Yeah, the ground. It threw him. I didn’t know how else to describe the way it’d heaved under his feet like a bucking horse.
“Aaron!” I yanked Sharpie from its case and flung it toward him. As he shoved back to his feet, he caught it out of the air and ripped the blade from its sheath.
“Lie flat, Tori,” he ordered as fire burst across his hands and ran up the steel. “Now!”
I dove for the ground as Aaron’s face tightened with concentration. He whipped his blade in a wide, horizontal arc and a sheet of red-hot fire swept out in an expanding ring at waist height. It whooshed over me and blasted across the nearby buildings. The quaking earth stilled.
Aaron grinned fiercely. “Got you, you bastard.”
As he leaped over the cracked ground, I shoved up. “Got who?”
“The terramage!” he yelled, charging toward the crumbling community hall. “They’re over here!”
Terramage? I glanced at the fun new hole our SUV was parked in. An earth mage. That made sense—but I sure as hell didn’t like it.
Unholstering my paintball gun, I sprinted after Aaron as he vaulted over a broken wall and into the building ruins. Not being an athletic machine like him, I slowed before doing a one-handed hop over the rubble. As I landed on the gritty floor inside, the ground heaved again—but now I could see the source of the mini earthquakes.
Inside the derelict building, our adversary waited for us. Nearly six and a half feet tall with powerful shoulders, their breadth enhanced by his sturdy leather jacket, the man held a wooden quarterstaff with steel-tipped ends. His tanned complexion stood out against the snow-dusted wall behind him, his dark brown hair shaved on the sides with a messy fauxhawk on top.
Fire burst across Aaron’s forearms as he swung Sharpie, sending a wave of flame at the terramage. The man smacked the butt of his staff into the ground, and a thin sheet of soil shot upward, forming a wall in front of him.
Aaron’s fire burst against it, and the wall crumbled as the terramage whirled his staff with easy grace. He swung the end around and pointed it at Aaron, thirty feet of empty space and scorched saplings between them.
The ground under Aaron’s feet shattered. As he staggered, the terramage flipped his staff in another swift, deliberate motion. The butt end hit the earth.
A four-inch-wide column of concrete and clay burst out of the dirt in front of Aaron. It shot upward and slammed into the pit of his stomach, lifting him a few inches off the ground.
He crashed down on his back, eyes bulging, unable to breathe.
“Shit!” I gasped again. I was saying that way too much.
The terramage’s eyes snapped to me, and that staff began to spin again. I didn’t wait to see what earthly terror he was about to inflict. I sprang forward, dodging saplings.
The quarterstaff swung to point at me. The ground in my path burst into ankle-breaking fissures. With a shriek, I leaped over them, landed on an unbroken patch, and jumped again with flailing arms.
“Asshole!” I yelled furiously. “Hoshi, smack that piece of shit in the head!”
The terramage braced, eyes darting as he searched for whoever “Hoshi” was.
The sylph appeared above him. She spun in a tight, violent circle and whipped her tail into the side of his skull with a loud thwack. As he thrust his staff up to knock her out of the air, I leveled my gun at him and pulled the trigger.
Pop pop pop pop!
Yellow potion burst everywhere—except on the terramage. All my shots had caught on the tangle of wussy little sapling branches between us.
“Goddamn it!” I snarled, my grip tightening on the gun. I had nothing else to fight with. The paintball gun was the only offensive weapon I had left!
Orange light flared across the crumbling walls. A fiery orb the size of a beach ball expanded on the tip of Aaron’s sword, and it blasted toward the terramage.
A whirl of that staff and another shielding wall of dirt rose in front of the mage, catching the fireball. As the barrier crumbled, I reached for a smoke bomb. My fingers curled around the cool glass orb, but I hesitated. A smoke shield would hide us from the terramage, but it would also hide him from us and maybe I shouldn’t—
The terramage whirled his staff in a new pattern and slapped it down.
The concrete beneath me and Aaron shattered, and we both fell. The soil around me heaved up in a bowl shape with me in the center, and a load of loose earth was dumped on my lap, burying my legs.
Another swing of that staff and the earth bucked under Aaron, throwing him back down to his knees as he tried to stand.
The terramage’s staff blurred as he spun it. He slammed it down one more time and another narrow column of rock launched at Aaron—this one shooting toward his skull.
I had one second to realize Aaron was about to take a possibly fatal blow to the head, and it was my fault for hesitating.
Aaron reeled back—and the earth went still, the rocky end of the column inches from his face.
The terramage pitched forward with his arms and legs vibrating. Two shiny wires ran from his back to the taser gun in the hand of another man, who was crouched in the rubble five feet behind the mage.
I stared, my mouth hanging open and my brain fizzing worse than the electrical current immobilizing the terramage. For a long, agonizing moment, I couldn’t speak. Then my voice returned—in a full-volume bellow of furious disbelief.
“Justin?”
“I hate fighting terramages,” Aaron growled, brushing at the grit clinging to his jacket.
I shot him a glare. He was barely smudged, whereas the terramage had straight-up buried the lower half of my body. I had dirt in my underwear.
In. My. Underwear. Aaron had nothing to complain about.
My glower skimmed across the terramage, now unconscious with yellow sleep potion splattered over the side of his neck. While he’d been down from Justin’s taser, I’d wrenched myself out of the dirt and made it over in time to shoot him.
“A terramage,” Justin muttered, arms crossed and feet set wide in a cliché policeman stance. He was dressed in civvies, with a blue toque and warm leather gloves.
My furious glare veered in his direction, but I forced it back to Aaron. If I spoke to my brother now, I’d end up screaming like a lunatic.
“What’s wrong with terramages?” I asked Aaron.
“Nothing wrong with them,” he admitted begrudgingly. “They’re just hard to beat, especially when they’re as good as this guy. It’s the most defensive order of Elementaria.
“Yeah, kinda hard to kick his ass when we couldn’t get near him.”
“That’s usually the terramage strategy.”
My temper cooled as curiosity took over. “What’s the counter strategy?”
“Exhaust them,” Aaron answered, flashing a tight grin. “Which I was working on. Terramages don’t have great endurance.”
“Ah.” I nodded in understanding. That explained why Aaron hadn’t tried any of his flashier moves. He’d been conserving strength while wasting the terramage’s. A good plan—except for the part where he’d almost gotten brained by a pillar of stone. Maybe he’d been counting on me to pull my weight as his combat partner.
Which I’d completely failed to do. My gaze flicked to the splatters of sleeping potion everywhere. Some help I’d been.