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Quayla
There seemed little reason to expect anything less than a full ambush, so I closed my left eye and evaluated other options for nullifying whatever preparations they’d made. Armoring up in addition to arming seemed prudent, but declaring war before I’d had the chance to measure their intentions wasn’t the smartest thing I could do.
Still, dealing with Fae Kissed, guns seemed likely—something a transmog into liquid form would handle with minimal effort. Rather than change into all water out in the open, I prepared my essence for the change before I stepped through the door. The warehouse lights were shut off with the intent to cause momentary blindness.
Meaning they’re going to jump me.
I swapped eyes and scanned the dim confines. Scents of old oil and moderate taint undercut the room.
“Isn’t this quaint?” The comment bought me the time intended, allowing a less rushed evaluation of my circumstances.
Four men in suits stood at different points around the open space, using industrial shelving filled with boxes and car parts or—in the case of Flag boy—the van for cover. Each wore the same Guy Fawkes mask, but decorated in different ways. Two had been painted roughly clown like and the last had red smeared all over the bottom half of Guy’s face as if he feasted on the organs of his foes.
An ogre lumbered out of the rearmost darkness, his skin a dark olive made darker by the stark white collar of his tailored business suit. He wore dark hair up in a man bun. Talon scars bracketed his remaining intelligent eye. More scars disappeared into a leather patch with a ruby set into a bronze fitting at its center.
I cast back to one of Dylan’s favorite movies and lowered my tone to a growl. “Hello again, Cyclops.”
To my knowledge, we’d never met, but I hadn’t wanted to screw up the quote just for the sake of accuracy.
“Where’s Dylan?”
A deep, melodic tone escaped the ogre’s lips instead of the gruff guttural words I’d expected. “Mr. Snyder is not present for this negotiation.”
Negotiation? Really?
“I’m listening.”
One corner of his mouth ticked upward. “You will surrender to me, and Mr. Snyder will go free.”
“What do you intend to do with me?”
“Deliver you to the Courts for a beheading and apology.”
“I’m not feeling particularly apologetic at the moment.”
He shrugged. “Then we move to Plan B.”
I raised my brows. “Kill or capture me then torture Dylan for your trouble?”
The ogre smiled.
I had to admit, the faerie was smarter than most, and his calm confidence was far more threatening than the usual rigmarole.
“May I counter?”
“By all means,” the ogre said.
I cast my eyes to the clowns. “You boys surrender whatever gift you’ve been granted in exchange for absolution.” My gaze fixed at the very large rabbit in a suit. “Then you’re going to tell me where Dylan is to stop the pain.”
He smirked, turning his back to me and strolling back into the darkness. “Plan B.”
Quicker than should have been mortally possible, all four Fae Kissed pulled heavy caliber pistols from inside their coats and opened fire.
I released the transmog I’d been holding on the run, essence rippling out of my core to transform me into water. I threw myself into a forward kneeling slide and leaned back, ducking under probable bullet paths and preparing to bring myself back upright.
My plan went to hell in instants.
Magic-shrouded bullets bent their paths, following me low, and slamming into me with teeth-jarring impacts. Novae of pain exploded through me as the hollow point shells tore out chunks of essence. Mushrooming bullets opened up to release metallic sodium payloads that immediately ignited into blazing orange stars. Accompanying spell energy set the surrounding essence alight.
A rectangle of light opened in the warehouse’s rear as the ogre exited, but the agony occupying my thoughts didn’t leave room for pursuit. The gunmen fired again and shifted position to maintain a distant, four-pointed perimeter.
I threw myself sidelong and rolled for all I was worth.
The bullets pursued anyway, all four hitting.
I managed my feet, pushing the burning sodium out of my body by sheer, tormented will and bolting for the nearest cover. Their initial assault cost me the blades in my Karambit hilts. I extruded replacements, ducked out of cover and hurled one of the blades at my nearest attacker.
Essence tore away, a spinning s-shaped blade hurtling at the gunman. Separating the blade from my core almost didn’t hurt compared to my other pains. My target stepped out of the blade’s path, but he wasn’t the only one who could control his ammunition.
At the last moment he jerked up his other fist, absorbing the essence blade into his suit sleeve.
Blighted hells!
The four Fae Kissed moved in eerie silence, repositioning to surround the huge industrial shelving I’d chosen for cover. I had almost no time, but I needed a new plan yesterday.
I like to think of myself as flexible, but reshaping myself to include armor on the fly seemed too much to bite off. Even so, I reformed with the thickest tactical armor I could recall from my garage encounter with Fae Kissed.
The gunmen kept to a distance that made thrown blades less of a risk, forcing me to add adapting my attacks to the long list of tasks on my already teetering plate.
Tucking away my hilts, I drew Ignis’s hilt from behind my back. I hadn’t had time to experiment with it, but I’d seen him launch crushing assaults with the bow he formed. His little blazing star arrows shot faster and farther, using far less essence than my own hurled blades.
Picturing Ignis’s ornate, glowing bow I pushed essence into the hilt and focused on my memories of his weapon. I ended up with something vaguely bow-shaped with a string of essence connecting the ends.
Another shot hit me in the back. It hurt like hell, but the essence I’d layered into thick armor stopped the shot from penetrating. Facing Fae Kissed with bullets in my essence form had proven an effective advantage, but the sodium hollow points the Four Horseman of the Clown Factory used cost too much essence—not to mention the exothermic reaction that tried to boil me away one tiny metallic star at a time. I whirled toward the offending clown and pulled back on the bowstring.
The bow bent. The string pulled tight. Arrows, though, didn’t just magically appear in the string.
Blight this is complicated.
I leapt through the shelf to dodge another shot, making the bullet impact on an old engine block. I planted my feet and pushed essence from the finger and thumb holding the bowstring, willing an arrow into existence.
Maintaining so much essence outside my body built up the pressure behind my eyes. It was bad enough I’d lost so much to the first bullet volley. It occurred to me I could try to create the arrow shaft in a kind of straw shape, transferring heat from the arrowhead to the back. In theory, the heat shift would create a steam rocket propulsion while allowing the arrow head to harden into a barbed ice spike.
It was an absolutely fantastic theory.
It also failed dismally.
I didn’t have enough practice with the bow to build arrows on the fly while dodging magical bullets and aiming a weapon I had very little practical experience using.
Not all of my new ideas were bad.
I sucked back in my essence, shifting myself back to water and pushing out my wings. I’d thought only divine phoenixes could pull off this shape until I’d seen Ignis and Terrance shift their shape that way. I reformed into flesh as a bullet took me through the gut and sprayed blood onto the boxes behind me.
My arm could only flip a knife blade so far and so fast. It was a matter of physics more than strength. My wings however had greater flexibility, reach, and more easily leveraged strength. Shaping one of my wingtip feathers into a dagger of essence, I whipped a wing at the nearest gunman. The feather blade shot out a little off target, but aqua kinesis pushed it back on track.
Two of the gunmen ducked out of cover and took their shots. I batted a wing at the bullets, only being partially successful at deflecting the hits.
Saved myself a little pain.
My target’s suit sleeve absorbed the magic feather.
I was in trouble.
Ranged assaults weren’t working and every time I tried to close with one of the gunmen, the other three shot. I’d lost essence. Blood trickled from several wounds that made it past my armor. I turned tail and bolted around the van. Breathing hard with my back covered by Chevrolet, I took a moment to rebalance my essence.
As the roaring waterfall of my blood in my ears calmed a bit, I noticed a low tone. I pushed around the waters of my essence to repair the damage I’d suffered and bolster my armor. The tinny hum intensified, splitting into two sounds a few moments before my assailants came around both sides of the van at once.
The two gunmen opened fire, seemingly unconcerned by the potential for crossfire. I let my essence snap back into flesh, launched myself up and vaulted off the top of the van with a handspring.
The hum vanished.
The tracking bullets tore chunks out of the van. Rather than earning another moment’s respite, the two other gunmen fired from where they’d waited.
Both bullets hit high on my chest, breaking my collar bone in at least two places and sending red hot pokers of pain into my flesh. A shift of wing that made exfoliating with a cheese grater before a lemon juice bath sound like paradise turned me sideways to present a smaller target.
Not that it matters when their bullets don’t miss.
The twist put me into an end-over-end cartwheel between them closer than I’d gotten to one of them yet. They fired again. I transmogrified into phoenix shape, rebalancing my essence with an agonized battle shriek.
The magic around their bullets fizzled away, and both shots missed. I slammed wings into both of them as hard as I could, willingly risking more broken bones just to score a hit. Thin wing bones shattered as Flag and Bloodface slammed into the nearest shelf full of crates.
The other two fired.
Another transmogrification allowed me to rebalance essence to mend the broken bones, but it hurt like hell. I cried out once more, landing on one knee with my wings curved around me to protect my head.
Both shots missed.
I gasped breath that seemed the only sound other than my rushing pulse. On instinct, I transmogrified into a watery angel once more.
The hum returned, except it wasn’t so much a hum as a kind of harmonic vibration.
I shifted back to flesh, and the sound vanished.
Understanding hit me like a Mack truck.
I’m hearing what they’re doing on my essence.
My spare few moments of discovery allowed the gunmen to recover and reposition into their four-sided attack.
They fired.
I transmogrified into phoenix form, shrieked then swept my wings downward in a powerful thrust. The magical auras around the bullets fizzled out again as I sailed over their attack with only a few damaged tail feathers.
My shriek had overpowered or broken the spell harmonics they used to keep their bullets from missing. A dry chuckle escaped me.
I’m facing a Barbershop Quartet from Sweeney Todd.
I hadn’t kept track of the number of bullets they’d fired, but I imagined they needed to reload soon. I didn’t see any magazines laying discarded on the ground, but it seemed reasonable that Flag and Bloodface had reloaded while they waited to ambush me.
Time to take the fight to these guys in a personal way.
My true form was really too big for the warehouse, but the bird of prey cries had disenchanted their bullets. Wings offered me several maneuverability advantages, but so did the tactical armor. I transmogrified back into a watery form, rebalanced essence and shifted most of the way back to my current body. I kept the wings, and this time kept them essence. I also kept my feathered phoenix head, leaving me a modern-day Horus in tactical armor.
I swept my feet in the fluid circles of Hep-Silat, an ancient martial art taken from Indonesian origins by Egyptian sailors and reborn to honor the river god Hapi.
I beckoned all four with hands and wings. “Come get me, boys.”
We fought in earnest—well, more earnest. Their tactics managed to keep me from slicing out any one throat and their suits still absorbed any essence blades I threw their way. The absorption raised niggling questions in the back of my mind. There was no way to tell if driving a Karambit blade into their chests when I finally caught one would actually penetrate their defense.
My change in tactics balanced the fight enough that one on four became mostly even odds.
Both my s-shaped blades and the sharpened feather daggers had been absorbed because they were essence. Shifting heat in the arrows I’d tried had turned them into icicle spike air-water rockets. I hadn’t managed to hit them, but the tactic seemed sound.
It seems today is Weird Hybrid Experimentation Day.
I waited until the first of them dropped back to reload. When it happened, both of the clowns I hadn’t named reloaded together. The practice motion took only moments, but in that time, I shifted the heat from one wing into my already-fiery core and hurled a trio of frozen feather knives at the first one that dropped his magazine.
The clown’s suit didn’t stop the ice. Blood blossomed from the Fae Kissed’s neck and chest. I shrieked with satisfaction, dispelling the magic on the answering volley of bullets.
The other reloader let loose an enraged scream—the first noise I’d heard him utter—and charged me, emptying his new clip as fast as he could.
I hurled an ice knife barrage at him, but he hit his knees, sliding across the concrete in a move that was sure to shred the skin on his knees. He scooped up the downed gunman’s pistol and started unloading that too.
The firing pattern he’d used had been purposefully haphazard enough that several bullets hit me despite my attempts to dodge. Before I could charge the kneeling man emptying his weapons, Flag and Bloodface bracketed him and fired one after another in a coordinated staccato.
I raced for cover, shifting to pure essence the moment I had a spare breath and rebalanced my essence. Neutralizing both their magic bullets and finding a way to penetrate their magical defenses had shifted the battle. The bullets they used were dangerous to both my flesh and essence forms. Up until that last barrage the Clown Quartet had conserved their ammunition and made the most of their shots. Maybe that was one gunman’s rage, or maybe I’d changed the battle enough to force them into embracing more aggressive tactics.
Flag and Bloodface came at me from either end of the van. I leapt back onto the top, expecting the twin-gunner to be waiting. Instead, the van shifted under me. I vaulted off the top as a shotgun blast tore a hole through the van’s roof. Several pellets hit my wings, and while they blasted their way through, it was immediately obvious the shot included metallic sodium.
The addition of the shotgun upped the stakes. Unfortunately, so did the pair of shrapnel grenades that rolled under the van toward my feet. I dove through the nearest industrial shelving, but not in time to put the crates and machine parts fully between me and the flesh-shredding projectiles.
Killing the gunman had changed the balance. His death had somehow crossed a line, escalating the conflict. I squinted through the pain back at the van to see Flag and Bloodface accept riot shields from inside the van.
Think!
There wasn’t enough cover to avoid three explosive wielding gunmen and those shields would stop my newest attack cold. The only way to beat them was from behind, but three on one in the dim warehouse made hiding my approach all but impossible.
Sweat dripped from me.
I’d exerted myself a lot as well as rebalanced internal heat to create ice shards. The exothermic reactions of their sodium ammunition and pure fury added to the heat I was feeling. With all the damage I’d taken and essence I’d hurled at them, I wasn’t at prime fighting weight any more.
Fortunately, Georgia humidity was usually thick enough to swim in during the summer. I didn’t often try farming the air for water like Dylan’s favorite movie hero—some whiny kid on a desert planet.
Moisture’s moisture, though it’d be easier if I was drawing on clouds.
My eyes shot to the rafters over our battlefield.
Clouds...water in the air...fog.
My opponents flushed me out of cover. The warehouse was pretty warm already. If I could cool and concentrate the humidity in the air to a higher density, the resultant reaction should create fog. I needed that fog to be thick enough to obscure visibility. Ultimately that meant instead of drawing in airborne moisture to rejuvenate my strength, I needed to push more of my essence into the air, draw in the warmth of the air near the ground and force the fog to form with aqua kinesis.
Sure, no problem.
The next several minutes consisted of me running around the warehouse like a phoenix with his head chopped off, dodging bullets and concentrating the humidity. Fog formed, but since they’d shut off all of the property’s water, I couldn’t generate enough essence or strength to grow the cloudy bank all the way to the rafters. I settled for about eight feet and hid behind the van. I’d had marginal luck dampening the glow of essence no longer connected to me. I’d never been able to quell the glow of my core essence. So, I transmogrified my wings from water to feathers. I vaulted onto the van’s top and into the rafters. The moment I managed my perch, I threw myself over to the other side of the warehouse, trying to obscure my intentions in case one of the gunmen had seen flashes of movement.
I’d used the van because I’d already used it for cover then jumped over it when attacked several times. If the trio of clowns couldn’t see everyone in their group through the thick grey fog, they might—might—assume a repeat.
I perched in the darkest corner I could find and slowed my breathing to prevent being heard.
I waited.
The shorter-than-desired fog bank played to my advantage. Gunmen moving through the cloud created swirls and eddies that helped me track them like a shark fin parting water’s surface. The clowns were able to use their targeting magic since I wasn’t trying to disrupt their hum, but I was pretty sure they had to be able to see their target to guide shots.
I waited more.
I watched.
A flashback of Dylan playing video games that involved hiding overhead in shadows and taking out foes one by one made me smile.
He’d be so proud of me.
The thought immediately stabbed a knife in my gut. The ogre had him, would hurt him because I hadn’t just given up. I needed to finish the clowns and get on the strange ogre’s trail.
My tactic didn’t work precisely like it had for Dylan’s video game characters, but I killed the three remaining clowns with only a few new holes in me. When they were dead and I’d scoured them for possible clues, I drew in all the water in the room and power washed their flesh and bones into innocuous grit.
With nothing to lead me toward the ogre and Dylan, I hurried back to Mrs. Cox’s apartment complex. I needed to set up my nest in a hurry, but more, I hoped Grynnberry might know something about this particular ogre.