Heartland

narrow shrines with the glass and the candles, I lifted one of the stubs of wax with the Chorus, infused it with my Will, and flipped it toward the center of the church. The candle, a squat block of wax with a tiny flame, morphed into a ball of fire as the energized Chorus realized my spell. The makeshift fireball bounced across the pews, scattering a trail of fire, and exploded with a dull pop a few rows over from the assassins. I threw two more in quick succession, giving little thought to where they landed. Just as long as they were noisy and bright.

Tiny noisemakers, distractions meant to afford me some cover as I sprinted for the back.

The trio at the rear heard me coming, as I wasn't making any effort to be silent, and the point man thought he was going to surprise me. He was stationed on the far side of the last pillar, waiting for me to run right into him. He thought I would hesitate when I saw him, that little moment of surprise that would make me freeze. He was the one who froze though, transfixed by the sight of the Chorus rising off my head and shoulders like a rampant phoenix, by the fire burning on my knuckles. I grabbed the barrel of his gun with one hand, and his throat with the other. I squeezed, and when he opened his mouth to scream, I could see the light of my fire at the back of his throat.

The other two started firing as the first gunman and I wrestled with his gun. Getting close and twisting him around, I felt him twitch and jerk as he took the brunt of their fusillade. Something raked my left shoulder and side, leaving tracks that burned. My hand shifted on his weapon as his grip loosened, forcing his arm away from his body, and I got a finger inside the trigger guard. I squeezed, firing the gun. The shots were wild, but the others scattered anyway, seeking cover behind the pillars.

The gunman leaned against me, gasping like an asphyxiating fish. Smoke leaked from his mouth and nostrils, and when he coughed, blood spattered my coat. He should be dead, Nicols whispered, his homicide experience providing commentary. Multiple hits at close range from 9mm ammunition. The Chorus was already in the gunman's throat, but they refused to go any deeper. There was something wrong, something buried in him that the Chorus didn't want to touch.

I had read the assassins wrong, assuming the light coming from them was being thrown off by their overly active Wills. But the glow wasn't the concentrated gleam of actualized Will, it was stemming from a hard knot in their chests.

I fired a couple more bursts from the pistol to keep the others at bay while I struggled to hold the wounded gunman upright. His eyes were glazing over, and each time his mouth flopped open, blood ran out, streaming down his chin. Definitely mortal wounds, so why wasn't he dead? Why wasn't his soul disassociating from his flesh?

Slightly more worryingly, why didn't the Chorus want it?

My finger brushed something hard on his chest. Some sort of raised shape, and as I was trying to discern what it was, a metal canister rattled across the floor at our feet.

Flashbang, Nicols noted, the only one in my head with the requisite experience.

I ducked, pulling the gasping gunman with me. The inner wall of the church bumped against my back and I buried my face against his bloody chest. Even with my eyes shut, the world went white as the flash grenade went off. Sound vanished in an imploding thump, and the ground moved sideways as my internal gyroscope was beaten back and forth by each successive burst of the grenade. Sound and fury, leaving me with nothing. The chapel wall kept me from completely falling, and I slid to the ground, the dying gunman sprawling across me. My head and neck were splashed with hot blood, and I couldn't see or hear anything.

The Chorus wasn't affected by the flash grenade, and they tracked the other two assassins. They also spotted the thin strands of etheric energy rising off each man. Anchors. The filaments, like spider silk fluttering in the wind, trailed behind them, back through the wall of the church to their magi controller outside.

The Chorus roared down my arm, through the metal of the pistol, and kissed the remaining bullets in the gun. Linguae ignis, was the thought I had, but I couldn't recall the conscious decision to use that spell. The Chorus moved anyway, following a definite course of action. Popping across the tips of the bullets, they laid their trap. Seven, they reported.

More than enough, I thought. My wrist moved, and the gun left my hand. It was like throwing a coin into a bottomless well: I let go, and it vanished; I never heard it hit bottom.

The Chorus swirled down into my chest, building a thunderhead of energy. Lightning streaked off their cloud, and the charge rejuvenated my stunned flesh. Like getting zapped with a car battery. Everything felt a little more alive. Everything became a little sharper.

I could hear a little now, and some of the flashes of light in my vision weren't retinal burns.

The other two gunmen approached. Keeping their distance, their weapons raised and ready. While they weren't magi-they didn't have any magick of their own-they were familiar with the occult practices, a familiarity that kept their fear mostly in check. Still, the sight of their buddy, who was vomiting more and more blood as he tried to get up, was starting to fracture their resolve. An animalistic thread of terror twisted in the gut of one, a familiar taste the Chorus read easily, and the other was a dense mass of chaotic thought. Some of it concerned the thread connecting him and his master.

The pair got close enough, and the Chorus darted out-a tongue of flame-and touched the pistol I had thrown. Their fire ignited the magick on the bullets, and the gun exploded.

When the gunmen reacted, I shoved the not-dead man off me and rolled forward, grabbing the foot of the thinking assassin. The Chorus found a nerve cluster in his ankle, and unleashed a furious lightning bolt from their energy cloud. The psychic energy pulse went up his leg, found his spine, raced up his back like a rocket launching, and exploded out the top of his head. His nervous system short-circuited, he dropped like a sack of rocks.

The other gunman reacted poorly, immobilized by the fear bubbling in his gut. The Chorus unleashed the rest of their storm, and the shockwave lifted him off his feet and hurled him across the width of the church. The psychic backlash from the spell upgraded my headache into migraine territory. Add to that the confusion from the flashbang and the Chorus' instinctive defense, and my circulatory system took up this internal pulse and echoed it all the way down to my toes. Pain, pain, pain.

Moving like a myopic sloth, I pulled the nerve-stunned gunman closer, pawing at his coat and shirt. He had the same hard ring on his chest, right over his heart. It was a ring of gray stone, cold to the touch, and my Chorus- bruised fingers traced the markings running along its surface. I couldn't make any sense of the script. Arcane shorthand, more symbolic than actualized.

What the hell was it? Not a protection sigil. My fiery hands had touched the first man easily enough. Yet the Chorus refused to get any closer, balking at my command to investigate the knot of energy held beneath the ring. The stone was filled with magick.

I started to reach for the silver strand rising off him, but stopped shy of actually touching it on the etheric layer. It was a conduit. I had seen them before. Magi used them to channel power to each other. To do remote viewing. In some extreme cases, they were used as a leash, a means of animating and controlling an otherwise reluctant host. In theory, it could be used to keep them alive. Energy flowed to them instead of the other direction.

But that didn't make much sense. To effectively transform that incoming energy, they had to know how to use it. They couldn't be passive receptors. They had to have some training. Otherwise it was just an open line, an unattended hose flooding the garden.

The Chorus boiled in frustration. There wasn't any energy flowing through the line, at least not an appreciable amount. A single pulse, rhythmic and steady, almost like a. . heartbeat.

Dead man switch. The Chorus finally spelled it out for me.

The strand was more than a conduit; it also monitored his body and soul. There was enough Will burned into the sigil that the conduit superseded the psychic link between flesh and spirit. As long as the conduit persisted, the soul couldn't leave the body. He couldn't die. Not until his master said so. Soul lock.

And when the signal came, the knot of power lodged in the gunman's chest would be released. In all of them. The assassination squad was on a suicide mission. They were a massive bomb, with linked detonators.

The mortally wounded gunman had rolled onto his back, and though my vision was still blurry, I could see that he was looking at me. He coughed, and his mouth moved into a smile. His eyes glittered with silver light, and I knew someone else was Watching.

The gunman coughed once more, and the breath that came out was his last one. His face spasmed once as all the pain he'd been carrying the last few minutes suddenly lit up his brain, and then the muscles in his face went slack. The silver light in his eyes intensified.