Jason’s shadow again rose up into the form of a shadow rider and Jason vanished into it, emerging from another, bringing him closer to more bikers. He reached out with a shadow arm and punched a biker in the face before snatching the man’s sawn-off shotgun. The disrupted bike crashed while Jason’s shadow arm retracted, delivering the gun to his real hand in a firing grip.
He hadn’t fired a shotgun since he was a teenager, again on his uncle’s farm, but the cut-down double-barrel wasn’t a complicated weapon. Using Shade’s superior mobility and control, he positioned himself to fire into the front wheel of one bikie then another, causing a pair of crashes before stowing the empty gun in his inventory.
After that, Jason started testing his abilities. He started with blood magic, which he knew to be effective against lesser vampires. Blood servants should, if anything, have even less resistance.
“Bleed for me.”
Jason’s guess was borne out as a bikie started convulsing, blood spraying from his mouth and nose. He lost control of his speeding bike, which toppled over into a crash. For the next, Jason tried a different spell.
“Feed me your sins.”
Jason was unsure if the vampire blood in the blood servants would count as an affliction, but suspected it might, given Vermillion’s description of the side effects. This proved to be the case as the biker’s life force left its body. It started bright red, with a darker red tint that was almost black; it drained out and into Jason’s outstretched hand. Jason sensed the bikie’s aura drop from the low end of bronze, through iron and down to normal as it did.
The holy afflictions Jason’s power left behind inflicted transcendent damage with Jason’s bronze-rank power on the suddenly normal-rank enemy. The biker's body lit up like a thermite reaction, cutting a trail of blinding light as his bike continued forward until it toppled over.
Jason didn’t restrict himself to stealing guns and flinging spells. With a biker coming up behind him, Jason activated the gliding power of his cloak, the momentum lifting him up into the air off his bike. His own bike raced ahead as the biker appeared under him. Jason extended his shadow arms to grab the handlebars, pulling himself down to land on the seat, behind the startled biker. He shoved the biker off and assumed control of the motorcycle.
Jason laughed like a madman, almost surprised the outlandish manoeuvre had worked. His bronze-ranked attributes had made it possible, the spatial awareness of his spirit and the agility of his speed attribute combining to superhuman effect.
Having cleared about a third of the bikers, Jason was momentarily clear of the rest. He took the chance to glance around and look at how well he had distracted the bikers from his uncle’s car. Most of them were now focused on him, although a handful were still in pursuit of the car.
Through the back window, he could see Vermillion, still body-blocking bullets for Taika in the driver’s seat. Jason watched as a biker drew close to the rear of the car. He sensed threads of magic emerging from the window, originating at the tips of Vermillion’s fingers.
The threads were so thin as to be invisible to the naked eye, but the magic imbued into the threads was clear to Jason. The same was clearly not true of the biker, who ignored them weaving around his arms, legs, torso, and neck. Suddenly, the threads went taut, slicing through flesh and bone like a knife through vegetables. The bloody wreck that was formerly a biker tumbled to the road in neatly cut slices.
Jason swerved around the remains on the motorcycle he had commandeered from one of the bikers. It was not his familiar, so he was forced to control it on his own as he recklessly pushed towards the closest surviving biker. He jumped up, briefly standing on the bike in a dangerous balancing act before leaping to the next biker.
His foot landed on the handlebars, which he used as a stepping stone to leap again, pushing off powerfully. One of Shade’s bike forms manoeuvred under Jason as the disrupted biker wobbled dangerously. Jason swerved in to finish the job with a backhand to the face. The biker lost control and crashed, Shade expertly avoiding being caught up in it.
“We’re about to have eyes on us,” Shade warned from Jason’s shadow. Jason looked up to spot an approaching white helicopter bearing a news network logo.
“Well, at least they can’t see my face. I’d best tone down the magic.”
The starlight glow of his cloak dimmed to black.
Annabeth Tilden was eating lunch and playing go with her wife in the comfortable private lounge in the rear of her wife’s art gallery when her phone rang. They looked at the phone on the coffee table and saw it was Anna’s deputy, Ketevan.
“At least it isn’t two in the morning, this time,” Susan said.
“Keti, what is it?” Anna answered. Her eyes went wide at the response. She borrowed her wife’s laptop to pull up a live news stream. Soon they were watching coverage of a wild, running battle between motorcyclists on a Sydney toll road.
There was a swath of leather-clad bikers on low-slung chopper-style motorcycles, many of whom fired handguns at vehicles in front of them. Most eye-catching was a man on a huge street cycle. He was wearing a hooded cloak that trailed through the air behind him in constant threat of being dragged into the back wheel of the large motorcycle.
There were flashes of gunfire, none of which fazed the dark figure, as he rapidly dispatched the bikers by means hard to make out. The news camera seemed to have a hard time keeping the man in focus, but every time he swerved into the direction of another bike, the biker crashed spectacularly.
“Dear gods,” Susan said as the footage cut to the trail of crashed cars and bikes left in the rolling battle’s wake.
Anna took a long, steeling breath, the phone still held to her head.
“I’m coming right in,” she said over the phone.
Even in a blood frenzy, the remaining bikers finally realised that their pursuit was futile. Jason likewise took off, flanked by the dark riders. He didn’t return to Hiro’s car under the gaze of the eye in the sky, but instead opened a voice chat with Vermillion.
“How are they?” Jason asked. “And you.”
“Your uncle and his man are intact, but my suit is done for,” Vermillion said sadly. “I did take quite a few bullets, though. I really need someone to eat.”
“You mean something to eat,” Jason said.
“That’s what I said.”
“Can you deliver Taika and my uncle to the cops safely?”
“Of course,” Vermillion said. “I can liaise with the Network, who I imagine are spitting blood right now. I’ll have to face the music at some point anyway, given it was blood servants that attacked us. They will be looking for an explanation from my organisation, since we’re the ones with the blood servants.”
“What will their attitude be towards me?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” Vermillion said. “You are thoroughly beyond my breadth of experience. It probably depends on how much that news helicopter saw. I’ll try and set up a meeting on neutral ground.”
“That would be good,” Jason said. “I owe you one for looking out for my uncle.”
The helicopter continued to trail Jason and the dark riders until they moved under an overpass and didn’t emerge out the other side.
15
A GOOD FRIEND AND A VERY BAD ENEMY