bedeviled & beyond 03 - bedeviled & beleaguered (17 page)

I grinned at Emo and he grinned back.
Busted! he thought at me.

“We’ll be around the corner in a minute and out of her sight.” Captain Lee told my partner in a hostile growl.

I laughed as Emo jerked in surprise. He quickly made a zipping motion over his head.

“It won’t work. I’ll still be able to get in there,” Captain Lee informed Emo.

I laughed again as Emo’s dark eyes widened in mock horror.

Ralph wasn’t in the room records had given us. Captain Lee threatened to go back down and pound on the harried clerk a little more.

I was really starting to like the guy.

I put a hand on his tree trunk of an arm to stop him. “However much fun that might be, I don’t think it’ll do much good. Being a werewolf with a supersized appetite, I’m guessing Ralph’s probably wondering around looking for something to eat. There are no meal drones. The usual routine is out the door right now.”

I was close. Ralph
was
wondering around with food. But he was dispensing it rather than consuming it. We found him after about twenty minutes of searching the thickly inhabited halls, dodging grasping hands and, in a few cases, well-aimed globs of spit from patients with severe anger issues.

He was pushing a cart down the middle of the hall and handing out small tubes of water and food whenever a patient was interested. Many of the people on the floor around our feet were unconscious. And most of them looked like they’d been through a war.

Ralph’s head shot up when Bob called out to him. He waved when he saw us but kept dispensing. We walked up to him. He started handing us tubes. “Help me distribute the rest of this batch and I’ll go get more.”

I shook my head. “We have something we need to do outside, Ralph. We came to get you to help us.”

He frowned, obviously unsure what to do.

Bob, knowing his partner well enough to gauge the problem, said, “They want us to bring in injured. The police are swamped and they’re having trouble getting everybody off the streets.”

Ralph nodded. “Help me get the rest of this passed out first. Then I’ll go with you.”

~SC~

A half hour later we shifted out of there. After much discussion we’d decided to start downtown, near the office. Because that was the area where the population was most densely situated and we figured it would be the optimum place for trouble.

As soon as light, sound and motion returned I knew we’d guessed right.

We stood in a cluster in the middle of a street that looked like it had recently survived a great war. The concrete was broken and sported huge craters filled with smoking air vehicles.

The buildings on either side of the street hadn’t fared much better. Every one of them showed some level of destruction. Smoke billowed from windows in almost every structure and some buildings were all but crumpled to the ground. It looked like someone had detonated a laser bomb beneath the city.

The mist hovered below the tops of the buildings, seemingly holding the smoke and fire beneath it. The situation was compacting its poison and magnifying the discomfort of being on the streets. Our eyes and noses started to burn and run almost immediately and I wondered if the acrid air was going to get us before the rabid human population got a chance at us.

Almost as I had the thought an inhuman howl pierced the smog at our backs and several apparitions covered in what looked like gray and red paint flew at us with long, sharp looking pieces of metal.

They looked like something from a forest tribe on one of the more backward planets.

Emo and I shot stunning levels of power at them and they jerked to a halt, their strangely painted faces clearly showing their surprise.

We started toward them, thinking they’d been adequately subdued.

“How are we gonna get them to the unplanned care unit?” I asked Emo as we approached the humans.

“I can see if my air vehicle survived the fire.”

I nodded and then ducked as the human nearest me swung a deadly looking scythe. I remembered seeing one of those in a museum once. As I ducked the first swing I presented a power induced uppercut to the human’s midsection, just below his ribs and he gasped once but quickly regained his momentum. The scythe whizzed by my left ear and hit the concrete with a jarring crunch.

I was pretty sure by the look on the human’s face that the concussion from the swing must have done some ligament damage to his arms but he was zombie-like in his determination to pulverize me and he lifted the scythe over his head again.

I glanced at Emo. “Wasn’t there a museum near here? Something tells me it’s been broken into. Some of these weapons are ancient.”

Emo nodded and kicked out at a human who was trying to hit him with a long, thick piece of wood that had sharp pieces of metal sticking out of the bashin’ end. The man flew backward and skidded several feet along the concrete. He hopped back up almost immediately and came at Emo with the weapon again, swinging it with deadly accuracy toward my partner’s head.

“Up the street a few blocks...that way.” He pointed with his right hand and lifted his left hand to shoot a jolt of power into the piece of wood, blasting it into tiny little pieces that flew toward my face.

“Shit!”

Emo grimaced. “Sorry. I’m trying not to hurt him.”

Emo and I both turned to look at the human. He had a six inch long chunk of wood sticking out of his forehead. His eyes crossed in an effort to look at the wood stuck between them and then rolled up in his head as he slid bonelessly to the ground.

“I think you hurt him.”

Emo frowned, “Damn fragile things, humans.”

Nodding, I returned my attention to the one who was trying to kill me.

He still seemed determined to dissect me with the scythe.

It was starting to piss me off.

I took a running leap and planted a foot in the middle of his chest. I hit with enough power to crack a few ribs and sprang off, landing just behind him and springing back onto my hands as the scythe completed another arc toward me.

Apparently, like the gargoyle in the park, the humans had become impervious to pain and fear as a result of the mist’s affects. It had given them an edge they’d never had before. They couldn’t be stopped without massive physical harm.

That presented a hefty problem for me.

I’d been sent out there to help the injured.

Not make more of them.

Finally I pulled my power forward and made a constraining bubble with it, encompassing the incensed human inside my magic. He swung at the bubble angrily with the scythe but couldn’t penetrate it.

How I was gonna get him out of that bubble and into custody I didn’t know.

Turning around I took note of how everyone else was doing.

Emo had left his nearly dead guy on the ground and was helping Bob and Ralph subdue a very large woman. Between the three of them they were like bidgie bugs fighting off a hawk.

The woman weighed three hundred pounds or my middle name wasn’t Q.

And she was extremely scary.

Despite her size she was dressed from head to toe in skintight red leather. Half of her very round face was covered in a black dragon tattoo and she had small knives piercing her ear lobes instead of earrings.

As she danced around, very gracefully for her size, trying to dissect the three men, her tongue slithered across her fleshy lips, showing a stud as big as my thumbprint in the center.

She had two very long, very businesslike knives in her hands and was swinging them in precise arcs around her thick body like she’d been trained to kill with them. I noticed that both Ralph and Bob were covered in small wounds, some of which were bleeding profusely.

They weren’t going to be able to stop her unless they hurt her.

The three men didn’t want to hurt her. I had no problem with it.

Lifting a hand, I zapped her until she fell to the ground. She hit hard, nearly shaking the street under our feet, and lay there quivering.

The three men looked at me and I shrugged. “What? She was pissing me off.”

I glanced at Captain Lee. He’d made lots of nice injured people for us to transport.

Our mission was not going well.

At the current rate we’d need an air bus just to transport the people we’d injured trying to save the injured people we were supposed to be rescuing.

My mental drawers shuffled as we were discussing what to do with our new injured people. Dialle’s voice warmed my happy places.

Astra, where are you?

Right now I’m in the middle of the street outside my office. We’ve been asked to help transport the injured to unplanned care. We could use your help if you’re bored.

A throaty chuckle throbbed nicely between my thighs.
Unfortunately, it is all we can do to keep the humans from our door. We have guards everywhere trying to...dissuade them from entering the Court with weapons and extremely bad attitudes. On the plus side, I have lots of injured people here for you.

Shit! We’ll get there as soon as we can. I think we’re gonna be busy here for a while.

If you need to rest, I believe my quarters are human-free at the moment. I’d be happy to assist your needs there.

I smirked.
I’ll just bet you would, bud.

The air changed at my elbow and I turned to find Flick standing there. His pale, freckled face swiveled with a look of shock as he observed the destruction at our feet. “Nice work Astra.”

I shrugged. What could I say? “What’s up, angel, we’re kind of busy here.”

He gave me a wry smile. “Yeah, I can see that. I came to tell you that the guardians have settled over the worst parts of the city. They’ve started projecting calming magics over the area and are having some success.”

Emo came up to us. “That’s good news.”

Flick shrugged. “It’s an overwhelming task. About all they’re going to be able to accomplish is to put a modicum of sense into the people who were decent and kind to start with. That’ll just leave behind the jerks and creeps for you guys to deal with.”

I frowned. “You know we’re supposed to be bringing in the injured right? Not cleaning up the streets.”

He nodded and grinned. “After five minutes with you they’re all going to be injured, Astra.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Har. Besides, I haven’t hurt
that
guy yet.” I turned to show him my guy with a scythe in a bubble. The man was screaming obscenities and banging on the inside of the bubble with his scythe. As we watched he misjudged a strike and the scythe bounced off the bubble in the wrong direction, pinging back toward him and cutting a large chunk out of his neck. Blood started to spurt from his throat.

I shrugged and turned back to Flick, grimacing.

Flick shook his head and shimmered away, leaving us to our dilemma about how to get our victims—er, I mean our injured—to unplanned care.

After a few minutes of arguing between Emo, Bob, Ralph and I over what to do with the injured, Captain Lee, who’d been standing slightly outside the group listening, stalked away from us.

I followed him with my gaze as he stomped down the street, massive arms swinging. He headed for the large bulk of an overturned air bus, which lay on its side up against the husk of a badly burned out building.

Lee walked around the air bus for a moment or two, then jumped up to peer inside. As we watched he dropped through a window and disappeared inside. We soon heard a wheezing sound that could have been the bus’s engine turning and the lights at the rear of the vehicle blinked on and then off again. Captain Lee reappeared a few minutes later and walked around to where the top of the bus rested against the scorched and still smoking building.

He disappeared behind it.

After a few seconds there was a screeching sound and the bus started to wobble. More screeching brought more wobbling. And suddenly the bus started to roll slowly away from the building. As it rolled far enough for its weight to carry it over, the air bus swung upright, crashing to the ground with an ominous sound. It rocked there for a moment and then Captain Lee picked himself up from the ground, where he’d apparently used the building for leverage to push the air bus over and climbed inside.

He started it up and swung it around, keeping it low to the ground as he pulled it up beside us. He climbed out and headed for my guy in his bubble, now covered in blood from his own stupidity. “Let’s load ’em up.”

I really like this guy
, I told my partner
.

Emo shook his head, laughing.

CHAPTER TEN

“Saving” Weighs

The magic bus did rumble down, dead streets destroyed by rage,

The Serpent’s perfect story writ, with poison on each page.

The air bus was nearly full.

Emo wove a holding spell on the bus as we left it to pick through the latest pile of bodies strewn across the street. We’d quickly found that, no matter how mangled the human injured were, we needed magic to keep the battered and enraged humans on the bus while we did our work.

Somehow my little gang had fallen into a rhythm. I’d been selected by silent agreement as the leader and Captain Lee had easily taken over the role as my second. Emo was chief magic wielder and Bob and Ralph were key negotiators and cleanup crew. Being well-versed in negotiations because of their work with the Were Council, they had naturally fallen into doing whatever they could to reason with our cargo and explain things to them. No easy task given that most of them were nearly deranged from the magic overload the veil was creating.

At some point in the evening we’d passed close by our office building and Ralph had asked Captain Lee to stop the magic bus so they could run up to their office for a few moments. Ever since that trek into the all but demolished building they’d been pulling weapons and gadgets out of hidden places on their persons on a regular basis. They were armed with so much stuff I expected them to clank as they walked.

As we left the bus behind and headed for the injured in the street, I kept an eye on the two men, watching for signs that the veil was affecting them. Although Weres were technically magical creatures, in their human form they had the potential to be affected by the veil’s poison. Hopefully their inability to shift would be the only affect. But I was keeping an eye on them just in case.