Page 46 of Magpies & Mayhem
“Hey, where are you going?” asked Cyrus, throwing me a concerned glance over his shoulder while trying to pay attention to the tornado of spectrals.
“To get my vampire back.”
“You should stay with the dragon,” he argued.
“Sure thing, boss.” Huck had a good grip on me, and he was a pretty sturdy little guy.I’ll bet he can give some Phantoms what-for. His tail dragged behind me as I hobbled toward the exit.
“That’s not what I meant!” Cyrus called. “You should—”
“Tell that orc team the crazy blonde girl is with you!” I hollered, cutting him off.
Pidgy was waiting for me when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, and Huck eyed him with interest. I tapped him on the snout. “Don’t eat Pidgy. Birds are friends, not food.”Voider movies have the best quotes, I thought to myself as I scanned the empty street in front of the bank. I wasn’t concerned with being stealthy, I was on a different mission. Right now, I wanted to be as obnoxious as possible. If Jordan’s team was going to have a hard time getting in the back because all the Phantom’s attention was focused there, I could try to bring some of their attention to the front.
The abandoned construction site looked promising. I removed Huck from my leg and set him on the sidewalk next to me so I could kick open a rusted gate, hoping he wouldn’t eat the empty-headed pigeon that continued to hop along behind us. Three strong kicks and it was broken, so I pushed it open and headed straight for a nearby pile of bricks. They were too large to fit between the metal bars covering the windows, but smashing them on the street reduced them to smaller chunks that I lobbed repeatedly at the second-story windows, causing Pidgy to flutter away finally.Good riddance.I’d never had the best aim, and most of them bounced off the metal bars anyway, but I did manage to crack two of the windows. “Hey, assholes!” I yelled at the front of the building. No response.
Looked like I needed to find a way to be louder if I wanted to provoke something. I stomped back into the construction site and spotted a three-foot length of rebar laying in the dirt.Now we’re talking. Rebar was great because it had a good heft to it, and it was long enough that if I needed to fight with it, I could keep someone bigger and stronger than me out of arm’s reach. But it would tear up my hands quickly, so I dug into my jacket pockets and pulled out my new leather gloves—thanks Jordan—sliding them on and snatching up the rebar along with a metal trash can lid.
Pidgy was already back on the sidewalk in front of the bank when I emerged, Huck eyeing him hungrily. “Shoo, Pidgy,” I said distractedly, waving my rebar at him while I watched the windows. I’d feel guilty if Pidgy died because my pig-headed dragon toddler ate him, and I’d be even more irritated about Huck making the connection that birds could be eaten, but right now getting Jordan out took up all my brain space. I slammed the rebar into the trash can lid repeatedly like I was playing terrible cymbals. “Hey! I want my vampire back!” I yelled, hollering at the top of my lungs at the building.
I saw movement in several second-story windows and one of the first-floor ones, people peering at me from behind old curtains and stacks of whatever. “Yeah, you!” I yelled at the one on the first floor, pointing my rebar at him. “I’m talking to you, asshole! Give me my vampire back!” I dropped the trash can lid, wound up like a batter, and slammed the rebar into the metal grate in front of the window. The thing had no give, but it made a satisfying clang and the guy in the window jumped back, disappearing from view. I made the rounds of all the first-floor windows, smacking the grates with rebar and trying to make as much noise as possible, whatever I could do to be a distraction.
When I walked past Pidgy again, he fluttered out of my way, flying up into the alcove for the big entryway to the bank. His movement triggered Huck’s prey drive, and Huck scrambled after him, shooting flames that arced up into the air and sprayed across the front doors. “Huck, no! We don’t eat Pidgy!” I yelled as he chased after him, beating his wings and actually managing to make it several feet off the ground before crashing back to the sidewalk again, shooting flames all the while.My baby was flying!I tackled him anyway. “Don’t eat birds, you dingus!”
The sound of crackling flames made me lift my head. Fire coated the solid wood front doors. Well, that would surely get their attention. The doors were sturdy and thick, and probably wouldn’t have burned easily if not for the sticky accelerant in dragon drool, but even the boards that had been nailed over the entrance began to catch as I watched.
“Hey, Pidgy, come back here,” I mumbled half-heartedly. He made good bait.
I climbed off Huck and picked him up, dropping my metal bar and trying to balance him, feeling along his throat. “What do you think, buddy? Can we get some more of that lighter fluid?” I asked him. There was a pair of lumps under his jawbone that I tried squeezing gently, and liquid shot out of his mouth, so I aimed him at the front door and sprayed until the fire had built into an inferno. Someday I’d have to figure out a way to train him to do this on command. I didn’t want to drain his glands completely, so when I was satisfied with the roaring flames, I set him down and stepped back to survey my handy work. Within seconds, the entire alcove was blackened, streaks of soot reaching up the front of the building. “Good work, Huck. Even if you were just trying to murder Pidgy…”
I gave him a quick pat on the horns, but he just blinked at me a few times, obviously confused. I grabbed the rebar again, holding it like a spear and using the end of it to ram the glass from between the metal bars on the windows. It was reinforced with some kind of film, but a few good whacks and a little elbow grease yielded some cracks that I could chip away at. I continued hammering away with the end of the bar until holes had opened up in several of the windows and I could hear shouting inside. More airflow was always good for fire, right? Mostly I just wanted to be as big of an annoyance as possible, and I wanted to getinside.
I punctured through a third window and a man appeared in front of the glass, grabbed the end of the rebar, and tried to wrench it away from me, cursing a blue streak and calling my mother all kinds of dirty names. She would have laughed. I jerked the metal out of his hands, hopefully shredding his palms in the process. “Why don’t you come out here and say that to my face, you pathetic piece of shit?” Why weren’t they coming outside?
I jumped up to grab ahold of the metal grates and hauled myself up, bracing my feet against the wall and pulling with all my might, but they wouldn’t budge. I dropped to the ground again and paced back to the front door, studying the framework and pattern of the fire as it ate through the wood. The door was solid and it would probably take a long time for the fire to ruin it completely, but the wood that had been used to board it up when the bank shut down was already coming apart. The gap between the two double doors had smoke pouring out from between them, so I focused on the spot next to the locks in the center of the doors and kicked with all my strength. It didn’t open, but I felt the wood crunch, which was satisfying, so I kicked again and again until the door finally cracked and fell open about a foot. There was something behind it blocking it from opening all the way, but the fire from the door would spread to whatever it was leaning against.
I counted to ten, trying to give it time to spread, but all I could think was that Jordan was in there somewhere, probably injured, and I wanted him out,now.Kicking the other door forced it open too, widening the opening between them to about two feet. While I was trying to figure out how I was going to get inside, Huck pushed past me and scrabbled his way through the doors.
“Ack! Oh no, you don’t!” I grabbed his tail before he could disappear. “The entire point of this is that we’re trying to get the dragons out!” He thrashed and one of the flaming boards nailed to the doors came loose, falling close enough to my face that I was forced to let go of him. He disappeared into the interior of the building. Screaming sounded from behind the door. I stood up and kicked harder and harder—grateful for the leather boots and pants Jordan had given me—putting all of my weight into it until the open door was slamming into whatever was behind it, pushing it back a little at a time. I finally made an opening big enough to fit through and could see a large desk that had been wedged against the back of the doors. One more hard shove and I was in. I picked up my rebar and headed into the darkened front room, coughing as it filled with smoke. Several large shapes jumped over a long counter, running from Huck as he spit fire at them, and disappeared through a swinging door in the back of the room.
More shouting filtered in from the exit they’d left through. We were in a small, dirty lobby area, and Huck quickly scrambled over the wooden counter, scoring large claw marks in the carved façade as he went. I followed him over, heading for the exit in the back of the room. Huck was already sniffing at the door, which had swung shut behind the men, and just as I got to it, a heavy-set guy at least a head taller than me jerked it open again. I didn’t recognize him, and he didn’t have an Enforcement uniform on, which meant he was the enemy. Huck spit fire on his feet, and I hauled back—channeling every drop of fear and anger and adrenaline into my swing—and cracked him across the head with my rebar. He dropped like a sack of rocks. “That’s going to leave a mark,” I panted.
Chapter 33
Jordan
Iopenedmyeyes,but nothing changed since there was no light in the vault. Every breath felt like sandpaper in my lungs and a belt around my rib cage, but I knew the sun must have set because it wasn’t such a fight to stay awake. I couldn’t even sleep to escape the incessant pain because they might come in to try to drag me out of the vault again. The smell of charred flesh assaulted my nose from the last time they’d tried, but I took another slow breath anyway to try to focus myself, disgusting smells be damned.
The mental fog that held me in its grip while the sun was up had finally begun to clear, so I tried to take stock of the situation. Normally, I’d already be up on my feet and ready to fight, but if I had energy enough for that, I’d have had energy enough to blow this whole place sky high once Lucas had gotten out. So, I was as much on high alert as I could be while lying in a heap against the wall, fighting off the last of the daysleep, but I didn’t have it in me to do much more than remain slumped in the back corner of the old basement level bank vault I was trapped in.
I closed my eyes as I thought about how much heat I was going to catch for breaking protocol with Lucas and coming in after the hatchlings without backup. His magic was all based in stealth and illusion, which is what made him such a good scout. We figured we could be in and out with the dragons and back to the compound with time to spare before daybreak.Mission accomplished!
My sardonic laugh turned into a rattling cough as I tried to clear some of the blood from my lungs. We hadn’t counted on the Phantoms recruiting a blood mage. This was just a temporary safe house for them—a place to hide which had been thrown together after the loss of their main bunker—so it shouldn’t have had any well-planned defenses. It was just bad luck that someone had tipped them off to my crew hunting them and that they’d had access to blood-magic hexes powerful enough to cripple vampires.
I’d fought through the daysleep multiple times already, just trying to stay alive. Listening to the Phantom’s muffled arguments about what to do with me and Lucas after they’d trapped us, and how they’d wished they’d sold the dragons to the first prospective buyer and gotten rid of them already, and then finally their increasing panic as nightfall grew closer and they knew we’d ‘awaken’ from our slumber soon. They hadn’t realized that by that point Lucas was already awake and ready to go, and when they tried their luck right before sundown, it hadn’t gone well for them.
The hatchlings shifted against each other, still curled up together in the other corner of the vault, where we’d found them. I hadn’t gotten a good look at them—since there wasn’t any light down here—but their breathing was labored and occasionally they sounded like they were shivering. I’d tried to create some warmth for them after we’d first been locked in, but once it became clear that Lucas and I couldn’t get out, and I’d need my fire magic to defend us until we could, I’d tried to reserve it for those times the Phantoms came in while we were ‘sleeping’.
They hadn’t learned their lesson the first time, or the second or third, and the fourth time resulted in the two piles of bones still smoldering next to the vault door. Luckily, Lucas was older and able to shake off the daysleep quicker, coherent enough by the last time to camouflage himself and bolt through the open door. We’d argued about it more than once. He wanted to take me with him, but I didn’t want to risk leaving the hatchlings and them being moved again. I could protect them as long as I stayed here and kept the Phantoms out of the vault, so he promised to return quickly with backup. But now I was questioning my choice to remain behind, as I choked on my own blood and tried to ignore the stinging gouges lingering on my back and shoulders.
