“Fucked up shit,” Zheng whispered again, and John decided that the creature would do.
He jumped down into what was fast becoming a river and splashed over to his little army.
“Protect,” he instructed, pointing at himself, because manlikans were not exactly genius level.
They were used primarily as beasts of burden in Faerie, to carry a warrior’s tent or extra weapons, or for target practice. They could also be used like puppets, allowing a warrior to see through their eyes, and to go places his body couldn’t reach. But John had no way to control six at once, so they were on autopilot, which limited them to very basic commands.
Hopefully that would be enough.
He gave the signal.
And, to their credit, Zheng’s boys didn’t waste any time. They sprang into action, using vampire swiftness to grab a war mage off the street at each end of the alley. It was done in the blink of an eye, so quickly that the men probably didn’t realize what had happened, leaving the two of them confused and slightly disoriented when John’s twin spells hit.
He slammed back into a recessed doorway, his protectors piled in front of him, as soon as the magic left his fingertips. The alley was dark, the recess even more so, and the transparent manlikans didn’t draw the eye. Unlike a couple of pissed off war mages.
Who immediately targeted each other instead of John.
What followed was a furious battle that John couldn’t see very well, since the mages weren’t close enough and he was looking at it through his watery protection. All he saw were smears of color and explosions of brick, but he could feel it. And so could his protectors.
The amount of magic being thrown around was enough to cause the water in the outermost manlikan to begin to boil, making it look like a ghost wreathed in the veils of steam escaping through its pores. A progressively smaller ghost, since it was losing water faster than it could replace it. John couldn’t help it, however, not without drawing attention to himself, not even when a second manlikan was taken out by a ricochet, exploding in a wash of hot liquid, some of which hit him over the heads of his defenders.
Shit! Trust him to get one of the maybe five percent of mages with fey blood. Manlikans were resistant to human magic, but their own would take them out fast enough. He pulled the rest back as far he could, further out of the line of fire, which was not a fun sensation.
Wobbles, he thought darkly.
And then the mages came into view.
Mage number one was a sandy haired blond with a battle-scarred golem close behind him. Its clay surface was pitted with what looked like acid burns, there was an ugly slash mark across its chest, and its nose was missing entirely. Its master could have repaired the damage or built it a new body altogether, but he hadn’t bothered, perhaps because he hadn’t even bothered to help himself.
His long, leather coat was tattered along the bottom, which since they were self-healing, meant that the spell was fraying, too. His boots were scuffed and old, bandoliers of ancient potion bottles crisscrossed his chest, and a ratty old bandanna hung around his throat, which looked like it hadn’t been washed years. He reminded John of an old west gunslinger. Not a Hollywood pretty boy with a perfect smile and hand tooled accessories, but the real deal: middle aged, cynical, and battle worn, the sort of man who didn’t bother to repair his coat’s spell because nothing was ever going to touch it anyway.
Because his shields were like solid steel.
No, John thought grimly. Not that one, especially not with the damned golem acting as back up. For his plan to work, he needed those shields down but with the mage still functional. That man’s shields would only fall when his heart stopped beating.
The other one, he decided, even before turning around. No matter who it was, he had to be better than Wyatt Earp over there. Preferably some fresh-faced kid with crap shields that were already buckling under the—
The other mage was Caleb.
Chapter Fifteen
F or a moment, John wondered if the distortion effect of all that water was playing tricks on his eyes. But no. There was the same powerful build, the same guarded expression, and the same clothes—black jeans and a maroon button up—that Caleb had had on back in Vegas.
The figure John had previously seen welded to the street, on the other hand, had been wearing the typical long coat that war mages used to conceal their weaponry. John could still see the bits of burnt leather in his mind, curled up on the strong back. But Caleb hadn’t had a coat on, had he? Before the world went to hell, he’d been doing paperwork in a warehouse with lousy air conditioning!
So, a doppelganger had died and Caleb had survived. John felt a surge of relief so strong that he actually took a step forward before stopping himself, remembering that his friend was not his friend right now. And that tripping merrily into the midst of a duel was not a smart move.
Unfortunately, manlikans are not smart.
Specifically, the doughboy wasn’t, and it had gotten the wrong idea from John’s abortive movement. It did a toddler-like run on its stubby legs out into the street, and then paused, as if wondering why John wasn’t following. And before John could call it back, it was hit with one of the spells flying about, an amber hued bolt that it absorbed through its porous skin, and that turned it a bright, glowing orange.
Among other things, John thought, staring.
He didn’t know what the spell had been designed to do originally—judging by the color, it was something offensive to hammer at Caleb’s shields—but it wasn’t doing that now. Instead, human magic was mixing with fey in the belly of the beast John had created. But instead of flaming out as he would have expected, or bursting the manlikan from the inside if it was powerful enough, it was doing . . . that.
“What the hell is that?” he saw Zheng mouth from the rooftop.
John had no idea.
The best he could tell, the two types of magic were warring, chasing each other around and around inside the pudgy form and bloating it more with each pass. But instead of tearing, the crappy ward serving as the creature’s skin stretched and elongated, and then stretched some more. In seconds, it was maybe six times the size of a man, as if the doughboy had been allowed to rise overnight.
And to fill the narrow alley with its pudgy “flesh.”
The duel abruptly stopped, possibly because the two combatants could barely see each another anymore. Or possibly because everybody else could. John saw Zheng suddenly gesturing wildly from the roofline, along with a couple of his men. The rest were still at either end of the alley, as John saw when he poked his head slightly beyond the doorframe. But a second later they were flying back, they were scrambling up the sides of buildings, they were getting out of the way.
Because two huge streams of war mages were breaking off the crowd and following swiftly behind them.
For a second, John just stared. The corpsmen been so single minded a moment ago that it had almost looked like they couldn’t see anything around them. Unless it became a target by trying to get in their way, that is. But now . . .
Yes, we definitely have their attention now, John thought, as they started throwing everything they had at the glowing orange doughboy.
And at the men with weakened shields standing in front of it.
The cowboy was all right, being tackled to the ground by his golem, and having better shields anyway. But Caleb was another story. The idea had been to get his shields weak enough that John could finish the job, whilst the manlikans distracted the other mage. It hadn’t been to kill him! But that was what was about to happen—any second now.