Apart from the four thugs I’d seen earlier, my thermal vision picked up three more on one side of the town hall and another on the first floor balcony. I ignored them for a moment and looked across the square to figure out where the cry had come from. There were dying heat signatures for dozens of people, all leading away from the town hall, and I hoped that those people had gotten to safety. Or if they were the bad guys, I hoped they’d gotten attacked by a rabid badger.
I scanned the surrounding area and picked out three heat signatures about two hundred feet to the east of me. On the field where Antonio and I had first met Bryce and his merry band of assholes.
I removed the thermal vision and vaulted over the tower, using my air magic to slow my descent to the ground. I didn’t land soundlessly, but it wasn’t enough to attract any of the guards, and I was soon moving away from the church, taking the alley between two rows of houses, and crossing the road beyond to move into a second alley that brought me to the rear of Antonio’s burned-out diner.
There was a second cry and the sound of two shots, all of which came from the park. I ran toward the noise as a third shot rang out, wrapping myself in a shield of air just in case someone decided to take a potshot at me.
I ran onto the field, and the lights around the area showed what had transpired. Doug was slumped on the ground about halfway up the field, leaning against a lamppost. He had his hands over his chest, and blood soaked through his shirt. Addison Tobin was lying on the ground beside him. Although I couldn’t tell what had happened to them, I was pretty sure they were dead.
Bryce was standing nearby, looking at them both. He turned the gun toward me and fired, but I extended my shield and dived to the side, and the bullet hit the outside of the shield and harmlessly dropped to the ground. I moved faster than Bryce was prepared for and struck him in the arm with a whip of air magic, slicing through his wrist and forearm, forcing him to drop the gun to the ground as he cried out in pain.
I lost the shield and walked calmly toward Bryce.
“Bitch was going to leave me,” he said. “Told me she couldn’t deal with what she’d done to her sister. She went to Doug, and they were going to go to the police with proof,” he continued. “Fucker deserved to get two in the chest for that. You don’t play games with another man’s woman.”
“What is it with you assholes and your desire to think of women as objects to own?” I asked. “I’d ask you if you could actually hear the stupidity leaving your mouth, but I think we both know you don’t care.” I heard a rustling noise behind Bryce. I turned on my thermal vision and spotted several masses of heat creeping up toward the whimpering thug.
Bryce got to his feet and pointed a finger at me. “This is your fault,” he said. “If you’d stayed out of it, we’d all be sitting pretty, getting paid, and going on to spread our word, but no, you had to turn out to be some kind of fucking assassin.”
“I told you to leave,” I said. “I told you to not hurt anyone. I told you several times. And you ignored me. And now you’re all going to die, and I’m going to go on with my life and forget any of you ever existed. No one will mourn you; no one will care. You’ll be a blip on the radar of history. An anomaly. And even that is more than you deserve.”
“Kill me, then,” Bryce said. “Go on. Do it.”
“No,” I told him. “Because while you deserve to die, you do not deserve a quick death, and I don’t have time to make it linger. That, however, does.”
I pointed behind Bryce, who turned just as the grendel from the compound pounced, taking Bryce by the throat and throwing him to the ground. The grendel straddled Bryce’s back and looked over at me as several more grendels moved toward Bryce.
“Take your time,” I said. “No one will come to help him. I’ll make sure.”
The grendel leaned down to Bryce’s ear and growled, low and menacing.
“Please kill me,” Bryce begged.
“The grendels will,” I said. “I think some might call this karma, but I’m pretty sure you’re too stupid to know what that means. Enjoy being digested.”
I ran back toward the diner as Bryce’s fear-filled screams were turned into a gurgle of pain. I knew from past experiences that grendels liked to remove the tongues of their prey to ensure they didn’t scream and bring in rival predators. Bryce was about to have a horrific night.
When I reached the outskirts of the square where the town hall was, I reapplied my night vision and moved through the darkness, keeping away from the light of the oil drums. I reached the left-hand side of the town hall and quickly scaled the building. I moved slowly over the roof until I was directly above the thug on the balcony. Sitting down, I concentrated, starting to remove the air from around him. I started off slow until I heard him cough, and then there was a slight hissing noise, followed by a sharp intake of breath as he used an inhaler, but I continued to thin the air, creating an invisible bubble of nothing around him. He took a step forward, and I removed the air from around his head as quickly as possible, and before he could do anything else, he fell unconscious and dropped to the balcony floor.
I climbed over the roof and dropped beside the unconscious Nazi. I looked through the glass door to the room beyond, but it was shrouded in darkness. A small noise escaped the lips of the Nazi, so I dragged him into the town hall and broke his neck before dropping him out of sight.
A quick ping of air magic under the door told me that there was no one in the immediate vicinity, so I pushed the door open and stepped out into the well-lit hallway. A set of stairs led down, and there was a second hallway between where I stood and a door forty feet in front of me. I looked over the stairs and heard muffled talking below, but I didn’t have time to hang around and check. I used my air magic to spread under the doors and find hostages or hostage takers, but there was no trace of anyone alive. As I walked past the rooms, those with glass doors showed that there were several dead inside, all shot at their desks, and more than one room was completely trashed.
Moving back to the top of the staircase, I looked over the banister at the fifty-foot drop to the polished floor beneath me, but I saw nothing there, so I headed to the first floor. Thirty feet from the bottom of the staircase, I heard the sounds of an AK-47 beneath me. That made my decision pretty fast.
I vaulted over the banister and landed on the floor below, readying a blade of fire, but the entire foyer of the town hall was empty. I ran across the floor to the first door, opened it, and found a Nazi inside with his rifle pointed at a group of hostages. A bolt of lightning through his chest ended him as a threat, and I removed the gun from his grip.
“Mayor,” I said as I recognized Kathleen Stone sitting on the floor among the hostages. She’d been shielding her staff members from the threat posed as I’d entered the room, and from the looks of the bruises on her face, she’d pissed off more than one of the bastards responsible for what had happened.
“You’re one of them,” she said. “A member of Avalon?”
“Not last time I checked,” I told her. “I need you all to stay here, keep your heads down, and stay out of my way. Do you know how many hostages are left?”
“A few dozen were taken to the main hall,” Kathleen said.