Balanced Chaos (The Void Series Book 3) Page 21

  She shoved those worries into the future, where they could take care of themselves, and focused on the here and now—the dragon slowly making a meal out of the building. Sam worked her way up the stairs, her legs beginning to feel like wet noodles as the muscles screamed at her to stop tormenting them.

  “You got to start working out,” she panted to herself.

  Her gift smugly agreed with her, though she suspected it was more referring to her magical abilities.

  Shut up, you! She thought as her speed decreased near the top of the first flight of stairs. Great, you’re having a conversation with your fae gift. What will the others think?

  Sam reached the second level of the building just as the screams began. A door near the middle of the long hallway burst open and an entire family of fae tumbled out, each one crying out with a variety of unique curses.

  Sam ignored the screaming family. She didn’t need to know where the dragon was, and she assumed the dragon was sticking his large maw through their window based on their frantic escape. Sam needed to know where the mage was hiding.

  Her gift gave her a gentle tug toward the next staircase at the end of the hall. Suddenly, a dozen more doors opened, releasing their inhabitants. The volume rose to an echoing din, with the screech of the dragon occasionally putting the women’s cries to shame. Sam wanted to comfort the frightened hordes, but she knew her efforts were best used putting the nightmare to rest. She pushed and shoved her way toward the staircase, no longer worrying about bowing and nodding to those who outranked her.

  Those old traditions can just bite the fattest part of my ass…she thought as she climbed the last flight of stairs. As she reached the third story, more families were poking their heads out and approaching the stairs with caution, wondering what was causing all the raucous.

  “Evacuate,” Sam ordered as loudly as she could with her oxygen-starved lungs.

  “Look here, young lady,” began the nearest man—a vampire her gift told her.

  “Evacuate or get eaten by the dragon. I don’t really give a shit what you decide,” Sam said, shoving past him and heading in the direction her gift prompted.

  “Dragon?” asked another woman over the sound of more screaming coming from the lower level.

  Before Sam could respond, a piercing shriek erupted from one of the third story apartments, followed by the conventional tumble of bodies through the front door. The apartment in question held a group of werewolves. They all raced along the hallway and stumbled down the stairs, not bothering to explain themselves.

  “Stay or leave, it’s your call,” Sam yelled over her shoulder as she followed her gift’s prompting to the last apartment on the safe side of the building.

  “What are you doing?” called the floor’s spokesperson.

  “Hopefully stopping the dragon.”

  Sam stopped short of the last apartment, noticing large chunks of glass scattered on the floor in front of the door, covering a wide swath of carpet.

  Interesting alarm system, she thought to herself. More effective if there isn’t an Armageddon going on in the building.

  “Any of you levitators?” she asked the folks still loitering in the hallway.

  As they stared at her, two more apartment doors opened, emptying their occupants with shrieks and cries. Sam noted that the doors were closer to her than the first. The dragon was working its way along the building in her direction—still sensing her location.

  “Why?” asked the spokesperson.

  “I need to move this glass so I don’t alert the bad guys…duh.”

  The petite woman next to him rose her shaking hand. Her man grabbed her hand and jerked it down.

  “Don’t even think about it, Sarah. We’re leaving. You’re not getting mixed up in this.”

  “Let me just borrow some of your powers.”

  “What do you mean borrow?” demanded the spokesman.

  “Don’t you recognize me? I’m the Void.”

  The entire group leaned away, some even taking a subconscious step back. Sam tried not to notice, but it was hard to ignore thirty people leaning in unison, as though they had moved by some cue.

  “Fine,” Sam scoffed. “Bunch of cowards.”

  Sam turned away, not wanting to see their retreat. Despite the continued screams and slamming of doors, she thought she heard the scuffing of their shoes and the thumps of their feet on the steps as she stared at the apartment door, wondering how she was going to sneak in without crunching what looked like broken antique soda pop bottles.

  Suddenly, though, she felt soft fingers slip into her hand. “Take whatever you need.”

  Sam flinched and turned to find the petite levitator standing next to her.

  “Be quick, my husband is grabbing a few things from the apartment before we escape.”

  Before the woman had a chance to wise up and run, Sam grabbed the fingers she had originally slipped into Sam’s hand. She released her gift—a little too quickly—and began to drain the woman. The levitator gasped—a mixture of fright and excitement, Sam thought. She reined in her gift, withdrawing the other woman’s power more slowly until she felt she had enough without weakening her.

  “That enough?” the woman asked, her fingers shaking within Sam’s grip.

  “Anymore and you’re husband will notice how weak you are. Thank you.”

  “You know how to use it?”

  “I’ve stolen a similar power before. I’ll be okay. Get out of here.”

  More people flooded the hallway as the dragon invaded their apartments, putting it nearly within reach of the mage’s hiding place. The woman turned and jogged back within the crowd filling the hallway. Sam pulled her gift within her and closed her eyes. She envisioned the glass pieces rising, and when she opened her eyes, she found them elevating six inches off the ground. With another deep breath held in her lungs, she shifted them away from the entryway. A few pieces fell to the ground with a soft tinkling sound, nearly lost to her ears by the cacophony of the screams coming from those still trying to escape the building. Finally, after a long minute of concentration, she shifted the last large piece of glass. A thousand microscopic pieces remained, but there was nothing she could do about them. She didn’t have enough borrowed power left, nor did she have the training to lift fibers that tiny.

  The whole exercise was a “better safe than sorry” attempt at eliminating yet another risk. Sam suspected the larger glass shards had been magically warded to alert the mage rather than just make noise.

  Sam stepped onto the tiny shards of glass, once again thankful for the sturdy boots Gallagher had insisted she wear. She gripped the door handle lightly and turned it, slipping in as silently as she could. She lowered herself to a crouch as she shut the door, making no more than a whisper of a noise. In the back of her mind, she wondered why she was trying to be so quiet. The entire building might as well have been in the middle of a professional wrestling match for all the noise the inhabitants were making, not to mention the sounds of the dragon crawling along the outside of the building. Based on the shattering of glass and the creaking of the building’s structure, Sam guessed the dragon was at the corner, working its way toward the side of the building that had been considered safe.

  She swallowed the lump in her throat. If she didn’t hurry, Mrs. Newberry would be in danger.

  Sam inched down the traditional hallway and peeked around the corner. All the furniture had been shoved into the small kitchenette, leaving space for the mage and his minions. Two vampires and a single fae, according to her gift, stood between her and the mage. Evidently they were running out of cannon fodder. Sam felt a smile as she thought of their men, either in Solitary or in the grave, put there by her and Werner. Soon they would have to give up their fight for lack of soldiers.

  Unless they have more dragons, the other half of her brain suggested.

  Before Sam could formulate a plan, the nearest vampire gave a little sniff and turned his head, reminding Sam of a dog. He gave he
r a quick glare before charging at her. Sam raised both her hands and dropped all the ties to her fae gift. Her power latched onto the vampire and drained it as it ran. Within just a few steps, the vampire dropped to the floor, on the verge of death, but Sam’s tank was full between the vampire’s power and what was left of the levitator’s fae gift.

  Sam wielded the levitator’s power and jerked a kitchen chair, sending into the space she hoped the second vampire would be. Vampires moved at epic speeds. Having moved at that speed herself when juiced up on their power, Sam knew she couldn’t fling objects where they were. She had to aim where she expected them to be.

  To her amazement, the chair collided with the vampire’s legs, sending him flipping head over heels and breaking the chair into a hundred pieces. Sam sprinted to his side at vampire speed.

  She liked the feel of the vamp power flowing through her, as though she had drunk too many energy drinks mixed with two dozen pixie sticks.

  Sam slid to a stop, scooping up a piece as she thumped into the vampire who scrambled to get up. The man flicked his arm out, striking her in the face. Sam cried out in pain, but the power of the vampire lying unconscious on the floor went straight to work, healing the damage done to her face and quickly subduing the pain in her fractured cheek.

  Sam ducked his next strike, and as she came up again she brought the piece of wood up with her, burying it in the vampire’s gut, the splinter of wood angled upward. The wood slid up under his protective ribcage, piercing the heart from underneath. The vampire gasped as it turned to dust.

  As she dusted her hands off, Sam turned, frantically looking for the fae. Just as she spotted it huddled in the kitchen among the haphazardly stacked furniture, the mage rose from his meditative posture. The mage, draped in a dark cloak, turned. Sam felt a small grin forming on her lips. The mage couldn’t be over sixteen, and female, too!

  “Okay, kid. Put the dragon away,” Sam said before she could stop herself.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The girl gave Sam a smile that could have melted her soul.

  “I’m not playing around, kid. You’ve scared enough people. You need to send that dragon away. I’ve already put two of your henchmen out of commission. You want me to kill the third one?”

  The girl looked at her last henchman and gave him the tiniest nod. Staying in his crouch he raised his hand and, before Sam could react, a jet of lightning erupted from his fingers directed at her. Instead of scorching her like normal lightning, the jets of power wrapped around her, lifting her off her feet.

  Sam jerked, trying to free herself from the grip of the electrical power sizzling against her flesh. Slowly, she watched as the electricity burned holes through her borrowed uniform. Against her skin, it hissed and crackled, but did little more damage than a severe sunburn, and that her stolen vampire powers worked to heal.

  The mage girl strolled around her, ducking under the jet of lightning, as she eyed Sam.

  “I have to admit, you are not what I expected.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  The girl shrugged her slight shoulders. “It’s okay. I’ll live.”

  Sam rolled her eyes. “Sure you will. Dare I ask what you expected?”

  “Well, considering how much they bartered to get me into the reservation to take you out, I expected more of a threat than some little girl.”

  Sam considered her words as the sizzle of the electricity began to increase in intensity, or perhaps the borrowed vampire power had drained from her reserves. It didn’t come as a surprise that someone was trying to take her out. She already knew that. There was always someone trying to kill her. It came with being a Void. The fact that someone had brought this mage in from the outside came as a surprise, though. Sam frowned down at the young girl.

  She can’t be more than fifteen, Sam thought.

  How had they smuggled her in from the outside world? Sam thought of the mommy tunnel—the fictitious channel supposedly used by the fae women who wanted to get pregnant. The story went that they used it to escape the reservation to go into the human world where they would get impregnated by a human before returning to the reservation and their waiting husband. Sam couldn’t comprehend why any woman would return if she had a way to escape, and therefore didn’t believe the tunnel existed. But now that she knew Dave wasn’t her father, she had to reconsider.

  Sam looked down at the girl, trying to hone her focus in on the danger before her. She wanted to dismiss the mage. After all, she was just a teenager—belonging more in school than in the arena, but if her enemies, whoever they were, had brought her in and she had conjured that half-dragon, then she was a threat to Sam.

  Besides, of the two of us, which one is trapped right now, Sam’s helpful brain reminded her.

  Sam suddenly realized she had left the mage unanswered for too long. “Sorry. Don’t know what to tell you. Your buyers got it wrong I guess. Why don’t you go back to the negotiating table? I’ll wait.”

  “Funny,” the girl replied, sounding older than fifteen despite her appearance. “But no amount of humor is going to save you.”

  As if on cue, the half-dragon slammed his head into the side of building, his enormous maw breaking through the window. He opened his jaws wide and yanked his head back, tearing the window into a larger hole and raining bricks and debris down onto the streets below. Even through the destruction, Sam could hear the cries of the soldiers. They had followed the dragon around the building and were still trying to draw it away from her.

  It chomped down on the edge of the opening, digging away at the hole that had been a window, its four front claws sunk into the wall and gouging deep fissures into the brick.

  “So who’re these big bads that hired you?” Sam blurted out in desperation, dragging her eyes away from the dragon and onto the little mage as she began to squirm within the grasp of the electrical mage.

  “Oh don’t worry, Void. This is sanctioned. Whoever they are, you need not worry. They won’t take any heat for your death.”

  Sam just stared at the mage, the dragon and her predicament momentarily forgotten. Had the mage really just assumed she would worry about her enemy’s future? Was she mad, or just really devoted? Or did she assume all fae genuflect before those who had hired her…

  The clan leaders, her mind whispered to her just before the dragon wrenched another portion of the wall away.

  “Keep her here until the dragon has finished his work,” she ordered before flipping the hood of her cloak up to obscure her dark red hair and exiting the small apartment.

  Sam didn’t waste any time and began draining power from the electrical fae—something she should have been doing the second the dragon appeared. The monster lifted one of its four front claws and began using it to tear away at the growing hole.

  To Sam’s astonishment, the fae stood his ground—huddled behind the pile of furniture in the kitchenette. All the same, despite her draining his power, he did not collapse under her attack. Instead, he sent a little zap of power directed at her head, momentarily stunning her.

  The dragon screeched, as though offended someone else had attacked its prey. Sam shook her head, trying to dispel the ringing in her ears as she renewed her struggles against the sizzling wires of electricity holding her suspended a foot above the ground.

  Sam glared down at the fae, trying her best to ignore the raging dragon, as she dragged more electrical power from the fae, but for some reason her gift responded sluggishly, as though the fae’s recent attack had stunned her gift more than it had her mind.

  Wake up, she screamed at her gift. It tried. She had to give her fae gift credit. She could feel it panicking inside her as it struggled against the lethargy—much like a waking nightmare, where one’s mind wakes before one’s body. Sam tried to calm her gift, allowing it to work at its own pace, but the longer it took to drain the fae, the closer the dragon got to tearing the wall from the building.

  Frantically, Sam thought through her options. Dragon abo
ut to get in. Electrical fae. Fae gift stunned. Electrical rope wrapped around my body…touching me…

  Sam focused in on the scorching bindings, directing her sluggish gift. It obeyed, moving at the pace of a snail, but moving all the same. As her gift approached the physical contact of the other fae’s gift, it perked up, as though it was now powered by electricity, too. It latched onto the electrical ropes and sucked, using the ropes like straws.

  At the same moment, a volley of gunfire erupted and the dragon wailed, turning its head back to look down on the soldiers below. It tore bricks from the wall and chucked them at the men. Sam squeezed her eyes shut, once again praying to the human gods that the dragon’s aim was as bad as her own.

  The longer Sam’s gift drained the fae, the stronger it became. Slowly, the electrical ropes weakened until suddenly she fell, collapsing on the floor. A throbbing red burn wrapped around her stomach, and she was completely out of vampire power to heal it. Sam glanced down, suddenly aware her borrowed camo had been turned into an awkward belly shirt.

  Boy, Werner’s gonna love this, she thought to herself as she jumped to her feet.

  The dragon shifted two of its dining table-sized claws onto the bottom of the hole and jerked, sending it and an enormous chunk of the wall crashing downward. Sam heard a cacophony of cries from the ground as people dodged the debris.

  Finally, with her fae gift working at full strength, she gave one last mighty heave. The other fae dropped like a rock, his neck bent at an odd angle and his blank features turned toward her, his eyes opened wide. Sam swallowed the lump in her throat as she realized he was dead—yet another fae killed at her hands.

  Sam balled her fingers into a fist, absently aware of the electricity crackling from one finger to the next. She dragged her gaze away from the dead fae in time to see the dragon rising in the air, its large wings beating in a steady rhythm despite the numerous holes from the gunshots.