“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” John yelled.
“Getting to the bottom of this.”
“You won’t make it five feet out here! You don’t have shields!”
“Then shut up—if you’re able—and come along,” Zheng growled. And the burly idiot started off again, before John could point out that he didn’t have shields, either!
At least not conventional ones, he thought, catching sight of something out of the corner of his eyes. He grabbed a vampire. “Smash that window!”
It was a testament to how bad things were that the creature didn’t hesitate at being ordered around by a war mage. He smashed the window. And John grabbed an armful of the warded umbrellas inside, tossing most of them at the vamps and keeping three for himself and Zheng.
If he could find the man!
He spotted him up ahead, throwing people out of the way as he forged a path across the square, apparently heedless of the fact that any of the spells flashing by could take him down and some of them could blow him up!
“Phalanx!” John snapped, and a dozen umbrellas opened at once, linked together, and formed a shield wall of black cloth and blue defensive shields that John really hoped were stronger than they looked. But there was no time to find anything else.
“Forward!” he yelled, and the seven of them went barreling across the square, umbrellas to the front and sides and overhead, first at human speed and then at something a good deal faster, when the vamps on either side of John grabbed him under his arms and he found himself running on thin air.
But they caught up with their insane master in time to prevent a vicious looking crimson spell from sheering his head off.
It went bouncing from umbrella to umbrella instead, popping the shields and turning the electric blue fields black and smoking. Before jumping off to melt a nearby, plastic garbage can into goo. The vamps dropped the ruined armor and regrouped behind the devices that were still active.
Not that it helped much.
There was magic everywhere, with multicolored fragments of deflected spells bouncing between shielded umbrellas like sprites, lighting up the darkness in vivid hues. Cool puddles of defensive spells, mostly greens and blues, surrounded people and parasols and extended a little way into the air around them, smacking John reproachfully whenever he got too close. And the vivid reds, oranges and yellows of the more offensive variety strobed his vision, blurring with the rain, and fighting with the neon signs all around for dominance.
The latter were mostly coming from the war mages, but some originated with the crowd, as people fought to escape to some safer part of the city. Which most seemed to have identified as the opposite of the way his group was going! It left John feeling like a salmon tying to swim upstream, if the other salmon had all decided to head the other way and were armed.
And then that strange magic hit again, another wave that rippled over the street, sending the spell fragments scattering like multicolored confetti, darkening half of the glowing umbrellas, and causing one of the vehicles commonly in use around here to spiral out of the sky.
They could look like anything, since there was no reason to hide magic in a city built on it. And because they were basically just a platform for a levitation spell, to get commuters above the narrow alleys and sudden dead ends that plagued the mostly unplanned metropolis. But the most common style was a recycled rickshaw body with a giant fan on the back that provided both propulsion and steering.
In theory, at least.
John had always thought of them as death machines, buzzing about wildly overhead, many with naked, metal fan blades and no cages to keep them from taking your damned head off. And he saw no reason to revise his opinion. Not after this one plowed through a burning trash pile two stories up, crashed into a building, and emerged from the other side only to careen across the street into a sushi shop.
The driver was immediately assaulted by a couple of large, graffitied samurai, which seemed to serve as both décor and makeshift bouncers. They peeled off the wall, fluffed themselves out from 2-D to 3-D, and proceeded to pummel the hell out of him. While he yelled something vicious and then started fighting back with an umbrella.
Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t shielded.
And unfortunately for John, the whole incident gave Zheng an idea.
“You bastards come find us!” he ordered his men, who had crowded close to hold the crowd at bay, their umbrellas deployed in all directions, and who were now looking as confused as John felt.
“You going somewhere?” he yelled at the big vamp.
“No, we are!”
And before John could ask the obvious, Zheng had used his elastic arms to snag another passing rickshaw, this one maybe three stories up. Or no, John realized, that wasn’t quite correct. He’d used one of them.
The other was looped around John’s waist.
Goddamnit!
And then they were gone.
Chapter Eighteen
J ohn once had a friend who was fond of video games. But when John went by his tattoo shop one day, to take him to dinner, he’d found him cursing at a small screen. Apparently, there was something called an escort quest, where a player had to protect a character from attack for a certain length of time, which had seemed easy enough. Except that said character seemed entirely designed to get himself killed.
John had laughed at his friend’s consternation when his character was murdered for the fifth time in a row, after which the small device had been thrown at a wall.
He wasn’t laughing now.
He was dangling off the side of a wildly careening sky buggy, which Zheng seemed to have no idea how to drive. Which was a problem since he’d just thrown the driver onto a passing roof! That left John hanging by one hand off a decrepit door, because the rickshaw looked to be an original, nineteenth century antique, and struggling to get inside, all while being raked along the side of buildings, dragged through a sky filled with lightning and magic, and then through a string of banners that almost decapitated him! And as he was fighting with them, he couldn’t help but notice—
“Shiiiiiiiit!”
John somehow managed to push off the side of a building and launch himself inside the cab, just before he would have been dragged through a huge neon sign. The cab caught part of it anyway, sending a large section crashing down onto the crowd below. Who responded by shooting spell bolts upward, one of which sent them into a spin seemingly designed to ensure that John lost the dinner he’d never had!
“Give me that!” he said, and grabbed the control, which was simply a tall, joystick-like device set into the floor that operated the big fan. But either it was stuck or the fan blade was bent, John couldn’t tell whilst being slung about as if on a carnival ride. And then he was abruptly snatched out of the cab and forcibly taken on a flying leap courtesy of the crazed, son-of-a-bitch, asshole of a—
“Auggghhhhh!” he screamed, because Zheng hadn’t just jumped to another cab, which would have been insane enough. No, he was jumping to consecutive ones and taking John along for the ride. Zheng was bouncing them from speeding murder buggy to speeding murder buggy—more or less.
In quick succession, John lost a clump of hair when a fan blade got too close, giving him a buzz cut over his left ear; took a blow to the solar plexis when the driver of one of the cabs took offense at their jumping on top of him; and was bitten in the right calf by another man’s little bastard of a dog.