Goddamnit!
He reached the end of the bags and jumped to the ground, knocking people over, not one of whom reacted. Other than to right themselves and continue on their path, like the mindless automatons someone had turned them into. John pushed past them until he reached the far wall, where the mighty thrum, thrum, thrum of the portal was raising chills on his arms.
As if the blank faces of his colleagues hadn’t done that already!
His one piece of luck was that whoever had positioned the portal had only been looking for a large enough space for it to materialize. They hadn’t bothered with what was around it, including a set of temporary bleachers on wheels that had been brought in for people waiting to use the main salle, or for classes taking instruction in new techniques. And which now served a different purpose when John let loose the wheel lock and shoved them in front of the portal’s great mouth.
And, all right, that provoked a response.
The crowd, which had not cared about getting elbowed in the ribs or knocked aside or even pushed completely over, did care most emphatically about a barrier that stopped them from reaching their goal. John suddenly found himself engulfed in a barrage of spell fire, which he barely shielded quick enough to avoid. But his watery shields were immediately steaming and wouldn’t last long under a combined attack. Already, the bleachers were burning.
Burn then, John thought viciously, and shoved them outward, forcing the crowd to stumble back to avoid immolation. It bought him only seconds, but seconds were all he needed. He sprang toward the portal, the strongest disruption spell he knew on his lips, and sent his body crashing through the giant maw.
The backlash was immediate and terrible. Power howled all around him, hurricane-like winds tore at his shields, and the spell he was using to bend the thing to his will was ripped to pieces almost before it left his lips. He switched to silent casting, but it wasn’t much better. Any kind of casting takes concentration—which is a little difficult when it feels like you’re being thrown down the throat of some great beast!
But his second spell worked, dragging all that power out of its loop, forcing the maelstrom to stop cutting through metaspace like a giant drill and instead to swirl up behind him like a cloak. A burning, searing cloak that lashed anything it touched. And it was touching more every second, shearing away great swaths of his shields like they were nothing.
John growled out a curse and hung on, dragging all that power almost physically off the wall and forcing the portal’s mouth to close up behind him.
That prevented any more mages from entering the tunnel, but it left a boiling mass of smoke and purple lightning welling up in his wake like a living storm, one with only one target now: the tiny man in front of it. John felt it snap at his heels as he tumbled forward, heard it roar in his ears, smelled his panicked sweat. And saw his shields start to buckle as the magical storm fought to rip him apart.
It almost succeeded.
It should have succeeded, because this portal was unlike any he’d ever seen—a tornado compared to a summer squall. It raged and howled, boiled and thundered. Yet, somehow, miraculously, his shields held.
He wasn’t sure why they did, but he didn’t have time to worry about it before he was abruptly dumped out onto a road, smoking and sizzling. The mighty wave of energy behind him disappeared with a deafening whoosh as the portal reached its end and ate itself. It fucked off to release its remaining energy into metaspace, while John lay where he’d fallen, trembling and choking and wondering whether he was coming apart at the seams.
He was fairly certain that the answer was yes.
His shields took that moment to finally give up the ghost in a huge cloud of steam. He couldn’t see a damned thing as a result, but he could feel, and it was wrong. Instead of the hard-packed earth of HQ’s tunnel system, his searching fingers found only rough stone. And before he could figure out what that meant, headlights pierced the vapor in front of him and he was almost run down by some kind of vehicle.
He rolled out of the way just in time, landing in a gutter as whatever it was zipped past, belching dark exhaust in his face. And finally putting him out of the path of the clouds of steam. He paused, halfway through an attempt to get back to his feet, and stared around, utterly confused.
Because this . . . was not HQ.
Chapter Five
J ohn stumbled into a phone booth and somehow managed to get the door shut behind him. His hands were shaking, his vision was blurry, and his knees kept threatening to give way. But not because he’d been hit by a vehicle.
But because he’d been hit by a spell.
Specifically, the spell, the damned enthrallment that was pulling at him with what felt like the strength of ten men. He muttered a counter curse, which did exactly fuck all, just like the last three, except for marginally calming his trembling hands. Enough that perhaps, just perhaps, he could make a blasted call!
He didn’t have his phone with him, not having worn it to bed, and the booth was similarly lacking. But that didn’t matter, because it had something better. Or, at least, it was supposed to.
The large mirror in front of him should have been reflecting back John’s harried face, the inside of the booth, and parts of the noodle shop across the street, where a cheerful yellow sign was gilding the cobblestones. Or, rather, it was trying to, but it was constantly being eclipsed by the crowd of war mages passing in front of it. Their silhouettes caused the light to blink, blink, blink as they strode down the cramped little street like men on a mission.
Which was what they were, which was why he needed to get the damned phone to work!
But the surface remained cloudy and silvery gray, even when he thumped it. So, he thumped it again, harder this time, enough to send the facade rippling a little. And then sent a bolt of magic through it, hot enough to have melted regular glass, and finally. No wonder nobody used these bloody things anymore!
The surface started to sluggishly swirl about, and a slightly annoyed looking face emerged. It was the same silver gray as the mirror, long and hairless, with minimal facial features because it was just an avatar that the spell used and nobody gave a damn what it looked like. Which wasn’t the case in reverse, apparently.
It gave John a disdainful once over, taking in the dirty and now sweat-stained sweats, because it had taken him minutes to locate a phone booth and the summer night was hot and humid.
John scowled back at it, raising a hand menacingly, and the thing finally began to speak—
In Cantonese.
John zapped it again, only to have it abruptly switch to Portuguese. And then to Mandarin, Spanish, French and something that might have been Azerbaijani, for all he knew, but it wasn’t helping! Goddamn it! It was a bastard thing in a bastard box in a bastard town—
“Sir. Please refrain from shaking the booth,” the mirror told him, or John presumed so. The latest language was German and his was rusty, since he primarily used it to swear in. Something he demonstrated to the box, before switching to English when he ran out of expletives.
“Oh.” The thin faced operator sniffed. “I might have known. British.”
John snarled at it. “Put me through to Stratford HQ. Now.”
“And which HQ would that be, exactly, sir? Amalgamated Alchemists? Astley’s Charms and Hexes? Avon Extreme Home Furnishings—”