Hard Magic: Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles-ARC

  The thin man was concentrating on his Power, sweat beading his brow. “One moment . . .”

  Yutaka was focused on his demon. Madi stomped over to him, scowling. They should have been done by now. “This is fucking unacceptable,” he shouted as he drew the Beast from his shoulder holster. “I’ll take care of these Grimmy bastards myself.”

  He flinched as Yutaka’s brains hit him in his good eye. The right side of his partner’s head had split open like a dropped melon. Yutaka opened his mouth, like he was trying to say something, but nothing came out except a trickle of blood as he fell to the ground.

  Madi wiped his face with his coat sleeve. A skinny, grey-eyed girl was standing there, big .45 raised in one quivering hand. “You!” they said at the same time, and she cranked off several fast shots, and by the time he raised his gun, she was gone.

  “Son of a bitch!” Madi bellowed, feeling the burn of the hot slugs embedded in his chest. It was that Portagee’s brat. “You Travelin’ whore!”

  Hiroyasu was crouched low, afraid. Madi’s improved senses couldn’t pick her up. He knelt down and checked Yutaka, but half the contents of his head had already slid onto the damp grass. His partner had only been able to sustain a single kanji of vitality on his body, and that wasn’t near enough to withstand getting your skull emptied.

  He’d lost an Iron Guard. He’d lost a brother. The Chairman was gonna be pissed.

  There was a flash of movement to his side, and he raised his .50, thinking it was that little Traveler bitch coming back for more, but instead it was one of the Shadow Guard. The little man in black bowed deeply, noticing the dead Iron Guard. “Sir, I have bad news.”

  “What now?” Madi spat.

  “Our other Shadow Guard was lost to the Grimnoir. He was—”

  “Frankly, I don’t give a shit. Did you find the device or not?”

  “Not yet, Iron Guard. I will return.”

  “Wait. You’re taking me with you. You want something done right, you gotta do it yourself.” He turned to where his remaining Iron Guard was cowering. The .45 bullet lodged in his lung was pissing him off. Madi grabbed Hiroyasu by the collar and hoisted the tiny Lazarus off the ground. “Listen up. Yutaka was twice the man you were. I’m going in there myself, and there damn well better be some gawdamned zombies doing some killin’ out here or I’m gonna come back and hurt you in ways you can’t even imagine. Got it?”

  “Hai!”

  Madi dropped him on his ass, put his hand on the Shadow Guard’s shoulder, and said, “Move it. I got murdering to attend to.” The two of them Traveled, disappearing into the darkness.

  * * *

  The Greater Summoned was confused, weakened. It stumbled as Delilah punched it in the chest with a crack that could be heard across the entire peninsula. It went to one knee, and Delilah immediately stepped up onto its leg, threw herself high, and crashed her elbow down between its four eyes. Fire billowed around her, scorching her dress.

  The demon slashed at her stomach, but she was too quick, and only a thin trail of blood flew from her abdomen as she leapt back, landing on her hands and knees fifteen feet away. The demon rose, smoke billowing from wounds too numerous to count. It wobbled, disoriented, no longer being whipped on by its Summoner.

  “Hey.” Sullivan reached up and tapped it on the shoulder. The demon turned and opened its mouth to roar at the new challenge. Jake calmly drove the muzzle of the BAR in between the flaming jaws and pulled the trigger. Smoke exploded from its eye sockets, nostrils, and ear holes as the .30-06 bullets ricocheted around inside its armored skull. He wrenched the gun free, raised his left hand, and Spiked gravity sideways.

  The demon tumbled down the lawn. It rose, shaking, onto its claws and knees. Wasting no time, Delilah ran up its back, crouched between the crumpled wings and grabbed it by the horns. She surged her Power, screaming as every vein became visible in her straining arms, and wrenched the head violently back. Its neck snapped, and smoke shot like a broken steam line from its throat as flesh ripped. Delilah kept pulling, her teeth grinding together, as her Power drove her strength to Herculean levels.

  The demon’s head tore free and she lurched back. The body seemed to deflate, smoke rising and oil dripping from the stump as it sank to the ground. Delilah raised the bull head over her like a trophy and shook it. “Take that, you magic cow son of a bitch!” She threw it over her shoulder as she appeared to shrink, her Power exhausted.

  Sullivan stepped over the body. Heinrich was struggling to get up, splattered with blood and smoking oil, his grey coat in tatters, but he was grinning from ear to ear. “Damn fine work, my friends.”

  “You okay?” Sullivan shouted at Delilah, concerned. She was panting, exhausted, filthy, and injured, but still gave him a broad smile and a wink. They’d done it. They’d survived. And Sullivan felt a huge weight lift from his chest. Then a man in black appeared at Delilah’s side and drove a sword deep into her guts.

  “Jake?” Her eyes widened, one hand stretched imploringly toward Sullivan. She fell away in a flash of red as the ninja twisted and jerked the blade free. Sullivan screamed her name, bringing up the BAR, but the barrel was blocked by an open hand that hit like iron, and he was staring into the blank white eye of his older brother.

  Chapter 16

  As an eminent pioneer in the realm of high frequency currents, I congratulate you on the great success of your life’s work, but I am of the sad belief that your Peace Ray may have been inappropriately named.

  —Albert Einstein,

  Letter to Nikola Tesla

  for Tesla’s 75th Birthday, 1931

  Mar Pacifica, California

  “Been a long time, Jake,” his brother said, still blocking the rifle barrel.

  Sullivan looked past the ruined face to where Delilah was lying on her back, hands pressed against her stomach, blood leaking between her fingers. “Go to hell, Matty,” he snarled, reaching for his Power and Spiking it hard.

  Magic crashed against magic. “It’s Madi now.” His teeth gnashed together behind ruined lips as he fired his own Power. Gravity collided and ruptured around them. “Matthew was my old name. My weak name. I had to take a new one as an Iron Guard. Remember where it came from?”

  “Yeah . . . Jimmy had a hard time with t’s.” The destroyed body of the Summoned and the rubble around it fell into the sky. Delilah screamed as she was shoved across the lawn. Heinrich was heading their way when he suddenly tumbled backward, flailing, toward the house. I forgot how strong he was.

  “I got baptized in the blood of the innocent. The only decent Sullivan there’s ever been.” Madi’s tie was whipping around his face, torn back and forth, as the pull of the Earth shifted. “Our brother deserved better.”

  “You think Jimmy would want this?” Sullivan hissed as the ground underfoot began to sink. Water from the broken pipes spun weightless around them. His Power had already been used hard on the demon and he could feel it weakening.

  “He was too good and pure and dumb to know what he wanted.” Madi didn’t even seem to feel the strain. Heat was radiating from his body as dozens of kanji burned magic. “But he was strong. We all were, but we gave our lives to protect the pathetic. They used us. And how’d they thank us? You saved a thousand lives, and you come home to what? Going to prison because you tried to keep some Active kid from getting lynched?”

  “Like you would have cared.” His pulse was pounding inside his skull. It was almost like he could see the line of Power stretching from his soul to the center of the Earth, and it was flickering bad. He was almost done.

  “They didn’t even waste a Healer to fix my face.”

  “Whole unit only had a few Healers. They did just enough to keep you from dying. It’s called triage, dummy,” Jake said. Madi had too much Power. With the forces buffeting them, the first to slip would be crushed. “You were always the ugly one anyways.”

  Madi laughed. “And you were always supposed to be the smart one.” Suddenly, Madi dropped his Powe
r, but rather than being smashed by the sudden increase in pressure, his body flared in strength like a Brute as he took the hit. The dirt around them exploded outward in a shower. Sullivan staggered back, surprised. “Who’s the smart one now?” Madi asked as he slugged Sullivan in the face.

  Sullivan rocked back. The blow rattled his thickened bones. Madi kept coming, hitting him over and over and over again, moving faster than was humanly possible. It was like being worked over by a meat hammer. “See, Jake. I’m the strongest there is. I’ve got the magic of ten Actives now. What you got?” He knocked Sullivan’s return punch aside with one casual forearm.

  Sullivan ducked a hook, falling on his butt, then jerked up the BAR and fired. The magazine had mostly been expended on the Summoned, but at least five rounds struck Madi in the chest, exiting his back in gouts of meat and fabric. His brother fell, crashing hard into the ground.

  Sullivan lay there, gasping, bleeding. His head was swimming from the beating. He had just killed his own blood.

  Then Madi got up. “Ahhh . . . yeah. Felt that one.” Blood was pouring from the holes in his chest. Sullivan scrambled back as Madi strode toward him. “Like I was sayin’, I’m the strongest.” He slammed a boot into Sullivan’s chest, rolling him hard. “I can see that pissant little Healin’ spell on your chest. You think that makes you a big man or something?” He booted him again. “Shit . . . I got five of those.”

  He managed to get to his hands and knees but Madi’s next kick landed in his ribs and lifted him several feet off the ground.

  “Madi is here!” Faye shouted as she appeared in what was left of the foyer.

  “We know,” Garrett said, pointing with one bloodied hand toward where a maelstrom of water, dirt, concrete, and fog was swirling across what had been the lawn. It was terrible to behold. Somewhere inside there were the two titans, slamming each other with Powers beyond comprehension.

  Heinrich appeared, carrying Delilah’s limp form in his arms. She seemed so very small and there was blood all over the German’s coat. “Jane!” he shouted. “Help!” He set her down gently where the piano had been.

  “One second!” Jane replied. She was crouched next to Mr. Browning, who was bleeding profusely from a bullet wound to his neck. “Keep pressure on her, Heinrich.”

  “Help the girl,” Browning whispered, his teeth stained red. “I’m fine.”

  “No offense, John, but shut your yap and don’t tell me how to do my job,” Jane responded calmly, her hands glowing like molten gold.

  Lance shrugged past Faye, working the action on his Winchester. “Undead are coming. All those assholes we killed once are back up and moving this way fast.”

  Heinrich closed his eyes and let out a long string of something that Faye could only assume was profanity. “Zombies. They’ve got a damn Necro . . . a Lazarus!”

  Grandpa’s Bible teachings hadn’t been very good, but Faye didn’t remember any of the dead people who came back to life in the New Testament going insane with a desire to kill like the radio shows said this kind did. On the other hand she’d slept through a lot of masses. “I got the one with the demon. If I shoot the man with the zombies, will that make the magic stop?” she asked.

  “Nein. Undead are different,” Heinrich said as he shoved what had once been the living room curtains against Delilah’s wound. “Their spirits can’t leave their bodies. They have been chained forever.”

  “How do we stop them?” Faye asked. The same show on the radio had made it sound like you could just shoot them in the head and they’d leave you alone, but she knew that those programs were just make-believe. This was real.

  “You can’t. You just damage them until they can no longer move, but that’s difficult when they are still sane and have guns. How many, Lance?”

  “Probably twenty undead. I don’t know how many alive.”

  “More than we can handle,” Heinrich stated with grim finality. “The Lazarus will whisper to them that the only way to end the pain is to destroy us. Poor bastards don’t even realize they’re dead yet.” The way the others acted when he said that made Faye certain that the German was their expert on zombies.

  The storm of flying debris finally stopped, and everything instantly fell as gravity returned to normal. All of them turned to see who had won, and sadly all they saw was Mr. Madi kicking Mr. Sullivan across the yard like a child’s ball. Behind the two giants was a crowd of mangled bodies, running right for them.

  The dead men were shrieking and crying, bones visible, flesh hanging off in strips where the slugs had hit, eyes bulging out of shattered skulls, bullet holes fresh and puckered in drained skin, white shards sticking out of broken limbs, and somehow she knew that they could still feel it all, every terrible unending ounce of hurt, and all those dead men held her and her friends responsible. The dead lifted their guns and Faye’s insides turned to water.

  Madi grabbed Sullivan by the throat and jerked him from the ground. “Hell, Jake,” his brother said, punching him in the stomach, “I had this all built up in my head like you were gonna be a challenge. This is just like when we were kids.” Sullivan blinked through the blood and tears. He grabbed Madi by the tie, pulled him forward and rammed his elbow into the side of his head. Madi dropped him and stepped back, rubbing his face, grinning savagely. “That’s more like it.”

  Sullivan stood shakily, spit a blob of blood, and raised his fists. “You always were a bully.”

  “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Madi said. He paused as his watch spoke to him with a woman’s voice. He lifted it and listened. “Hell . . . Fun as this has been. I’m about to fry this whole area with a Peace Ray. You’re distracting me from my mission. You seen a piece of a Tesla device around here?”

  Sullivan stepped forward, put his weight into it, and swung a big right at Madi’s face. Madi dodged it so quickly that the air whistled around him. He responded by clubbing Sullivan effortlessly to the ground. “Guess not.” Sullivan gasped as a heavy boot slammed onto his spine, pinning him down. There was a popping of snaps, a creak of a leather harness, and finally a loud metallic click as a hammer was cocked.

  “So long, Jake. Any last words?”

  “Mama always liked me best,” Sullivan grunted, sputtering out a bloody laugh.

  Madi aimed the Beast at the back of Jake’s head. If he had more time, he’d let his brother know just how much this moment meant to him. He could actually feel. It was a bittersweet victory, and the old, weak, sickly part of him was screaming no, but he pushed that part back down into the deep well where he kept it chained in black poisoned waters. He pulled the trigger.

  Then there was a snap of air and a pair of grey eyes shining in the dark as Jake vanished.

  The bullet dug a .50-caliber hole in the ground. Madi looked up at the mansion, a snarl parting his ruined lips. “I’m getting sooo tired of her . . .”

  Hiroyasu’s zombies were passing him, charging blindly toward the house. The morons didn’t even realize they were dead yet. Some of them were shooting, screaming, bones sticking out their faces, or dragging their intestines behind them in long steaming trails. About damn time.

  A few of the living goons approached him cautiously, carrying their new Arisaka subguns, following the zombies. Those were the brave and stupid. The cowards in the ranks had probably bolted and run as soon as they’d realized he wasn’t about to waste any perfectly good corpses. He glared at the remaining men. “What? We’ve almost got th—” A rifle bullet hit him in the shoulder, tore through his flesh until it struck his collarbone and shattered. He grimaced as the fragments tore a dozen separate wound channels through his flesh and a chunk of bone pierced his heart. “Damn it.” Even he had his limits, and time was almost up. Toshiko was yelling at him that they needed to fire soon or risk discovery. No matter what, the Imperium couldn’t afford to be implicated. It was time to finish this.

  He followed the blood trail of the dead mob, murder in his wounded heart.

  Francis worked the bolt of his
Enfield. He’d plugged Madi square with an .06 soft-point, but the Iron Guard didn’t seem to notice. He fired the remaining rounds at the closest zombie as fast as he could work the bolt. He was an excellent shot, since Black Jack had taught him well, and he pulverized the undead body, but it just kept coming. He used his Power to reach out and pick up chunks of concrete as heavy as he could lift, and started hurling them at the undead.

  Garrett grabbed him on the shoulder, breaking his concentration right as he put a chunk of rebar through a zombie’s face. “Fall back!” he shouted in his ear. Garrett hefted a BAR and laid down fire as he walked backwards. Francis took up his empty rifle and ran.

  Faye and Sullivan popped into existence so close that he almost tripped over them. “Help me!” she cried. “He’s too big.”

  He grabbed one of Sullivan’s arms and pulled. Jesus. He weighs a ton. Garrett grabbed the other and they pulled his body further inside. The zombies would be on them in seconds.

  The Heavy stirred, his bloody face scrunched up, and then he pushed Francis away. “We got to get out of here.”

  “No kidding. Zombies!” Francis jerked his head toward the front.

  He shook his head. “Peace Ray . . . Browning! You got to get your people out of here. Madi’s gonna fire the Peace Ray at us.”

  Jane had just left him and moved to help Delilah. Browning was holding himself up by leaning on the banister, looking pale and weak. “Are you certain?”

  “Yeah. We ain’t got much time.”

  Browning nodded. “Lance, get everyone to the tunnels.”