The air turned to fire in my lungs. I dodged a beast, another…
Thirty feet.
The shining object pinged me with its magic.
Twenty.
Ten.
The metal rings spun in front of me, two feet wide, splattered with slime and algae. Inside a flower bud glowed, a brilliant electric blue lotus woven of pure magic and just about to bloom.
My family’s magic coursed through me, guiding my thrust. I stabbed it.
The bud burst, sending a cloud of luminescent sparks into the air. The blue glow vanished. The rings stopped spinning. The beasts around me froze.
For a torturous moment nothing moved.
The creatures stared at me. I stared back.
The pack turned and made a break for the river.
It was over.
The relief washed over me. A steady rhythmic noise came into focus, and I realized it was my heart racing in my chest. My knees shook. A bitter metallic patina coated my tongue. My body couldn’t figure out if it was hot or cold. The world felt wrong, as if I had been poisoned.
The ruins of the device lay in front of me. I tried to take a step. My leg folded under me, the ground decided to spontaneously tilt to the side, and I almost wiped out on a perfectly level lawn. Too much adrenaline. Nothing to do but wait it out. Some people were born for the knife’s edge intensity of combat. I wasn’t one of them.
Focusing on something to distract myself usually helped. I crouched and scrutinized the rings. The metal didn’t look exactly like steel, but it might have been some sort of iron alloy. A string of glyphs ran the circumference of each ring.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and snapped a pic.
The rings fit inside each other, the largest about three inches smaller than the larger one. The flower stalk was attached to the bottom of the inner ring. No, not attached. It grew from the inner ring, seamlessly protruding from the metal.
How?
I picked up the ring and tugged on the stalk. It held. I ran my fingers along the flower. Toward the severed end, where the flower bud had been, the texture felt like a typical plant. But the lower I moved my fingers, the more metallic the texture became. A true biomechanical meld. To my knowledge, no mage had yet achieved it.
Hammer rolled up next to me. Cornelius jumped out. Pale purple blood splattered the armored vehicle’s custom grille guard. Bits and pieces of alien flesh hung from the metal.
“Are you alright?” Cornelius asked.
No. “Yes. I’m so sorry,” I told him. “I know this was very unpleasant for you.”
Animal mages formed a special bond with a few chosen animals, but they cared about all of them, and we had just mowed down at least a dozen, maybe more.
Cornelius nodded. “Thank you for your concern. They weren’t true animals in the native sense of the world. It helped some.”
“Is this a summon?” I asked.
Cornelius shook his head. “I don’t think so. They feel slightly similar to Zeus. Not of Earth but not completely of the arcane realm either.”
“Earlier you said they were too ‘preoccupied’ to reach?”
Cornelius frowned and nodded at the rings and the bud within. “This object emitted magic.”
“I felt it.”
“The emissions were so dense, they effectively deafened the creatures. They couldn’t feel me. I’d tried to contact the object itself, but the biological component of it is so primitive, it was like trying to communicate with a sea sponge.”
The House lab scenario looked more and more likely. If these proto-crocodiles had come out of the arcane realm, we would have seen a summoner and a portal. Massive holes in reality were kind of hard to miss.
Linus would just love this.
Speaking of Linus… I pulled out my phone and dialed his number. One beep, two, three…
At the other end of the lawn Leon jogged across the road, Zeus in tow.
The phone kept ringing. Officially Linus Duncan was retired. In reality, he still served the state of Texas in a new, more frightening capacity, and I was his deputy. He always answered my calls.
Beep. Another.
Linus’ voice came on the line. “Yes?”
“I was attacked by magic monsters in Eleanor Tinsley Park. They were controlled by a biomechanical device powered with magic.”
Leon ran up and halted next to me.
“Do you require assistance?” Linus asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Show me.”
I activated facetime, switched the camera, and panned the phone, capturing the device, the corpses, and the fleeing creatures. On the screen, Linus stared into the phone. In his sixties, still fit, with thick salt and pepper hair, Linus always had the Texas tan. His features were handsome and bold, a square jaw framed by a short beard, prominent nose, thick dark eyebrows, and dark eyes. He smiled easily and when he paid attention to you, you felt special. If you asked ten people who just met him to describe him, they would all say one word – charming.
The man looking back at me from the phone was the real Linus Duncan, a Prime, former Speaker of the Texas Assembly, focused, sharp, his dark eyes merciless. He looked like an old tiger who spotted an intruder in his domain and was sharpening his claws for the kill. A dry staccato came through the phone, a rhythmic thud-thud-thud, followed by a mechanical whine. Linus’ turrets. He was under attack.
Who in the world would assault Linus Duncan in his home? He was a Hephaestus mage. He made lethal firearms out of discarded paperclips and duct tape and his house packed enough firepower to wipe out an elite battalion in minutes.
They attacked me and Linus simultaneously. The thought burned at trail through my mind like a comet.
“Disengage,” Linus said. “Go straight to MII, take over the Morton case, use the badge. Repeat.”
“Go straight to MII, show the badge, take over the Morton case.”
Usually Linus brought me in after the jurisdiction had been established. In the last six months, I’ve had to use my badge exactly once, to take over an FBI investigation. To say they had been unhappy about it would be a gross understatement.
“I’ll send the files.” Linus hung up.
“What are we doing?” My cousin asked.
“You’re driving me to MII.”
“I’ll follow.” Cornelius sprinted to the parking lot, Zeus on his heels, bounding like an overly enthusiastic kitten.
I grabbed the device. The metal rings were slick with mud and slime. I walked to Hammer, threw the device into the bin in the back, and jumped into the passenger seat.
In the distance, police sirens wailed, getting closer.