Chapter 7

I'm used to being outnumbered and outgunned. It's an occupational hazard when you're a practicing private Adept working on your own in hazardous situations, especially when you're facing some gawd-awful creatures from some unfashionable region of the multi-verse. What just makes everything twice as bad is when you discover that the poor misguided folks that have been aiding and abetting your nasty alien visitor like things this way, and take a rather unhelpful attitude towards your kindly humanitarian assistance.

Today was a perfect example ... and as usual my timing and luck was pretty shitty. We were surrounded now and about to be under attack from three sides at once. Inside the doorway of the consular house, I could sense just with the rising hairs on the back of my neck that a host of rather unpleasant entities was about to come and see what the fuss was about, and probably take an unfortunately dim view to my interruption of their unsavory activities. Behind me to one side, Bel and Janice were already dealing with a car load of a half dozen Clinton Street Gang thugs loaded up to their eye teeth with pistols, rifles and at least one automatic weapon. Now, as if this wasn't quite enough trouble to deal with at one time, a new car load of misguided governmental busybodies in dark suits had just shown up, almost certainly with the preposterous notion that we leave their precious and highly malevolent visitors alone.

Let them all come!

The only real problem was that I really didn't think I could hold off all three sets of assailants at once. Two sets, maybe. Bel and Miranda were doing their best to help, but both were exhausted already and pretty much out of willpower, due to the long trek we'd made tracking the simulacrum of the missing young child. Bel was keeping a shield up in front of us, bouncing (mostly) the hail of bullets from the gangsters, but she was so tired already that she could just barely stand, let alone hold up the protection for more than maybe a few seconds more. Miranda, being a scarcely trained very minor teenaged magician, was already way out of her comfort zone and far past her level of competence and was now in the early stages of a very immense 'freak-out'. I didn't blame her, if I'd been in her shoes and thrown headfirst into this ratfuck, I'd be wanting to run for the hills screaming too!

"Miranda!" I sharply barked while giving the panicking girl a quick rough shake. "You're going to have to help Bel fast, her powers are just about exhausted and if her shield weakens any further things are going to get very ugly and painful fast! Grab the Earth Ley just under your feet and channel it into Bel the best you can. Hold her and hug her if you need to, but help get that force into her somehow! She's too tired now to do anything other than draw on her own internal resources, and knowing her, she'll burn herself out or drain every drop of her entire life-force protecting us, so do it, now!" The teen girl's eyes began to sharpen and focus and then close hard in concentration and I felt her connect to the underground magical energy field, then with tears in her eyes from her own exertions, she clung on to Bel's back and hugged her hard, forcing her own tired and ill-trained will to flow into and join Bel's shield. The result was minimal at first, but as Bel was starting to expend her final internal reserves she sensed and latched on to this flow of new power, much like a drowning person would a life-raft. Her strength stabilized and now with her energies reinforced, the protective shield began to strengthen and slowly even began to increase in size and strength around us, now forming at last a full circular field. It was ragged and a really powerful magician could have overwhelmed it easily, but for now it would do!

"Sean," I muttered, after taking a quick breath for gathering a bit of strength myself, "Bel has the shield firmed up for now, but can you do something fairly overt to slow down the imminent arrival of our visitor friends? I just can't deal with them yet until we get our rear flanking attackers settled with. I think those new government wizards are going to be real trouble!"

I'd rarely spoken truer words! Sean gave me a mental grunt and with an intense and hyper-rapid channeling of massive but untraceable force, a new shimmering shield now barred the doorway in front of us, but this time the protection was to keep them in, rather than them keeping us out. This gave me the minute I'd need to deal with the three dark suited government agents, each of whom was now channeling an alarming amount of magic power directed right at us!

They weren't even interested in talking to us, and suddenly with almost no warning three bolts of magical power were now blasted straight towards us, and I just barely had a moment to interpose myself just outside of Bel's shield, so that I could focus my own defenses to parry these energies first. There was no way that Bel's protections could have even slowed these massive energies for even a moment and the Clinton Street thugs were still banging away at us with their guns.

I've been in a magical duel or three over the many years, but I'd nearly always in the past won due to superior cleverness or just sheer dumb luck. My most recent shoot-out outside of the Austin convention center was such an example. Today, facing three extremely powerful wizard-class magicians all at once convinced me once and for all that I was certainly no mundane Adept level magician anymore! I stopped the first three bolts, and then the next three ... and then I stopped holding my breath and started to think about making a counter-attack.

Since I wanted to leave Miranda and Bel with unimpeded access to the Earth Ley for their shield, I settled upon my old faithful and usual standby, the Fire Ley, from even deeper into the ground to use for my own. As my flame shield grew in power my confidence began to grow. I was able to restrain their following attacks with relative ease, and now I could also get a better measure of my dark trio of opponents. Their powers were certainly wizard class, perhaps even 'Great Wizard' (or 'Magician 1st Class, Primus', as they call them up here in the USA. Definitely at least 9 Score, each, to the best of my calculation. In theory, I shouldn't have stood a chance against one of them, let alone all three, but I was certainly somehow able to hold my own. Nice ... I'd worry about the potential ramifications of this odd magical bounty later!

My first thought was to stick to what I did best, maniacally burn down entire neighborhoods with excessive and unnecessary force ... just joking. I did try a few nice sharp fire-bolts, but their shields were up to the task of deflecting them, for the moment. Putting my opponents on the defensive now was also useful for another reason, I wanted to try a focused Spirit jab or two to get some more information about my foes. Now that they were probably drawing near max normal power, I could feel a dark thread or weave to their castings, a similar sort of feel that I had noticed earlier when scanning the protections of this house.

With a loud grunt, I focused a probably excessive bundle of raw fire energy and hurled it right at the wizards, and as expected they stopped it, or rather they slowed it down rather considerably. They didn't quite go up into smoke, like the car behind them, or the houses across the street, but it served its purpose. I'd lead with the jab to conceal the punch that was launched a fraction of a second behind it. This blow of spirit power should have knocked any normal human senseless, or at least scrambled their brain long enough to disconnect their powers ... but it didn't. In fact, the sense of darkness about them instead just grew some more with intensity, until the figures just appeared to be ones of shadowy darkness and not actually human anymore. Now that was both interesting and really creepy at the same time!

These visitors had apparently taken over the mortal husks of these once human governmental agents and even though their stolen physical bodies had now been consumed by the power of the battle, the malevolent spirits within still lived, if that's even remotely the right word.

Since I now had a better feel for their powers and the sort of energy that they thrived upon, and since fire didn't seem to be especially effective, I decided that it was time to try something different – it was time to let the winds of the Zephyr blow!

Replacing the Fire Ley with the closer and even more powerful Air one, I began to focus my efforts on grabbing first an upper level warm air mass from the south, and then a slightly lower and much colder mass of air from further northeast, right over Lake Michigan. It was going to take a few minutes to bring these two opposing fronts of air together in a collision right over our heads but we didn't seem to be in hurry at the moment. Bel's shields were holding fairly stable and secure for the moment, and Sean's barrier across the doorway was certainly still shimmering and glowing quite nicely. The Clinton Street gunsels were regrouping behind their car for the moment and probably also calling for reinforcements, heavier weapons and probably another carload more of ammunition. They had most likely already fired nearly every round of ammo they'd brought with them, and they'd been busy with their 'Chicago typewriter' so far, but it hadn't done much if any good. Now it was my turn at bat!

The tornado of lightning that I'd coaxed down from the super-cell of violent weather I had now created was absolutely and very definitely an example of extreme overkill, and an absolute illustration of 'what not to do' in crowded urban area, especially when it's nearly dropped down right on our heads, landing dead center on the lawn in front of us! Someday, my autobiography is going to be mandatory reading in school rooms everywhere to teach young magicians to think more carefully and to just use the minimum amount of magic necessary to solve each and every one of your problems.

I realized pretty quickly that I'd seriously overdone it - again ... and hurled myself upon Bel, Janice and Miranda, to knock them to the ground and then I added my own strength to Bel's earth-shield (also rather overdoing it a tad excessively in my panic) as the tip of the massive electrical tornado touched down right where I'd directed it, on the front lawn of the consular house. I then felt, rather than saw, the energy fields of the three visitor wizards crackle and then finally fail from the electrical disruptions of the massive storm, disintegrating into non-animate energy to be utterly dispersed by the storm.

This quite permanently took care of the three hostile wizards ... and the six mobsters too, who were never seen again and quite probably blown into Lake Michigan, if not Canada ... along with a three block stretch of every house along Consular Row before I could concentrate enough to force the twister to return back up into the clouds. It wasn't quite the storm of the century for Chicago, but it would rain non-stop for the next three days and create smaller tornadoes that did rather remarkable amount of city property damage. The big one I had summoned would later be graded a very strong Scale 4, the second strongest possible. Mercifully it was never quite traced back to me! There were no deaths (other than the alien wizards and gunsels) – thank goodness! I'd have never quite forgiven myself if anyone else had been killed due to my miscalculation!

The Zephyr had indeed extended his storm wings and triumphed, but I didn't need to see the unhappy glares on both Bel's and Janice's faces to know that I'd once again done something unpardonably reckless. Only Miranda thought I had just done something really neat and cool and I didn't have the heart to tell her that she was just an ignorant un-magically educated kid and that what I had just done was indeed insanely reckless and (almost) unforgiveable. I just couldn't keep making a habit of this!

Actually, the view of the devastation around us was quite remarkable in at least one way. The visitors' lair, now once again opened up for our entry, was completely undamaged by the tornado. In fact it looked unscratched, with not a single roof tile or window out of place! Now that I had a moment to think about it, this miraculous feat wasn't particularly surprising. Our particular malevolent race of visitors seemed to exist just slightly out of phase or time with our own dimension, as we noted when the girl's tracks could no longer be followed once her abductor had taken over her body. The entire house, behind its layer of protections, was much the same ... right here and now in front of us, but yet slightly 'elsewhere' at the same time.

With Sean's ward now removed, I gathered up our exhausted and wobbly crew for the final push, indoors, right into the very heart of darkness (or so it seemed). With Janice and Miranda's help, I was just about able to get Bel standing upright and vertical again. I say 'just', because if anyone had then let go of her she'd have then collapsed right straight back onto the pavement. A quick feel of Miranda's energy suggested she was near equally done in.

"Whatever masculinely clever idea you've plotted for your encore," Bel weakly murmured, "you're going to have to do it without my help. I couldn't light a candle now, but after the carnage you've just caused, I don't dare let you go in alone out of my sight!" The beady-eyed look on her face said it all.

"Fine! It's me against the entire fucking universe once again ... and that's just the way I like it!" Ouch ... this was a cruel statement to make to poor Bel, who'd done every little bit that she could have done, and far beyond what I could have done back when I was a mere Adept, or perhaps even mortal. No, something in me had changed ... and perhaps not entirely for the better.

"Sorry Bel, that was extremely uncalled for and rude. I'm tired and I'm scared more than a bit at what I've just done ... to save us all, and I'm frightened more than a little that I'll just screw up or 'slightly miscalculate' again, and probably soon - to save us all over again yet once more. I don't like what I feel about what's inside this house and I've got to stop it, and yes, all alone ... I'm now the only one who can, but I need to know that you're still on my side. To offer practical advice, and just hold my hand when I get scared completely out of my wits, if nothing else."

She didn't quite smile, as I had done quite a bit these last five minutes that she wasn't going to forgive me for anytime at all soon. But still she took my hand to steady herself and then she quietly leaned her head against my shoulder. It was going to take all of us to keep her standing, but she was there – ready now to fight and if necessary die at our side.