Hey guys. This chapter took a long time to write since it's over double the usual length (nearly 6k words). Besides following Fitz story, I'm going to occasionally add in other side PoVs (from this new character and even some monsters) as a world-building tool, as well as giving some insight into what's going on in other parts of the city.
Unfortunately, one of the cool little parts I wanted to add (a mystical language for the ritual) didn't translate too well on RR, as it was a unique font type, so I went with the more mundane version. :-/
Anyways, Fitz will be back for the next chapter! Let me know if you find any mistakes so I can correct them. Thanks!
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Of Monsters and men
Chapter Four
~ Shortly before the Awakening ~
Eyes red, Chloe wiped the snot from her nose, using the cuff a long-sleeve shirt poking out from her leather jacket. “Get it together, Chloe,” she mumbled through another sniffle. “Get it the fuck together.”
She rubbed the tears out from her watering eyes, careful to use her sleeve again as her trembling hands still reeked of the alchemical salves she’d used for the burns.
Still sniffling, Chloe adjusted the strap of the beat-up messenger bag biting into her shoulder. She slipped through a set of double doors that had opened for the doctor she trailed behind, entering the Intensive Care Unit of the Saint John Hospital.
The worn soles of her army-surplus boots clicked sharply against the pristine white vinyl flooring as she shuffled down the sparsely Christmas-decorated hall. However, no one seemed to notice her passing—not the loud report of her footsteps, or even the out-of-place teenage punk they belonged to.
The exhausted gazes of the hospital staff seemed to just slide off of Chloe. Nurses shuffled aside, almost unwittingly, to let her pass unmolested. And it was all thanks to her latest shoddily-crafted creation, an obfuscation charm.
One hand clutching at the strap across her chest, Chloe nervously plucked at the glowing charm pinned to her leather jacket. It was of a runic design, belonging to some ancient druidic circle and hand-carved from cedar, a wood renowned for its latent properties of protection.
In this case, protection from the eyes of others.
But the cloak didn’t extend to her effect on the world. After all, bending the laws of the universe to one’s will was rarely subtle. Magic always left signs, especially upon the technology so reliant upon those laws.
The hospital staff worriedly glanced around when the hallway lights began to flicker, when monitors glitched into nonsensical displays of fragmented data, when the announcement over the nearby P.A. system became muffled with static. And all of this was a result of her drawing upon only a little ambient magic in the air to power the charm.
Chloe chewed on her bottom lip as she picked up her pace.
The faster she got out of here, the better.
So before she got totally lost in the maze of corridors, Chloe unwound the silver chain wrapped around her wrist and held it out before her. A dowsing crystal with a clouded red center dangled from the chain.
The droplets of blood infused within the crystal served as a material link to her target, allowing her to circumvent anti-divination charms—of which she knew there were plenty. Chloe narrowed her eyes and concentrated.
Harnessing the fiery spark of magic within her, she began to manipulate the ambient magic around her, a bluish haze to her magesight, and injected it into the crystal. She whispered out a word of power, the verbal component of a spell that shapes the magic according to one’s will, for her incantation. “Quaertie.”
The dowsing crystal began to swing in a tight circle, and the hallway lights began to dim. Chloe tried to picture the cherubic face of her nine year old brother, his cheeks still pudgy with baby fat, and that ruffled mop of brown hair hiding a pair of mischievous eyes. But then his skin began to peel as horrid burns—
“Come on, Chloe,” she growled. “You need to concentrate.”
Swallowing her horror, Chloe looked down to find the dowsing crystal flashing in the direction of a nearby hallway whenever it completed a full rotation. She let the crystal guide her as she continued deeper into the hospital, dreading what she’d find upon her arrival.
~~~~~~~~~~
The dowsing crystal flashed towards the closed glass door before her. On the other side was her brother. No cops were posted outside his door for security, so no one suspected him of accidentally burning down the abandoned warehouse that had been their home for the past few weeks.
It was a small blessing.
Wrapping the crystal around her wrist once more, Chloe gulped audibly and steeled herself for whatever was inside. She pressed a hand onto the room’s card reader and channeled in some magic to scramble it—a little B&E trick Chloe had picked up over the years. A moment passed, and then the reader issued an acceptance chime.
She slid open the door and stepped inside.
Chloe flinched as the overpowering aroma of antiseptic seared her nostrils, and she barely even registered the soft click as the heavy door slid shut behind her. Laying flat upon the room’s single bed was the small figure of a comatose child.
Benjamin.
His lanky frame was cocooned in layers of bandages, as if he had been mummified. Beside his bed were a morphine drip, along with other IV bags, and an EKG monitor, where the latter displayed the weak pulse of his heartbeat. Breathing tubes had been shoved down his throat and the wheezing hum of a ventilator filled the silence.
“I warned you,” Chloe whispered. She blinked away the tears that began to well in her eyes. “I fucking warned you. You should never play with magic, you stupid kid.”
Magic wasn’t a toy, and she had the scars to prove that. She’d hoped to spare her brother the pain of her hard-learned lessons. But just as she’d once been at his age, he was a stubborn child. A firebrand. He had a youth’s sense of invincibility, and he’d been proven how wrong that assumption was.
Magic was dangerous.
Deadly.
Especially now, when in the past few weeks, magic had been pouring up from the earth in unprecedented amounts. It was a phenomenon that still mystified Chloe.
For countless generations, most unaffiliated mages had been reduced to little more than hedge wizardry, performing only the weakest of cantrips that barely rated above parlor tricks—not due to lack of skill, but rather a lack of power.
Of magic.
That was why so many practitioners employed the use of foci, such as charms and amulets, or complex rituals incorporating all manner of occult paraphernalia. It all helped to reduce the necessary cost of the very limited magic at one’s disposal by refining its potency. It was the reason why Chloe, herself, might qualify as a walking arsenal of magical trinkets—as with most serious mages.
Now though, magic saturated the very air. To her magesight, the bluish miasma of magic seemed to curl up from the earth like smoke pouring out from a furnace. It was as if a dam had broken to end an eternal drought, and similar to men dying of thirst in an endless desert, the temptation to dive into the magic—to drink it in and harness it—was almost irresistible.
And that was dangerous.
All mages could hear the magic whispering insidious promises of power, but now it was louder than ever, its twisted promises sweeter than even ambrosia. It was a sea of untold power begging to be tapped. But those that had never learned to swim would often drown.
Just like Benjamin.
Chloe approached her brother’s bedside. The hospital machinery almost immediately began to go on the fritz, but Chloe ignored it. For a brief moment, she reached out to Benjamin’s bandaged forehead, but she stopped herself, hesitant to even touch him.
“Hang in there, Benji,” Chloe said as she withdrew her hovering hand. “Just hang in there for a little bit longer. Your big sis is going to fix you up, okay?”
Despite her comforting words, Benjamin lay still as death.
Chloe took a deep breath to steady herself, and then she got to work. She lifted her bag’s strap over her head and heaved the heavy messenger bag onto the foot of Benjamin’s bed. She began to pull out the tools she’d need from within, listing off each component in her head.
Candles.
Incense.
Chalk.
Lastly, she slid out a thick tome radiating a profound sense of power. It was one of Chloe’s most prized possessions, a genuine Atlantean grimoire, penned by a powerful mage of old.
She’d gotten lucky a few years back in Chicago, and discovered it deep within the bowels of an antique bookshop, its true contents hidden to the eyes of mundanes by a minor illusion enchantment. Chloe ran her fingers over the rugged cover and breathed out a soft incantation. “Revelet deus absconsa tua.”
Ancient runes flared into existence upon the dried barnacle-encrusted cover, their alluring design a sort of flowing pattern, where the eye would naturally drift from one wavy symbol to the next, as if dragged by a gentle ocean current.
Chloe cracked open the tome. She carefully began flicking through the brittle pages filled with more flowing runes and magical diagrams, and scrawled within the margins was her own rough handwriting from her meticulous attempts at translating the long-dead language.
A minute later she found what she’d been searching for. A powerful healing ritual. She scanned through the frighteningly complex spellwork, frowning.
“Wizards,” Chloe grumbled soon after she finished. She felt a headache beginning from merely reviewing the spell. Besides being mindbogglingly complicated, it was all so bland. So formulaic. For practitioners of the magical arts, wizards often had an uncanny knack to somehow suck the magic out of everything.
Chloe never had that problem, not as a sorcerer. She lived and breathed magic as a natural-born mage, and unlike wizards, she didn’t have to spend years painstakingly unlocking the magical potential within herself.
However, wizards did have one advantage over sorcerers. Versatility. Sorcerers, due to their innate gifts, are often specialists within one area of magic—pyromancy in Chloe’s case—while their skill in other types of magic are usually lackluster, at best.
And unfortunately, the healing spell she needed was, as with most Atlantean magic, based on hydromancy, her innate talent’s diametric opposite.
She grabbed the nub of chalk. “You can do this, Chloe.”
Chloe began to carefully draw out the ritual circle on the vinyl floor around the bed, stopping only on occasion to refer back to the tome’s diagrams. Next, she placed the candles and incense around the circle. Everything needed to be perfect, since she’d be relying more on the formula than her talent for this.
She snapped her fingers and all the candles were lit by a wordless cantrip, reserved only for the simplest spells. Now, the preparations were complete.
Chloe hefted up the open tome in one hand and held her other out and over Benjamin. She glanced down at the runes upon the grimoire’s pages and the phonetic translation she’d written for it months ago, and cleared her throat, the magic now at her fingertips. “I call—”
“What do you think you’re doing in here?”
The gathering magic dissipated instantly as Chloe jumped upon hearing the demanding voice. Slowly, she lowered the grimoire and turned around, her brow furrowed.
Standing before the doorway was a young woman in medical scrubs. In stark contrast to her rather plain attire though, the fine lines of her face were accentuated by makeup, and her long black hair was tied up in an elegant knot. It was as if she were starring in some sort of medical drama. She even radiated that intangible, eye-catching charisma befitting a movie star.
But what Chloe found most shocking about the woman were her piercing green eyes, because they were staring right at her. Her heart racing, the teenage sorcerer sneaked a peek at the obfuscation charm pinned to her leather jacket. It was still dimly glowing.
Chloe’s gaze narrowed on the mysterious woman, the familiar wariness of someone long accustomed to being hunted creeping into her eyes. Pinned to the front of the woman’s green scrubs was a name tag.
Paige.
“You,” Chloe began slowly with disbelief, “You can actually see me?”
“Of course I can see you,” Paige said with a no-nonsense tone. Her eyebrows knit as she noticed the candles and circle behind Chloe. “Now, I asked you a question, or do I have to get security to—”
Chloe tossed the grimoire onto the bed behind her with a flick of her wrist and lunged forward. The woman’s eyes widened as the fingers of Chloe’s hand wrapped around her slender throat and shoved her against the glass door. No one heard Paige’s strangled off cry as Chloe was close enough to mask her beneath the obfuscation charm.
“Sphaera Flammam Volvens!”
The room’s lights dimmed dramatically and a rolling orb of fire burst to life within Chloe’s other hand. Its size and intensity even shocked Chloe, who was still adapting to the abundance of ambient magic she could now draw upon.
She thrust the fireball hovering in her hand at the face of the woman in an attempt to intimidate her into submission. But the woman surprised her.
Rather than being paralyzed by fear, Paige caught Chloe’s wrist to keep the fireball at bay, and the woman’s lithe figure contained a surprising strength. However, years of living on the streets had given Chloe a wiry sort of muscle that was more than a match for Paige. Chloe didn’t even have to bother charging up the strength enchantments stitched into her mitts.
“Who are you working for?!” Chloe roared as the fireball inched closer to the woman’s face. Beads of sweat broke out across Paige’s brow from the flames’ sweltering heat, but she continued fighting, her pale face reddening. “Answer me! Did the Arcanum send you?!”
“I don’t know what that is,” Paige said through gasping breaths.
The fireball in Chloe’s hand grew with a surge of power, its dancing flames now a hot white. “Tell me the truth, or I swear I’ll melt your fucking face off, bitch! How did you see through my charm?!”
“I’m telling the truth,” Paige hissed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
Chloe searched the woman’s face for signs of deception, but all she found was genuine fear and surprise. There was no calculation. No hidden agenda. It was as if she truly were just some mundane.
But a mundane shouldn’t have been able to pierce her charm.
Not without some incredible willpower.
Then, as she stared into Paige’s eyes, something caught Chloe’s attention. There was a faint glimmer of something deep within Paige’s gaze. Something magical—maybe left behind after a brush with some powerful magic, perhaps?
Chloe squinted to get a—
A powerful roar suddenly erupted within Chloe’s mind. The fireball in her hand vanished out of existence with puff of smoke as she staggered backwards, reeling. Then a fist clocked Chloe across her jaw in an explosion of pain.
Black dots clouded her vision as she felt Paige grab her right arm. With an almost casual ease then, the woman slid a leg just behind her knee and pushed. Chloe was swept off her feet and her back slammed into the floor.
Paige twisted her arm behind her back, and bent it into a painful angle to forcefully turn Chloe onto her belly. She felt Paige place a knee onto the small of her back as the side of her face was pressed against cool vinyl.
Not that it mattered.
Not now.
She barely even registered Paige’s shouts for security, or even tasted the warm blood staining her teeth. Instead, her attention was focused solely upon the smoky blue mist billowing up from the ground and curling within the air, seemingly without end. Her breathing grew ragged at the sight.
Magic.
So much magic.
A blood-curdling scream shook Chloe from her stupor. Twisting her neck, she saw Paige no longer shouting for security, but rather staring intently at the room’s glass door with an expression of uncertainty. Soon, more screams echoed from deeper in the hospital, and the hairs on the nape of Chloe’s neck stood on end.
Something was happening.
Something bad.
“Let me go,” Chloe snapped as she began to writhe beneath Paige’s unshakable grip. She didn’t want to hurt the woman with her magic, but if she were left with no other options, she would. “Can’t you hear something far worse is going on?!”
Chloe could almost see the internal struggle within Paige as she tried to decide the best course of action. The dreadful wail from the hallway beyond the door seemed to be the deciding factor. “Don’t try any of that weird stuff, okay?”
“Whatever,” Chloe muttered. “Just get the fuck off me.”
Paige seemed to bite back some choice words, but she got off Chloe regardless. She retreated a few careful steps, her hands clenched into tight fists. Just in case.
Chloe paid her little mind as she climbed to her feet. Using her shirt sleeve then, she wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth. Her tongue prodded the busted lip she now sported.
“So are we good?” Paige asked.
Chloe glowered at the woman, but nodded. “We’re good.”
Paige let her gaze linger for a moment, as if to measure just how genuine Chloe’s words were. Then she turned and slid open the door. But just as she stepped out, Paige was bowled over by a sprinting nurse and sent sprawling onto the ground with a grunt. The nurse barely even registered the collision as he picked himself up, sputtering nonsense, and continued running, his eyes filled with dread.
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.
Not fear.
Dread.
Chloe ran over to the open doorway just as Paige got to her feet, and ran down the hallway in the opposite direction of the nurse with a shout, “Dr. Dhaliwal!”
She knelt down next to the writhing form of a young doctor and turned him onto his side, just as a few other level-headed staff members came to offer assistance. The doctor’s back was arched and his eyes had rolled up into the back of his head, as if he were seizing. Froth bubbled from his mouth as his body jerked wildly.
But Chloe saw something much different.
Her awareness already tuned into the astral due to her magesight, Chloe gaped at the thick ambient magic surrounding the man. It wrapped around his thrashing body as if it were a cocoon of smoky winds.
A phantom face condensed within the frenzied magic overlaying the doctor, struggling to break free. It’s inhumanly beautiful face was marred by a pair of needle-like fangs that extended from its silently screaming maw. Then a phantom arm appeared, reaching skyward with an outstretched hand, and the doctor’s arm jerked upward in unison.
Chloe unconsciously took a step back.
Every street-honed instinct was screaming at her to hide, to rush through the healing ritual and get out with her brother from this hellish scene, now.
But she didn’t run. Not yet. Because underneath all the cheap perfume and leather, Chloe still considered herself something of a decent human being.
“What the fuck are you doing, Chloe?” she muttered as she stepped through the doorway. She shoved past a couple of frantic hospital staff, hurrying to attend to other patients, to reach Paige and grabbed her shoulder. “Leave him! He’s beyond your help.”
The woman shrugged off Chloe’s hand. “Stay away from—”
Dr. Dhaliwal’s eyes snapped open. Then his pupils narrowed to reptilian slits. Paige jumped backwards in fright as the canines of the man’s clenched teeth began to elongate into a pair of venomous fangs. Locked in a maddening agony, Dr. Dhaliwal began to claw at his shirt and the dusty brown skin of his chest, his fingernails tearing away flesh—
—revealing the scales beneath.
Her youthful face devoid of mercy, Chloe raised a hand to blast the metamorphosing doctor. But the words of power died on her lips as the spell fizzled before she’d even started. There wasn’t enough magic to power the spell. The good doctor had devoured all the ambient magic to jump-start his transformation. It’d take a few precious seconds before the ambient magic returned to a level necessary for spellwork.
“Argh! Amateur mistake, Chloe!” She grabbed Paige’s arm and half dragged the bewildered woman away from the doctor, cursing. “Fucking amateur mistake!”
Her attention flickering between the doctor and the nearing door to her brother’s room, Chloe noticed Dr. Dhaliwal rolling onto his stomach. One hand slapped onto the floor as his shuddering body was wracked with pain. Clothing began to split as his muscles swelled. Teeth grit, the man raised his other hand and slammed it down before him.
Crack!
Vinyl tiles split beneath his palm and the fine-pointed nails he’d grown. Slowly, the doctor-turned-monster hauled himself forward, his nails digging long furrows across the tiles, before slamming down his other hand. He dragged himself free of his torn clothing.
Of his human skin.
Behind him, Chloe saw a long serpentine tail beginning at the man’s waist. Its sculptured musculature was covered in iridescent green scales that crawled up its neck and stopped to frame a monstrously beautiful and all-to-human face, while azure-tinted hair trailed down its back. The monster’s body shivered then, as if finally at peace.
A forked tongue flicked out from its mouth, tasting the air. It turned to the three cowering staff members just behind it, all frozen with fear. The light blue pants of one terrified woman darkened beneath the creature’s unflinching gaze and her quivering body seemed to shrink in on itself.
Chloe wasn’t doing much better; her skin was crawling and her body felt leaden. But she didn’t let the terror paralyze her. She had someone relying on her, after all. Someone that had been relying on her strength for years.
Almost casually, the monster’s tail whipped left to right with a lightning-fast speed, sweeping the entire width of the hallway. It crushed the three people against the wall as if they were bugs, and their dying bodies twitched as they slid down the walls.
Just then Chloe reached her brother’s room.
She threw Paige inside and slammed the door shut. The clear glass door. Chloe hit the light switch off to blanket the room in near darkness and drew the thin privacy curtain across the door. The flickering flames of the candles encircling Benjamin’s bed provided only the faintest illumination.
“What—what was that thing?!” Paige demanded with barely restrained hysteria as she began to hyperventilate. She leaned against the wall for support as she stared at the curtain, where the screams beyond had renewed with a terrible vigor.
“Something that shouldn’t exist,” Chloe said through her panting, just as confused. It definitely wasn’t a homunculus, a sort of magical familiar for a mage. Based on how much magic it had consumed it was far too powerful for that. No, this was another type of magic.
An ancient magic.
And she was trapped in a hospital with it.
Chloe ran over to the Benjamin’s beside and snatched up the grimoire. She needed to work fast because, right now, her little brother was in no condition to be moved. And if that monster-that naga from Hindu mythology?-came knocking…
A shiver trailed down her spine.
“Come on, come on,” Chloe muttered as she frantically leafed through the tome’s fragile pages, searching for the ritual once more and ignoring Paige’s questioning looks. “Come on. Where the fuck are you? It should be right around—”
There!
Chloe’s eyes lit up as she found a familiar set of designs and runes. She scanned through the page once to be certain, which only confirmed this was the right spell. This time, Chloe made sure to check the ambient magic. The air was oversaturated with it.
Fuckin’ A.
“Okay, now just take a deep breath, Chloe,” she said nervously. “You can do this. It’s just a little hydromancy, no big deal.” She wiped away the sweat upon her brow before extending her hand, fingers splayed. Then her gaze fell to the open tome in her other hand.
It suddenly all seemed much more complicated. The pressure of a monster literally lurking around the corner certainly didn’t help much either.
But Chloe cleared her throat and began the ritual’s incantation, her voice becoming as deep as the bottomless depths of the ocean. “I call upon the flowing spirits of the sea—”
The candles flickered as the ambient magic began to pool above the circle, a howling vortex. Chloe could just barely control it. Alarms blared from the hospital machinery beside the bed now going haywire from the magical interference. And for the first time tonight, Benjamin’s body began to twitch.
Shouting, but her words lost in the din, Paige ran up to the bed as if to stabilize her patient, but she was pushed back by the invisible buffer of the circle. The woman slid backwards on her feet, her hands thrown up before her as magical winds tore at her.
“—Upon the boundless water that stretches into the horizon, to heed my summons. I beseech the great spirits—”
Her outstretched hand began to tremble and her throat was becoming raw from the words of power. But Chloe continued the incantation, struggling. The healing runes drawn within the circle began to glow as the magic continued to pour in.
Crunch!
The privacy curtain drawn over the door swayed.
Something was trying to get in.
“—To aid me in my hour of need, to let their healing waters—”
A powerful hit bashed into the door’s anti-shatter glass again, and the upper corner of the sliding door was broken off its tracks, falling into the room and taking down part of the curtain.
Across the bed, and through the cracked glass of the door, Chloe saw the towering figure of a naga, propped up on its coiled tail and its scaled torso dyed in blood. The cold-blooded monster eyed the dark interior with a sadistic grin, as if it could easily spot its prey inside.
Paige stared at her former boss in shock. “Dr. Dhaliwal…”
The naga slid forward, one hand gripping the upper edge of the doorway and the other latched onto the broken-in corner of the door itself. Then it began to push inward. The groaning metal of the door began to warp beneath the naga’s overwhelming strength.
Her voice nearly hoarse and her mind going fuzzy from commanding so much magic, Chloe roared out the last part of the incantation. “—Soothe my mortal pains and nurture this frail vessel!”
A thunderclap of magic threw Chloe into the wall behind her as the full power of the circle funneled into Benjamin’s jerking body.
The door broke down completely with the screeching snap of metal. Paige backpedaled away from the monster, her back pressed to the side wall, as it slithered into the room, its human half framed by the flickering light of the hallway behind it.
Blood trailed down from Chloe’s nose, and she only succeeded in smearing it across her upper lip when she tried to wipe it away. Behind her eyes was the sharp pain of a migraine—just another toll of the hydromancy.
But worst of all was the state of the ambient magic.
The room was bone-dry.
The naga stared at Benjamin, who lay unmoving on the bed between Chloe and the monster. His wounds—or lack thereof—were still hidden beneath the copious amounts of bandages wrapped around his body. “Hmm,” the naga’s silken voice came out as a breathy melody. “The strangely familiar power that called out to me, it’s gone.”
“It’s called magic,” Chloe venomously spat. “Here, how about a little taste!?”
And then, Chloe did something no sane mage would ever think about doing. She tapped into her inner spark of magic, a mage’s last resort—often permanently. Because if a mage’s inner spark of magic was used up completely, she’d burn out.
She’d become a mundane.
Forever.
But with no ambient magic to draw upon and a snake monster bearing down on her, Chloe didn’t care anymore. Better to be alive and burnt out than dead and, well, dead.
So Chloe threw up her arm and screamed out an incantation. “Columna Ignis!” A roaring torrent of fire poured from her hand, its power and intensity far beyond anything she’d conjured up before. Immediately, though, a bone-aching weariness washed over Chloe as she expended the precious magic of her spark.
Hissing, the naga reared back, its arms crossed defensively before it. The scales of its forearms began to glow orange beneath the fiery onslaught. Its tail blindly whipped forward to smash into Benjamin’s bed and send it skittering towards Chloe. It crashed into her before she could even react, shattering her concentration so the spell died instantly.
Weakly, Chloe clutched at the bed railing digging painfully into her gut as she gasped for air. She raised her head just in time to see Paige quietly slipping out of the room, using Chloe’s firework display as a distraction. She was running, and leaving her and Benjamin to die, even after Chloe saved her ass. “Ungrateful bitch…”
Chloe swung her stare towards the naga. That inner spark of magic within her, once a raging bonfire, had dwindled to a dull fire. She’d have just enough juice for one more spell, at most. Anymore and she’d burn out.
The naga quickly slithered deeper inside and its massive length filled the room. Her voice still raw, Chloe began to croak out a new incantation. “Flatus—”
The naga roughly snatched Chloe by her throat and choked the words off. Then it lifted her up against the wall, pinning her to it as her kicking legs dangled. The cold black eyes of a reptile studied her with a hint of curiosity. “Interesting,” it breathed out. “That was the magic you mentioned, no?”
Chloe could only garble out a curse in response.
“Let’s see,” the naga continued. It raised its other hand, palm up. Then, drawing upon the minuscule ambient magic that had been replenished after the ritual, a marble-sized orb of water appeared within the needle-sharp nails of its curled fingers.
A delighted smile split across the naga’s face as if it’d discovered a new toy. But then the naga snapped its head towards the rapid footfalls of someone sprinting from behind it. The rounded bottom of a heavy fire extinguisher bashed into its surprised face with a sickening crunch.
The naga reeled back with a hiss and dropped Chloe, who began a hacking fit as she gulped down air. The monster’s hand pawed at its once flawless face as it tried to stem the blood gushing from its broken nose. A hateful rage ignited within the naga’s cold gaze and its lips, wet with its own blood, peeled back to reveal its fangs.
Her pale face flushed, Paige ripped the pin from the fire extinguisher and gave the naga a mouthful of fire-smothering powder. “Run!” she screamed at Chloe as the now-blinded naga tried to swat away the annoying powder stream. “Get out of—”
The naga’s tail viciously swept across the room, knocking aside hospital machinery and furniture as if it were trash, and crushed Paige into the wall. She spat out a mist of blood before slumping onto the floor, unmoving.
The strengthening enchantments stitched into the worn leather of Chloe’s mitts began to dimly glow as she channeled more magic from her spark into them. She kicked off the wall with the hissing snarl of an alley cat, leaping clear across Benjamin’s bed and onto the distracted naga’s back.
Her left arm looped around the naga’s throat to secure her in place. Sharp nails raked across Chloe’s back as the naga attempted to buck and rip her off, but she clung on stubbornly, the flare of quickly weakening protective enchantments on her jacket negating the damage. For now.
The scrambling fingers of Chloe’s free hand entangled themselves in the naga’s flowing azure hair, and then she viciously tugged down with her enhanced strength. The naga’s head snapped back so its powdered face was directed at the ceiling.
The naga’s eyes lit up when it saw Chloe’s face above it, close enough for a kiss. The monster’s mouth opened to speak just as Chloe whispered an incantation with the last bit of magic at her disposal. “Flatus Draco…”
Then Chloe inhaled in deeply and breathed out a blindingly bright stream of pure fire down the naga’s throat. Its unearthly blaze was hot enough to shine brightly even beneath the naga’s skin as it poured into the monster’s belly.
Chloe fell from the naga when the spell finally cut out, her magic and body thoroughly exhausted, and hit the ground in an awkward tumble.
The naga swayed slightly for a moment. Then it too fell forward with a heavy crash. A cloud of black smoke poured from its mouth as the naga wheezed out its last breath.
“Yeah,” Chloe growled. She drunkenly wobbled onto her feet as she glared at the dead naga. “How’d you—how’d you like that? The first lesson in magic, motherfucker, is that it’s fucking dangerous.” Her knees buckled then and she collapsed onto an overturned cabinet, panting.
A feeble voice called out then. “Chloe?” Sitting up in the bed was Benjamin. He pawed at the thick bandages covering his eyes without much luck, his breathing tubes already removed.
“Benjamin!” Chloe lurched over to her brother’s bedside with tears in her eyes. She grabbed his grasping hand. “I’m here, Benji. I’m right here. Hold still and I’ll get these dressings off.”
Her tired fingers fumbled with the bandages as she began to unwind them, starting with his head. Brown tufts of hair spilled out, and then Chloe saw the healthy pink of newly healed skin. She couldn’t help but chuckle in joyous relief and hugging him tightly.
Benjamin blinked as his eyes adjusted to the room’s darkness. Then his mouth became a large ‘O’ as he took in his surroundings, from the wreckage of his room to the massive bulk of the dead naga. “What happened here?”
“I don’t know. Whatever it is though, it’s big.” Chilling screams continued to echo throughout the hospital, both human and inhuman now. “Come on,” Chloe said anxiously as she hooked her arms underneath Benjamin’s armpits to set him on the ground. “We’ve got to get out of this place, quickly. Can you walk?”
“My legs are a bit wobbly.”
“That’s good enough. But first.” She snatched up her bag still on the bed, and then pulled out a balled up wad of tatty clothes that she tossed to Benjamin. “Put these on. It’s not much, but I stitched in some basic enchantments on them. They’ll do until I get us someplace safe.”
Benjamin began to put on the clothes over his bandage-swaddled body without complaint, only studying them for a moment to check their size rather than their quality. Once he was dressed, Chloe grabbed her brother’s hand and began to lead him out of the one, one side of her body pressed against the wall as a support for her current weakened state.
But then she heard a raspy gasp. Her back propped up against the opposite wall, Paige’s chest slightly rose as she struggled to breath, clinging to life by a thread. Blood drooled from her mouth.
“Sis,” Benjamin’s hand tightened around her fingers, “That lady’s still alive.”
Chloe bit her bottom lip as she listened to a world falling apart at the seams, torn. She could hear the wailing of people dying throughout the hospital, and if she stayed any longer, she could be risking Benjamin’s safety.
But, the woman had come back.
She’d given Chloe the chance to beat the naga.
To save Benjamin.
“Fuck!” Chloe smacked a balled fist against the wall in frustration. But then she began to hobble over to the dying woman, ignoring the chaos erupting around her. “Benji, help me get her in the circle. We don’t have much time.”