Zero Sum (48 page)

Rei perked. “You looked up the punishment as well? It is one of my personal favorites.”

“No doubt,” I muttered. “You still have that boxcutter?”

“No,” Rei said with a frown. “Security seized it.”

With a blue flash, a gate peeled opened before us. Out walked Gaston Spinoza in his black alguacil fatigues. He grinned as he tossed us our robes. “I knew I would like this one. Like father, like son.”
 

Behind Spinoza came said father figure. My father, Kurtz Resnick, was dressed like Spinoza—and was packing a shotgun the size of a small car.
 

He acknowledged me with a stiff nod. “Son, I need to—”

His eyes flashed to the wound on my neck. A fire I had never seen erupted in his eyes.
 

“Lad,” he said gruffly. “I want you to walk over here real slow.” He leveled his hand-cannon at Rei. “This’ll all be over right quick. I’ll get you home safe and sound.”

Then things happened rather fast.
 

Rei snarled. My Sight flared. Spinoza shouted. I dove. And my father fired.
 

I took the blast right in the gut.
 

My ears ringing, the world slowed. Spinoza jumped in front of my father. I watched as he wrestled the gun from his hands. Rei collapsed into a heap. She might have been screaming. I wasn’t sure. I curled up in a ball from the pain. It was funny, really. I had never considered jumping
into
a wave of light before. But I had done it without hesitation. No regrets, either. Rei was safe. That was good enough. Still…a gut shot? What a way to go.
 

“She’s not to be harmed!” Spinoza roared. “I gave Albright my word, damn it!”
 

My father rolled his eyes.

Rei crawled toward me. She was mumbling nonsense in a tongue I didn’t understand.

Funny, I thought. Death smelled a lot like a garlic lover’s pizza.

My eyes widened. “Stay back!” I screamed. “I’ve been seasoned!”

Rei sniffed the air and froze. “Oh, a garlic round.” She scurried backwards. “Thank you for the warning, my most odiferous companion.”
 

I examined the welts the garlic pellets had left on my stomach. They hurt like a bitch, but I’d recover after a shower. Now if these had hit Rei…I got to my feet and went for my father. Patricide had a great ring to it.
 

Spinoza jumped between us. “Enough, you two. We’ll deal with this later. Avert a major reaping now, yes?”

“Fuck that!” I screamed. “I can’t trust this bastard.”

“Dieter, we must attend to Lambda,” Rei urged. “The Thompson Pair is outflanking them to the north.”

I was still glaring at my father, but the fight had dropped out of me. I took a step back. “Fine, but Rei and I will strike out north. Spinoza, you take this jackass and head south. I don’t want to see his face.”

My father didn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell what was going on inside his head, and I didn’t care. I tore off my ruined shirt and tossed it off the side of the building. Replacing it with my robe, I turned to Rei.
 

“Let’s move,” I growled.

I could sense Rei was biting her tongue as we hustled away.

“What is it?” I asked.

“How can you speak to your kin like that?”

“He just tried to shoot you. He’s an asshole.”

“If I uttered such words against my parents, I would be gutted, staked, and left to roast in the sun.”

“Yikes.”

“Then, on the fourth day—”

“I get the picture. Remind me to never vacation in Chicago.”

“Don’t be silly. You would most certainly enjoy Chicago. Sailing on the lake is most refreshing, and the beaters do rave about the cuisine. I cannot speak from my own experience of course, but it certainly plumps them up nicely.”

Pushing Rei’s culinary insights to the side, I checked my bearings. “Access to the upper deck should be right around here.”

“Very well. Let’s disable the forces here and then move to interfere with the cast.”
 

I gave Rei a boost over the ledge, and she lifted me up. We hid behind a nearby hot dog cart and checked out the scene.

“So
that’s
a castout?” I said. “Okay. Wow.”

“Indeed,” Rei said. She was similarly in awe. The observation deck was a bona fide battlefield. From down on the Strip, it must have looked like the fireworks had started early. Lambda had carved out some turf behind what was left of the gift shop, but they were under heavy fire from half a dozen gunmen. Roster and Sheila were pressed back-to-back fending off four trolls. I watched as Sheila, her giant broadsword gleaming, amputated one of the trolls at the knee. A shower of light shot across the sky, and the downed monster howled in pain.

“She always gets me with that move,” Rei said in passing. She clicked on her radio and updated our location. Monique was tossing off heavy spells, trying to break through Talmax’s suppressive fire. Jules and Dante were working defense. Closer to us, agents Masterson and Collins were squaring off against the Rileys. Both pairs’ mana reserves must have been massive; they were casting like there was no tomorrow.
 

Looping around from the South, Spinoza screamed, “ICE. Yield or die!” at Carrera’s eight remaining colleagues. The Talmax mages responded with a veritable firestorm. Judging by the bits my father turned the nearest spellcaster into, he’d switched to regular rounds. One thing bothered me.
 

“I don’t see Anna or Hans.”

Rei nodded. “Sister is not one to lead a charge. And Dieter, whatever her crimes, you mustn’t touch her. You represent the DEA. You can’t comprehend the implications of an assault on her person. I will manage her when she shows. Her actions are in defiance of the Treaty. I will bring her home for justice. Promise me that you will leave her to me.”

I nodded. Yea, like I wanted to pick a fight with a super-vampire right now.

“Then I guess I’ll handle Sadie.”

Rei looked at me uneasily.

“Hey, if Sadie can fling it, I can entrap it.” I tried to sound confident, but capturing a plasma flow with my palm seemed like a bit of a stretch.

“Dieter, our link is stronger now. Your attempts at subterfuge are doomed to failure. And besides, you were always a horrendous liar.”

I sighed. “Then I guess I can’t hide the fact that you have wicked blood-breath right now.”

Rei stared at me, mortified,
 

“Good hunting, kumpadre.”

I struck out low and fast toward the back of the enemy line.
 

Glancing back, I caught Rei breathing into her hand.
 

That ego of hers…it was fantastic.

+

As I ran along, I took a peek at my stomach.

Stars above.

The welts had totally healed. The same went for the spot where Hans had punched me. My innards felt fine too. I felt my neck—not even a scab. The vampire blood hadn’t turned me, but it was certainly
acting
on me. I wiped the sweat off my brow. If I didn’t kill him first, my father and I needed to have a talk.
 

A defensive arch had been set up around Lambda. I recognized Jules’ signature in the fortification. Anti-personnel by the look of it. It gave Lambda a fighting chance at holding off Talmax’s superior numbers. But it wasn’t perfect. It had gaps. I spotted Sadie making her way to one of them. I kept low and shadowed her movements.
 

Halfway there, my Sight flared. I dropped flat on my belly, and a brilliant ball of energy flew straight past me. I watched as it soar off the side of the building. Streaming out into the night, it exploded into a brilliant red fireball. A chorus of cheers erupted from below. Maybe I should have tried to catch it. I was running on zero mana and there was no way I could pull off any spells.
 

Fortunately, a dead gunman was in my way. I took his assault rifle and shoved a few of those flash grenades into the pockets of my robe. Halfway through the task, I looked down at my hands. The gun was coated in the man’s blood. Concerned about my future passions, I gave the blood a probative sniff.

Yuck.
Rapid healing or not, human blood still smelled like shit. Much more at ease, I pulled the dongle connected to the gun’s bolt. I was pretty sure that motion chambered a round. Checking that the safety was off, I crept forward. I was about to go toe-to-toe with a good friend, and I didn’t like the prospects of it. Sadie had knelt down to work on a circle. My guess was she planned to blast away at Jules’ fortification using one of her counters. That would leave Lambda exposed to whatever the rest of Talmax wanted to throw at them. Lucky for me, the complicated counter-cast left Sadie distracted.
 

I pointed the heavy rifle at her back, swallowed, and lowered the muzzle. Aiming a gun at a girl…it just felt wrong. Reconsidering, I dug out a flash grenade. I pulled the pin and gave it a toss. The fat tube rolled right up next to her. Sadie let out a yelp as the nonlethal grenade burst two feet from her toes. Even my ears were ringing from the intense flash of light and noise. She’d be knocked out cold.

Three cheers for modern weaponry.
 

I walked over to claim my trophy, but as the smoke cleared I froze. Sadie had vanished.

“Conflagerous!” she screamed form my right.

A red flash splashed across my Sight. I had enough time prepare a hasty extraction, but Sadie’s cast was a broad one. We had trained together for months. Sadie knew my style. She had anticipated that I would attempt to extract the mana from her cast. A wide-angle spell made that near impossible. The intense heat singed my brows, but my head somehow found the hood of my robe.
 

My robe took the brunt of it, but I still wasn’t out of the woods. I sidestepped left and dove behind a concrete bench. My feet felt like molasses. I looked down to discover my boots were ruined. Sadie’s cast had melted them down to nubs. I checked the rest of my body. I was singed but fine. Only one thing was weird—my robe was glowing crimson.

“Nice dodge, Dieter,” Sadie shouted. “Now how about I show you how one of these actually works?”
 

I glanced over the bench. There was a ruby red pendant around Sadie’s neck.
 

“Wonderful,” I grumbled. I was facing an upper-tier mage with an ACT device.

With unnerving speed, Sadie spun the air around her into the palm of her hand. I braced myself. A plasma stream would bore through the concrete bench in seconds. I had always wanted to play with the stuff when I got to college—but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

“Oi, Dieter,” Jules shouted. “I do recall tellin’ ya not to go off and die tonight—and here I was gonna give ya an A for your gatework.”

Jules kicked some rubble out of her way as she emerged from the wreckage of the gift shop. She was covered head to toe in bruises, burns, and scratches. Half her robe was cooked off. On top of it all was a dried matting of blood. There was too much of it to be her own. Her glasses were gone, and her blond curls flapped this way and that in the wind. Her flaming green eyes shot daggers at Sadie.

“Ichi is dyin’ because of your treachery, ya clatty bitch. Time ta pay the piper. Get a move on, apprentice. You’ve other matters ta attend.” She walked right past me, dragging a thin brown reed behind her. “I’ll be managin’ this embarrassment.”

“You’re the embarrassment,” Sadie shot back. “Defending these pigs? They betrayed the likes of us long ago. Remember your history before you start throwing claims about.”

“And what history would that be? The history where Catholics slaughtered me kin till we clung ta just a few rocks off in the coast—or the history where yer parents jumped ship when the times got rough?”
 

Personally, I thought the Great Potato Famine was a great reason to emigrate from Ireland, but I didn’t think now was the time to raise that point. The energy rising between the two of them was sparking through the air like arc lightning.
 

Sadie’s jaw tightened. “Obviously, we missed one too many of you treehumpers.” She stretched her brewing spell to its limit, yelled, “Solrak!” and unleashed a stream of fire from the sizzling ball of energy atop her palm.

I yelled at Jules to dodge, but she was having none of it. She swept a long reed in a circle, trilling, “Pinus palustris!” as she went. The cast was some sort of barrier spell—but the sphere she conjured moved with her. My jaw dropped. A
moving
circle? I didn’t even understand how that was possible.

Sadie’s beam of plasma rushed forth and smacked into Jules’ transparent defense. The entire sky flashed white, and the force of the blast knocked me back. I opened my eyes to find Sadie’s strike glancing off into space. The blast soared out across the night sky trailing a brilliant stream of light. Far below, the crowds gasped in awe at the amazing pyrotechnics.

Dragging her thin reed behind her, Jules kept pressing forward.

She never broke her focus. Never lost Sadie’s eyes.
 

“Get a move on, Dieter. I’ll manage this wee cur. She needs a lesson in humility, dontcha think?”
 

I was about to protest, when all across the valley, fireworks launched into evening sky. It was midnight. Carrera was about to start his cast. I was the only person not pinned down. I had to go.

“The hell you will,” Sadie yelled. She clutched her pendant, called out, “Penetrus!” and catapulted a bolt of energy straight towards me. It was of the same style as the one Spinoza had used against Ichijo—and its speed was beyond what I could dodge.

Jules slid between us. Whipping her reed in front of her, she trilled, “Piratinera!” The tremendous force of Sadie’s cast impacted her thin reed with a thwack. Like a batter connecting with a fastball, Jules rebounded the strike back at Sadie. The Penetrus returned twice as fast, catching Sadie square in the gut.

“Stars above,” I muttered. Diverting a strike was hard enough—but actually
reflecting
a cast? I’d never seen it done.