The ground shook beneath the enraged stomping of the seven-foot-tall creature Cheyenne had seen in her mind’s eye, that thing with a head like a boulder who considered himself the big boss among these thugs. The guy was built like a tree and bellowed in rage. Everywhere he turned, thick columns of smaller stones burst from his hands and laid waste to everything in their path.
“Bring that ogre down!” The shout came from behind her and to the left.
Cheyenne didn’t dare turn her back to the fight when a crazed goblin with spit flying from his snarling jaws ran full speed at her. A gun went off from the same place as that shout, and the goblin jerked beneath the pelting of automatic rounds in his chest.
That was when Cheyenne lost all sense of control and reason. The metallic sting of gunpowder and hot steel barrels and so much blood was the only thing she acknowledged. She heard herself scream, and somewhere in the back of her mind, she terrified herself.
Black tendrils whipped through the air and struck any moving thing in her path. Her hands shot in every direction, sending magical thugs flying and crashing into each other and sliding into walls. She didn’t remember when she switched between blazing bolts of black energy sparking with purple and snaking black tendrils that moved like part of her body.
The seven-foot-tall stone ogre bellowed and stormed toward her, his glare burning with red flame in his gray-streaked face. A man garbed in black, wearing body armor and a helmet and firing an automatic rifle, stepped up beside her and took aim at the ogre.
The bullets pinged off the magical’s stone-hard skin like spit wads shot from a straw. More weapons from the team in black fired at the ogre, and nothing made a dent.
“Goddamnit, O’Malley! If there was ever a time to use the fell launcher, that would be right goddamn now!”
“Can anyone cover me on the west end of the first floor?”
“On your nine!”
Cheyenne heard the entire conversation through the crackle of radio static and the double echo of the chaos their headsets broadcast. She tried to focus on separating the magicals from the large team in black with automatic weapons who’d stormed the event center right behind her, but everyone appeared the same.
“A-1, I’m about to—” A scream erupted from the operative, wherever he was.
Another man beside her cursed and stepped forward as a snarling troll flung a burst of electric blue energy toward them. Cheyenne raised her arm reflexively, as if she were raising a shield, and a black wall of magic burst to life in front of her in time to keep the searing blue attack from hitting home. The guy in black who’d rushed past her staggered back beneath the dark shadow of her shield, training his weapon straight ahead.
The shield dropped, and Cheyenne blasted the troll through the opposite wall of the arena, which then boasted a troll-shaped hole.
“Shit.” The man turned to look Cheyenne up and down.
She stormed forward, consumed by her battle rage, the heat searing through her skin, and the chaos of screams and spells and gunfire.
Two figures rushed toward her with blazing trails of orange and red churning through the air seconds behind their hands. She ducked beneath one of their attacks and slid forward on her knees. When she raised her hand, it wasn’t to unleash an attacking sphere of crackling sparks or the black tendrils from her fingertips. Instead, a spell of some unseen force she hadn’t known she could cast—hadn’t even considered—sent the green-skinned magical straight up into the ceiling. Gunfire rattled from his flailing hand before he crashed into the plaster and brought a rain of it down around them.
Someone dropped from the second-floor balcony. Cheyenne whirled and shot out her snaking tendrils before the falling operative in black gear hit the floor. She wasn’t trying to save him, but she slowed his descent enough to preserve his life before she released the coiled black vines from his arms and whipped them toward a tall, thin magical with pale-violet skin.
“Any day with that launcher!” someone shouted.
“Shut up and cover me.”
“You cannot stop F’rulz Asharig!” the ogre bellowed. “That regime is already a pile of rotting corpses.” The giant magical mobster stormed toward Cheyenne, his fiery eyes blazing bright. “You have betrayed the call of—”
A burst of searing heat flared in Cheyenne’s hip, and she staggered sideways in shock and rage. She turned to blast the troll still training his pistol on her and saw the gun flying away from his flopping body with his finger still on the trigger, and his hand and half an arm attached.
The ogre raged across the arena. “Drow! You will perish in flames like the rest of us!”
He talking to me? The pain seemed to have brought her mind back to itself, or at least her ability to reason. Her damaged hip wouldn’t hold the weight of her body. She fired a few more shots at the ogre, who kept coming. Cheyenne fell to her knees with a shout of frustration and pain. Get up!
An operative in black stepped in front of her and fired one automatic burst after the other, tearing the ogre down as he tried to dodge his attackers to get to the fallen drow.
Cheyenne tried pushing to her feet.
“Stay there,” the man in black shouted. “We’ll call it even.”
“What?”
As soon as she asked the question, a thunderous explosion ripped through the arena, followed by a thick, muted crack. Green light whizzed across the room, heading down from a launch point on the second-story balcony. It wobbled a little, then straightened with a trail of green-gray smoke before it hit its target in the space
