There were so many.
“How are there so many?” I asked, staring at what still looked like a couple hundred dark mages, maybe more, silhouetted against the brilliant golden sheen of the ward.
“That thing you conjured up ate ten or so,” Carla huffed. “And stepped on another thirty or forty, I don’t know. It was exorcised with at least fifteen still sticking to its damn hide! And those old women—and what the fuck are those old women—”
“The Graeae.”
“—they killed maybe fifty more, before they ended up isolated over by the stairs—”
“Then why are there still so many?”
“Because they weren’t all in here before! They must have been afraid you’d freeze time on them or something, and had backup spread around the hotel that came running when—”
A massive explosion cut her off, and magic prickled over my arms, so strong it was almost painful. The floor vibrated beneath us, enough to send Carla stumbling to the floor beside me. And a flash exploded across my vision, so bright it whited out the room.
For a second—a wonderful, heart-gripping second—I thought the cavalry had arrived.
Then I realized the truth.
“Fall back! Fall back!” someone yelled.
But there was no time to fall back. There was a rush of wind and a clap like thunder, and I looked up to see the middle of the ward billowing in like a tattered curtain, leaving a gap big enough to fit a truck through. But a truck wasn’t using it.
An army of dark mages was.
And Armageddon arrived in an instant.
A spell hit the floor beside me, carving out a chunk of concrete the size of a wheelbarrow, and sending me rolling to the side. Another exploded just behind me, causing Carla to shriek and hit the floor again. More spells slammed through the air overhead, dug furrows out of the floor, and ricocheted off the building behind us, hitting a decorative light post and whipping it back at the break in the ward.
And at the mass of mages flooding through, right behind the barrage.
A few were tripped up by the post. More were lashed by billowing strands of the broken ward. But not enough, not close to enough. Because Fran?oise was trying to shield and also drag Rhea, and Carla was staring up in wordless horror, and I was on my hands and knees, trying to throw a spell I didn’t have the power for and only retching and seeing the world swirl around me.
And then another spell was thrown, this one too close and too fast to dodge even if I’d been able to see straight. Only I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything but sprawl there, watching the bright orange curse come boiling at me, knowing I had no way to stop it—
But someone else did.
A violently purple spell came out of nowhere, big as a beach ball, and slammed into the smaller one, sending it twisting off course and crashing against the ceiling. I was still staring at it, and at the brilliant trail of aftereffects, when a dozen more spells lit the air. Offensive red, orange, and yellow; defensive green, white, and blue; and more of those weird purple ones were suddenly blurring across my vision.
But that wasn’t the weird thing.
The weird thing is that they were going the other way.
At least half of the spells suddenly shooting around were going toward our enemies, exploding against the advancing bombardment, or capturing the spells and sending them wildly off course. Some of the war mages ended up on their asses, because it didn’t look like they’d expected much of a defense. But they were getting one.
I managed to get my head turned around, enough to see a tall, distinguished-looking old man with a paunch and a three-piece suit standing in front of Dante’s, looking like a banker. And behind him was a crowd of people who didn’t look like war mages, didn’t look like a rescue squad, didn’t look like anything except a random sample plucked off the street. There were student types with piercings, older men and women in suits, and a biker chick with pink hair.
And an elderly woman in a dress covered in cabbage roses, her bun of silver hair falling around her face and her teeth bared in hatred.
“That’s for Celia,” she choked, and sent a spell ripping through the air over my head, so hot I thought my hair was on fire.
And it finally clicked.
The reporters, down from their perch for a last stand.
But despite their courage, and despite the fact that they’d just stopped a dark mage advance cold, it was about to be their last.
Because they might know some wicked spells, but the point of war mages wasn’t just what they knew, but what they were: magical freaks whose bodies produced many times the magic of a normal human’s. So yeah, three or four dozen regular Joes might be able to hold a narrow pass for a minute or two. But the pass was about to get a whole lot wider, and they were about to get a whole lot weaker, and this wasn’t going to work.
“Where are they?” Carla screamed. “Where’s the goddamn Circle—”
“It’s only been ten minutes,” Fran?oise said, staring at me.
“Ten.” The witch gaped at her like she was speaking another language. “What do you mean, ten?”
“I ’ave been timing eet.”
“No. No, that’s wrong. That’s impossible!”
But it wasn’t impossible. I’d spent two or three minutes talking to the mage, another minute or so in Augustine’s, and maybe a couple more for the hound to run amok. And then Rhea . . .
No, it wasn’t impossible at all.
I started fumbling around in my shirt.
Things got both faster and slower after that, like someone was playing around with time. But I didn’t think it was me, since I couldn’t even manage to get the high collar of the nightgown open. Maybe because of the shrapnel from that first blast.
Pieces of it were sticking out of the hands I’d thrown up to shield myself; out of my side, which was drenched with blood; out of one of my knees. And then another spell hit nearby and I gave up and tried to crawl. The pain was excruciating, because I think I was crawling on the shrapnel, but I did it anyway. Because it was that or die, make it to the shop or die, make it soon or die, making a rhythm that thrummed in my head, in my heart, in the blood in my ears.
But not so much that I didn’t notice other things.
Like the violet spell, thrown by the girl with pink hair, which wrapped around a vicious red curse heading my way and stopped it cold, burying both of them in the floor. Or like the net spell that engulfed two mages who were running at me, and then constricted, throwing them off their feet. Or like the lasso that tripped up half a dozen more, because they hadn’t seen the thin line snaking across the floor at ankle height until it was too late.
And none of it mattered.