Authors: Edward Lazellari
Seth ran over to his partner, who was struggling with all her strength to stay atop the grate and fall inward toward the deck, not slide off the outer curve. Her hands were bleeding from the strain of her weight.
Shit … she weighs as much as a horse!
Seth realized. She began to slip backward, the edge of the grate cutting at her fingers. He dropped his staff and jumped up to grab her shoulders, pulling back toward the deck with all his weight. His added weight allowed Lelani time to brace her invisible back hoof on a support piece that ran horizontally along the fence, and leverage by which to stabilize herself.
A very expensive sounding piece of metal pinged, as it was unsheathed behind Seth. He was not at a good angle to see behind him, but Lelani’s expression said Symian was on his feet and opportunistically revoking his surrender. From the corner of Seth’s eye, Symian shuffled slowly toward them through puddles on the deck with the silver dagger in hand, still dazed by his master’s mind puppetry and Seth’s salt attack.
“Fucking bad guys,” Seth grunted.
As if things could not get worse, a flash emanated from the Chrysler Building. Time slowed for Seth—everything in the world looked trapped inside a gelatin mold, but whether it was a true magical effect or his mind’s natural reaction to impending death, he could not say. He did know that a bolt of lightning hurled toward them across the sky—whether it hit true was irrelevant, Lelani could not get off the fence in time—she would fry. Her fear-filled expression locked with his in mutual understanding that there was not enough time for whatever sentiments still remained between them—her hands too vital in keeping her from falling off the building to raise a counter spell.
An epiphany filled the ex-photographer, a possession of his consciousness by his own knowledge of a thing. As the bolt approached, he dropped from the fence, put out his hand toward his staff and called it to him, whipped it before him to tap Lelani through the grate, and aimed the back end at the troll. The lightning hit Lelani dead on; it passed through her, painfully, but safely, into the staff and shot out of the rear at the troll. Symian simultaneously ignited and was blown through the grate on the opposite end of the deck by the powerful bolt. He shrieked in anguish, a bright screaming star hurtling down with the rain toward Horace Greeley Park.
The lightning blast had short-circuited Lelani’s illusion spell. With Seth’s help, she clamored back onto the observation deck, slightly smoking, in full centaur glory. Her hands were bloodied, her clothes torn, and her bright red hair a mess, but still, she was beautiful. Seth had forgotten how stunning she was. He’d been in shock when she dropped her illusion at the MacDonnells’ home, with barely enough wits to appreciate what a striking creature Lelani Stormbringer was. Without the illusion, she abandoned her crouch and stood at her full height, topping out at six foot three. He drank her in, determined not to let another opportunity pass him by.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Thank you,” he responded. “For putting up with me. For saving my life when you got to New York … for being my friend when I was so undeserving of it.”
She grinned devilishly. “Well … I will deny this if you repeat it, but as much as you were an annoying pain in the ass back in Aandor—you were also the most fun student we had at the academy. If you hadn’t kept challenging the limits of common sense, it would have been a lot duller.”
Seth laughed.
They headed into the lobby—the elevators were completely blown out.
“I guess it’s the stairs,” Seth observed.
“Not exactly,” Lelani said. They walked to the eastern side of the building. Lelani used a spell that mimicked a blowtorch to cut through the grate. “You have to challenge Dorn. He is unaware that his power dwindles.”
“He probably thinks we’re dead.”
From her satchel Lelani retrieved a small dream catcher necklace, similar to her own, and placed it around Seth’s neck.
“You should disprove Dorn of that notion,” she said.
Seth knew just what to do, too. Rosencrantz reminded him while he lay unconscious … the nature of lightning. And having channeled it, he understood it better now, knew how to use magic to manipulate its essence. Standing on the northeast corner of the observation deck, he dug in his heels, knees bent. He brought up his anger—anger of the injustices in his life; anger at himself for ruining Darcy; for taking his friends for granted over the years; for Ben Reyes, who deserved better than to die protecting his home; for all the men and women who died in this city tonight who would never have a chance to redeem their own mistakes because of Dorn—years of accumulated shame, fury, and pain. This time the magic did not avoid him, he had threaded the needle … he knew how to draw it to him, bind it like a cowboy knew how to rope five hundred pounds of angry bull.
Seth focused all this emotion into a white-hot line in his head that he named redemption, and thrust his staff toward the Chrysler Building with both hands. A bright hot streak of lightning emanated from its tip and whipped across the sky battering the other building’s silver crown.
“That felt great,” he admitted.
Never one to let a challenge go unanswered, Dorn responded in kind, but before his bolt reached the Empire State, Seth met it halfway with another one of his own. The two lines collided over Thirty-ninth Street struggling for dominance, illuminating the Manhattan skyline for miles. Dorn’s push was strong, but Seth pushed just as hard and held the midpoint of the dual bolts at bay.
“GO!” he grunted. “I don’t know how long I can stay toe to toe.”
Lelani closed her eyes. With hands opened, palms up and thumbs and index fingers forming circles, she chanted in a language Seth now recognized as Centauran. She entered a trancelike state as she cast this enchantment upon herself. A faint black glow appeared on the edge of her body then brightly flickered out like the blowing of flame. Lelani opened her eyes, pulled her composite longbow and quiver from her bag, and, with a smile, vaulted over the edge of the balcony.
CHAPTER 50
NO SOUP FOR YOU
The last column of the henge was about to be put in place. The highly experienced and able men of Local 20 had made fast work of it. Allyn wondered why then it took so long to get construction projects finished in New York. The same highways were still under repair since he had last visited two years earlier.
He looked toward Manhattan; flashes of lightning cut the deep blue sky. This was wizards’ doing … heavy columns of gray smoke billowed up from Midtown and joined the rain clouds above. What price to pay for the life of one boy. How many dead? Injured? Scarred for life? Americans were not used to fighting battles on the home front. War was something we exported. In so many ways Aandor was similar, Allyn thought. Like New York after 9/11, Aandor, too, had lost its innocence … its confidence of its own indestructibility.
What Farrenheil had done to Aandor was an abomination. The rules of chivalry kept wars on battle plains among armies. But once the dogs of war were let loose, few could restrain their bite. Soldiers did not fight for weekly pay … they fight for the opportunity to pillage, to make themselves rich in one fell swoop by raiding the fine homes of the enemy, to plant their seeds in their adversaries’ wives and daughters. Now, Farrenheil has taken its pound of flesh from this beautiful metropolis as well—a city that had suffered so much already. There would be a reckoning. No one listens to the pacifist pleas of ministers and priests. Cycles like this were hard to break.
Allyn stepped onto a crane and motioned upward with his thumb. It rose ten stories, giving him a better vantage by which to see Midtown. He could just make out the Chrysler Building from where he stood. It was still saturated with the mana. But he spotted what he had hoped for, a cutoff point near its middle. As Dorn used more energy, the mana rose but did not replenish from below—it drained from the building like penicillin plunged out of a needle. Soon, Lord Dorn will have nothing to draw on but the smoke and ash of his own destruction.
“We done here, Rev?” asked Johnny Maronne.
“Yes. It’s up to the warriors and wizards now.”
“Okay boys, wrap it up!” cried Johnny. You’ll have some special bonuses in your next pay. Don’t spend it all in one place.”
“Where to, now?” asked Allyn.
“Boss says to bring you to the compound in New Jersey.”
Allyn debated heading back to North Carolina. He missed his wife and daughter greatly, even if Michelle wanted nothing to do with him at the moment. But the boy … so much potential; Allyn would stay, just a little longer to see this episode through. If Callum and Malcolm failed, if their wizards were killed, the prince would have only Allyn and Tilcook to help him. He did not want to leave that impressionable young man alone in the hands of a mobster.
“Lead the way,” Allyn told Maronne.
CHAPTER 51
A CRIMSON BLUR
Lelani Stormbringer galloped down the side of the Empire State Building with the speed of a thoroughbred—defying gravity as her hooves stamped their imprints into its slick stone façade. Her scarlet hair billowed behind her like a torch in defiance of gravity, random blond streaks bestowing her with the illusion of a flaming crown against the building’s gray, dark countenance. The enchantment held her firm to the granite and Indiana limestone as though it were the earth itself.
The cool rain purified and revived her. People at their windows witnessing the mayhem below turned their heads to the unlikely sound of a gallop on their walls. They gasped as she passed. Such was the height of the building that Lelani thought she had run miles before she was close enough to discern man from beast for her purposes. She raised her bow firing at golems as she hurtled toward the street. From the onlookers, a roar of cheers came forth from the windows, loud as any sports stadium, quashing the sirens and gunfire below. Each arrow hit their mark, straight through a monster’s brain.
The beasts had collected below her, enraged by her attack and raring to engage her. Lelani grasped that as long as they were focused on her, they would leave the civilians and civil defenders alone. A few began to climb up the Empire State Building, impatient with her progress toward them. At the fifth floor, with the more advanced golems only feet away, she pushed away from the building, leaped over the beasts, onto the roof of a coach bus. Looking north, a locked-in sea of coach, city, tour buses, and trucks presented the path of least resistance to Forty-second Street. The golems shook the bus and climbed to get at her—Lelani took a running start, avoiding their grabs, and leaped to the next bus several feet away, and not stopping, ran for the next one after that.
She was soon past Thirty-fifth Street with a sea of golems on her tail. She vaulted the metal bars that held the streetlights aloft. Where there were no busses she leaped to the nearest truck, where there were no trucks, a cab, an SUV, whatever vehicle gave her the highest elevation until she again found herself on the highest point possible.
Spotlights from the helicopters above had found her and struggled to keep pace as she dashed above the streets of New York, her tail flapping in her wake. The air vehicles were careful to stay out of the lightning battle’s line of fire, still raging overhead. Lelani fired arrows continuously, wherever she thought it would do any good: a family cornered—arrow to the beast’s head; policemen under siege to her right—arrow to the head; a besieged double-decker tour bus in front of her—arrow to the head; two beasts on the left chasing school children—two arrows to the brainpans. Lelani transformed into a whirlwind of deathly grace, with a growing mob of golems behind her laboring to keep pace. She had made herself enemy number one to this newly minted race.
Better her than the prince of Aandor, she thought. She had finally met the boy, and deemed him worthy of her sacrifice.
At Forty-second Street, Lelani cut a hard right onto a double-decker Gray Line tour bus and headed east toward the Chrysler Building. Above her the lightning storm still raged, illuminating the streets in an eerie strobe of blue-and-white flashes and intermittent darkness. There were power outages in this section of town, probably power lines severed when the golems rose up through the infrastructure. The Park Avenue Bridge that circumvented Grand Central Station came up ahead, and she had no clearance for it. She leaped onto it, crossed the road, and resumed her bus hurdles on the other end. The monsters were not deterred. All the beasts on Park Avenue, seeing their enraged Fifth Avenue brethrens’ stampede, quickly joined in. Each street she passed brought other hordes of growling, snarling beasties toward Forty-second Street. Lelani was sure the majority of the Midtown golems were now converging on her. When she reached the Chrysler Building, she came to a defensive position made up of police and military units behind tanks and quickly assembled hodgepodge perimeters made up of trucks and trailers. Hovering loudly a hundred feet above these units were two military helicopters armed to the teeth. The men on the ground tried to stop her advance. She hopped onto a tractor-trailer parked next to the Chrysler Building and then jumped onto the building’s façade to begin her gallop upward in the reverse of her Empire State Building descent.
With more pressing matters upon them, the military copters opened fire on Lelani’s collected mob of golems with everything: autocannons, rockets, 30-millimeter M230 machine guns.
The hordes turned into a virtual stew of fur, blood, and talons. More heavy weapons fire came to bear on adjoining streets, and then the tanks and ground units moved in under the cover of the helicopters. They shot anything still moving dead on the spot.
Several high-up news copters had kept pace with Lelani and tagged her with spotlights as she made her gravity defying upward run. She’d just cleared the sixty-first floor when she felt her traction begin to slip. Lelani tried to pull more magic into her enchantment, but to no use—with Dorn sucking in every last joule of mana in the edifice, the building was drained of mana—her enchantment was dying off. She considered using her personal reserve, enough for one large spell, or several smaller ones, but held off in case it would be needed against Dorn.