Hidden Spark (Dark Magic Enforcer Book 6) (24 page)

"Hell, he's just one guy. We'll find him, deal with him." It seemed like he was making a big deal out of nothing.

"Spark, you don't understand. I put very good people on it, and they found him all right, no problem."

"There you go then. Sorted."

"No, not problem sorted, problem exacerbated. Look, many of these wyrmlings are rich, powerful people. They help each other, have done for thousands of years, you know that, about their weird cults or businesses. Long term planning, that's what they're good at, for when the Dragon returns. Well, he has, and this particular man, who is very much dead now, which is my fault as the trolls are never good at being subtle, he'd already got word out, about me."

"Called home, you mean?"

"Yes, and now I'm screwed. Maybe we all are. The wyrmlings are coming from all over the world anyway, because Dragon is here, but I'm more worried about those that are after me."

"We've got time, we can deal with it. Set a few wizards on it."

"It's too late, they've already got planes in the air. I told you, they're rich. They have private jets, large ones, and I've had word from those in Romania. They're on their way, probably landed already. I can't keep track of such things. We don't have people everywhere in the Regular world. They could be here any minute."

"Well they won't get in here, will they? They don't even know where it is. Hell, I don't."

"No, but it's a small city and there are a lot of them. They'll find me. Anyway," Dancer waved away his personal problems, "enough about that. For now let's just deal with Dragon. Haha, I can't believe he took his name from a girl."

"Come on, to be fair you know that wasn't unusual way back when. She was queen of whatever that place was, I guess for other shifters, bloody large ones, or kind of dragon creatures. She was pretty tight-lipped about the whole thing, but if he was made king then it makes sense he was the dragon's King. Guess he liked it, or used it to spite her after she wanted nothing to do with him. Either way, he's trouble."

"Him lying low is worse than him just attacking," mused Dancer.

The windows imploded, the door splintered open in a shower of deadly shards of wood, there were screams and shouts and roars and the sounds of flesh ripping and teeth gnashing.

"You and your big mouth!"

Eyes snapping to black, magic worming its way hard into my ink, running along perfectly configured lines, mixing with the magic of a giant, yeah, all the usual stuff.

Only thing missing was me being in the least bit prepared for what came through the door.

Dragon, riding a damn unicorn.

Haha, joke. He was on a tiger. No, not joke. Very damn serious.

No Time to Chat

"We'll finish this later," I warned Dancer, forcing myself not to look out the windows into the impossibly warped non-landscape, feeling like I was hurtling through time in the Tardis, which maybe wasn't too far from the truth.

"Sorry," Dancer looked genuinely apologetic, but it wasn't his fault, not really. The wyrmlings would have come anyway, just maybe not with the intention of getting to him in such a hurry, so, um, yeah, I've changed my mind—it was his fault.

"No place to hide, little boys," cackled Dragon, the tiger coming to a halt. I stared not into his eyes, but the eyes of the creature, hoping it was held against its will and I could help free it. No such luck. It was more than willing, felt honored to carry the sage on its beautiful back.

"Who said anything about hiding? We were just discussing how best to kick your ass and your little grublings' bony bums."

"Wyrmlings! How dare you make fun of them? They are the true believers and they shall rule alongside me."

"Or they'll get blasted to bits," I snapped, having had just about enough of all this for one day. "Oh, I met your wife, she seems nice."

Dragon faltered, climbing off the shifter and studying me. Reading me easily, knowing I told the truth. "You spoke with her?" His features softened as if all they'd been through was a rough patch and he still wanted her more than anything else.

"Yeah, and she said to say fuck you."

"You disgust me!" Dragon went into an instant rage, face contorted, image morphing between one of impossible age and a beautiful vampire with venom dripping from teeth as sharp and white as the tiger's. Then to a deformed and twisted thing, all green and unholy. A zombie of sorts, and a hundred other things he'd been in his life, then back to him, a fairly old man with long hair, dressed in a style that only the truly old and out-of-date wizard could ever hope to pull off and not be ridiculed for.

"She knows who you are, that you're an abomination. And a liar. You never created the shifters, you just told them that so they'd follow you. But most of them despise you now. Everyone knows what you did to the gremlins, that you destroyed the sleeping vampires. How'd you think that went down, old man?"

Dragon was hardly even listening, so caught up in his own power, his own sense of righteousness, that it was clear he was lost to madness and well out the other side of insanity.

Wyrmlings amassed behind him in the doorway and he and the tiger moved deeper into the room to give his people space. Outside, the screams grew louder and the walls began to shake violently as those that could, used magic to try to fend off the crazed worshipers. Were there enough of us to win this fight? The place was buzzing with our people, readying for an attack somewhere, but nobody had expected to fight at Hidden HQ. So stupid, I should have seen it coming, we all should have.

Of all the places he could have come to begin his takeover plan, it made sense it would start here. The seat of power in the UK, once decimated, would send out a clear signal to other Hidden and Councils that he was a man not to be messed with.

"Oh, Delilah also said you were crap in bed," I whispered, hands cupped over my mouth as if revealing a secret. I grinned sheepishly, shrugging my shoulders at him and his wyrmlings, and that was the final straw.

Dragon roared, but rather than coming at us he shouted, "Tear them to pieces, Kali," and the tiger bunched its huge muscles, bared its teeth, and leaped right at us.

I was ready and I knew I'd beat it, but Dancer was faster. He stepped to the side as I did likewise, and his arm shot out faster than a vampire can do the shimmer dance, his blade buried to the hilt in the creature's eye, piercing the brain. It was dead, but he wasted no time and even as the creature returned to human form—a man in his fifties with dense muscle and even denser body hair—Dancer's eyes lost focus, rolled up in his head, and he was deep in the necromancer's trance.

The room was a whirlwind. Papers flew everywhere, the stench of the other side cloyed the air as the faces of the damned and the lost and the angry and the desperate pushed at the weakened divide between this world and theirs, faces contorted in the ephemeral, smoky maelstrom. Only Dancer's skill stopping them from breaking through as he sought what he wanted on their side of death.

The body of the tiger shook and the man shot upright, coughing and wheezing, eyes wild, horror-stricken and looking all kinds of disturbed—I guess what awaited him was no pleasant afterlife.

The wyrmlings crowded in. Dragon began to be shrouded in a mist of magic while Dancer moved his arms in strange ways as if controlling a puppet on a string.

And that's exactly what he was doing. As the resurrected shifter fought to break Dancer's hold, Dancer clenched pretty much everything by the looks of how rigid he went, and flung his arms forward violently.

The shifter morphed back into half tiger form, body a contorted mess of agony. Fur and skin combining in the most terrible of ways as its head widened and cracked, massive jaws protruding grossly from a terrified face.

And then it turned and leapt, guided by its one remaining eye, and as Dragon sidestepped, protected by his magic, the tiger tore into the wyrmlings with unhinged savagery. Tearing and ripping, clawing and biting its way through them until the bodies just piled up and it leapt over them to continue its savagery out in the corridor.

It didn't matter, more wyrmlings appeared after it rampaged away, and as Dancer's eyes came back into focus I knew he'd lost his hold over it. Wyrmlings poured into the room, and by the look of pure hate on some of their faces it was clear they knew Dancer, or knew of him.

"My friends, the Romanians, are not happy with Dansator here, isn't that right?" A number of men muttered angrily in a strange language and Dancer looked like he recognized a few.

Knowing we had to get away or we'd be toast, I turned my attention to the wall and, without pausing, lifted both my hands in the air, felt the power swirl around my ink, magic forming a tight ball as it rushed to a concentric circle at my navel then shot up and out through my hands in a fierce show of destruction.

The wall exploded. I grabbed Dancer and dragged him through the splintered brick. Dust and bits of body coated us as we clambered through, the force of my magic having torn a score of wyrmlings in the hallway to little more than pulp.

Everywhere was death, bodies of our own and bodies of our attackers, but we kept moving, speeding down the stairs. Almost falling over ourselves in our haste to gain room to fight and maybe figure out a way to get out of the building alive. I was so stressed I didn't even slide down the banister, and I'd really wanted to do it.

Down at the main entrance was utter carnage, making upstairs look like it was an OCD sufferer's paradise.

"We can make calls, right? To the Regular world?" I asked Dancer in a panic of jumbled thoughts and words.

"What did you say? It sounded like you asked if we can make cakes. Now isn't the time for cakes, Spark." Dancer looked at me like I was an alien creature, and as I tried to get my mind to clear he began to wobble like a weird jelly, turning into a cartoon of himself. A caricature, one dimensional, like he was as thin as a pancake and in a kids' show.

"Ugh. I asked if we can make calls?"

"Yes, of course. The building is protected by magic but everything functions like normal. Um, or it did. What's happening?" He was shaking his head, slapping the banister as though it would ground him in reality. His hand was millimeters thin, an artist's pale drawing, filled in with a single color. A waxy off-white like the rest of him, his slicked back hair in dark contrast to his face, then his suit a solid block of color.

I looked down at my body and I was similar. Jacket open, revealing not my fine red shirt but a flat shape with black circles done in marker pen for the buttons, feet brown triangles that were stuck to the floor as if I was some kind of cardboard cutout man.

Knowing this was very bad, and that it wasn't just me losing my marbles, I pulled out my phone and called the number Delilah had given me in case Dragon turned up, and he most definitely had. I gave a rushed explanation of where we were, warned her about what was happening, but she came through garbled, voice stuttering and breaking up. Then there was nothing but static.

I looked at my phone and all I was holding was a flat piece of black paper with little silver shapes where the icons would have been.

"Dragon's messed with reality to get inside the building. How do we stop this?"

"You want to go shopping? What is going on? I think Dragon's done this," said Dancer, coming to the same realization as me. "Come on, we need to find the wizards protecting our HQ."

Wyrmlings came tearing down the stairs, some of them using the banister, the lucky buggers. Dragon himself took them slow, one at a time, smiling and surrounded by magic that burned away the plush decorations on the walls while the carpet smoked beneath his feet. We ran through the lobby and into a series of open rooms that fronted the property.

I followed the flat figure of Dancer, wondering how he didn't fall over now he was made of paper and pondered how he was alive as his insides would be squished to nothing.

It was hard to remind myself it was an illusion; it seemed utterly real.

Were we in magic limbo? Destined to forever float around the no man's land of magical complexity generated by old men that kept the place secret but had clearly failed to keep a grip on the situation?

Dancer burst through a hidden door that just looked like a part of a book-lined shelf, and an old wizard turned in his chair, cream cake raised to his mouth, eyes wide in shock.

"I think you better get back to work," screeched Dancer, snatching the roughly cut out picture of the cake from the wizened old man's hand.

Back to Reality

I'm all for a little magical mayhem, but when your world turns into a bad cartoon made by amateurs it's time to get back to reality.

The wizard was shocked, but by the look on his face he knew he had been slacking off his job. He picked up a crooked staff, clutched it tight, and began mumbling.

Magic filled the room in an instant, power emanating from the tip of the polished wood, and reality coalesced.

"Thank god for that," I said, Dancer's body plumping out with a pop, expanding as though he'd been inflated by a magical pump. I was back to being me, too, which is always nice.

"No more slacking, you," warned Dancer, growling at the scared looking wizard.

"I was just taking a break," he whined, mumbling his spells between words.

"We're under attack, you can't go eating cakes. Damn, you can't get the right wizards these days."

"Look, I'll have you know—"

"Just keep the building safe. We can't deal with Dragon if we can't even be human beings. Are we tethered again?"

"Yes, of course," the wizard muttered. "There's been a disruption, someone forced their way in by the looks of it, and it sent things a bit skewy."

"I know! Just stay put, and don't mess up, or I'll dock your wages."

With that we turned and left the old man to it.

"That's how this whole place works? Some dude in a library muttering spells to keep it secret?" I'd kind of assumed it was something a little more high-tech, although what I had in mind I wasn't sure.