It was over. Two powerful and unauthorized shielding spells had been used on Museum grounds. The golems were closing in after determining their initial barrage hadn’t finished the job, and now Jones had probably just tagged himself as a traitor by protecting Kyle. This sucked.

Jones was frozen in terror for a moment. Wide eyes staring at the shield spell mere feet over his face. He was going to die and was taking a few seconds to wrap his head around that fact. Was it too late to abandon Kyle and run for it? Almost before he’d finished that thought, Jones had dismissed it. Leave someone behind? He couldn’t. Regardless of the fact that The Last Line would end him if he actually did.

Maybe the noise had drawn the attention of someone in the museum who could do something about this? Because Jones was tapped out. He patted Kyle. Not on the shoulder, but some part of him that just happened to be close enough to his hand for convenient reach. Kyle groaned back at him.

“Give me a second, I’ll think of something…. Maybe.” Jones had tried to reassure his partner but ended up doing the opposite as a thready chuckle came from the direction of Kyle’s head followed by another groan. Then, as Jones made a conscious effort to continue staring at the sky and not look toward any of the coming golems because he did not want to see his death approaching, he felt a feeble nudging on his side. Kyle was patting him back to console Jones.

The sound of massive fireball spells had managed to gain the attention of several people. Anna, on the couch of Kyle’s apartment looked up as yet another antenna tower of prisms collapsed in a tinkling crash. Then the herd rushed her to hide inside her pockets and cower.

Jim Thafesh was running at full tilt as he tried to keep up with a furious and terrified Camina in full mamma-bear mode as she chased a smoking dark blur across the rolling grass lawn of central park. While Jim didn’t know why he and Camina were heading towards the danger, again – okay, that’s not entirely accurate. Camina would always run toward the danger. Which by default meant that Jim would be running toward danger if he was with her.

It was fine.

No.

Really.

It was.

Though the journalist desperately wished he had the ability to see what the blur was they were chasing. Instead, what he did manage to see was dozens of the intimidating, blocky, scary-as-fuck security golems converging on some poor hapless monster. Or…maybe it was something else? Whatever was happening, the blur they were after was heading toward it also.

It wasn’t until he was almost zapped by a bolt of lightning that Jim realized they were running through a grove of magic trees.

“Ahhhh.” He screamed and stumbled away from the little explosion that had nearly knocked him off his feet. It was then that he took a moment to glance around the sun-dappled landscape to see that the trees were dozens of different colors. Not just the leaves, which would be expected considering it was getting into Fall, but also the trunks. And the leaves of the trees in this grove weren’t standard ‘leaf’ colors either. For example, one particular tree that drew Jim’s attention had Cherenkov blue leaves.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Now, it wasn’t necessarily a good thing for anything to be Cherenkov blue, the color of light produced by a nuclear reactor in water. However, when a tree with Cherenkov blue leaves also had glassy bark and bright silver fruit hanging from it, electric currents sparking occasionally between them, it was clearly dangerous. Incongruously, cloud hopper rabbits were perched throughout the charged tree eating the silver fruit. Jim backed away from it and frantically searched for a safer route through what his memory told him must be the Central Park Magical Tree Orchard.

Unsure which way to go as he’d lost sight of Camina and the blur, Jim picked a direction he thought might be right and navigated clear of the tree dodging a few more electric bolts as his pace became a run once more. Tree trunks flashed by his face now, kind of interspersed with the light artifacts dancing across his vision from the bright lightning bolts. Up and to the right, the trees seemed to be thinner as Jim could see more light between the trunks there.

He veered in that direction checking his camera once more just to ensure it was still recording properly as he navigated his way among the trees. A rhythmic thumping from all around kept distracting him as he looked feverishly for its source while trying not to faceplant on a trunk. Worse yet, the sound was getting louder as he approached the direction he believed Camina and the blur to have disappeared in.

He broke out of the orchard into the full light of day. Sure, he’d been expecting it but he hadn’t at the same time. Before Jim laid the rolling manicured lawn of New York’s Central Park. Or more of it, since the park was quite large and he’d already seen vast swatches of it over by the museum proper. But it was out in that vast expanse that something drew Jim’s eyes.

A magical shield was hovering mere feet above the ground. Below which was huddled a Magicorp soldier, his yellow beret and uniform and cape a dead giveaway of his service branch. Beside the soldier was a mage, dark robe splayed around him. What had drawn Jim’s eyes though, was the circle of burned and charred ground around the shield.

“Holy shit!” Jim breathed as he continued recording and checked his camera’s focus. He didn’t dare add any commentary. Like speculating why, a Magicorp soldier and the unidentified mage might have been attacked by the army of golems who were emerging around the clearing. The blur that Camina had run after was nowhere to be found. Of course, if it had stopped moving…

It wouldn’t be a blur anymore.

So, the question was, where was Camina, again?

There. There she was standing back from the scene around the two bodies. No. Not standing. Arguing. She was gesturing angrily as a tall and slim but muscular man with burnt umber eyes physically restrained her with one arm as he gesticulated at the duo beneath the fading shield with the other. Jim tensed as he considered how best to help Camina with this interloper. While the pair’s words were heated, Jim was unable to make them out over the ominous thumping of golem footsteps. The sound was almost thunderous, really.

“FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WILL YOU JUST LET ME DO MY JOB, CAMINA!” Okay, that was the director. The revelation filled Jim with both relief and anxiety at once. Relief, because it was the Director of the Museum, he was the representative on Earth of the power the institution wielded. The Anxiety, of course, came from the fact that he was also a vampire, and vampires ate people.