Black Wolf (38 page)

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?"

33

Jesse ran
blindly, not caring what direction, certain only that anywhere was
better than where Shaine and Kevin were. Not completely carelessly,
though. It would be very easy for Kevin to get one of the other
wolves here to follow his trail, and Shaine knew him much too well.
He'd survived by being able to vanish effectively; having to break
a scent trail was new, but he was sure he could do it. The scents
of the city had been overwhelming to him when he'd come back fully
wolf, and they were nonetheless familiar to him; to the Haven
wolves, who were unfamiliar with them, that background would make
it much harder to follow a single trail. He zigzagged across busy
streets, cut through a gas station and scrambled over a fence at
the back, went straight to the doors of a busy nightclub that never
checked ID and then backed along the same path until he could use
the hood of a car that was just pulling out as an alternate
route.

He slowed down
as he came to a busier street, and let himself blend in with the
others in the area, mostly pleasure-seekers. When a park offered
itself, he cut through that. He knew this park, this was the
strange one, all hills and trees and rocks with a sundial and
fountain in the middle, like no other park he knew of. Except the
one in Haven, on the lake.

That didn't
bear thinking about.

He found a
spot by the fountain, hidden by the curve of the hill, and settled
there, hugging himself.

His thoughts
were crystal-clear, now. The LSD he'd taken had worn off
completely. It had been about six times the most he'd ever
ventured, deliberately, and he didn't think much time had passed
between losing the real world and coming back to find both Shaine
and
Kevin there. Pure proof of wolf resilience; it hadn't
even been much of a trip.