As their short debate over what to do came to an end, the blue and orange lights appeared again. There was one larger light, with four smaller ones orbiting it. Two of the smaller lights broke away from the others and flew towards them, closer to the speed of an arrow than a bullet.
The two unshielded men scrambled out of the light’s path. The two luminous points made a direct line for their car, merging together just as they impacted it. The resulting explosion blasted Paul and Nicolas who, even having fled, were concussed and sent tumbling.
Luc was closer but also barely hurt. His bubble shield absorbed enough of the blast, which seemed poorly suited to penetrate the magical shield. The sheer power of the blast made it collapse, but what little force remained splashed against Luc’s stone body, leaving small cracks in it. Luc felt a flicker of panic. The blast was clearly more effective against his stone body than the magic shield, but it was a spent force.
Like the stone of Luc’s body, the metal car proved highly susceptible to the power of the blast, being far more than superficially damaged. It had been torn open like someone with fat fingers and no coordination had tried to split a sandwich with someone by pulling it in half. It was certainly no longer driveable.
Lying in the light scrub off the side of the road where he had been thrown by the explosion, Paul yelled out in fresh pain. Nicolas scrambled to his feet as Luc went to check on him, only for a shadowy figure to appear behind Nicolas. It lashed out several times before vanishing as Nicolas echoed Paul’s exclamations.
“What’s going on?” Luc asked in a panic as he helped Paul to his feet. “This shouldn’t be possible! He’s meant to be collared!”
“What do we do?” Paul called out to Nicolas, but Nicolas had no answers. He stared at the wreckage of the car in the bloody illumination of the fiery orb. The headlights of their vehicle had died with the car.
The only answer came from a voice as cold and dark as the black winter night.
“Bleed for me.”
Luc had strong defensive powers, with his magical shield and his earth form powers. His means of attack were powerful but simple, and he generally relied on his teammates to pin down the enemy for him to finish off. His teammates had died around him, however, without his catching more than a glimpse of their attacker. There had only been the merciless voice chanting sinister incantations. Paul and Nicolas fired powers wildly into the dark to no discernible effect, until they succumbed to death.
Luc broke down as his companions ended their screaming, leaving dark carcasses of blackened flesh with the unnerving stillness of death. More lights lit up on the empty road, this time not blue and orange but the silver pinprick of stars. The night sky, hidden beyond the dark clouds of winter, had taken the form of a man. Luc remembered the stories of the starlight angel that had been on the news. For him, this would be no angel of mercy.
He didn’t fight back, merely watching the approaching figure with defiance. He wasn’t even thinking of it as the target anymore. It was more like a monster, born of the night. It moved slowly, finally appearing before him, all darkness and stars. The figure moved over Paul’s body, then over Nicolas. It reached up and pulled a suppression collar from the impenetrable dark of its hood. The collar then vanished from its hand, and it turned its attention to Luc.
“You’re going to tell me the things I want to know,” came a hard, ruthless voice.
“I don’t care if you collar and torture me,” Luc said. “Even without my powers, my body can take the pain.”
“I believe you,” the voice said.
Luc felt something crushing down on his aura like a fist squeezing an egg.
“Can your soul?” the voice asked.
Jason discovered that the advantage of holding a person’s soul in his hand was that lies and evasions could not go undetected. He didn’t feel good about executing the man in cold blood after exhausting his knowledge. Being honest with himself, though, he didn’t feel all that bad, either. The ability to negate the effects of suppression collars was a trump card for Jason’s most vulnerable moments, as his current circumstances neatly demonstrated. That secret was more valuable than a life—at least the life of a man that had kidnapped him.
Before he died, the man filled in many important details for Jason, both about why the men had come for him and about the Network. For centuries, the Network had been a series of independent secret societies and apparently old games of competitiveness and resource-hoarding continued through to the present. It was a more fractious organisation than Vermillion’s description had led him to believe, although Vermillion was an outsider and total accuracy was not to be expected.
This did not automatically mean that the local branch would be an ally, rather than an enemy. Given what the man had revealed, Jason hoped they would be. The most important thing he had learned from the Frenchman was that the Network branch in Lyon had the other outworlder in its custody. Jason hoped that the factional conflict was sufficient that the local Network would help him take the outworlder from the Lyon branch. Whatever threats he might have made to Annabeth Tilden, he knew that trying it alone was suicide.
Jason failed to learn anything else about the other outworlder; the Frenchman knew nothing about them. He suggested that their leader, Sebastian, might, but he had gone to the local Network branch for healing. The man Jason questioned suspected that the local branch would detain Sebastian to squeeze some concessions out of the French, given that they were not meant to be in the country at all.
Jason had already looted one of the bodies, retrieving the key to the collar around his neck. He had crafted some single-use keys that probably would have worked, but he wasn’t entirely confident that his sloppy, self-made product would be effective. He looted the rest, their bodies not sufficiently composed of magic to dissolve into rainbow smoke, but his power did save Jason needing to rifle through their pockets. They didn’t have much on them, but he did get both his own phone and theirs.
He allowed Colin to dispose of the three Frenchmen. It would help the familiar reconstitute the biomass expended in the fight against the trio’s leader, now in Network custody. As for the car, Gordon’s beams broke the car down into little pieces that Jason tossed away into the scrub. It was possible someone could use a GPS record to track the spot, but there was nothing left that could cause him any problems.