Rosebud!
“Where’s the monkey?”
“Safe in the BMW.”
Oh good. Good, good, good.
I pulled a sharp U-turn and sped down the street back toward the parking lot. The beasts scrambled to follow. The gaps between the bodies widened to several feet and I saw clearly the source of the magic. Two metals rings, spinning one inside the other, like a gyroscope. A small blue glow hovered between them.
We passed Leon. He pointed to the glowing thing with his SIG and pretended to smash the two guns in his hands together. Ram it. Thank you, Captain Strategy, I got it. That thing had survived the river. If I hit it with Rhino, it might just bounce aside, and if it was arcane, there was no telling what sort of damage it would do to the car. No, this would require precision.
“Rapier?” I asked.
“One moment.” Cornelius turned and hit the switch on the console between our seats. Most SUV vehicles had two front seats and a wide backseat designed to seat three. Rhino’s backseat was split into two, with a long, custom-built console storage space running lengthwise between them. The console popped open, and a weapon shelf sprang up, offering a choice of two blades and two guns secured by prongs.
I pulled another U-turn. A white truck screeched to a stop in front of me. The driver laid on the horn, saw the beasts, and reversed down the street at breakneck speed.
“Got it.” Cornelius turned back in his seat, my rapier in his hand.
I aimed Rhino at the gyroscope. Bodies slammed against the car.
“This is foolhardy,” Cornelius advised. “What if it explodes?”
“Then I’ll be dead, and I won’t care,” I quoted.
“Using Leon as inspiration is a doubtful survival strategy.”
I slammed on the brakes. Rhino slid across the lawn and stopped. I grabbed the rapier from Cornelius and jumped out of the SUV. The rotating thing spun only fifty feet away from me. I sprinted to it.
A beast lunged at me. I jumped aside and kept running.
Behind me Rhino thundered as Cornelius revved the engine to distract them.
The air turned to fire in my lungs. I dodged a beast, another . . .
Thirty feet.
The shining object pinged me with its magic.
Twenty.
Ten.
The metal rings spun in front of me, a foot wide, splattered with slime and algae. Inside a flower bud glowed, a brilliant electric blue lotus woven of pure magic and just about to bloom.
My family’s magic coursed through me, guiding my thrust. I stabbed it.
The bud burst, sending a cloud of luminescent sparks into the air. Its glow vanished. The rings spun one last time and collapsed.
The beasts around me froze.
For a torturous moment nothing moved.
The creatures stared at me. I stared back.
The pack turned and made a break for the river.
It was over.
Relief washed over me. A steady rhythmic noise came into focus, and I realized it was my heart racing in my chest. My knees shook. A bitter metallic patina coated my tongue. My body couldn’t figure out if it was hot or cold. The world felt wrong, as if I had been poisoned.
The ruins of the device lay in front of me. I tried to take a step. My leg folded under me, the ground decided to spontaneously tilt to the side, and I almost wiped out on a perfectly level lawn. Too much adrenaline. Nothing to do but wait it out. Some people were born for the knife’s-edge intensity of combat. I wasn’t one of them.
Focusing on something to distract myself usually helped. I crouched and scrutinized the rings. The metal didn’t look exactly like steel, but it might have been some sort of iron alloy. A string of glyphs ran the circumference of each ring.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped a pic.
The rings fit inside each other, the inner about three inches smaller than the outer one. The flower stalk was attached to the bottom of the inner ring. No, not attached. It grew from the inner ring, seamlessly protruding from the metal.
How?
I picked up the ring and tugged on the stalk. It held. I ran my fingers along the flower. Toward the severed end, where the flower bud had been, the texture felt like a typical plant. But the lower I moved my fingers, the more metallic the texture became. A true biomechanical meld. To my knowledge, no mage had yet achieved it.
Rhino rolled up next to me and Cornelius jumped out. Pale purple blood splattered the armored vehicle’s custom grille guard. Bits and pieces of alien flesh hung from the metal.
“Are you all right?” Cornelius asked.
No. “Yes. I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I know this was very unpleasant for you.”
Animal mages formed a special bond with a few chosen animals, but they cared about all of them, and we had just mowed down at least a dozen, maybe more.
Cornelius nodded. “Thank you for your concern. They weren’t true animals in the native sense of the word. It helped some.”
“Is this a summon?” I asked.
Cornelius shook his head. “I don’t think so. They feel slightly similar to Zeus. Not of Earth but not completely of the arcane realm either.”
“Earlier you said they were too ‘preoccupied’ to reach?”
Cornelius frowned and nodded at the rings and the bud within. “This object emitted magic.”
“I felt it.”
“The emissions were so dense, they effectively deafened the creatures. They couldn’t feel me. I tried to contact the object itself, but the biological component of it is so primitive, it was like trying to communicate with a sea sponge.”
The House lab scenario looked more and more likely. If these proto-crocodiles had come out of the arcane realm, we would have seen a summoner and a portal. Massive holes in reality were kind of hard to miss.
Linus would just love this.
I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. One beep, two, three . . .
At the other end of the lawn Leon jogged across the road, Zeus in tow.
The phone kept ringing. Officially Linus Duncan was retired. In reality, he still served the state of Texas in a new, more frightening capacity, and I was his deputy. He always answered my calls.
Beep. Another.
Linus’ voice came on the line. “Yes?”
“I was attacked by magic monsters in Eleanor Tinsley Park. They were controlled by a biomechanical device powered with magic.”
Leon ran up and halted next to me.
“Do you require assistance?” Linus asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Show me.”
I activated FaceTime, switched the camera, and panned the phone, capturing the device, the corpses, and the fleeing creatures. On the screen, Linus stared into the phone. In his sixties, still fit, with thick salt-and-pepper hair, he always had the Texas tan. His features were handsome and bold, a square jaw framed by a short beard, prominent nose, thick dark eyebrows, and dark eyes that looked either hazel or brown, depending on the light. He smiled easily, and when he paid attention to you, you felt special. If you asked ten people who just met him to describe him, they would all say one word—charming.
The man looking back at me from the phone was the real Linus Duncan, a Prime, former Speaker of the Texas Assembly, focused, sharp, his eyes merciless. He looked like an old tiger who spotted an intruder in his domain and was sharpening his claws for the kill. A dry staccato came through the phone, a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, followed by a mechanical whine. Linus’ turrets. He was under attack.