Chapter 6

Jill pressed herself against me, and we kissed for a long time before finally coming up for air. We were still holding each other and hadn’t moved when suddenly there was the

BOOM

of a huge explosion, and we were knocked from our feet by the sound of it.

It was a good number of seconds before we attempted to get to our feet. There was a loud ringing in our ears, and we couldn’t hear anything else. Once upright, I grabbed Jill to keep both of us on our feet, shook my head to clear it somewhat, and checked my wards around the house and the shell. To my relief, they were both still at full strength, so there had been little or no damage to the house other than the noise of the explosion.

From the volume of the noise, previous experience, and the fact that we had been knocked down by the sound wave, I presumed that whoever did this had used several hundred pounds of explosive, perhaps as much as four or five hundred pounds of explosive. They had definitely wanted to destroy Jill’s house and those in it. The only thing that had saved it and us was the shell and the wards around the house.

Jill had been staring at me with a questioning expression on her face while I did my checking. She obviously wanted to know what we should do. Since she couldn’t hear any better than I could presently, I pointed outside. We needed to see what damage the explosion had caused, and to try to catch any of those who had caused this, if they were still around. Secondly, we could help any of her neighbors who were in trouble. I took her hand in mine, and we walked out of the house and across her lawn to the part of the shell nearest the street. The street, curbing, and a bit of sidewalk at that point had disappeared and been replaced by a large deep hole where the bomb and its carrier had exploded.

I quickly realized that the shell had acted like tamping to the explosive, being too hard for it to penetrate, and preventing it from going forward. Instead it had reflected the force of the explosion, and its energy, back the way the vehicle had come. But the shell being a sphere with a curved surface in all directions had not reflected all of the energy straight back. It had only been directed straight back at and close to the actual point where the explosion was centered. The remainder of the energy had been reflected at an angle depending on how and where it hit the surface of the sphere. Because the sphere has a radius of fifty feet, it curved very gently so that most of the energy had been directed across the street. This was the reason that Mrs. Black’s house and the house on the other side of Jill’s had received very little damage from the blast.

The houses across the street hadn’t been so lucky, and even though they were seventy feet or more away, the blast wave had done a lot of damage to their fronts. The car in the driveway of the house directly across from Jill’s had been blown into and through the garage door. All of the windows on the front of the house had been blown out, shingles had been blown off the roof, and the entire front of the first floor had been caved in. The second floor was a bit better, but the front was still pushed in some and sagging from lack of support under it. The houses on either side of it had received a lot of damage also.

The moon had been of little help in seeing all of this, as it was only a few days past the new moon, and it would be setting soon having risen late that morning. Fortunately there were still some street lights on down the block, and we were able to see a truck just down the street that had been blown over by the blast wave. It was one of those four wheel drive trucks that had been raised, making it center of gravity higher and the vehicle prone to turning over.

Jill pointed to it and indicated that we should check it out. We quickly reached it, though we had to move carefully to avoid tripping over all of the concrete chunks, rocks and clumps of dirt that had been blasted out of the street and into the air to land where the blast sent them.

As we approached the truck, we could see that the windows had all been broken by the blast wave. There were two men in the vehicle. One was obviously dead as a chunk of concrete had crashed through the front window, perhaps smashing it, and slamming into the man in the passenger’s seat smashing him too. The second man was covered with bits of safety-glass and was bleeding from a cut on his forehead. He was unconscious. Reaching through the now empty front window, I pulled him out of the vehicle easily, as he hadn’t fastened his seat belt. A number of sheets of paper came out with him. It was too dark to read them, but Jill grabbed several of them.

People had begun emerging from their houses all up and down the street by now to see what had happened, and we didn’t need to be seen here. I threw the unconscious man over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry, grabbed Jill’s hand, and we vanished from the street to reappear in her dining room. I lay the man on the table there, and Jill used a spell of some sort to close the cut on the man’s forehead stopping the bleeding. We needed to decide what to do with him, but we needed to regain our hearing first. I cast a partial freeze spell on the man to keep him from moving if he came to. I also decided that I needed to learn the spell that she had used to stop the bleeding.

When I had finished, Jill handed me some of the papers that had come out of the truck with the prisoner. We both looked at them for a few seconds, and knew that we had the right guy. They were propaganda put out by the Magic Haters denouncing those who used Magic of any kind. This guy was either one of them, or someone hired by them. We would need to learn what he knew.

“Can you hear anything yet?” I shouted following that, but Jill just threw up her hands before going to retrieve some fresh paper and a pen.

“What did you say?” she wrote.

“I asked if you could hear anything yet,” I wrote under her question.

“No, but I have this terrible ringing in my ears.”

“So do I. It’s a result of the noise from the explosion.”

“Is it permanent?”

“No, it’s only temporary, but I don’t know how long it will last.”

“What can we do?”

“Wait.”

“Just wait?”

“What else is there to do?”

“You don’t know?” she wrote before leaning in to kiss me. We kissed for long time and I wrapped my arms around Jill as she snuggled into me and wrapped her arms around my neck. We eventually had to come up for air, and she grabbed the paper again.

“Upstairs,” she wrote before grabbing my hand and leading the way upstairs to the bedroom. We quickly lost our clothes before returning to kissing and rubbing against each other’s naked bodies. I couldn’t hear if she was moaning or not, but she was very passionate. I was as hard as ever also. There is something about a close call with death that makes one appreciate the finer things in life, especially sex.

We eventually fell into the bed, and I moved over on top of Jill. She is a very curvaceous woman, and she was hot and wet already. I entered her in one long stroke, and she melted into me. We made long, slow, passionate love for a long, long time before our needs overcame us, and we finished hard with short, fast strokes; coming together.

I heard Jill scream as she went rigid, but it sounded like she was far away from me. Perhaps our hearing was returning, but we were more interested in a short nap than checking on that, and we fell asleep with her cuddled up against me.

Some time later, I awoke to find Jill missing but was treated to the sound of water running in the shower. It appeared that our hearing was returning.

“Jill?” I called.

“Come shower,” she replied, and I rose from the bed to join her.

“We’re out of soap,” she told me, but had the water running over herself. I joined her and got wet under the water. It was the best that we could do for now. We would need to bring soap and towels with us if we were going to repeat this very often, but Jill moved up against me just then and all thoughts of towels and soap vanished. We moved against each other and kissed under the running water. It was a long passionate kiss, and we might have gone further if the hot water hadn’t run out.

“Brrrr... !” she said as we turned off the water. The old towel was still here, and we dried off as best we could with it before retrieving our clothes.

“How is your hearing?” I asked as we dressed.

“Not too bad, but I still have this ringing in my ears, it’s like an echo,” she told me.

“Tinnitus,” I told her. “It should go away in a bit.”

“What about the prisoner? Will he be able to hear yet?” she asked.

“Don’t know, we’ll have to see,” I told her, as we headed back downstairs.

I had no compassion for the prisoner. He was a part of those who had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered my children in addition to sending pictures of their tortured and mutilated bodies to my wife, causing her to hang herself. I would do whatever it took to make him tell us all that he knew.

By now it was almost midnight, and Jill went to check on what was going on outside of the shell. She looked out the front window but couldn’t see much in the dark.

“I’m going outside to see what is going on,” she told me, turning away from the window.

“Don’t let them see you,” I warned her.

“I won’t, I know your invisibility spell,” she reminded me and transferred out onto the front lawn, while I checked on the prisoner. He was awake, but unable to move because of the partial freeze spell. I had neglected to cast the improved pain spell on him before going upstairs.

“What happened?” he asked on seeing me. “Where is Hugo?” he added.

“You set off a bomb,” I reminded him.

“I know that. What happened then? Why can’t I move and where is Hugo?” he demanded.

“If Hugo was the guy in the passenger seat, he didn’t make it. A chunk of concrete came through the windshield smashing it and Hugo,” I told him. “That was probably after the truck was blown over and the all of the glass in the windows and the windshield was probably already missing,” I finished.

“What happened to me? Why can’t I move?” he demanded in an angry voice.

“You can’t move because I cast a freeze spell on you,” I told him and grinned at his reaction.

“Who are you?” he asked in a shaken voice, “And where am I?” he added.

“I’m Max Hardtrick, and you are in the house that you tried to bomb,” I told him with an even bigger grin at the shocked look on his face.

“No ... no, that’s not possible. There was enough explosives in that minivan to completely destroy that house. It was set to go off on contact with the house,” he said in disbelief.

“It went off when it hit the wards around the house. It wasn’t able to penetrate them, and all of the force of the explosion was reflected back from the wards,” I explained.

“How do you know this?” he asked in an unsure voice.

“Because I’m the one who cast those wards. I’m also the one who dragged your sorry ass out of that truck after the explosion,” I told him, but I was no longer smiling, and alarm appeared on his face.

“You ... you’re the guy from Atlanta,” he finally realized and panic replaced the alarm on his face.

“Yes, I’m the guy from Atlanta. The guy whose kids YOUR people kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. The same guy whose wife committed suicide when YOUR people sent her the pictures of her tortured and dead kids,” I told him before casting the improved pain spell on him and then changed the freeze spell to a full body one.

The spell would require time to work. Time that should have been occurring while Jill and I were upstairs except I was too distracted to remember to cast it. While waiting, I went outside to see what Jill was doing while the spell worked. Even invisible, she was easy to locate by her now familiar Talent. I joined her also being invisible.

I could see that there were now barrels with flashing lights around the large hole in the street that had been created by the explosion. There were also still a number of police cars present with their flashers running and their headlight on. There was crime scene tape around the pickup as well as many of the houses across the street, but it didn’t appear that any of the debris from the explosion had been moved from where it had fallen.

Enough time had passed that all of the ambulances, and most of the news trucks had left along with the firefighters.

The three houses directly across the street from Jill’s which had taken the brunt of the damaged from the explosion were illuminated by the police car’s headlights, highlighting the damage which was even greater than it had first appeared. Additionally, there were blown out windows all along the street for many hundreds of feet. It appeared that the residents of those houses had returned to them by now as we only saw the police and a few reporters.

“We should check on Calisa. She is probably in a panic wondering what happened, and if we are alive,” Jill told me, after giving me time to digest what was going on.

“We should check on Mrs. Black also, but in the morning,” I told her.

“Yes, we should. We aren’t going to get much sleep tonight, since we still need to question the prisoner,” she said with a sigh.

“Let’s check on Calisa. I have the prisoner under the pain spell, and it needs time to work,” I told her and joining hands, we cast the transfer spell. We appeared in Calisa’s living room to find the television on and Calisa asleep on the sofa with the cat curled up asleep at her feet.

“Should we wake her?” Jill whispered, as we both canceled our invisibility spells.

“Let’s see what is on the news first,” I told her as I picked up the remote and changed channels until I found someone doing the news.

“To repeat our lead story tonight. There was a gas explosion in North Charleston tonight. It caused damage to a number of houses and the force of the explosion broke windows in a number of other houses. The cause of the gas leak wasn’t immediately apparent. Several people from the damaged houses were transported to the hospital for injuries suffered as a result of the explosion, and numerous people in the area had their hearing impaired by the sound.