He got himself under control after a moment and sorted through the rest of the detritus. But the only usable items were the coat itself, which John pulled on despite it being too small for his frame, and a couple of personal spell bombs that had been preserved inside a warded pouch. They weren’t from a retailer, but rather something their former owner had made up for himself. John rubbed the blue-black, slightly crumbly surface of one to release the scent, and immediately went swimmy headed again.
Knock out bombs. Useless against the vampires this city was infested with, but which might be of help against humans. He shoved them in a pocket.
And felt something else brush against his hand.
He pulled out a long, smooth, slightly bumpy piece of wood that had been protected from the blaze by the spells woven into the coat. Holly, John’s brain identified automatically, Odin’s wood. Said to be the tree his spear had been made from. A powerful wood that made a powerful weapon, and a challenging one to control . . .
John’s fist closed around it.
He looked up to find Zheng watching him.
“Is this it?” John demanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“There were several hundred mages back there! Is this all you took?”
Kong, who had shown up with the other vamps in response to his friend’s screams, suddenly lunged for John, but the others held him back.
“Yeah,” Zheng said heavily. “Don’t know why we couldn’t have managed a leisurely shopping trip. You’re lucky we got anything at all.”
Not that lucky, John thought, feeling naked without his equipment, not to mention vulnerable. Which is what he damned well was! War mages carried an arsenal of magic with them to compensate in a fight if theirs ran out.
So much for that idea.
“You said you’re on the North American Senate?” he asked Zheng, to make sure he’d heard right.
“Yeah?”
“Then where the hell’s the Chinese?”
“China?”
John was beginning to wonder if he’d hit his head one too many times. “Then call them?”
Zheng rolled his eyes. “Already tried. You need special phones to call out from here, unless you’re near a portal. And now that those are closed, too—”
“What do you mean, closed? There are five major portals out of here, and that’s just the authorized ones!”
“And they’re all shut down,” Zheng said patiently. “And no, I don’t know why. Nobody seems to know what the hell’s going on. We were trying to get you out so you could vouch for what happened here, but we ran into a mass of confused people trying to do the same thing. Only to be told that the gates are out of commission and nobody knows when they’re going back up.”
John stared at him some more. “Are you trying to tell me that we’re trapped?”
“With a bunch of murderous war mages on a rampage, yeah. And if we can’t get out, nobody can get in to help us. Which means a whole lot of people are going to die unless you figure out a way to stop this.”
I’ll get right on that, John thought, looking down at his blood splattered sweats, filthy trainers and nonexistent weapons. But then he looked back up at the vampire, who was waiting with a strange expression on his face, half jaded cynicism, half hopeful expectancy. It didn’t look like he thought any more of mages than the tong did, but John was all he had.
And vice versa, John thought, facing up to reality.
“All right,” he told Zheng harshly. “Here’s what we’re going to do.”
Chapter Fourteen
T he whole neighborhood was burning, John realized, gazing around the city from the roof of a house just off the main road. Overhead, the boiling green and black clouds were laced with lighting. On John’s level, it looked like some of the surrounding houses had been on fire for a while, because the roofs were starting to collapse and erupt in flames that spewed toward the heavens. And below were what looked like leather rivers, flowing through the streets and lighting up the night with their own type of fire.
Because he’d been wrong: there weren’t hundreds of mages down there.
There were thousands.
How the hell was he supposed to stop this?
The answer, of course, was that he wasn’t. Not by targeting corpsmen, at least. That would get him killed in his current state, and even if he could somehow break through the enthrallment on a few of them, what difference would it make?
No, he needed to find out who was behind this and target them. A spell did not long survive the death of the caster, including enthrallment spells. And if there was one thing John was good at, it was killing things.
But for that he needed to know who to kill!
The current plan was for him to apply a Return to Sender hex and a tracking charm to one of the war mages. The hex should cause him to break off whatever he was doing and head back to the originator of the enthrallment, while the charm should ensure that they didn’t lose him in the chaos of the city. It was a common tactic for dealing with enchanted suspects, which is one reason such charms were standard war mage equipment.
Unfortunately, John didn’t have his equipment.
That was a problem for more than one reason, because the enthralled mage had to remain functional in order to lead them back to the source of all this. That deprived the vamps of their favorite way of dealing with wayward humans, and neither the spell nor the tracker could be applied through shields. Meaning that his little group had to trap a war mage, get his shields down, hope he had the right charms in his equipment, and apply one to his body, all while leaving him in decent shape and not getting killed themselves.
Which was a little hard to imagine without weapons!
“We have weapons,” Zheng said, in reply to John’s muttering. They were lying side by side against the roofline of the house in order to peer over without drawing attention. The big vampire seemed to have decided that this made the perfect opportunity to continue their argument.
It had moved from ordering John to fix this, to trying to micromanage how he did it, including offering advice about human weapons, most of which they didn’t have and none of which would have helped anyway!
“There’s some shops around here we could raid,” Zheng added when John didn’t answer, because ignoring a master vamp was apparently not allowed. “Although what me and the boys are carrying is really—”
“Useless,” John said shortly.
“I beg to differ,” The vamp pulled a .357 magnum out from under his arm. It was obviously a custom job, with intricate engraving on the frame, a slide polished to a mirror shine, and an ironwood grip. It came complete with a monogrammed snake skin holster. John tried not to sneer.
He must not have done a very good job.
“What?” Zheng demanded.
“It’s very . . . pretty.”
The big vampire blinked. “You did not just diss my gun.”
“That’s not a gun, unless you’re going up against non-magical humans, in which case I have to wonder why you’d bother.”
“Then what would you call it?”
“Jewelry.”
Zheng glared at him. “I had this special made!”
“To impress your friends and to look good. A single spell would melt it back into a lump of steel—oh, forgive me, titanium.”