32

Shaine prowled the streets, all senses alert while his mind mulled over possible sources of money for rent. His luck was no longer as good as it had once been. He knew why: his lack of purpose in life without Jesse to watch over was eroding the carefully-erected self-control that made it possible for him to function in what was, to him, an alien environment. If Jess only knew what it had cost him, to provoke that fight to drive Jess away to Haven to stay...

Any cost was worth it. Jesse was there and had the life he deserved, finally. However lonely that left Shaine. There seemed little point now, no more reason to try.

Yet he continued to fight for survival.

A well-dressed man of about forty caught his eye. Shaine contemplated walking up to him and asking for money, backing it with just enough charm to make it sound like a perfectly reasonable request... he'd gotten anywhere from ten dollars to fifty by doing that on other occasions. He took a few steps in that direction, planning out not only words but inflections and tone as he moved.

A familiar sensation tingled up Shaine's spine.

Suddenly losing interest in money, he left the area swiftly, let himself disappear into the darkness of a back alley. What was going on? Jesse was supposed to be in Haven!

It took time, too much time. He couldn't track Jesse properly, there was something interfering, making him lose his focus repeatedly. His frustration increased, held in check only by firm self-discipline; it was taking so long...

The feeling of the interference was familiar, nagging at him. Something beyond the fact that Jesse was full-healed and aware of himself now.

He found a name for it, abruptly, and that name was elvenmage.

He all but stumbled across Jesse with no warning. Jesse, in a back alley, huddled in a corner, eyes closed, breathing alarmingly fast and shallow.

Jesse, with an elf coming unhurriedly closer.

With no hesitation, Shaine stepped between.

“Get out of my way,” the elf commanded.

Shaine folded his arms across his chest, feet spread for balance. “No.”

The elf blinked in surprise. “What? I told you...”

With a powerful magical suggestion behind it, at that. “I heard you. I'm not moving. Leave him alone.”

“I promise you, I'm not someone you want to mess with.” Light shimmered around the elf, blurring details, making it hard to look at him directly; Shaine focused a little to one side. Who needed to actually see, anyway?

“I'm supposed to be impressed? Go ahead, take your best shot, elf.”

The light gathered around the mage's hand, and he threw it.

Shaine held quite still, forcing himself to stay calm, but only with difficulty. Gazing at the ball of fire intently, he called the moisture of the air around it tightly, suffocating it and dampening it. Before it touched him, it vanished.

“That was your best shot?”

The elvenmage backed off a pace, warily, the halo of light fading away to only a faint outline. Shaine grinned to himself. Yes, the elf would be uneasy: to all appearances, it was an entirely ungifted human facing him so coolly. No mage survived long if he were foolhardy enough to challenge something he had no way to judge.

Cautiously, the elf gestured, and coloured light swirled around Shaine, coalescing into a dome-shaped cage.

Shaine shrugged, offhandedly. “Yeah, so? What next?”

To judge by the elvenmage's growing annoyance, he was used to his theatrics provoking more of a reaction. Another gesture, and the cage began to constrict.

Shaine sighed, and closed his eyes briefly, reaching inside. Using anything but the most basic of his gifts was hard, after so long and after having locked everything down as ruthlessly and absolutely as possible. He could do it, though, he just had to find the place inside where the magic came from, and...

The elvenmage jumped backwards, alarmed, as the light-cage exploded outwards like shattering glass. Shaine dropped to a crouch, one arm up to protect himself from the shower. The elvenmage threw up a shield of fire around himself, just long enough for the deadly rain to pass.

“What are you?” he spat.

Shaine straightened and smiled. “Wouldn't you like to know.”

“Whatever you are, you won't have a chance in a real fight against me.”

“How sure of that are you? Sure enough to bet your life on it?” He reached upwards into the few clouds he could sense above, coaxing them together, summoning more. He was going to be exhausted for days after this. Still, if he could stand off this elvenmage...

The elf gestured, and light formed into a long fiery whip. He swung it menacingly back and forth a few times, as though testing its balance.

Though not at all sure he could counter that, and very sure that he didn't want even brief contact with it, Shaine simply waited, still with that smile calculated to irritate.

The elvenmage swung at him, with the full force of his anger behind it. If that thing wrapped around him as intended, the damage it did would not be at all pretty...

Please let this work!

The bright lash whipped through where Shaine was standing without slowing. The elvenmage, off-balance, spun in a full circle and dropped to one knee. The whip disappeared.

Shaine laughed mockingly. “You wanted to try.” No way was he going to let the elf see what phasing had taken out of him, or how frighteningly close he'd come to not being able to reverse it, but he resolved not to do that again. Ever.

The elvenmage got to his feet, expression dangerous. He flung out a hand, and a beam of cold white light shot from his palm towards Shaine.

With no time to think, old training took over. A mirror of clear ice spun out of the air's moisture, caught the light-beam, and bounced it back. At an angle: it hit a nearby building instead, and lanced straight through the brick.

Just over the head of another, much younger, elvenmage who had just stepped through a gate of light; he ducked, reflexively.

The first mage frowned. “You again.”

The newcomer placed himself between the first mage, and Shaine and Jesse. “Leave them alone. I'm not scared to fight to protect my friends. You know that already. Are we really going to have to go through this a second time?”

The second mage had to be Kevin. Shaine remembered Jesse's vivid descriptions of him, and who else would show up from nowhere to protect him? Shaine decided to let him handle it; he retreated to crouch beside Jesse, ready to defend them both if necessary with whatever he had left. He glanced up at the sky, at the ominous clouds darkening the stars. The air was getting heavy with static; that should mess up magic of any kind a little.

“I warned you I'd be ready for you next time,” the other mage said coldly. “You won't be pulling dirty tricks again.” Light swirled and thickened around him; Shaine looked away, but Kevin didn't appear to have any trouble with it. Light gathered around Kevin, too, but the shield before him was visibly more fragile, and only a semi-circle, not a full ring.

Wait a minute. There's not very much light in this alley. Where the hell is that mage getting the power to do this stuff?

A closer look at the other mage's shields answered that question, but he didn't like it at all. The shields were dark heavy crimson and syrupy saffron, with threads twining through it of no colour meant for the mortal plane: demon-power laced into his own, tainting even his birthright gifts. Kevin's held only the pure gold of the sun at dawn, the white of noon, the red of sunset.

Shit. This is not good.

Just as well for Kevin he has an ally, too, even if he doesn't know it.

And so help me, nobody who deals with demons is getting anywhere near Jess while I'm alive!

The other mage gestured, and sent a cascade of... fireballs? No, these weren't balls, they were flat disks, and they were coming edge-on, which struck Shaine as a bad sign.

Kevin muttered something that sounded a lot like, “Oh bloody hell,” and raised both hands, palm out. Most of the cascade shattered against his shields; the rest spun out of control and flung themselves uselessly at the walls around them. Kevin's shields trembled; Shaine couldn't see his expression, but he could see the tension in his posture—and the other mage had followed the attack, closing the distance between them. Before Kevin had time to strengthen his shields, the other mage shaped a sword made all of fire and swung it in an arc that, by rights, should have removed Kevin's head from his shoulders; Kevin's shields winked out, reappeared much smaller and much more condensed, and deflected the sword away even as Kevin ducked. He flung back a handful of blue-white fire that wrapped itself around the fire-sword and ate into it; the other mage slashed at him again, kept battering away at the weakening shield with the sword, and was coming alarmingly close when the sword finally disintegrated in his hands. Shaine saw Kevin release a breath he'd been holding.

“This doesn't make sense,” Kevin said, frustrated and confused. “There's nowhere you can be getting that kind of power from! You certainly didn't have it last time!”

Some mage: he couldn't even recognize what was right in front of him. “Demons,” Shaine said. “He doesn't need a light source anymore. You must've caught him by surprise before.”

The other mage glanced at Shaine, clearly surprised that a mere human knew that, but shrugged. “And?”

“Oh, wonderful,” Kevin sighed. “Bane's going to kill me.”

“Give me the wolf and the human who challenged me and there will be no fight.” Somehow, Shaine didn't believe him.

Kevin spread his feet for balance, took a deep breath, and raised both hands again. “Right, like I'm going to let you near my friends so you can give them to a demon, or something. Hardly.” Shaine wasn't sure whether to call it determination, stubbornness, or sheer bravado, but whichever it was, he had to give Kevin points for it, considering that he could have escaped easily to somewhere safe.

The demon-mage grinned. “I had a feeling you'd say that.” He threw another laser-like light-bolt at Kevin, who reflexively shielded against it, even though there was no chance it would hold. Hastily, Shaine cast a mirror just outside Kevin's shield. The light-ray hit the mirror, deflected back. A second mirror turned it directly at its source.

It scored glancingly across the other mage's chest, and vanished into another wall.

Kevin did a double-take, and shot Shaine a measuring glance, but had no time for more. His opponent let out a howl of pain and rage, and threw a flurry of ordinary fire-daggers at him in quick succession. The static in the air crackled, connecting with the mage-fire, making sparks dance around the daggers. Shaine frowned at them, calling together every trace of moisture he could reach from the air around them, from the garbage bins ten feet away, anything he could find, to wrap around the daggers before they could reach Kevin. Even had Kevin been paying attention, which he wasn't since he was too busy doing something else, what remained of his shields couldn't have stopped them. It wasn't enough; he had to reach upwards, into the clouds, for more. It gave the static within them a path downwards too, which was at this point likely to hamper Kevin more than the other mage, but there was no help for that.

The ambient light of the city, intertwined with what Shaine was alarmingly certain was the last of Kevin's personal reserves, gathered and grew brighter, some twenty feet above the ground. Brilliant wings spread wide, beat once, twice, and the phoenix dived at the other mage, the static striking even more sparks around each fiery feather, talons that glinted hard and cold as diamond extended as it stooped.

Even as the phoenix formed, the other mage gestured imperiously with both arms, frowning in concentration, and a kind of storm coalesced. Shaine had no name for it, but he doubted being touched by any of those intense streaks of coloured light would be healthy even had it not been created with demon-power.

And the channel Shaine had formed, directly from the clouds above to the battlefield below, remained in place.

Phoenix and storm met fifteen feet above, and joined with the improbably heavy static charge in the air.

Beams of light exploded in all directions, although they seemed to do little true damage; the air glowed with something strongly reminiscent of the aurora borealis, that certainly didn't belong in a city alley; swirling shapes of coloured fire spun randomly in complete disregard for gravity; raw power made the very air shiver and shimmer. Shaine ducked, covering Jesse with his own body, shielding as strongly as he could with all the power he had left. As an afterthought, he rerouted some into a shield around Kevin, aware of Kevin also, somehow, finding enough reserves to shield all three of them.

It seemed to take forever for the storm to calm.

Shaine raised his head cautiously, surveying the alley.

Kevin was on his knees, head down, as small a target as possible.

The other elvenmage was gone without a trace.

“You okay?” Kevin asked hoarsely, stretching carefully. His eyes weren't really tracking much, Shaine noticed, though he'd had no perceptible trouble during the fight. Must be something to do with being an elf.

Who's asking who that? Shaine thought ironically, straightening. “Yeah, I'm all right. You?”

“I think so. Blessed gods, I've never seen anything like that happen before. Where'd the natural storm go?”

What natural storm? “Got me, you're the mage. What brought you here?”

“A hunch that Jess was in danger.”

“Really. And what's Jess doing here?”

“Uh, that's kinda hard to explain...”

“Speaking of Jess...” Shaine turned around, and swore. “Where the hell did he disappear to now?”

Kevin echoed the curse, and went quite still—presumably attempting a search his own way. Shaine did likewise, and wasn't surprised that he hit only a blank. Whatever Jess had been high on had to have left him briefly open to being tracked; since that had apparently worn off, natural defences were back in force.

“I'm dead,” Kevin groaned. “I lost him. And I haven't even got the strength left to find him at close range.”

“We might still be able to track him,” Shaine said. He doubted it, but it was worth a try. “He's only had like two minutes.”

“Where do we start? And now that I can concentrate, a friend of mine is going to be here as fast as my cousin can build him a gate, and he can probably help with that, which might distract him temporarily from ripping my hide off. And, before I go into shock and collapse into a useless heap, is there somewhere I can grab something to eat while we look?”

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