Warping Minds & Other Misdemeanors - Annette Marie Page 0,4
door.
A nightmarish barrage of sounds assaulted my ears. Over the alarm, there were people screaming, footsteps pounding, metal clanging, and stuff breaking. To my right, the wide corridor ended in a set of nice, normal double doors. To my left, the hall bent around a sharp corner, beyond which was the epicenter of hell—billowing smoke, the orange glow of flames, bright flashes of magic.
Lienna strode to the left, Rubik’s Cube in hand. Fighting every instinct I possessed, I crept quietly behind her. She crouched, peeked around the corner, then tucked back behind the protective wall.
“Are the soles of your shoes made of rubber?” she yelled over the alarm as she spun the Rubik’s Cube, rearranging the runes that marked each square.
I looked down at the prison-issued tennis shoes I’d been handed on my arrival. “I have no idea. Why?”
A sizzling bolt of lightning leaped out of the billowing smoke and struck the fluorescent light overhead. The plastic casing shattered, raining debris on us.
“Electramage,” Lienna revealed brusquely. She poked her head around the corner again. “Let’s go.”
“Whoa there!” I yelled like the worst cowboy of all time, desperately grabbing for her jacket. I caught the hem and yanked her back.
She shrugged me off. “What?”
“I can’t go running out there like this!”
“What do you want me to do?”
My anger flared again, and I used my cuffed hands to point at her Rubik’s Cube. “Share the wealth. Load me up. Magicify me!”
Another arc of lightning lit up the hallway and left a smoking hole in the wall across from us.
“At least give me something that’ll protect me from Zeus!” I pointed at the cube again. “You can make different spells with that, right? It’s got like forty quintillion possible combinations, so there must be one that’ll make me immune to all this shit.”
“Easier said than done,” she snapped.
“Come on, Agent Shen. I’m defenseless here.”
Jaw tight, she looked at the Rubik’s Cube. “Give me a minute.”
“I’m not sure we have a minute.”
But she wasn’t listening. She twisted and spun the cube, muttering words I could barely make out over the alarm.
The deep whooshing sound of a flamethrower, accompanied by a painfully bright orange glow, cascaded down the hall. A Wilhelm scream pierced the cacophony.
Lienna spun the cube once more, then thunked it against my chest. The alarm drowned out half her shouted incantation, and a pale glow washed over the cube.
My swelling rage subsided. Calm swept over me—followed by a wave of holy shit panic as another blast of electricity assaulted the wall.
“Did it work?” she asked. “Are your emotions back to normal?”
“Uh … yeah, I think—” As her face lit up with a proud smile, disbelief scrunched my brows. “Wait, that’s what your spell did? You made me immune to the empath?”
“You asked me to—”
If my hands hadn’t been cuffed, I would’ve thrown them in the air. “What about the electricity? The hellfire? The maelstrom of death magic about to explode us into gooey mist? That’s what I wanted immunity from!”
Her scowl returned. “Magic isn’t that simple. At least you can think straight now. You should be thanking me.”
Yeah, sure. I’d thank her if I made it through this without being skewered by lightning.
Rising to her full height and setting her feet, she faced the corridor from hell. “Just stick close to me.”
With that, she leaped from behind the sheltering wall and sprinted into the melee. I took one step—then stopped. She was right. I could think straight again, and for some reason, charging after her held no appeal.
Instead, I inched to the corner and poked my head out. Two yards away, she whipped another marble artifact at a woman lit up with crackling white electricity. The electramage stumbled and fell backward, her power snuffed out—but she wasn’t the only crazed mythic in the corridor.
It looked like a WWE cage match on supernatural steroids. A dozen bodies in various stages of giving or taking an ass whooping were tangled in a mass brawl. Some were criminals freed from their cells, while others were MPD agents and employees.
An alchemist and a diviner, whom I’d last seen in the holding cell beside mine, were very non-magically punching the ever-loving shit out of each other. Nearby, a short, wiry man was waving his arms and yowling incoherently—and a whirlwind was forming in the middle of the hall. Dust and debris sucked into the growing tornado, the roar of wind rising above the shrieking