James and Aidan were on their feet within seconds, eager to prevent further damage and disaster to this their only solid lead. Thus, Myra hadn’t time to warn them before each found themselves staring at their former partners who wove and whirled like twin devils in the midst of the bloodbath that the Flameists’ ceremony had suddenly become.
Bereft of a custodian and in the midst of an all-out battle, Addair’s machine wheezed and coughed, sputtering to a halt. And with that its electricity died, and Kady was everywhere at once. Quite literally. Myra watched the Kinetic in action, unable to follow the woman’s actions and mesmerized by that fact alone. Stephen proved more than capable with a pistol, especially when James joined the fracas at his side. Together they worked to stop those ceremonial swords being put to use. And Aidan, well, he was firing off spells quick as he could, but his face told Myra that he was fast falling into shock.
“We’ve got to run,” Stephen called above the din, his voice familiar to Myra’s Empathic soul and therefore sending her into the same type of downward spiral which gripped Aidan.
“The machine, though,” James protested, firing magic indiscriminately into the faces of the hooded Order members.
“Leave it.” Stephen grabbed James bodily as he ran past. “In here. All of you. Quickly. Kady, the doors?”
Materializing by the floor grate, Kady yanked it open with a grunt. “Yes. Cellar is sealed. Come on, you.”
Quick though she would like to be, Myra was slow to follow the rest, prompting Kady’s annoyed urging. Aidan. James. Stephen. Each hopped straight down into the darkness without so much as a backward glance.
Myra, however, needed that last look around the room, if only to ascertain she was really seeing it all correctly. Bodies—some alive, most not—were strewn over the cellar floor. Black robes pooled in black blood. The machine glimmered in the midst of all, pristine. Myra hurried to find footing on the small ladder of the shaft beneath the opened grate, her eyes on Kady. The American spy was flitting between each of the gas wall sconces, extinguishing the flames. And turning up the gas. Myra could hear the hiss even across the long room.
The cellar darkened with the last of the gaslight’s extinguishing, leaving Myra nothing to look at. James, Aidan, and Stephen waited below. She could see points of light from Aidan and James’ wands. She jumped down the remaining few feet, falling ankle deep into odious muck. Above her, the grate clanged shut.
“What about Kady, she’s—?” Myra began, still looking up into the dark.
“Right here.” Kady tossed her hair with a grin, leaving a finger-streak of soot on her cheek. “Come on then. Time to run. Not sure how well my seal will hold against the lantern, and whatever is down here smells as flammable as what is above.”
They ran, fleeing through the sewers of London like a mischief of rats, wands raised to light the way.
James quickly caught Myra up. “Can you feel the magic I am doing, Myra?”
She slowed, trying to catch her gift on his. “Yes.”
The air freshened around them. Myra took in a grateful lungful, picking up the pace once more, noting how they had fallen behind when James had stopped to help her with his clever little trick. “Thank you.”
“Save your breath. We’re no longer meeting Robert back at his club,” James said.
And with that, Mayra had no more breath to waste on pleasantries. Kady and Stephen led the way. It made a certain sort of sense, as they had apparently come to the Flameists’ ceremony via this route in the first place. They slowed at last. Not a full stop, mind you, but their pace became less a full-out sprint and more a swift jog.
With each soggy footfall, Myra began to wonder if they were going to run the entire way back to Grafford House. Or perhaps Stephen and Kady had holed up at another locale.
"Doesn’t this seem a little extreme to you?" Myra grumbled her discontent as her footing slipped on an uneven bit of paving hidden somewhere under the muck. It would not do to roll an ankle, or worse, take a tumble into the morass through which they slogged.
Nobody answered. They were probably all concentrating on their footing as well. Myra supposed a likelier cause: a spy didn’t complain. Well, she was complaining. She would complain so long as they had ears to hear. And noses to smell.
Memories of Stephen and Kady's demise—daring escape—replayed in Myra’s mind, mingling with what she had just witnessed at the Flameists’ ceremony. “Can’t Kady just—?”
“No. I can’t,” Kady herself spoke up, cutting off any further protest Myra might have made.
Myra slipped again, catching herself hard on Aidan’s quick reflexes. She risked a look to his face. Kady was back. What did that mean for the team? For Aidan? Of course, in trying not to think of what she had felt pass between the two American agents, Myra could only think of such. She hoped that the smell of the sewer refuse would cover up her thoughts, mask them from Aidan’s sharp senses.
The stink was certainly making breathing difficult. Myra’s grip on her magic slipped as surely as her feet, and she gagged in the sudden influx of the stench around her. The air was poison. Her lungs burned. She grew afraid that she would lose strength before they had reached their destination.
This new complaint rose to her lips. Myra lacked the air to give it voice. Stars began to dance in her vision, lighting the tunnel as it swayed to and fro, to and—
The group slowed to a halt. Stephen had Myra’s arm, steadying her. Instinct prompted her to reach for his art, anything to aid her faltering spell. She remembered all too late that he had none. Poor Stephen. The rest of the team breathed heavily, though none seemed as uneasy on their feet as Myra.
Stephen was looking at her strangely. “Who’re you, then?”
“New recruit. Myra, Stephen. Stephen, Myra.” James exhaled heavily, moving off to inspect the walls of the intersection in which they had found themselves.
“Breathe, Myra. Breathe, girl.” Stephen's concern morphed into a bright smile. “You’ve got to get more running under ye. Builds the lungs.”
Considering the noxious atmosphere, Myra was not all that certain she wanted her lungs “built.”
Aidan came up to them, saying, “We’ve another few blocks to go. I can ask James if you’d rather walk it.”
Stephen’s questioning curious look found a new victim. Aidan obliged, “Steve, she’s an Em—”
“Moving.” James grabbed Aidan’s forearm, bodily redirecting him before he could finish the word. Even in the dim tunnel, it was evident that he was glowering . . . as usual.
“That information can be exchanged”—James gave a meaningful look to the dark, slimy walls—“later.”
Turning, they urged their legs into reluctant motion once more. Myra kept apace, refusing to slow the team. Not that she necessarily needed any more urging to not linger in such a space. But she still had questions, questions that persisted when they finally gained the surface via an out of way alleyway a few short minutes later. Rags from a nearby bin—Stephen’s own foresight, Myra was assured—cleaned most of the sludge and worse from them. Magic took care of the rest.
Blinking in the cleansing fog that had built during their time below ground, Myra looked about for a landmark, any sign that they were in familiar territory. The idea of walking further weighed heavy upon her already tired legs. But Myra still wanted to know, “Won’t the police find that massacre?”
“What massacre?” Kady flashed a grin and snapped her fingers. Myra felt the pull of power from the Kinetic, the tug of an invisible cord leading out into the darkness. A deep rumble sounded, and an orange glow ascended up into the foggy night air not quite a mile away. A fireball, it painted the underside of the clouds in lurid detail. The shock of sound came a moment later, the roar of fire and explosive lamentation.
“Time to go.” For one who had nearly died in a similar blast, Kady was certainly glib about the whole thing. It took a gentle tug on Myra’s arm from Aidan to remind her that they still had some ways to travel before returning to Grafford House. And it would not do to be caught in a gape-mouthed stare at the conflagration they had caused, should anyone make the connection between errant lantern, prematurely extinguished gaslights in a cellar, and a team of rogue wizards.
The light fog that had settled into the honeycomb of London’s streets was enough to congeal the night’s traffic and aid M.I.’s ragtag team of wizards in their hurried darting from alleyway to back street. Stephen, Myra quickly discovered, could not become invisible as they. Nor could she “lend” him the power to do so. To throw her gift at him was to toss a cupful of water into a dry riverbed. She could almost feel his barren, thirsty soul soaking it up, yet it made little difference.
Nobody of the team questioned Stephen as he led the way through the deepening shadows. At his back trailed four ghosts who swirled the fitful fog with their invisible passing. And no ords—constabulatory or otherwise—prevented the former mage’s headlong dash into the slums of East London.
Myra was long past wondering where they were going. Instead memory replayed the events of the evening in garish color across her mind’s eye. Cool introspection replaced horror. Curiosity substituted repugnance.
So, I’m already dulled to the work done here. Myra held a small funeral for the last of her innocence, enjoying the resultant wave of sorrow that swept through her at the thought of all those men and women who had died. Not wholly jaded, then. There was humanity within her, if allayed by the hard reality of what it was they must do as agents of right. Her stumbling steps informed her that a good deal of what she was not feeling was merely exhaustion tempered with shock. Stephen alive. Kady alive. And with that revelation, an answering revival in Aidan.
Myra’s reconsideration of this last was stoppered as she nearly ran smack into a blank wall. It loomed suddenly at her from the darkness and forced her companions to a halt. Close around her, the rest of the wizards gathered, waiting as Stephen navigated the wood boards that blocked the entrance to his safe house. An intricate puzzle of sliding slats, the racket he made set Myra’s teeth on edge and set her hunting for her wand in case their presence brought any ne’er-do-wells. A quick glance about confirmed that she was not the only mage to do so. James, Aidan, Kady . . . each of their wands flickered into sight around her as tiny points of reassuring illumination. Even so, they were still hard to see within the pressing darkness of the alleyway and growing fog. Wands at the ready, the group entered the dilapidated house at Stephen’s heels, Kady taking up the rear guard so as to close the doorway in its proper configuration.
Two brilliant points of light met them in the interior blackness, wands trained at their hearts.