“The boy looks a bit like them, doesn’t he?” Clayton squinted. “A long-lost relation, perhaps. Come to watch the fight for the family mantle? I’ve heard Matriarch Elanor isn’t doing terribly well these days.”
“For the gods’ sake, niño, stop touching the poor man!” Samantha yelled at the same time Clayton said, “Aaaand he’s out again.”
When the three witches huddled together, Marshall knew things were about to get ugly. He found himself rooting for the boy and his soldier and tried to stop. Even though the boy looked small and helpless, he knew it meant nothing. Marshall had been mistaken before, and the price was too dear to pay ever again.
When the building collapsed behind them, it was clear the witches, at least, were not on the side of the angels.
“This has gone too far.” He jumped to his feet and began to pace, wanting to do something, but he also knew he needed to see the rest of the fight before he could act.
“What is he doing now?” Clayton was referring to the gestures the boy was making with his hands.
Marshall focused on the boy. “I would say he’s casting a spell, but there’s no magic behind it.” That wasn’t quite right though. There was something churning up inside the boy, but it was unfocused and kept dissipating before anything could happen.
When the soldier scrabbled away from the boy, Samantha cheered. “Soldier boy finally got the memo!”
Marshall noted when the soldier pushed away from the boy, he took his shield with him. But when he saw the pink firestorm erupt from the boy’s body, wild and unconstrained, Marshall lost his train of thought. The boy was definitely not an empath—they were notoriously bad at combat spells.
It was starting to look like there might be no good guys in the fight after all. Family power struggles were always messy. They were rare though, because no one wanted the attention of the Guard.
Too bad for the Blaike family. They had his full attention now.
Then Marshall thought of the soldier, who might as well have had norm plastered across his forehead, and began to feel sorry for him. If anyone in this mess was innocent, it might be him. But if so, how was the man creating a shield? Marshall had too many questions and needed to get into the field to start finding answers.
“Wait, can you pause, Fzzt? Back up to… Yes, right there. Thank you.” He walked closer to examine the boy’s face when he saw the devastation his spell had created. He looked horrified at what he had done. “Does that look like the face of a person who knew what he was doing?”
“He looks like a frightened child to me,” Samantha said softly. “I don’t think he has any training at all, Marshall.”
“Thank you, Samantha. Okay, you can keep playing, Fzzt.”
The frozen ‘screen’ got sharp around the edges and quivered slightly.
“Fzzt feels it is important for you to know he isn’t a machine and has better things to do with his time than to act like one.” Clayton delivered the message with the air of a person expecting to be bitten.
Clayton’s shoulders relaxed from their position by his ears when Marshall smiled wryly and said, “Of course you do, Fzzt. We are all grateful to you for helping us right now, and I’m deeply sorry for offending you. Would you be willing to stay long enough to let us see the end?”
In response, the ‘screen’ softened and continued showing the scene.
They sat in silence as they saw the hole take the entire cemetery and most of the street. Everyone but the sprite sighed in relief when the couple got away.
When the ‘movie’ ended, Marshall was about to thank the sprite, but it swirled over to the door, blew it open, and left before he had a chance to do more than open his mouth. Firmly closing it again, he went to Clayton’s desk, grabbed a notepad, and scrawled a quick message.
“Give this to my team when they get here and tell them what happened.” He handed the pad to Clayton who dropped it, caught it, then dropped it again. Marshall patted his shoulder. “Also, see if you can find any other sprites who might have seen where those two went after the cemetery.”
It looked different than it had the last time Marshall was there in the late 1800s. Trees that had been newly planted now towered overhead.
He was a teenager when his father had taken him to see the cemetery where Paul Revere had been laid to rest. Marshall had grown up on the tales of adventures Revere and his father had gone on together. To hear his father tell it, the Revolutionary War was a big laugh, but sometimes his father would get a look in his eye while sharing a story, and Marshall could tell he was editing out the more gruesome details.
He knew his father would have been angered by the scene that lay before Marshall now. There was nothing left of the cemetery where so many legends had been buried. The hole the boy had created was deep enough that the bottom was shrouded in darkness. It was good the full force of the spell had been focused down rather than out. Otherwise, the death toll would have been staggering.
Marshall needed to find the boy quickly before he hurt someone.
After sampling the general flavor of the crowd’s thoughts, Marshall was able to discern that no one had any idea what was going on. He cast out further, searching for magic, and zeroed in on the top floor of a building on the other side of the crater.
In order to get there before the next Ice Age, he had to nudge people out of his way. It took a minuscule amount of power to do so and didn’t break the core tenet of the dreamwalkers.
No altering people’s souls.
Rather than change who the person was on a fundamental level, nudging merely muddied up their thoughts for a short time, making them highly suggestible. Once they heeded his simple, “Excuse me,” they went on their way, never knowing anything out of the ordinary had happened to them.
Marshall could feel the fear and anger of the crowd around him and had to close his mind away to keep from getting swept up in the fervor. Once he found out what had really happened, Marshall needed to be able to deal with the person or persons responsible with a clear and level head.
Once inside the building, he came across a dozen or so norms in uniform. He could tell from their auras they were on a witch hunt, and anyone in their path was going to have a bad day. Marshall had neither the time nor the inclination to convince them that he wouldn’t make a good scapegoat, so he scooped up their thoughts and told them collectively he wasn’t there.
Marshall was forced to squeeze against the wall as they stormed past him to avoid getting trampled. He was tempted to follow in case they found what they were looking for, but he needed to verify for himself the contents of the wrecked hallway he had glimpsed in their minds.
He was glad he had. The fight was only minutes old, so the air in the hallway was filled with residual energy. Both ends of the hall shimmered with the jagged, white distortion of demon magic. Anyone coming in contact with either of those spots would be in danger of possession, so once he was done investigating the scene, he would need to clear them away.
One side of the hall had a large dent in the wall, not far from one of the distortions, and the air in the entire place vibrated with power. Marshall could see a faint halo in the air of thwarted spells. Even though they didn’t have much of a chance of doing any damage on their own, there was still a possibility they could combine into something unpleasant, so they would have to be cleared too.
There was no doubt in his mind that this battle was a continuation of the fight in the cemetery. The magical signatures were the exact same. Except for demon magic. That was new. And very troubling. This was definitely a case for the Guard.
Marshall found it interesting that this time the spells were less lethal in nature, unlike the ones in the cemetery. The intent behind them held a flavor of containment, rather than destruction. What had changed in the short time between both battles?
Between one breath and the next, his partner Jack’s hulking presence loomed over his shoulder, barely giving him a start. Marshall didn’t think to wonder anymore at how, unlike nearly everyone else, Jack could manage to sneak up on him undetected. “Adelle’s downstairs trying to get a trace on the couple in your message like you asked.”
“Get her up here. This fight is more recent and easier to get to.” Marshall’s sister may have been the best tracker in the Guard, but the closer she could get to a scene, the better her results were.
