It Was Always Drafty, Anyway

I had half a second to wonder what the hell was going on. I came up with nothing.

            In that half a second, Beck’s eyes flicked down towards her Text and her lips formed syllables that I instantly couldn’t recall, and only an instinctive jerk of the arm saved me.

            Light flashed from her brand, and a lump of silver-white light sparked into being in her outstretched palm. It looked alive and dangerous. I brought up a hand in a defensive position just as she spoke a third syllable, and with a shriek like tearing steel, the spell launched towards my face.

            There was a muffled whump, and my arm jerked back. I opened my clenched eyes and saw that Beck and I were wearing the same expression: utter surprise. The silver light was spinning rapidly, and inch above my left palm, little arcs of light sparking from each of the gemstones on my glove.

            So the spell-catcher worked. Cool.

            Our eyes met again, and Beck scowled, and my good nature ran out. I shoved my gloved hand towards her, hurling the gathered light directly towards her heart-shaped face, but she had already anticipated that and spun out of the way, leaping down the steps in front of my apartment. The light ripped through the air and exploded in my neighbor’s flower pot, blasting clay and soil and hydrangeas everywhere.

            “What the f**k?!” I snarled, moving to chase her, stopping just before I crossed my door because honestly, how stupid would I have to be to �"

            CRACK!

            Another bolt of light lanced through my front porch, tearing the wood to splinters, and I dove backwards into my kitchen. I glanced towards the door just in time to see a third spell shear the steps completely away from my door, ripping the landing and some of the doorframe away violently. Sawdust and splinters filled the air, along with a smell of ozone, like someone had dumped a can of beer onto a bug zapper.

            I was stuck, three floors up.

            I pulled myself to my feet, holding my hand out defensively in case another spell came my way. What was she doing? I mean, she was clearly trying to kill me, but why?

            All I could think was how unfair it was. She’d broken up with ME. I should be the one going berserk with rage, not her! Of course, neither of us should have been reacting this way, I realized, so it was possible that that wasn’t what this attack was about.

            “You’re trapped, Trick!” her voice rang out, floating in through the gigantic hole that used to be my door. “Just accept it!”

            “Like hell,” I muttered, and opened my Text. “Yayin Aayatana!” I pronounced triumphantly, and felt the jerk of the teleport spell beginning to take me away �" and then, with a sensation like being punched in the gut, I didn’t go anywhere. I distinctly experienced a sense of being …leashed.

            She’d really thought this out. I didn’t know how, but she’d blocked my ability to teleport away from my apartment.

            “What the hell are you doing?!” I shouted back, frantically pacing. My eyes fell on my bed, more specifically the collection of items lying atop it. I began to form an idea.

            “You’re not going to understand, but this is for your own good!” she yelled, almost pleading. “It’s better than the alternative! Just come out!”

            I stashed the shield ball in my pocket, kicked off my sneakers. I began lacing up my new boots as fast as I could. Goddamn shoes always come as un-wearable as possible. I pulled what felt like ten feet of paper out of the left boot while I shouted, “The alternative was that I was gonna take a f*****g nap! What is this?!”

            Words that sounded like random sputtering rang out, and I covered my head. A hideous cracking, popping, groaning sound filled the apartment. I looked around for a cause and shivered. The whole place was growing icy cold.

            Frost spread creepily up the few intact windows, and I felt a floorboard pop under my feet, the low temperature splitting the fibers in the wood.

            “That’s fucked up, Beck!” I cried, looping multiple necklaces over my head. I flipped through my Text, finally wearing as much of my gear as I could manage, shivering violently now. She was completely in control of the situation, apparently not willing to tell me why I had to die violently, and judging from the size and power of the ice spell, significantly better at the whole Reading thing than I was.

            The faucet in my sink twisted like a pretzel as the metal contracted. It was past time to be gone, but I would only have one chance to get this right and it was a stupid, senseless plan to begin with.

            “Just come out, Tyler,” she called. I peeked out a corner of a window and saw her standing in the driveway, waves of bluish, freezing light pouring from her outstretched hand. Apparently she could maintain the effect without having to Read it continuously.

            Every pulse of the light that washed over my home lowered the temperature another couple of degrees.

            “Miss Dean is going to lose her mind,” I muttered to myself, hesitating despite the urgency of the situation. I took a deep breath, glanced out the window again, and took another deep breath.

            Count down from ten, I told myself, and when you get to zero, you’re doing this, no matter what. I agreed with myself. It was an old psychological trick I’d taught myself �" commit to action before committing it. Convince myself there’s no other choice.

            “There’s a new world coming,” Beck shouted, “And you’re not going to mess it up for the rest of us!”

            I didn’t like the sound of that one bit.

            Three. Two. One.

            F**k it.

            I stepped back, aimed my hand at the wall closest to my driveway, and spat a string of meaningless letters. For a second, a shrill whine seared my eardrums, then a burst of unfocused, aimless force rushed outward from my skin.

            The freezing, brittle construction of Miss Dean’s cheap building exploded outward like scattered toothpicks, leaving a gaping, door-sized hole in the wall. I figured Beck would immediately cast an attack at my new exit, so I stepped back-

            -and the other side of the room, the side I’d retreated to, exploded with even greater force. I fell forward, peppered from behind with splinters and debris, cursing a blue streak. She’d anticipated my anticipation.

            “Clever girl,” I scowled to nobody, pulling myself up. I was hurting �" but now I had three choices of exit. The whole house shuddered menacingly. It wasn’t going to stand much longer. I had to go.

            I chose door number three.

            With a whispered incantation, I created a fireball in my right hand, then carefully holstered my Text without throwing the spell. Thank you, Beck, for teaching me that little trick. I wondered how long I could hold it.

            “Still alive?” came Beck’s now-mocking voice, and instead of answering, I stood up, sprinted the four steps to my former wall, and leaped out of the third-story apartment, already heaving the fireball towards the last place I’d seen Beck.

            It met a blob of silver-white light in midair, and the two spells annihilated each other with an earsplitting BANG. I was too busy falling forty feet to concern myself with it.

            I winced before I hit the ground, right next to my shiny new car, but my new boots worked their magic. Ninety-nine percent of the kinetic force of my fall was absorbed…

            …and redirected into the ground around my feet. The pavement around me, and under my car, cracked in an expanding radius. The lower part of the driver’s side doors crumpled, and both left tires popped loudly.

            Son of a b***h. That killed my escape plan.

            No time to feel stupid. I wheeled around to face Beck, trying to place my car between us. If it wasn’t going to drive me away, it could at least soak up a couple of spells for me.

            I spotted her, emerging from behind my neighbor’s truck. She had her hand out, which had taken on the same menacing meaning as a drawn gun, and her Text opened and propped in the crook of her elbow. She saw me and grinned.

            “You know, if this was about cleverness, I’d spare you,” she said, probably sounding very reasonable if you didn’t listen to the words. “You were always clever, clever. Resourceful. Always put yourself into terrible situations and yet, somehow, always wriggled out. Not this time.”

            She spat a word and blasted my poor car with one of those silver bolts she seemed to like. Half of the trunk ripped away, and I had to duckstep backwards to avoid being crushed as the whole thing rotated with the impact.

            “I just bought this car!” I yelled, stalling. She laughed.

            “Always with the jokes!” she said, a chill creeping into her voice. “That’s why we don’t want you around, in the new world. You don’t know how to take anything seriously.” She let out another stream of syllables, and I felt the air begin to grow cold again. I had to take my hands away from the car, my fingertips had already begun to stick to the cold steel.

            I looked into the mirror and saw her channeling that spell again, waves of freezing energy crashing against everything in an arc away from her outstretched palm. The grass began to freeze into tiny, crystalline daggers. Frantically, I looked for any way to turn the situation around… and then I saw it.

            Some kind of antenna thing, silvery bright and covered with spokes, was planted in the dirt near Beck’s feet. She was pouring energy into the freezing spell, that much was clear from the pained look on her face. She already looked a couple of pounds lighter than when she’d arrived.

            So whatever was keeping me from teleporting, it couldn’t be her Reading. It had to be some kind of external, constructed magic, and I had to believe it was that spoked gadget sticking out of the ground.

            I don’t know how I got the idea, but I whipped out my Text, flipped to a page with a sticky note I’d prepared, and gritting my teeth, pressed a hand to the searing-cold metal of my car.

            “Vesparde Madriga,” I pronounced, and the weightlessness Glyph sucked nearly all the gravity from my body �" and whatever my body was touching. The car became a five-pound heap of feathers. Counting, concentrating on numbers rather than the feeling of my fingertips crystallizing, I endured the cold until the spell had about two seconds left, and shoved.

            Some of my skin went with the car, hurtling unnaturally sideways across the driveway. Beck’s eyes widened and she dove out of the way, barely escaping the path of the ravaged automobile-

            -which abruptly weighed over a thousand pounds again, while retaining its impossible momentum. The vehicle tore into the pavement, rolled over, and crushed the antenna device on its way to crushing other, less important things. The leash was broken. I hoped.

            I saw her straighten up, saw the recognition of what I’d done cross her face, and heard the first part of her curse, before I screamed the familiar words of escape and found freedom in the nowhere of the teleportation Glyph.

*

            I landed in the storage room of The B Word, knocking over a pile of donated copies of Breaking Dawn. We had to have had at least a hundred of that book, I guess nobody liked it. I was still shivering, gasping for breath, dizzy from the amount of magic I’d just thrown around and the nightmare of nausea that was teleporting. But I was alive, and for the very immediate present, safe.

            I mean. I thought maybe I was safe. She knew I worked here, it would only be a matter of time before she came looking for me. I couldn’t stay. There was only one option, as far as avoiding places Beck knew, and that list included the Nexus.

            I couldn’t rule out the possibility that Conclave was behind this. Lee herself had originally been assigned to take me out, and with Lee in blatant rebellion, it was easy to imagine Conclave passing her assignment to someone more in line with Conclave’s way of thinking. She’d also rambled about a new world, and said ‘we’ a lot. She wasn’t acting alone.

            Conclave had money, power, and influence, whatever other people said. And I didn’t fit.

            I emerged cautiously from the back room, peering around. “Buck?”

            “Who the f**k is that?!” came Buck’s familiar, paranoid wail, and he spun up out of a chair, dropping a joint and a taco on the area rug. He blinked at me, rubbed his eyes, and grinned. “Trick!”

            “Me!” I said, trying to be cool. I didn’t want to alarm him. This wasn’t his problem. “Listen, man, I know this is a big favor to ask, and if there was any way I could avoid it I would, but… can I crash at your place? Like… right now?”

            He blinked at me a few more times, taking in my ravaged silk outfit, strapped-on assortment of gadgets, and exhausted, probably filthy face. Then he grinned.

            “Let’s roll, man.”

Reviews

[UponATyme]

I love it! So much action! Had me glued to the screen!

Be careful with Beck; her being super good at Reading has the potential to cross over into Mary-Sue territory. Make it make sense.