It was Fourteen.

He wouldn’t leave Cym to the monsters unless he was ordered to, and even then, Cym had a feeling Fourteen would find a way around it. And if he wouldn’t leave Cym, Sterling didn’t have a chance on his own, so he might as well do something stupid.

Reaching back, he gripped Fourteen’s bare wrist, feeling his comforting energy mingling with Cym’s, and said to the nightmare, “Fuck you.”

Throwing back Stella’s head, the monster laughed, a horrible, howling laughter sounding like dozens of voices screaming in unison. It raised a hand toward the mercenaries above it and said. “Kill them, but don’t touch Cymbeline.”

Fourteen dragged Cym behind him and jerked them both to the ground, but nothing happened. Cym looked up at the rooftops in confusion. All the mercenaries were slumped over in sleep.

But before he had a chance to react, the world dropped out from under him.

Chapter 19Marshall

“You know, I wasn’t expecting our soldier to…” Marshall trailed off as he surveyed the destruction before him.

“What? Tear through the compound like a spicy burrito through an octogenarian’s digestive tract?” Jack added helpfully.

“...Sure.” Marshall noticed his hand running through his hair, and he stopped, not wanting to make himself look like a mad scientist. He barely resisted the urge to use magic to check if he’d messed his hair up. He was still too close to the whole nearly dying inside the ‘Scape from magic drain incident to use magic carelessly right before a potential battle.

It was fortunate for Fire that Fzzt had been curious about their mission. The excitement from the day before had sent the sprite back to the chapter house time and again to check and see if anything new had happened. When Samantha’s blanket spell had alerted them something may or may not be happening near the marina, Fzzt had noticed and decided to follow them.

As soon as the soldier had dropped his strange smoking device and run, Fzzt had followed him without prompting. Adelle had managed to attach a passenger spell to the air sprite before it took off, allowing Fire to experience everything the sprite did.

The team watched avidly as Cymbeline’s champion evaded capture and secured help, offering to give a set of armor to The Company—whatever that was—in return for help in releasing his friend. Marshall learned enough about Agent Fourteen to decide he had made a grave error trying to keep the norm on the sidelines.

After much debate, Marshall decided to allow Fourteen to go through with his plan. The family estate they had visited previously had been vacated, and they had no new leads to find where the Blaike family had holed up.

Normally Marshall wouldn’t allow a norm to be used as bait, no matter how resourceful, but his anger over the near-loss of Jack had changed things. He kept flashing to the echoing void he’d encountered on the beach. His gut would clench painfully, and his mind would race to find a way to prevent something like that from ever happening again. The lines between what he knew to be right and wrong became blurred, and the phrase acceptable risks kept popping up into his speech more often than he liked.

The looks he kept getting from both Jack and Adelle told him his behavior hadn’t escaped their notice, but he chose to ignore it. Once this was over, he would calm down and things would go back to normal—or whatever passed for his normal these days.

So his team had followed the man and watched in fascination as Fourteen had plunked himself down in the middle of a parking lot and taken off his jacket. The strange nothingness that he gave off had been stripped away, and Marshall had been able to fully witness the deep black of his essence. The confusion Marshall had felt when listening to the discussion between Harper and Fourteen about new tech and armor that could negate it lifted.

His armor repelled magic.

Curious, Marshall had reached out a tendril of his own magic to learn more about the man and discovered another puzzle. Once inside the man’s head, he found only scattered fragments of a person. Delving deeper, Marshall saw that the fragments were knitting themselves together slowly, and the person who was emerging from the fragments was someone Marshall wanted to know better.

After a few minutes, Fourteen put his jacket back on, removing himself once again from magical sight. Shortly afterward, two black vans arrived, bursting with people, but instead of fighting, he put his hands on his head and allowed himself to be searched, bound, and stuffed into the back of one of the vans.

It was a simple matter for Fzzt to follow the convoy north, right over the border to New Hampshire, with Fire trailing close behind.

Marshall and Jack had broken through the shield surrounding the Blaike secret hideout they’d discovered and had been greeted with complete pandemonium. Though it was long past sunset, the compound was bathed in the light from over a dozen fires scattered haphazardly across the base. Sharp barks of gunfire were interspersed between unintelligible shouts from the people fighting fires.

Gunfire was an odd noise to find on property belonging to a member of the Other, even if it was under attack. Witches were far more comfortable using spells for combat over guns. It bore looking into.

The air next to them wavered as Adelle came through the shield around the compound. Her eyes went wide as she noted the uncontained fire sweeping through most of the buildings. “At least you don’t have to worry he’s in over his head,” Adelle remarked.

“There is that.” Marshall took a slow, steadying breath and put on the mantle of Guardian Marshall. “Come on, we need to get down there and see what’s going on.”

Rounding the corner of the closest building, they came face-to-face with complete bedlam. Most of the outbuildings were on fire, and each one had at least one witch casting suppression spells in an attempt to minimize the damage.

“Sheeze, are you sure our man is still alive in all of this?”

On the opposite side of the compound, Marshall could hear shouting followed by gunfire.

Marshall raised his eyebrows and said, “I am now.” He motioned for his team to follow him and ran toward the sound of fighting.

As they ran, Marshall sifted through the surface thoughts of anyone within eyesight of his team and told the bystanders not to see them. He could have gone deeper to find out exactly what was going on, but the time it would have taken to do so might end up getting the Blaike heir killed.

When they reached the far side of the compound, they found nothing but destruction and a pile of bodies.

“We need to find them. Fast. Ideas?” Marshall dug a hand roughly into his hair as if trying to pull out an idea.

Adelle chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Hold on. Maybe we can’t find where soldier boy is, but what if we could find where he isn’t?”

Marshall tugged on a stray curl as he considered. “You mean looking for a deadzone? That might work in the ’Scape, but here, it’ll be fairly iffy. We’d need a lot of people around him for his nothingness to bounce off in order to find him.”

Adelle motioned to the chaos around them. “You don’t think the perpetrator of this has a ton of people after him?”

“Fair point.” He grinned sheepishly, “Cover me, I’m going to take a Walk.”

They crowded into a nearby alley, and Adelle and Jack bracketed him facing outward on either side. Marshall sat down and did his best to accept and transcend the chaos of the compound. Immediately, pinpoints of lights popped into his awareness, and he saw a mass of yellow, red, and orange dots converging on a point behind him and to the right. The general emotion of all the dots was excitement, but without going deeper he couldn’t see why and he didn’t have the time.

He let his mind unfocus and zoom out to see if he could sense the nothingness of Fourteen. As he did, he noted a small cluster of blue, green, and purple lights grouped in the main building. He also noticed a swarm of aggression-laden black lights moving quickly toward the same place as the yellows, reds, and oranges.

He caught no trace of Fourteen’s nothingness, but the converging lights were enough for Marshall to go on. He was ready to come out of his trance until his attention was captured by a blazing, white light so putrid that if he’d been fully in his body he would have retched.

He came back to himself so fast he saw starbursts in his vision. “Demon… Great big massive demon. That way.” He was panting, covered in sweat, and he felt like he’d just run a marathon.

The flames from the building across the street illuminated Jack’s shocked face as he reached down and hauled Marshall to his feet by his upper arms. Jack was the only person big enough to move Marshall around like that without the use of magic. “How?”

“You tell me. I’ve never heard of them getting this big in the Real.” Even the one that took Marshall’s father hadn’t been this size.

The corners of Adelle’s eyes tightened minutely, but her voice was calm as she said, “Lead the way, we’re behind you.”

“At least we’re all at full power this time,” Jack said cheerfully, though his serious expression told Marshall he wasn’t as optimistic as he sounded.

Marshall nodded in agreement and stated simply, “We can do this.” He had to be their rock in a situation like this, and he refused to allow even the smallest gap in his outward show of confidence. But on the inside, his mind crawled with terror and doubt. His team wasn’t up for fighting a large demon without notice. No team was. He’d just come from a battle where he’d almost lost Jack. What if he lost his whole team this time?

They couldn’t run for backup. It could be hours before help arrived. Even if he pulled the entire network of the Boston chapter house—which mostly consisted of politicians and scholars—they’d never arrive in time to stop what was happening.

At that moment, all Marshall wanted to do was run into the night with his friends and not look back, and he was pretty sure he could control both of them long enough to get them far away until the shitshow on the compound had run its course. Only the memory of those who died in the past to protect him kept his feet rooted to the ground. Being a coward was no way to repay them for what they had done.

Team Fire was going to have to stand and fight. He hoped Fourteen had something special up his sleeve.