Diana sniffed the air. “Wolves.”
“Go fight,” Mordred said. “I’ll figure out how to get down to the levels below. There has to be more entrances if they can get up here.”
Gunfire could be heard from the main club area, and two wolves burst into the hallway from the door at the far end. They eyed Mordred, Diana, and Fiona before howling and charging.
Diana had changed into her werebear form before she took a step, charging into one of the werewolves, taking the massive beast off its feet and smashing it into the wall. Fiona removed a pistol from a holster and fired at the second wolf, who avoided the bullets with ease. She drew her rapier and moved to confront it, parrying the werewolf’s claw strikes and catching it with a vicious cut across one eye, which burned as the silver content in the sword went to work.
A third werewolf appeared at the end of the hallway. His appearance caused Mordred to sigh, and he walked past Fiona and her opponent. The new werewolf growled and walked toward Mordred, who shot a two-foot-long blade of ice from his palm, which the werewolf smashed with a swipe of one huge paw.
Mordred cracked his knuckles and threw two more blades, which the werewolf destroyed once again as he got closer and closer. Mordred smiled and waited until the werewolf was close enough before unleashing a torrent of water from his hands. It crashed into the werewolf, who couldn’t avoid it and was thrown back several feet.
Mordred moved his fingers slightly, and the water froze in place, pinning the werewolf’s legs to the floor. He roared in anger and clawed at the ice, ripping off huge chunks that, with no magic controlling them, quickly vanished. Mordred sprinted forward, wrapping thick ice around his fist and driving it into the side of the werewolf’s head.
The werewolf swiped back at Mordred, who blocked the blow with a shield of air and quickly countered by slamming a blade of ice into the werewolf’s leg, pinning him to the ground. Mordred dodged a swipe and pinned the werewolf’s arm to the wall with another blade of ice.
“Does that not hurt?” Mordred asked.
“Gut you,” the werewolf said, frothing at the mouth.
“You’re on something. Some sort of suppressant to stop pain? It’ll wear off soon—that’s one of the problems with having a healing ability as fast as yours. Also, those ice blades will stay there until I remove the magic, so you’re not going anywhere.” Mordred stepped around the werewolf, keeping his distance, and saw that both Fiona and Diana had killed their werewolves.
“You’re all alone,” Mordred said, and the werewolf turned as best as it could to look at him. “I’m going to be honest with you.” Mordred raised his arm, and red glyphs ignited across his arms, moving over the blue ones for his water elemental magic. “This is mind magic. Do you know what that does?”
The werewolf said nothing but continued to stare at Mordred’s arm.
“Right, well, basically it means I can turn your brain into a big puddle of mush. I can reach in there, grab everything I can, and shake it like there’s no tomorrow, or I could . . .” Mordred paused, thinking for a second, before a smile spread across his lips and he clapped his hands together. “I’m going to make you think you’re a poodle. No, a miniature poodle—that’s perfect. I’ve never done this before, but if it works you’re going to look lovely at next year’s Crufts dog show. And if it doesn’t work, you’ll end up someone who really likes drooling while staring into space.”
“What do you want?” the werewolf asked as Diana leaned up against the wall beside it, still in her werebear beast form.
“How’d you get up here?”
“There’s a hidden door right inside the coatroom. There’s a stairwell behind it.”
“How many down there?”
“Four or five.”
“Viktor?”
The werewolf nodded.
“What’s your kill number?”
The werewolf paused, glancing between the three people watching him. “I forget.”
“Bullshit. How many have you killed?”
“Forty-one.”
Mordred drew the silver blade and slit the werewolf’s throat in one smooth motion. “And that’s where it ends.”
The sounds of more gunfire came through the nearby door. “We need to go,” Mordred said.
“Can you really do that?” Fiona asked, her anxiety still evident, but joined with more than a little fear. “Melt someone’s brain?”
Mordred shook his head. “My mind magic is purely defensive. No telepathy, or telekinesis, or anything else that allows me to manipulate others. It’s purely so that no one can mess with my mind or make me do anything I don’t want to do. Magic isn’t exactly an easy thing to research, but sometimes I think that the omega magic allows you to only do the things you really need to be able to do at the time of its activation.”
The three ran back into the main area of the club, where several more werewolves were dead on the floor, with a couple more seriously wounded. Polina’s men had taken casualties, too, with more than one unmoving on the floor.
Morgan and several of her golems threw two werewolves around as if they were bags of sugar while Nabu drove a sword into the heart of a werewolf, pulling the blade out and using it to remove the hand of another nearby attacker.
“We’ve got this,” Diana said. “Go find Viktor.”
“I’m coming with you,” Fiona said.
“No, you can’t,” Mordred told her. “You’re too close to this. Too emotional.”
“My husband might be down there,” she snapped.
“And if you go down there like this, what happens to you?” Mordred asked, keeping calm.
Fiona got in Mordred’s face. “He’s my husband.”
“And that’s why you’re staying here.”
“Mordred’s right,” Diana said. “You can’t go down there. You won’t be helping anyone. If Alan is there, Mordred will find him.”
“If he’s there, you’d best get him out alive,” Fiona said.
Mordred ignored the threat in her voice and ran across the dance floor, using his air magic to fling one of the werewolves aside so that he could leap over the counter of the cloakroom and through the open door inside it. He took the stairs two at a time until he reached a door several dozen feet beneath the club area. He blasted the door apart with a gust of air magic, stepping through the remains and into a gray corridor that led off to the right and left. There were several doors down either side, and Mordred cursed the fact that it was going to take him forever to search everything.
He walked to the nearest door—a white door identical to all the others Mordred could see on the floor—and found it unlocked. He pushed it open and discovered three doors inside the dark-gray-tiled room. He went to each door in turn and found that two of them led into new, albeit identical, rooms, while the third door took him out into the opposite side of the hallway from where he’d started.
“They made a maze,” Mordred said to himself. “Great, they’re psychotic werewolf architects.”