“Keep going,” Eric growled. “I’ll hold them back.”
Fire wreathed Eric from head to toe. He thrust his hands into the bodies of the warped climbing the wall. His blows hit like spears, a relentless assault that tore through the goopy creatures and sprayed us all with steaming ichor.
The attack had stopped the monsters’ advance, though at a terrible cost. Eric shivered and struggled to stay on his feet. The flames around him guttered out as his core emptied, and he sank to his knees. Black wounds covered his arms and hands. Touching the warped had marked my friend.
“You did it,” I said as I dragged Eric back to his feet. The barbed wall’s spines converged above us. “You saved us.”
“Thanks,” Eric gasped and steadied himself against me. Blood ran from the wounds he’d suffered, and his breath came in ragged sobs. The scar above his eye was ugly, but it was nothing compared to the wounds he’d picked up in the last few minutes. Eric didn’t seem to care, though. Something had changed in his heart. He was no longer a fighter.
He’d become a warrior.
We took advantage of our defensive shelter to cycle our breath and refill our cores. Minor injuries healed as sacred energy flowed through us. Even Eric looked better with his core filled, though the ugly black wounds that covered his arms and hands would need serious attention before they’d even start to heal.
That was a worry for the future, though. For now, we concentrated all our efforts on strengthening the walls that surrounded us. The warped were far from finished with this fight.
Their tentacles coiled around the bars and pulled at them, shattering chunks of sandstone. We repaired the damage as fast as we could, but there were more of the squidheads than us, and they took full advantage of their numbers. They clambered to the top of the spines and snapped the wicked points loose. Sickly, translucent blood rained down around us, staining our robes and slicking our hair with rank fluid.
“Jace,” Clem said. “What do we do now?”
That was a very good question. For the moment we were safe. But the cage that shielded us was also our prison. Eventually, our defenses would fail, and the warped would overwhelm us.
A sharp crack ripped me out of my thoughts. Light flashed through the gaps in our cage’s bars, and the rumble of thunder pounded the air with a deafening fury. The warped atop the cage vanished, their bodies shredded and cast aside.
“What is that?” Abi asked.
I peered through the bars to see figures in tight-fitting black jumpsuits blasting away at the warped with sleek firearms. The men and women advanced on their enemies with cool efficiency, focusing their attacks to pulverize one warped before moving to the next. A woman with a tattoo down the side of her face stepped away from the firing squad and tossed a metal cylinder into a knot of warped monsters near the edge of the terrace. Fire and thunder burst away from it on impact, hurling chunks of dead blubber in every direction.
The reinforcements had arrived.
“Those are the good guys,” I said, a manic grin splitting my face. “Sort of.”
As the gunfire slowed to a stutter and the bone-rattling thunder of explosives died away, I drained the aspects out of the cage we’d built and pushed through the crumbling spines.
I scanned the crowd for the man who led this band of hired killers. As my eyes swept over the collection of foot soldiers and their arsenal of military-grade hardware, I realized that the guns they carried were no longer pointed down into the ruins.
There were aimed at me.
The Unexpected
RAGE AND WORRY BATTLED for the top slot in my mind. That many guns was more than enough to kill me and my friends. But Tru had arranged for a delivery of two and a half million oboli to Grimaldi before we’d left on this little field trip, and I’d promised him that much again once I made it back to the School. If he killed me, the gang boss would never get the second half of that fortune. It made no sense to gun me down before he collected.
“You don’t want to do this,” I said to the man nearest me.
The rifle he’d trained on my chest didn’t waver even an inch. We were less than ten feet apart. I was fast enough to reach him before he could pull the trigger, but there was no way for me to stop the rest of his friends from shooting me full of holes.
“Don’t worry your pretty little head,” Grimaldi called out to me as he strolled through the thicket of guns. “If you don’t do anything stupid, my boys and girls won’t shoot you.”
The urge to rush forward and tear the man’s heart out of his chest was difficult to resist. This fool had no idea what he was doing. Betraying me was idiotic, but endangering this mission was suicidal. I forced myself to unclench my fists and speak to him in the only language he’d understand.
“How much?” I asked.
The man had stopped fifteen feet away from me. He leaned on a thick cane that looked like it had begun life as a shotgun. He peered at me as he pulled a cigar from a case in the cane’s handle. His eyes never left mine, not even when a cluster of fire aspects appeared around the end of his cigar to light it. Grimaldi puffed on the reeking thing, then blew a plume of smoke into the air between us.
“I’m a very rich man,” he said. “What makes
