never have to do without it again. Oh, how I have missed you.
“What was that?” Sharps shouted, confused. Then he noticed the spreading nothingness and froze.
Filled with magic and anger, Heinrich stood up and spit out a wad of blood. “Now it is my turn.”
Sharps turned, surprised to see Heinrich still moving. He swung, but lurched as his fist flew cleanly through his target as if Heinrich was made of smoke. He struck again, but it was like attacking the shadows. Sharps’ eyes grew wide. “Oh shit.”
Heinrich was a Fade, and as such, could make his body insubstantial enough to pass through solid objects for a brief time. He could also take someone else with him. He made himself solid again, reached out, grabbed Sharps by the throat, then Faded them both. Sharps thrashed as they began to sink into the floor. Heinrich let go, and then altered himself just enough to step out of the ground before becoming solid again.
Sharps screamed as the molecules of his feet and ankles fused with the earth.
It was a terrible way to go, with all of those severed nerve endings screaming, trapped, while some horrific darkness came to eat you, but Heinrich wasn’t feeling particularly charitable. “Good day, sir,” and then he hobbled out the door.
Deych had barely made it into the hall before the explosion had gone off overhead. It appeared that a large chunk of the ceiling had fallen and struck him down. He was stunned, but alive. Heinrich grabbed Deych by the collar and dragged him away. Sharps kept on screaming incoherently, jerking his frozen legs, and windmilling his arms helplessly.
Heinrich got Deych ten feet down the hall, then slapped him until he began to stir. Deych had been hit pretty hard by the debris and it took a moment for his eyelids to flutter awake.
Talking was very painful and Heinrich wondered if they’d managed to crack his jaw. “The attack you are framing us for. Where is it?” Deych looked back at the darkness. It had consumed most of the cell and its edge was spilling into the hall behind them. It was growing faster now. Sharps’ screams grew more desperate. “Where? Or I feed you to it!”
“There’s a gathering on the mall. Antimagic people are camped out there for a big protest,” Deych stammered, unable to take his eyes off the darkness. “There’s a truck bomb on the other side of the river. We’re going to blow them up.”
Heinrich’s face hurt too much to smile. It made a sick sort of sense. If the Grimnoir were truly as evil as Bradford Carr was portraying them as, then obviously they would strike directly at their political foes in the most craven and cowardly way possible. The backlash against Actives would be terrible.
“I told you! Let me go! Let me go!”
Heinrich stood up and took another look at the vortex. Now that it was free of the cell he could see that it was uniformly round, with a center that must have begun in the other cell, and it was getting bigger by the second. Francis must have created some sort of spell to destroy the nullifiers, but he wondered if creating a black hole had been part of the plan. It would be interesting to see when it would stop growing… Maybe a better question would be if it would stop growing.
Sharps’ screams stopped abruptly as the nothingness reached him.
“Flee, you fool,” Heinrich spat at Deych.
Sullivan Spellbound
Chapter 19
I speak to the just people of the South. You charge that we stir up insurrection among your slaves, and more insidiously, amongst your slaves with dangerous magics. We deny it. Where is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! The mad wizard John Brown was no Republican. Despite this slander, we will strive to keep harmony in the Republic. Yet if our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand firm. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.
Mason Island
Faye could hear the gunfire and see the occasional flash through the trees. She checked her head map for the fiftieth time and found that her magic still wouldn’t work against the island’s defenses. Faye, Whisper, and Hammer were sitting in a car parked just north of where the bridge reached land, watching the island.
“We’d best get ready,” Whisper said as she glanced up and down the Washington side of the shore. Lights were now on in many windows and people were coming outside to see what the commotion was. Soon the police would arrive, so Whisper would set the bridge on fire to make a mess of things and then they’d have to skulk away.
That was really making Faye mad. Somewhere on that island, Francis and a bunch of her friends were in danger, and she couldn’t do a darn thing about it. Here she was, one of the most powerful Actives anybody knew of, with a perfectly good automatic shotgun, bandoleers full of buckshot, a. 45, and a great big stag-handled stabbing knife, but with nobody to use any of this useful stuff on. Since Sullivan had said the island was muddy, she’d even worn pants. Faye was ready to get to work.
Suddenly there was a huge flash of light on the island. It was so bright that it was almost like looking into a photographer’s pan of flash powder when it went off. It took a second before they heard the loud whump that was then followed by an ominous rumble. An orange glow began to grow behind the trees, obviously a fire, and Faye could see the smoke curling slowly in front of it.
“What in the world was that?” Hammer exclaimed.
“I don’t know.” Faye checked for the fifty-first time… only this time her map could actually reach the island. There were a few smaller bits that were all blurry on the periphery where some of the other little Dymaxions were still working, but the great big one was off. There was something else really weird going on, a confusing circle that seemed to poke a hole in her head map, but other than that, she was good to go. “All right!”
“Faye, can you-” Whisper turned, but Faye was already gone.
Crow was thoroughly enjoying himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had this much fun. The Grimnoir had shot him hundreds of times, but it didn’t matter. A Summoned was given form in this world by gathering up stray matter and coalescing it into a physical body. The smoking substance that most referred to as demon’s ink bound the creature’s essence to this world, and in order to banish the creature, the created body had to be battered to the point until most of that essence had escaped. On a form as resilient as this one, that was a very difficult task.
Sure, this wasn’t exactly what the Summoned had looked like back when it had been a real, living, breathing being on its own world. With some effort he could make the bodies appear completely human, or he could set them free, to take on a more familiar form. Crow knew that the Summoner’s subconscious played a role in how the creatures appeared here. He didn’t want to think too hard about why his always tended to look so evil. He figured it had something to do with all those hellfire-and-brimstone sermons he’d had to endure as a child.
The bullets felt like beestings. The Grimnoir were falling back through the trees, each one pausing in turn to stop and futilely shoot at him as their friends ran by. Let them run. It made the chase more rewarding.
However, one of them wasn’t the running type. “Get to the boats,” Sullivan ordered the others. The Heavy stood in the middle of a path, slamming another magazine into a funny looking rifle. “I’ll slow him down.”
“How do you figure you’re going to do that?” Crow laughed. The monster in the back of his shared mind was screaming for blood, but he told it to shut up. This stupid Heavy had embarrassed him, made his life difficult, and was one of the backbone members of his enemy’s Society. He had a reputation for being especially tough, so Sullivan’s death would demoralize the rest. Crow wanted to enjoy this.
Sullivan didn’t waste time with talking, he just shouldered the machine gun and fired. Crow felt the pulsing impacts as the bullets tracked up his torso and into his face. There were no organs inside a Summoned, no bones to break, no weak spots to exploit, just a shell filled with hate, but Sullivan’s bullets were spilling precious ink. The flaming blood set the brush on fire and Crow’s body was wreathed in smoke. Every drop spilled made the body
