In a single smooth move, Alessandro lowered his arms, letting the two guns clatter to the floor, and raised them again without a pause, a new firearm in each hand. He squeezed the triggers, and bullets punched into the beasts. How?
Metal clanged behind me, the exit door swinging open. Pressure smashed into my mind, searing hot, trying to crush my will. I lunged to the side to cover Alessandro’s back and snapped my wings open, taking the brunt of the mental attack on my feathers.
The pressure battered my defenses. A psionic. At least a Significant, maybe higher.
Alessandro whipped around, looked over my shoulder, and fired a rapid burst down the hallway. Boom, boom, boom.
“Stay behind me,” I ground out.
If I turned around, I’d have to engage the psionic full-on. Once two mental mages locked in combat on a mental plane, there was no moving. I couldn’t fight a mental duel with flying scorpion ticks trying to rip us apart.
The first wave of creatures dived at us, screeching. Alessandro shot, quick, barely bothering to aim, the steady gunfire mixing with the shrieks of the summoned beasts into a deafening cacophony. The scorpion ticks rained on the floor. Every bullet he sent hit and killed a target.
A beast dove at me, flying low. I raised my gun and fired. The creature crashed to the floor by my feet, splitting open. Ichor spilled onto the polished floor. An acrid, salty stench washed over me. I gagged.
The pressure turned into pain, the dull battering ram of the psionic’s magic splitting into sharp spikes trying to rend my defenses. Claws tore at my side, slicing across my thigh in an ice-cold burn. I fired to the side on instinct, without turning to look. A shriek answered and died.
The swarm flailed around us. I couldn’t even see the walls. Claws cut my left arm, then my right.
Alessandro dropped the guns. A machete appeared in his right hand.
“Elevators!” he barked.
I had to save my bullets. I thrust the gun into its holster and pulled my gladius out. We sliced at the swarm, carving a way through it. Alessandro cut a path ahead of me, slicing, chopping, cutting in a controlled frenzy. A step. Another step. The battering ram of the psionic’s magic hammered against my will. If my defenses broke, the psionic would flood my mind with fear, rage, or any of the other primal emotions, smothering all conscious thought.
I stumbled after Alessandro, hacking with my gladius on pure instinct, almost collided with the wall, and frantically pushed the call button.
A creature smacked into the wall on my right. Ichor splattered my face. Oh, gross. I pushed the button again. Come on. Come on!
The elevator chimed. The doors took forever to open.
“Get in!” Alessandro shouted and hurled his gun into the swarm.
I dove in, grabbed his jacket, and pulled him back into the elevator. A scorpion tick thrust in behind him, trying to claw at Alessandro’s arms with its segmented legs. Alessandro chopped at it with the machete. The beast screeched, ichor and severed legs flying everywhere. I punched the panel, lighting up all floors, and mashed the close doors button.
The doors started closing, ever so slowly, the swarm surging toward us like a tsunami through a shrinking gap.
Close, close, close!
The doors shut. The cabin slid up. The pressure on my mind vanished and I exhaled.
Alessandro raised his hands, flexing his fingers. I ejected the magazine out of my Beretta and slid the full one in. I still had eight bullets left, but I might need fifteen bullets fast.
The digital display counted off the floors: 2, 3, 4 . . . I had pressed all of them. The elevator should have stopped.
“They’re taking us to the roof,” I guessed. On the roof there would be nowhere to hide.
“Yes.” His face was grim. “Stay close to me.”
“What is your Antistasi range?”
“Not far,” he said.
When he’d used it on me, he’d been within touching distance. During the trials, when he was defending himself, he was about fifteen feet away. That was probably the extent of his range. He would have to get close to either mage to negate their magic, and neither the summoner nor the psionic would let him do that.
A summoner and a psionic. A far easier plan would have been to snipe us as we exited the building. Benedict had tried a strike team, and when that hadn’t worked, he sent two magic users perfectly paired to pin down and capture a Prime. Benedict wanted me alive.
The elevator door slid open and delivered us into a small room. On the left was a metal door marked stairs. On the right an open doorway gaped, leading to the roof, its door missing.
Alessandro tried the stairs door, then rammed it with his shoulder. It held.
“Barred from the other side.”
The elevator slid down.
A soft thud sounded from the other side of the stairs door, then another, followed by a shriek. The scorpion ticks had flooded the stairway. In a few moments they would be in the elevator shaft too.
I needed to get an arcane circle going fast. Most commercial buildings had flat concrete roofs.
I sprinted for the doorway and into the night.
A rectangular roof stretched in front of me, lit up by orange lights along its perimeter and perfectly flat except for the stubby row of AC units to the far right. Gravel crunched under my feet. A tar and gravel roof. It wasn’t smooth enough for a circle. The gravel would break the lines. Damn it.
Behind me Alessandro marched out of the utility room.
A whirlwind of green spiraled up over the building’s edge, directly opposite us, smashed into the roof, breaking into individual creatures, and vomited the summoner onto the gravel. He landed on his side, awkward, and staggered to his feet, his movements jerky and disjointed. The scorpion ticks circled him, whipping about. I could see glimpses of him, but I had no shot. Pumping bullets into the swarm was futile. I might as well just toss the gun over the side of the building.
To the left of me, Alessandro strode forward, putting himself into the path of the swarm. I moved to my right to get a clear shot.
The summoner focused on Alessandro, his swarm thickening to counter an attack from his direction. His coat hung open, revealing a thin body and a face that was no longer human. His skin had a sickly bluish tint, stretched too tightly over his features. His forehead protruded over his temples and the corners of his jaw were too far apart, as if someone had grafted extra bones onto a human skull.
Revulsion squirmed through me. The mix of human and insect felt wrong on a deep, primal level.
The summoner opened his mouth and hissed.
He was warped, and he was using magic. And doing a damn good job.
I reached out with my magic, trying to sense his mind. It was there, a weak, pale glow to my mind’s eye. The scorpion ticks streamed over him, each a faint greenish dot of primitive sentience. They buzzed around him like bees. On their own, they wouldn’t deter me, but collectively, they formed a mental veil that wrapped around him, all parts of it communicating, connected, and one.
I was looking at an alien hive mind.
This was so far out of my frame of reference, I didn’t know how to go about attacking it. I couldn’t even tell if he was human enough for my siren call to work.
Alessandro pulled a nail gun out of thin air, dropped it, lifted up a shovel, threw it, and came up with a tennis racket–shaped bug zapper. He hurled it at the swarm. It sparked, and one of the scorpion ticks went into a swan dive, landed a few feet from me, and lay on the ground twitching.