Page 96 of Junk Magic

“I’m trying! Something is dragging on us!”

I looked around and discovered that he was right. The lasso spell I’d thrown earlier had attached itself to the back of the truck and been towing the two mages all over the arena. They were looking fairly battered, but they’d managed to get back to their feet and they were pissed.

Until a massive, bloody Were suddenly bounded over from the fray. I didn’t think he was one of ours, since he was missing half of his side and most of his entrails and had the odor of someone who had been dead for a while. But he’d nonetheless decided that he was hungry.

He fell on the mages, blood and flesh went flying and the tether snapped, but we were still barely moving.

“We’re still barely moving!” I yelled at Caleb.

“Yeah! ‘Cause his highness here weighs a ton!”

“Change back!” I told Sebastian as we took off.

The giant face stopped trying to gnaw through a tether long enough to snarl something at me, despite the fact that we hadn’t abandoned everyone else. Sophie had stayed behind, forming a rear guard alongside Ulmer and his wolves and some of Jen’s creatures. And just as I’d thought, the mages were redirecting their attention anyway, now that their main target had left the area.

Sebastian’s people were doing better than we were, but he didn’t seem to realize it. And I didn’t have time to point it out. Because our few seconds of a head start had most definitely evaporated.

I attached Sebastian’s tethers to the truck and left them to fend for self, while redirecting my magic into a shield. I was barely in time. A barrage of spells slammed into us a second later, landing like body blows, like a furious beating hitting all at once. Because shields feel like an extension of a mage’s skin, and mine had just been pummeled.

I dropped to one knee, breathing hard and barely conscious for a second, before I snarled and shook it off.

But I wasn’t going to last much longer if I had to protect all of us.

And then it got worse.

“What the fuck?” Caleb screamed, and Caleb is not a man who screams. But I was not about to rib him about it assuming that either of us lived through this.

Because if I’d ever seen a What the Fuck, that was it.

He swerved the truck in a large circle, since standing on the brakes was not an option with half a hundred mages on our tail. Although they were suddenly breaking off, were backing up, were falling over themselves in an effort to get away. But not because of anything we were doing.

No, that would be due to the new guys on the field, and while I had never seen anything like them, I had heard of them.

When I was a baby mage, my trainer had despaired of teaching me anything that my father hadn’t already drilled into my skull since childhood, and had set me some extra study. Or maybe he’d just wanted to get rid of me; I didn’t know. But the upshot was that I’d been allowed to shadow a bunch of mages with different specialties while the rest of the class was learning how to shield and cast basic offensive spells.

One of those, an expert on dark magic, had told me a story that I’d barely listened to at the time, because I’d thought he was just trying to scare me. If so, he’d failed. The reality, on the other hand . . .

“What the hell is that?” Caleb yelled, as our new problems crawled out of a pile of corpses—literally. They were separating dim, shadowy limbs from mangled flesh in jerky, stop-motion actions, like lizards shedding their skin. Or like spirits shedding the bodies they no longer needed, because that’s what they were.

“Shades,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Shades of the dead! We’re not the only ones with a necro on the field!”

And, in fact, there were at least five more. I spotted them the next second, because they were the only ones not fleeing the area. They were huddled together in a dark wad, muttering something and staring at their misshapen servants. Because that was what the creatures I was looking at were: disembodied spirits who had recently died, but had not yet faded from this realm.

They weren’t ghosts, not yet, because ghosts fed off the energy shed by the living, and they hadn’t had a chance to do that yet. They were souls betwixt and between, as my old instructor had put it. Subsisting off what was left of their own energy for a few hours or days, until it was depleted and they had to choose.

Stay here and scrouge up whatever crumbs of power they could, while being preyed upon by any supernatural being who ate energy and could catch them. Or move on into whatever came next. It would seem like an easy choice, but fear of the unknown could be powerful, especially when combined with resentment from unfinished business in this life.

Ghosts were nonetheless still rare, and quickly learned their way around the supernatural world. They would fight any necro who tried to control them, which was why few made the attempt. But shades were more naïve, confused, and plentiful, especially on a battleground. And powerful necros, or ones working as a group, could often bind them as slaves, forcing them to do their bidding until their energy ran out.

Or so the story went.

And it looked like the old mage had known what he was talking about. Because the mass of souls was getting bigger all the time, as more and more joined the first ones, drawn from all over the battlefield. Their power was boiling darkly over the sands as they streamed this way, like a black sun that casts no shade.

I swallowed and gripped the seat in front of me.

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