sec. Let me try something.” Sigils slipped up Gobardon’s arm as he started toward her, and a flash of energy rose, then settled. The cat shifted its attention onto him with a mental flick of its tail, but McKay calmed it with a thought.
Just wait. He’s here to help.
The cat didn’t seem convinced—it never was—but it did settle, sliding back into McKay’s mind as Gobardon drew nearer.
He slowed and lifted his hand. “Stay still.”
He let her get a good look at the sigils on his arm—let the cat read them through her eyes—then, slowly, he moved his hand toward her forehead as if he were going to touch it.
Two inches from her face, the sigils changed.
Gobardon attacked.
Pain spiked through her head. She jerked back as a slippery, acrid magic poured through her skin.
The cat vanished from her thoughts in a blip of static.
Chapter 10
She didn’t remember what she did first. That was the thing about the army. They drilled the moves into you so much, they became your mother tongue, and she had taken to fighting like a fish to water. The first few seconds passed in a blur of movement, pain, and blunt force as she smashed her arms into his elbow to get his hand away from her face, closed the distance, slammed a palm strike into his solar plexus, and followed it up with a few punches.
Gobardon was taller than her, with a greater reach and greater strength, but she was a scrappy, vicious bitch and he’d made the mistake of being close and open.
It didn’t take him long to reach for his magic. Within the span of two seconds, her fists stopped hitting flesh and instead smacked hard into a blunt green shield.
Pain cracked through her knuckles and wrist. She pulled them and danced back, looking for openings.
Then, the cat returned in a roar of rage and power, and the fight tipped decidedly in her favor.
Anger flooded through her. Anger, and the shuddering, staggeringly huge power of a very pissed off giant cat.
He tried to take her from me. He tried to take her, and she didn’t like it.
She wasn’t sure how she knew that. The message had come to her in a rush of images and instincts delivered on a raw, primal roar, and its meaning had simply bloomed in her mind like an exploding flower.
The cat’s anger shook through her like the thundering roar of a volcano.
Sigils burst across her skin, and energy flooded her senses. She stepped forward and the ground cracked, the building’s latent wards snapping under her feet like small, hollow bones. A roar of sound rose in her mind, a rumbling growl like the crash of rocks in a landslide, or a heavy grinding deep within the earth.
Slowly, energy settled behind her eyes.
She didn’t need to look in a mirror to know that they now glowed a bright green.
Meese’s did that, too, when the Phoenix moved close beneath her skin. And Kitty’s had done that earlier.
Gobardon’s, however, did not. His eyes were dark. What had Axariel called him? Black blood?
Fuck. She should never have trusted him. He’d done exactly what Axariel had predicted he’d do.
And he was still trying to do it.
He was still standing, remarkably. Though the entire building heaved and shook under her and the cat’s combined power, he remained upright, encased in a vivid green shield that glowed like phosphorus. Behind her, she was aware of a vague shouting—the roar and crash and shake of the building around them drowned Kitty out, but she could feel the woman’s attempts to get closer.
It was like before, when Kitty had led the Dark Mage closer.
The cat growled.
She was not going to let that happen again.
Power struck down. She yelled, flexing her hands as the spell ripped through her. The cat’s power surged through her arms, and she threw it into the ground.
The concrete crunched beneath her feet.
Two meters away, Gobardon’s shield splintered, cracks fissuring across it like a broken windshield.
He attacked.
With the cat behind her, she felt more than saw his spell coming. She threw herself to the side, tucking into a ragged roll. Part of the warehouse came with her, responding to the cat’s power, cupping into her back and hips as she moved, helping her back up. Another power—Gobardon’s—rooted deep into the earth.
The cat reached for it just as McKay reached for her gun.
The Labette 27 wasn’t a large gun, nor very impressive. It held ten rounds of forty-caliber ammunition and punched them with enough kick to drop a dude. She’d bought it off a retiring cop on her third year of service. Even at that point, the war hadn’t been going well, and she’d meant to have something to protect herself when it inevitably all fell to shit.
She hadn’t anticipated coming to Mersetzdeitz back then. Hell, she thought she’d be hiding in a Westran city, or holed up somewhere in the mountains.
Regardless, her practiced fingers had the Labette out of its holster within a second. She rolled to the side as another wave of power came from Gobardon. This time, the cat put up a shield around her.
It crunched, just as Gobardon’s had when she’d attacked him.
“Stop!” she shouted. “Stop right now!”
God, he looked intense—a full-powered, well-trained Mage at the height of his power, the rows and rows of sigils on his arms evidence of his studies. They glowed on his skin, making him look preternatural. But his eyes were dark.
Always, his eyes were dark.
She remembered studying them earlier. Remembered the highlight of brown that traced its edges, separating it from the pupil.
He rotated slowly, those eyes finding her.
There was no brown in them anymore. They were just black now, a calculating expression on his face.
He lifted a hand, and she felt his power fluctuate.
He wasn’t stopping.
Then, this is his fault.
She aimed the gun at his leg and fired. The cat reached through, touching its power into the shot.
The bullet ripped through his splintered shield like a mortar round. Green light flared, sigils flooding his skin as he skittered to the side and flung his hands down in defense.
When he looked back up, his expression had gone absolutely livid.
He did not like getting shot at.
Well, maybe you shouldn’t have started this fight.
As he rounded back on them, McKay braced herself. The cat growled through her throat, the sound like a slow, rolling crash of thunder. Pain spiked up her hip and thigh from where she’d bumped it in the roll.
She stared as sigils gathered on his arms.
Just what kind of spell was he pulling? Fuck, she should have studied the language and spells—just so she could be prepared for this type of assholery. Instead, only the cat knew what they said, what spell he was building, what kind of defense they’d—
Abruptly, Earth magic grabbed her body and smashed her to the ground.
McKay gasped. Pain ripped through her when she tried to move—her arms and legs and back were locked to the floor, as if her bones were iron to a magnet. Green light lit up around her back. From the corner of her eyes, she caught glimpses of Earth magic sigils forming a neat circle around her, similar to the ones Kitty had used to stabilize the ground and make a pathway for Tachun to get to her.
A second spell slid into her. Energy tightened like an iron vise around her arms, legs, and ribs.
She couldn’t move.
Then, in the Elemental vision of her mind, Gobardon put one foot forward and began to walk toward her.
The cat thrashed inside. Power quaked. The ground shuddered like it had been struck. Gobardon defended against an errant spell. A second one slid off his shield like oil on water.
She stretched her fingers for the gun. Like the rest of her, her hand was pinned, the flesh and bones flattened to the ground. Little bites of pain niggled through her fingertips as she fought its hold.
The force around her rib cage tightened. She drew in one ragged breath and hissed as pain bloomed around her chest.
She couldn’t breathe.
Gobardon approached, his gait a slow, methodical saunter. Dark eyes looked down at her, his entire form underlit by the glow from his skin and the one from the ground around her.
More sigils shivered onto his skin, lining themselves up along his wrist in a spell that promised to be sent her way.
Whatever the cat read in it, it wasn’t happy. A roar of pain and rage ripped through the ground. As Gobardon drew alongside her, looking down from above, the cat dug its touch deep into the building’s structure.
The entire ceiling cracked, the sound like breaking glacial ice.
Gobardon’s attention snapped upward.
In the gloom beyond the ceiling’s lighting, veins of Earth magic spread into the ceiling like a tunneling, invasive vine.
Her heart sped up as she took it in, the thunder of a thousand cracks filling her head as the cat destroyed the thick, reinforced structure above her, each chunk a good six feet in thickness, with a tonnage that could crush her flat in an instant.
Little flutters of fear slid into her abdomen. Her body, already shaking from the pain, went stock-still with a cold clarity.
I’m going to die. That is going to fall on top of me, and I am going to die.
Gobardon was backing up, his jog turning into a sprint.
The cat snarled, gave chase. The entire warehouse heaved. McKay stared at the ceiling as it began to collapse, stuck in place as hundreds of giant chunks of concrete broke free and started to fall like a load of gravel.
For the second time that day, everything went dark.
Chapter 11
After the ceiling fell, it took another ten seconds for the cat to snap the bindings on her body.
McKay knew. Staring at the new, much closer ceiling, unable to move—unable to breathe—she counted.
One. Two. Three.
Dust coated the air. It stung at her eyes, had already painted her face and lips. She blinked rapidly, feeling the trail of warm tears leaking down the sides of her face. Her mouth was a gray mix of dust, dirt, and something that came with a burned chemical taste.
Four. Five. Six.
Above her, the thin light of the cat’s shield fluctuated slowly, making the shadows ripple on the packed rock, metal, and concrete that surrounded her.
God, it looked like it would fall at any second. Without access to the cat’s Elemental senses, she had no way of knowing how deep she’d been buried.
She could feel the cat around, somewhere to her left, doing the magical equivalent of sniffing around, but she couldn’t get its attention.
It didn’t give a shit about her. She was a vessel, nothing more. And it treated its vessel like shit.
Her diaphragm convulsed, desperate to drag a breath in, but the steel around her ribs wouldn’t let her. Every cell in her body screamed for oxygen.
She opened her mouth, and a small, pathetic sound came out.
Come on, cat. Do the thing. Don’t let me die here. You’ll die, too.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
She couldn’t breathe. She began to struggle in earnest, more pathetic groans escaping her. It felt like something had clamped down on her lungs so she couldn’t move them at all. More tears swept from her eyes, making a warm wetness down the side of her face that began to burn with the dust.
Then, the cat finally looked her way.
The bindings snapped in a surge of Earth magic.
McKay jerked over, sucking in air in great, coughing gulps. The dust and dirt burned at her throat, and she clawed at the loose rock that formed her bed. Pain seared through her entire body as she wracked with the effort.
She coughed so hard, she puked.
Another pathetic noise bubbled from her throat as her body shook. She spat a glob of phlegm and vomit onto the floor, coughed again, and focused on her breathing. When that settled out, she sagged forward until her forehead touched the rocks and closed her eyes.
Well, I’m alive. That’s a start.
She groaned. It felt like her entire body had been wrung out and beaten. Everything hurt, from the burn in her throat and lungs to the myriad of bruises that would surely show themselves over the next few days. It felt like someone had removed her central nervous system and run it through a jet engine, or her grandpa’s old threshing machine that used to leak gas.
And, as she took stock of her body and the sensations that were coming with it, she realized that she had pissed herself.
Fantastic.
To be fair, watching an entire building fall on oneself is fucking terrifying—especially when one is unable to move.
It’s not like the cat had shared its plans with her. A part of her had suspected that it would protect her, but the cat had gone crazy before. And it was an immortal spirit.
All it would take was one small misunderstanding of just how fragile humans were, and McKay would be dead.
Well, her and probably a number of other people, if it got to that point.
God, how had everything gotten so fucked up?
She coughed again, a rough, slipshod hack that caught at her raspy throat, winced at the flare of acid burn it caused, then gritted her teeth and got her feet under her.
She grunted as a low pain burned through her abs and thighs at the movement.
Christ. Maybe I should stay down.
But that wasn’t an option. Not with Gobardon still likely around.
Hopefully, the cat was doing a bit more to hold him down than simply burying him. The man had moved nearly half a mountain’s worth of dirt and debris before they’d left the Underground—and all of that after getting into a massive magic battle and whatever the fuck else he had been up to. She doubted the mere roof of a warehouse would do him in, even as thick and reinforced as this warehouse roof had been.
Squinting against the dirt and the dust—God, she was covered in the stuff—she spotted her gun a few feet to the side, close to where her right hand had been, and scooped it up. She slid the safety back on and gave it a quick check before putting it back in its ankle holster. It’d need a clean before she tried using it again.
Then, she rolled her shoulders, wiped the drool, vomit, and tears from her face, no doubt leaving streaks of dirt over it instead, and called on the cat to help her get out.
Luckily, it was listening this time. With a heavy grumble, the rock and metal in front of her parted like some ancient stone curtain. She rose from her crouch and stepped out.
Her arms and legs shook hard under her. She had to lean on the rocks at her side to keep her balance, placing one boot in front of the other and leveraging herself up and out in a place where she normally would have hopped up—but, fuck it, the day was finally catching up to her.
It was no surprise to find the warehouse now open to the sky. Fresh rain fell on the rubble that had once been the ceiling, accompanied by the gray, soggy light of the Mersetzdeitz cloud cover that could mean it was anywhere between two and six p.m., tinted green by the layer of shielding the cat kept around her. It added a wet smell to the dust in her nose, but the burned remains of her throat were glad for the moisture.
Gobardon stood in the center of a rubble pile close to the opposite end of the warehouse, the green glow of his shield like a beacon in the gloom, as she imagined her own shield was, too.
By the looks of it, the cat had chased him with its ceiling-smash game. The piles of rubble formed a distinct trail to where he was now standing, with the largest pieces fractured around where he now stood. Some of them looked sharper than the rest, too. As if the cat had added teeth to its attack.
It was with some satisfaction that she noticed a dark patch running down from close to his eye.
Blood.
Something they had done must have gotten him.
Good. If she’d had the energy, she would have punched him again.
But she didn’t.
“So,” she said, stifling a cough and letting her raspy voice rise through the silence and the rain. “Are you done, or do you have another warehouse you’d like demolished? Perhaps I could try for your beautiful car outside?”
He was watching her. The light from his shield was enough to tell that. Even if it hadn’t been, she’d felt his dark eyes on her even before she’d stepped out into the open.
The cat had obviously not hidden her very well.
Finally, he spoke.
“Greneinta is a Lürian spirit from a Lürian crystal, and I know the circumstances that led her to use you as a vessel. I thought that, if I could provide her with another option—”
Oh, Christ. Not this again.
“You think we haven’t tried that? Jesus fucking Christ—we had an entire lab of crystal engineers and Mageguard trying to extract her. She won’t go, and that’s final. Hell, she doesn’t want to go.” She made a disgusted noise in her throat and looked around.
Alarm spiked through her as she realized their third wheel was missing.
“Where’s Kitty?”
He grunted. “Ported out.”
She let out a breath.
Good. Then she was safe.
“They tried to get Greneinta out of you?” Gobardon asked.
“Yes. They tried for an entire month. She has made it very clear that she intends to stay, for better or for worse.”
So far, it had been for worse. Though she did admit—seeing Gobardon’s fancy warehouse brought down into a pile of loose rubble deeply appealed to her.
The cat was very good at destruction.
“I doubt they tried everything,” Gobardon said. “There is much we lost in the Transition, old rituals that weren’t in modern databanks. If—”
