Sinister Seraphim of Mine (Overworld Chronicles Book 8) (22 page)

"You're under arrest for treason," the lead man, a beefy fellow with hair creeping up from his neckline.

A short scrawny man at his side spat on the cobblestone street and said, "Not to mention defacement of public property."

"Treason?" I laughed. "Since when is defacing a poster treason?"

"Let's get out of here," Elyssa said, the carpet already rising.

"We've got runners," the man shouted into an arcphone.

"Son of a—" Elyssa directed the carpet back down to street level as three carpets, each one bearing cloaked Arcanes whizzed overhead.

"Give it up," Hairy Beef shouted. "You're surrounded."

Chapter 20

Hairy grinned, displaying a mouthful of crooked teeth.

"You should go to a dentist," I said. "Or maybe I'll just hold you down and pull out those ugly chompers one by one."

Before I could make another quip, our carpet abruptly dodged to the side. The carpet magically bonded our feet to keep us from falling off, but my body whipsawed to the right. A bolt of yellow light crackled past my nose and left burn marks on the cobblestones.

"It's a good thing I'm watching your back," Elyssa said, and leaned forward. Our carpet, a top of the line Templar model, shot forward. The other carpets, unfortunately, appeared to be top of the line Arcane models and jetted after us.

Our carpet swooped low. Elyssa leaned left and took us down a narrow alley, took a right through a small bazaar, and swerved the carpet neatly into an alcove. Our pursuers whooshed past an instant later. We waited several seconds before Elyssa nudged the carpet into the alley. It looked clear. I heard a shout from above and looked up to see Hairy and Scrawny riding a pimped-out carpet with the head of a roaring Bengal tiger on the bottom.

The dynamic duo dove for us. Hairy aimed his staff. The badge on his lanyard flashed yellow, and a beam of lightning crackled from his staff. Elyssa dodged it easily, but shouts echoed from the alleys around us, and I knew we were about to be surrounded.

Elyssa veered left and took us down a narrow passage, which opened in a large park near the towering MagicSoft and Orange retail buildings. Hairy's carpet surged after us. I didn't want to kill anyone, but I had to put a stop to the madness. As we passed through the park, a tree gave me sudden inspiration.
A strand of Murk anchored to the carpet and the tree ought to slow them down.
I took aim and channeled.

Every molecule in a line from my chest to my arm seemed to catch fire. I cried out and dropped to my knees, clutching my arm.

"What happened?" Elyssa asked glancing back for an instant.

"I don't know," I said in a wheezing voice. I didn't have time to analyze it, either. I turned and tried to channel again. Agony splintered my concentration. My hand felt like I'd dipped it in boiling acid, though it didn't look damaged. I looked up and saw Hairy's badge glow yellow as he blasted another bolt of energy at us.

His shot missed by a wide margin, but I had to figure out what was wrong with me or we were toast. I faced forward and saw the undulating liquid glass windows of the MagicSoft building only feet away. "Watch out!" Before I could prepare myself for impact, the clear surface parted and we slipped through. I looked back. The hole closed just as a pursuing carpet tried to make it through. A tremendous thud echoed. Blood splashed across the surface.

A group of people gathered around a table next to the window screamed in unison as the deceased Arcanes slid down the window like squashed bugs.

"How did we get through?" I asked, my lips locked in a horrified grimace.

"The carpet has a liquid glass destabilizer," Elyssa said without looking back.

"Can it shoot oil out its backside too?"

More people cried out in alarm as we zipped through a wide room painted in pastel colors. Hipsters on beanbags and funky chairs gave us shocked looks as we flew past.

"Who wanted the grande choco-latte cinnamon with skim?" A young woman bearing a tray of coffee cups asked as she stepped around the corner in front of us.

Elyssa leaned left and narrowly avoided a collision that would've ruined the day for the woman and everyone looking forward to their coffee. The pane of liquid glass parted in front of us and we scooted through.

A spear of sizzling magic shot at us. I tried to throw up a shield on instinct and almost barfed as agonizing nausea paralyzed me. Heat washed across my back as the death beam barely missed its mark. Something was horribly wrong with my Seraphim magic and I had no time to figure it out. Thankfully, I could still cast Arcane spells. I pulled my compact wand from my back pocket, flicked it out to its full thirteen-inch length, and shouted, "
Hadouken
!"

A fireball the size of my head should have streaked at the pursuing carpet. Instead, flames seemed to explode in my chest.

"Son of a blue-eyed biscuit eater!" I hollered, nearly dropping my wand.

"What's wrong?" Elyssa cried over her shoulder, dodging several more blasts of energy as half a dozen more Arcanes on flying carpets converged from all sides.

"Every time I try to use magic, it hurts like a son of a bitch!"

"The interdiction zone," Elyssa said with a snarl. "Maybe that sign wasn't just a warning. What if they have some way of blocking magic?"

My thoughts flashed back to the warning sign we'd seen while entering town. "Then how in the hell are those guys using magic?" Hairy shot a solid beam of white at our tail end. As he did, I saw the glow of his badge. Another blast of magic converged on us just as Elyssa tried to dodge the first. The spell sliced the corner off our carpet. Sparks streamed from the fabric.

"We're losing aether," Elyssa said. "We've got to get out of the interdiction area."

"Their badges," I said. "That's how they're able to use magic." I gripped her shoulder. "Get me close. I'm gonna do this the old-fashioned way."

I looked right and saw an enemy carpet pacing us a street over. Elyssa saw them too and cut the corner so hard we went horizontal. The centrifugal force felt like it added another hundred pounds on my shoulders. The man on the carpet saw us at the last instant. He held up his hands and screamed as if he were in a spaceship about to collide with an asteroid. I leapt from my carpet, landed on his, and punched him in the face.

He slumped. I jerked off the lanyard with his badge, and dropped him in a dumpster behind a restaurant as we flew over it. I tried to control his carpet, but it refused to answer my commands. "I can't control the carpet."

"It's probably got a wand lock on it." She looked down at the dumpster. "And his wand is probably with him." Elyssa swung closer to my hijacked ride. I leapt back to her and placed the lanyard around my neck. "We might have enough juice to make it out of here."

"Let me give this a test."

"Go for it." She cut through another park, sending picnicking family screaming in panic as we whooshed overhead.

Drawing on my angel magic, I tried to channel Murk. I winced in anticipation of agony. A glob of murk popped from my finger and vanished in the wind, this time without the pain. "Yes!" I pumped a fist, and then took aim at Hairy and pal. I shot a strand of Murk at their carpet. It stuck to the bottom like a web. As we passed a building, I slapped the ultraviolet rope to it. Since it was stuck to the bottom of the carpet, they didn't seem to notice it. They streaked past the building. The strand stretched taut and then—it broke.

"What?" I hadn't seen that happen before. A blazing sphere hummed past my head close enough to singe my eyebrows. Scrawny leered at me. "Enough is enough." I channeled a beam of Brilliance at the carpet. A thin trickle of white singed the front end of their carpet. "Something is seriously wrong."

"Maybe those badges can't handle angel magic," Elyssa said.

I had to agree. "I'm going to hop off at the next turn."

"There are at least six carpets chasing us!" Elyssa said, eyes wide. "You can't take on that many Arcanes at once."

"I don't plan to."

Our ride shuddered. Elyssa grimaced. "We're not going to make it much farther."

"New plan," I said and nodded toward an intersection bordered by rows of tall apartment buildings. "Hook a sharp right."

She nodded. "Then what?"

"We hop off on the first balcony and carpet-jack the next fools who come by. This time, I'll steal the wands before dropping them in the garbage."

Our carpet made a wheezing noise and backfired a cloud of aether sparks just as we cut the corner.

A wide marble balcony with black iron railing loomed to the side. Elyssa and I jumped to it. Our carpet folded like a wet noodle and fluttered to the road far below. We ducked behind a bench swing and watched a flock of carpets blur past. None of the riders looked down to see our poor rug. Two more carpets whooshed overhead and stopped, hovering above the maze of buildings.

The Bengal tiger on Hairy's rug seemed to stare down at me, but its riders didn't glance over the edge. I saw a finger poke over the side and a moment later, the rug took off in that direction while the other dropped down to street level and prowled.

"Maybe we can sneak out of here on foot," Elyssa said.

"How are they able to block my magic?" I asked.

She shrugged. "I didn't realize it could be done."

"I wonder if they're using another artifact like the statues."

"Hmm." She pursed her lips and took the badge I'd stolen, turned it over in her hands. "This looks too new to be an artifact."

"No wonder Queens Gate is so empty." Even this residential street had few signs of life from what I could see. "Cyphanis and his people have all the power here."

"Look at that." Elyssa pointed down at a poster on the wall across the road from us.

The man on the poster wore a gold badge and black cloak and was in the act of leaning over and handing a delighted boy a lollipop. Large words beneath proclaimed:
The Enforcers are our friends.

"Talk about old-school propaganda," I muttered. A slight susurrus caught my ears. I pulled Elyssa back down behind the bench swing again as Hairy and Scrawny floated down over the building and hovered over the road just a few feet from the balcony.

"They didn't go far," Hairy growled.

Scrawny grunted. "I call dibs on that girl."

"The hell you do," his bearish companion said. "I saw her first."

I felt Elyssa tense. Before I could turn to look, she blurred forward. Without missing a beat, she stepped up on the balcony and leapt across to the carpet. Two precise blows. Two explosive exhalations from her targets. The two Arcanes dropped to the rug. Scrawny looked as if he was out cold while Hairy rolled, gripping his crotch, his face nearly green.

I didn't even want to think what a super-powered knee to the balls would feel like, especially at the hands of an outraged ninja Templar. Elyssa jerked Hairy's wand from his grasp and flew the carpet until it was even with the balcony. She shoved the two men off with her foot. Hairy whimpered when he landed on the hard marble.

"Let's go before I decide to drop them on the street," Elyssa said, violet eyes blazing.

I was more than ready to oblige, but I needed to know something first. Gripping Hairy by the collar of his black cloak, I held him up. "How are you blocking magic?"

The man made a whining noise and looked as if he desperately wanted to be as unconscious as his partner.

"Take a deep breath and tell me what I want to know, or I'll ask her"—I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder at Elyssa—"to knee your crotch until you're a eunuch."

His eyes widened and his face turned a shade greener. Hairy took in a deep breath. "New arctech the Exorcists brought us to test."

"The Exorcists?" I asked, feeling my own eyes widen. Using arctech and creating it were worlds apart. "They don't invent arctech."

"They do now," he wheezed. "Some new chick—"

"New what?" Elyssa said in a low threatening voice.

"New woman! New woman!" Hairy said. "Her name is Luna."

"How does it work?" Elyssa asked.

He shook his head. "I don't know."

I narrowed my eyes. "Tell me or you'll be singing falsetto for the rest of your life."

Elyssa cracked her knuckles.

"I swear I don't know!" He curled into the fetal position. "All she told us is that it does something to the aether to make you sick if you don't have a badge to filter it."

"Do I need to do anything special to make a badge work?" I asked.

"No, just wear it." His eyes flicked between me and Elyssa. "It does limit your power output though. She said it was a kink they're working on."

I sighed, gave Hairy one last look of disgust, and punched his lights out. He finally got the unconsciousness he so desperately wanted. I took his badge, leaned over and took his partner's as well. "Let's go."

Elyssa hopped on the carpet in front of me. "Don't have to tell me twice."

We backtracked several streets and cut through several alleys before making a beeline to the edge of the interdiction zone. When we crossed the border, I felt a slight easing of tension in my chest. Whatever this new device was doing to the aether, it wasn't overtly detectable.

When we got back to the mansion, we found Shelton and Bella playing Scrabble.

"You guys eat everything on the menu?" Shelton asked, grimacing as Bella spelled
Xenophobia
down the side of the board.

"Things are worse than we thought," I said.

Bella looked up from the board, a smile fading from her face. "What happened?"

"Cyphanis Rax and his merry band of Enforcers," Elyssa said. "Queens Gate is under lockdown and magical interdiction."

"Interdiction?" Shelton looked flummoxed. "What the hell do you mean by that?"

"The Exorcists have a new leader," I said. "Someone named Luna who apparently created a device that makes you sick if you try to cast spells or channel without one of these." I held up one of the badges.

He stood and took the badge, turning it over in his hand. "We are in deep doo doo."

I looked around the seemingly empty mansion. "Where is everyone?"