Page 23 of The Malevolent Eight

Cool as a midnight breeze, I complimented myself.

Hey, you come up with something wittier when you’ve just committed the foulest form of murder imaginable, only for your victim to come back– not from the dead, by the way: fromnon-existence– and ask you why her waistcoat feels too tight.

The Spellslinger brought her hands up to her chest and gave her breasts a squeeze through the tan fabric. ‘You want to hear something weird? I think you might be right.’

I left her to concern herself with her bust while I prepared myself to summon up the esoteric energies of unmaking once more. While legends and fairy-tales tell us that attempting a failed spell a second time is destined to fail again, I live in the real world. Just because a wall doesn’t come down when you hit it with a hammer, doesn’t mean a few more swings won’t get the job done.

‘Uh-uh,’ she said, wagging a finger at me. ‘You took your shot, Cade. Now it’s my turn.’

Okay, so: shield spells. Almost every form of mystical attunement affords some kind of protective magic. It’s all about figuring out how the—

The heavy heel of Corrigan’s boots announced his arrival as he leaped from the doorway of the restaurant down to the broken ground next to me. ‘Ah, shit,’ he swore. ‘Now, this is disappointing.’

‘By all that lives. . .’ Galass murmured, following close behind. ‘Cade, what did you do?’

Notice how everyone just assumesImust be the one to blame for everything having been blown to hell?

‘Don’t get your hair in a tizzy, girl,’ Corrigan told her. He gestured dismissively to the devastation. ‘This is just luminist magic.’ He spat on the ground. ‘Illusionists really piss me off. All show, no substance.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Shame, coming out next. I turned and saw her body had shortened, growing a dozen tentacles with tiny eyes of different colours at the ends which were probing the scene before her. ‘This is real.’

‘Seriously?’ Corrigan asked before turning to me. ‘What did you do, Cade?’

Aradeus and Alice joined us. Temper, perhaps wiser than the others, only peeked his furry kangaroo head out from the doorway.

‘Come one, come all,’ the Spellslinger announced. ‘There’s plenty of room for everyone.’ She pointed first to Corrigan then to a spot on the cracked ground beside her. ‘I believe this belongs to you, big man.’

I expected the sizzle of an indigo thunderbolt or a death threat or at least a rude joke. Instead, Corrigan walked right past me to take his place over one of the shadows surrounding the Spellslinger.

‘You’re dead, obviously,’ she informed him, then narrowed her eyes as if trying to recall some forgotten detail. ‘Killed by your own thunder, I think.’

‘That makes sense,’ Corrigan agreed, and then lay down on the ground atop the contorted shadow. ‘Like this?’

‘One arm across your chest and the right leg more bent,’ the Spellslinger told him. ‘And, of course. . .’ She gestured to his stomach, made a fist and then spread her fingers. ‘You know. Boom.’

‘Right, right,’ Corrigan said, his expression one of sheepish embarrassment. His left arm came up, hand shimmering with the indigo sparks that preceded one of his simpler spells.

‘Corrigan, no!’ I screamed, but he never heard me. The crack of a breach between our realm and the Tempestoral plane erupted into a deafening thunderclap. A bolt of indigo lightning tore through his torso, leaving behind a blackened, charred hole where his internal organs had been.

‘Alice next, I think,’ said the Spellslinger.

‘Stop,’ I said, widening my own breach between this world and the plane of reality whose physical laws made the destructive energies of the Tempestoral realm pale by comparison. But theclack-clackingin my mind settled almost instantly to an impotent silence.

‘Told you, it’s my turn,’ the Spellslinger reminded me.

She beckoned to Alice, who approached obediently, though her usual petulant sneer was firmly in place. ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘I end up dying by my own blade?’

‘Sorry, hon. If it makes you feel any better, you never once wavered in the Justiciar Path. It’s an honourable death.’ She held her nose. ‘Though not a particularly pleasant one.’

I tried to yell for Alice to refuse the unspoken command, but the words tumbled from my mouth as dried leaves that crumbled apart and scattered to the wind.

Alice took her place over the second shadow on the ground. As soon as she removed her whip-sword from its sheath, the silver ribbon split apart into dozens of tiny slivers. She pressed the cross-guard of the now bladeless bone hilt to her chest and squeezed, then screamed as the shards reassembled themselves inside her heart. She fell next to Corrigan, her pose a perfect match for the shadow that gave way for her.

‘I believe my death comes next,’ Aradeus said, striding past me to find his shadow among the others. ‘Corrigan and Alice tend to attack first, but I would not have allowed my other comrades to fall before me.’

The Spellslinger nodded. ‘A true swashbuckler to the very end.’

Aradeus drew his rapier, then tossed it away. ‘I doubt I would’ve died by my own blade. Rats are far too cunni—’

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