Crimes Against Magic (36 page)

Jenny released her hands and moved her head slowly, planting one last kiss on my lips. "I cut the table's runes."

Information flashed through my head. The runes had been blocking my use of magic. "Thank you." 

Jenny whispered her final request into my ear, so quietly that I could barely make out the words. Then she slumped onto my chest and died as a half dozen people rushed toward us, dragging her off me. 

 "Fucking bitch," the grey suited man said and delivered a swift kick to Jenny's lifeless body. 

He turned his attention to me, his eyes full of fire and rage. I returned the stare dispassionately. "Hello, Mordred," I said. "It's been a while."

Chapter 37

Jenny's body was dragged from the room by two scientists, as everyone else ran around like headless chickens. Mordred stood and stared at me with an expression of rage. I winked at him. He'd be dead soon enough, so it wasn't like he would be able to hold his grudge for too much longer. Jenny's final request rang in my ears –
Make them pay.
I smiled. That was going to be my pleasure.

The table I was on was hoisted upright so that I was against the far wall, looking down on everyone whilst they went to work. "What are you actually doing?" I asked after one of the scientists took blood from me. She was shaking so hard, she missed the vein twice. I offered to do it for her if she wasn't competent enough.

"We want to make sure you survive the questioning process," Mordred said. "Don't want you to be allergic to something, or immune to others. We figured testing your blood first would be a good idea. And since whatever that bitch did seems to have restored your memories, this process should be much easier.”

"Good luck with that," I said with a smile. "You do know I'm going to kill you?"

Mordred laughed, making everyone in the room stop what they were doing. They probably didn't hear his laugh too often. He never had been the jovial type. "You're chained to a rune covered table with silver manacles. You're not going anywhere except to an incinerator once we've discarded your useless body."

"Let me guess, you want to turn Dani and Samantha into Fates. Young ones too, although you'll need a third. A past Fate."

"We already have one." He clicked his fingers and the mystery woman from the phone calls entered the room. "She spent so much time trying to hide Dani and Samantha. We figured it'd be only right that they never be separated again."

 "You're a psychic?" I asked her, but she looked away.

Mordred lifted her top to show the dark blood magic marks on her stomach. "She's already undergone part of the process. And as Dani and Samantha are her daughters, it should be easier to convert them than it was with Cassandra and her granddaughter, Ivy."

I cursed myself for not figuring it out sooner, that the mystery woman was Dani and Samantha's mother. 

 "You're back to helping this asshole because he threatened your daughters." The memory of Ivy bringing me and Cassandra tea, shot into the forefront of my mind. I’d been unable to keep Ivy from Mordred’s clutches once, but now they were safe. And I would make sure they stayed that way.

Mordred took exception to my description of him and slammed his walking stick into my ribs. I winced, but forced a smile through, angering him even more. "You always were a shitty sorcerer," I said with a laugh and noticed that once more the room had gone silent. So, still a sore point.

"I don't need to be a great sorcerer to kill you," Mordred said with a smile. He turned to the scientist who had taken my blood. "The results. Now."

She fumbled with a piece of paper, almost dropping it. "Preliminary results suggest that he's perfectly healthy. But we need to test it with blood magic. We started when he was unconscious, but it’ll be a few hours yet."

Mordred sighed and back handed the scientist as if striking a gnat in the air. She tumbled to the ground, knocking a second scientist over. "You have one hour," Mordred said. "If it's not done by then, I'll slit your throat."

The two scientists dusted themselves off and raced from the room. 

"You have to be firm with people," he said to me before turning to one of his people. "Remove his shirt."

Almost immediately a white-coat-wearing Nazi cut through my t-shirt, ripping it from me. 

"Impressed?" I asked Mordred.

He ignored the remark and stared at the six dark glyphs on my torso. "You have the same six that you've always had." He walked away and wrote on a piece of paper. "There’s no residual mark from what I did to you. It appears that those marks you have, protected you from further damage. It's something I wish I could have looked into a little further. But I have little time for fun these days."

"My lord you need to see this," Surfer guy said as he continued to stare at my naked chest.

"You'd better buy me lunch," I told him, but he didn't even glance up at me. "At least put a five in my belt."

Mordred did as his crony asked, although it clearly pained him to do so, and raised an eyebrow as he examined the mark on my left pectoral. "It's fading," he said with an edge. "That bitch must have started a chain-reaction.” He spun back to the Surfer guy, who had wisely started to edge away. "You will drag those fucking memories out of his head right now, or I will make you beg me to kill you."

"Scared, Mordred," I taunted.

"Fuck you," he snapped, but his eyes remained on his subordinate.

"You're not even going to get the information yourself." I tutted. "I thought I meant something to you, I thought I was special."

Mordred stalked toward me until his face was an inch from mine. "My psychic over there is going to tear everything I need from your brain and then I'm going to fucking kill you."

I stared passed my old nemesis, toward Surfer guy, infuriating him even more. He'd started scratching his arm, raising his lab-coat to show off the unmistakable swirl of a blood magic glyph. "You cursed him."

"Good help is hard to find," Mordred said. "If he betrays me, he dies. It's a nice little curse I've perfected over the years. I'd love to show you, but it has to be done willingly. Shame really, I think that would have been fun."

"My lord, how long will it be before those marks vanish?" Surfer guy asked, his voice breaking slightly from nerves.

"It depends on just how intertwined these are with what was done to Nate all those centuries ago, and how much energy Jenny managed to expel. They could all vanish now, or take hundreds of years. Blood magic curses aren't exactly a science."

Mordred glared at me once again. "You've caused me no end of trouble in the past few hundred years. France, Holland, Istanbul, everywhere I go, you're right behind me, fucking up my plans as best as possible. I imagine screaming will be involved during your last few hours on earth. I might record it to play back on my iPod when I get bored. We'll use what information we drag out of you to make me more powerful."

The past ten years had done little for Mordred's sanity. "In all of your plotting and planning, you forgot something," I said.

"And what would that be?"

"Two things, actually. Firstly, you should have killed me when you had a chance. That was really stupid."

Mordred laughed. "And secondly?"

"Secondly, you should have remembered. Never piss off a sorcerer." Glyphs blared across my body, brilliant whites and oranges mixing as the table became engulfed in flame. In the blink of an eye the wood weakened to the point that I launched myself from it, the manacles still attached to my hands and feet as I landed a few feet away from a sprinting Mordred. 

I looked around the room at the remaining scientists, Mordred had bolted through the door, taking Dani's mum, and locking it behind him, leaving five people in a room with me – a very angry and deadly sorcerer. And then the screams began.

*****

The first scientist tried to attack me with a scalpel. A stream of molten hot fire the size of my finger, hit him in the throat. 

The female scientist who had taken my blood had started screaming almost immediately, intensifying as I killed two more of her colleagues who hadn't learned from their dead workmate and had tried the exact same attack with their scalpels. Two razor sharp blades of air appeared at the end of each of my hands. I cut through my attackers, drenching the surrounding floor and wall in blood. Three down, killed in a matter of seconds, two to go. 

I turned to the still screaming woman. "Will you please shut up?" My words had an effect as her screams transformed into a soft whimpering. "Now, before anymore of you have to die, would anyone like to tell me where I can find the keys for these things?" I raised the manacles. I could have used magic to remove them, but as they were silver, the amount it would take would have left me weak immediately afterwards.

Surfer guy fumbled in his pockets and tossed me the key, which I caught as it sailed over my head. The psychic ran at me, his palms toward me readying an attack, but I had plenty of time to direct a blast of air in his direction. It slammed into his chest, driving the air from him as he collapsed to the floor with a gasp. 

I unlocked the manacles from my wrists, dropping them to the floor with a satisfying bang, followed by the ones on my feet. The manacles were heavy and uncomfortable, I was grateful to have been able to remove them. 

The scientist who'd taken my blood huddled in the nearest corner like a frightened rabbit. But before I asked her anything, Surfer guy got back to his feet, holding one hand against his chest and breathing heavily. "You've probably got a few broken ribs," I said. "Maybe a punctured lung." As if on cue, he started coughing up blood. 

"Last chance," I said. 

He took a step toward me and I used a strong gust of wind to pick up one of the scalpels, and flung it at Surfer guy. He didn't notice it until it was too late, and then he fell to the floor. A thin trickle of blood fell between his eyes after the razor sharp blade pieced his brain. Only the tip of the handle remained visible. "They're silver," I said to the remaining scientist, who nodded profusely.

"My lord wanted to kill you slowly. So he demanded we use silver on you."

I knelt in front of her. "His name is Mordred." I was utterly fed up of his people considering him better than he was. "And you have two choices. Help me, or die."

"What do you need?" she asked without pause. 

"What's the best way out of here? The door or the window?"

"The air compression chamber outside will be locked," she said. "There's no way through it unless you rip the door apart. And that will take hours, it's silver laced."

"So, the window then," I said glancing at the large glass portal.

"That window is a few inches thick. You'd need a bullet to get through it."

"Are you saying we're trapped in here?"

She nodded. "Are you going to kill me?" her voice was small.

"Why would I do that? Are you going to try to kill me?"

She shook her head.

"Then you're safe," I smiled. "I do have one question. How many people did you kill here?"

Her eyes darted around the room, searching for an escape that was unlikely to come. "I didn't kill anyone. I just did the work on their bodies."

I kept smiling. "How. Many?"

"A few dozen. But they were already dead," she pleaded. "I didn't kill anyone. I just did my job."

"So did the Nazis," I said, and with a wave of my hands, I removed all of the oxygen from her lungs. Her eyes bulged in panic and she started to move, but within seconds she was unconscious on the floor. I had no intention of killing her, but that didn't mean I had to help her either.

I made my way to the viewing window and stared into the darkness beyond. People would have been running around trying to lock the building down—having a pissed off sixteen-hundred-year-old sorcerer wake up and kill a bunch of workers; tended to cause people to panic. That meant only the most ardent of employees would have stayed behind, with a few inches of glass to separate them from me.

I concentrated, forcing as much heat as possible out of my glyph-covered hands and into the glass. The unconscious scientist had been right, the glass was thick, and it took a massive amount of force to melt all the way through to the other side. But once the initial hole had formed, the rest of the glass gave way like it was made of paper, until the hole was large enough for me to climb through. 

As I'd guessed, the room beyond, although dark and uninviting, was empty. It contained only chairs and tables, used while viewing whatever sick and twisted experiments Mordred's employees carried out at his request. 

I was about to open the door and leave the room, when a noise from behind it caused me to pause. After a few seconds of silence, and no repeat noise, I wondered if I was going mad. I'd just had a millennium and a half of memories dumped in my head, and I still felt a little groggy from it. Maybe I was hearing things, but just as I'd pushed the thought aside, I heard something else. 

I placed my hand against the door and used my air magic to create sonar of whatever was outside the room. I got three pings. Three people waited for me to come through the door, one directly behind the door and two more slightly down the corridor. A small smile creaked across my lips. If they were waiting for me, it would be rude not to oblige them.

The heavy door exploded outward in a tornado of howling wind. It hurtled into the armed guard who happened to be behind it, taking him off his feet and crashing into the nearest wall.

The other two guards were in shock. Their guns were still in holsters against their hips as they held electric batons, a bit like a cattle-prod, to use as weapons. However, unlike a cattle-prod, everything beyond the handle is used to deliver a massive shock, easily the equivalent of a taser. 

I darted for the closest guard, avoiding the humming baton as it swung toward me and removed his revolver from its holster. I flicked the safety off and kept moving, placing a round between the second guard's eyes and putting distance between myself and another swing from the first guard's baton. Panic appeared in the guard's eyes and he flung the baton at me. It was easily avoided and countered with another bullet. This one caught him just above the top of his Kevlar vest, ripping into his neck. He dropped to his knees, and a horrible bubbling sound left the wound as he died.