Page 100 of Junk Magic

“It looked like a bird,” Sebastian said, his voice unruffled but his eyes glowing slightly.

“Birds don’t get that big,” Caleb argued.

And no, they didn’t, I thought, searching the river of sky above us. Nothing got that big. Unless a jet liner had decided to wonder off its flight plan and joyride over the desert.

And then to drop down in a sudden plummet, falling on us without warning, and throwing the corridor into utter darkness—

I screamed; the father screamed; and then something else did. Loud enough to slice through the muffling effects of the acoustics and send my flesh trying to vibrate off my bones. It wasn’t an animal cry; it wasn’t human; I didn’t know what it was.

But it wasn’t bearable.

I found myself abandoning the steering wheel to clamp my hands over my ears, afraid that my head was literally going to explode. The sound was a knife to the brain, a thousand knives, whiting out my vision and making it impossible to think. And it went on and on until I tried stuffing pieces of my shield in my ears, and then layering more on top, desperate to stop that hideous noise.

Which abruptly cut out.

I came back to myself, heart pounding, vision blurring, and us sliding along a wall, throwing sparks off the stones and causing what should have been ear-splitting metallic shrieks. But I could barely hear them. Even when I shook off the makeshift earplugs, I still couldn’t, my head ringing like cathedral bells.

“Up top,” Caleb whispered, only he looked like he was shouting. And maybe he was; I couldn’t tell. But when I followed his pointing finger, I saw—

“Damn it!” I wrenched the truck to the side, which didn’t help much because the corridor wasn’t that wide.

But I managed to miss a falling mage, who was screaming and throwing everything, absolutely everything in his arsenal, on the way down. Spells and bullets ricocheted off the walls before the man hit the ground with a thump. But he’d managed only glancing blows on our protection, because he hadn’t been aiming at us.

“What the hell is going on?” Caleb yelled, just as my ears popped.

“Those bastards didn’t follow us in,” I said, staring upward. “They’re flanking us from above.”

But it looked like something had also flanked them, although I could be reading it wrong. I couldn’t see much, and didn't have time for more than glances as I was increasing our speed to try to outrun the problem. Caleb, meanwhile, had started checking out his arsenal, or what was left of it, pawing around in his coat for the little surprises that war mages secreted away for emergencies.

“What’s going on?” the father demanded, grabbing my arm. “What’s happening?”

“We thought we were trapping them—the dark mages,” I said. “But they used magical tethers to scale up the outside walls. And now they’re running along the top of the rocks, picking off our defenders—”

“And shooting at us while we’re trapped in here?” he started looking around, his face panicked.

“That’s . . . probably the plan.”

Or it had been, before something up there went wrong.

I had no idea what was happening now and my new super vision wasn’t helping. All I could see were the red outlines of moving bodies in between the rocks, where a hell of a fight seemed to be going on. I could anticipate where people were going to fall, allowing me to swerve back and forth across the corridor, avoiding them. Could even tell the difference between Were and human by their shapes.

But whatever they were fighting, I couldn’t see at all.

And then the darkness was gone, and the stars were blooming overhead again as something moved on—toward the arena.

“We have to go back!” Sebastian grabbed my shoulder, his eyes wild. “Turn around! We have to help—”

“Help how?” Caleb demanded.

“There’s a new weapon in the field! My people can’t handle that, not on top of everything else—”

“And we can? The noise that thing gave off almost popped my shield—”

“I don’t give a damn about your shield!”

“—leaving us with zero protection if we turn around—”

“Auggghhhhh!” the father screeched from the floorboard, where he’d retreated and wrapped himself around his son. “Look! They’re coming!”

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