Page 106 of Junk Magic

Disruptors didn’t send body parts flying off to attach to anything in the nearby area, like dislocators. They did something worse. They sent DNA, swapping it for whatever or whoever’s was handy.

The choice was arbitrary, and the spell, unsurprisingly considering where we were, had glommed onto a nearby piece of rock. Leaving the wolves surging around the new, living statue as carelessly as if he’d been just another piece of stone. While, on a nearby piece of rock, a smear of color bloomed.

I looked away, swallowing hard.

The Corps didn’t use the awful things. Dislocators were permitted because they simply killed—most of the time, anyway. And were useful for taking on many opponents at once, or scaring a large group away once they realized what you had.

Disruptors were different. They were designed to leave you alive, only as a terrible, twisted version of yourself that would intimidate the hell out of anyone who saw you. The dark had developed them some time ago, but while the Corps studied them, we didn’t use them.

But we could still be affected by them.

And, for the first time today, I felt true terror creeping over me.

“Didn’t think those worked on non-living things,” Caleb said shakily, as if feeling the same way.

“Well, now you know.” I gripped the steering wheel hard enough to bruise.

I wanted out of here.

I wanted out now.

But that was a little hard to imagine, after half a dozen mages threw tethers onto the back of the truck, trying to bring us down. We whipped around a corner and they whipped with us, determined to get their prize. Or maybe, seeing their desperate faces, they were just trying to hitch a ride out of here.

I wasn’t sure which, but I wasn’t having it.

They’d put levitation spells on something under their boots, allowing them to surf along in our wake. But that didn’t really help, since the hall was just wide enough to allow me to sling them back and forth across the width of it. They went crashing into walls, smashing into ridges, and in one case, dragging face first over the stony ground, when whatever he was using as a platform shot out from under him. He was smart enough to let go before the rest of his flesh was scraped off, but the others weren’t. They doggedly held on, even when they started to get dangerously close to the fulminare’s electric field.

Allowing Caleb to get a tether of his own around their ropy spells, pull them together, and jerk.

That ended that, I thought, as the electrified mages fell away, smoking, onto the corridor floor. But they had accomplished one very important thing in the process. They’d slowed us down.

Not by a lot, but by enough that a spell from above hit the engine hard enough to flip us. That didn’t make much of a difference to our momentum, since the engine wasn’t propelling us anyway. But it left us hanging upside down and clinging to our seats and whatever else we could find for dear life. Meanwhile, the truck started careening back the way we’d come.

Right over the heads of a lot of enraged mages.

Well, some were enraged. Others ducked the lightning storm, then seemed relieved to have a way out of the trap they’d found themselves in. They made a break for the open corridor ahead as soon as we were out of the way, thus splitting the ranks, with half continuing to pelt down the hallway and the rest bunching up to lob spells at the guy they still believed to be Sebastian.

Who used his considerable bulk to abruptly flip the truck right-side up again, before a dozen spells hit the undercarriage hotly enough to melt parts of it.

That saved our lives, but also unbalanced the truck, which started slinging around the small space in a circle, shedding sparks and electricity onto the crowd below.

I fought with the sluggish steering to get us evened out, while acid from a potion bomb ate away at the floorboards under my feet, turning them to metal lace. I also tried to keep an eye on the battle, although that was difficult through the potion fumes seeping up from below and smoke billowing out of the merrily burning fire that had been my engine. And which finally decided to fall out, prompting a new barrage from those below.

Several more spells tore at us from overhead, and they were better aimed, because they weren’t having to deal with dripping potion’s residue, smoke and a renewed attack from the pack of Weres, who had just caught up to their prey. The bolts barely missed the madly circling truck, and that was only because they’d been fired at an angle and on the run. The mages who had been pelting along the rocks above had taken a moment to reorient themselves and were now headed back this way.

With a vengeance.

I managed to slam a hex into one, knocking him into the melee below. But it hurt me almost as much as it did him, with the sprained-muscle feeling of bottomed-out magic echoing through my body like a struck funny bone. I wasn’t going to be throwing too many more of those.

Which was a problem, since another blast took that moment to hit the wall beside us, bombarding the truck with a hurricane of shards that mimicked the sound of a machine gun. And felt like one, too, when shrapnel peppered my thigh through the missing door of the truck, and a jagged piece bit into my side, leaving me feeling like I’d been shanked.

But I’d managed to get us straightened out again and we rocketed ahead. We were moving in the wrong direction, but right now, I’d take it. Right now, I’d take anything that wasn’t here.

Because the mages up top had almost caught up, as indicated by a succession of explosions, creating craters in the walls and floor all around us. Rock flew, spells rained, people screamed. And it was so fast and frantic that I couldn’t stop trying to dodge long enough even to attempt to fire back.

Caleb, on the other hand, had acquired a new gun. How I didn’t know, but I guessed that he’d used his tether like a whip to snatch it off a mage. He was firing back, and he dropped at least one of the bastards.

But that left plenty more, and we weren’t likely to get any help from below.

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