I thought of nothing but Cecilia. First the Auroch, now this. Stabbed! No way it was a coincidence. Kusuma wanted to silence her. I didn’t care what the gang thought; I’d make Kusuma bleed. Alone, if necessary.

Victoria—Vic stuck with me. She called a driver or taxi or something, but it’d take too long, so I jogged to close the distance. My frantic state didn’t help decision making, but luckily Xandria had a clear head. ‘Assuming it was an assassin,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t Wira Kusuma also want you and Victoria F. Fornax to be silenced?’

‘I know,’ I snapped.

‘Then, it may be wise to operate under the assumption there is more than one assassin.’

I slowed, and skidded to a stop. Vic stumbled against my back. Nobody but us walked the dark street. A lot of the streets and buildings surrounding Vandagriff were dedicated to transport routes, surplus storage, or daytime stores. At the current hour, there wasn’t a reason for people to be hanging around. Perfect for an ambush.

Sure enough, a hooded figure came out from an alley and blocked our path. They started toward us, raising both arms in a bizarre swooping motion.

‘Run!’

I spun, and Vic followed. I couldn’t run ahead. I had to keep between her and the assassin, all the while looking over my shoulder. The assassin swung their arms, as if wielding two whips. The air distorted in a thin arc. I spun and pushed outward with both palms. The arcs split and struck either side of me. On my left, a metal streetlight shook with a harsh shrieking noise. A deep groove had cut into the metal. On the right, a similar groove had been carved into a brick wall.

Caelum-class magic. Cutting. If it cut through metal, flesh and bone wouldn’t be an issue.

The assassin paused. I couldn’t see beneath the hood, but I guessed how their face looked. By all accounts, I should’ve been decapitated. I panted and swallowed, glad that I still could.

‘What’re you doing?’ Vic shouted from ahead. I sprinted to catch up. The assassin followed. Our shoes hammered the sidewalk. Fresh attacks launched every few seconds. I flung an arm back each time, splitting the arcs and scoring the street with deep notches. One attack hit a truck, shattering a window and splitting the door. The alarm blared.

I panted. We hadn’t run for long, but sudden exhaustion ruined me. It hurt to breathe, and my side ached. It felt like metal weights were tied to my wrist. The deflected attacks got closer and closer, until the concrete a fingernail’s length from my shoe got cut.

The assassin grew desperate the closer we got to Vandagriff. If we made it through the gate, we’d be able to find help. Yet, I suddenly wasn’t sure I’d reach it. My feet grew heavy. The soles of my shoes scraped the ground. I’d never used my magic so much, and it had an unexpected impact.

Not far. Not far.

We had to cross the street. Vic went first. Too soon. No, no. I couldn’t get the words out. The assassin noticed and launched a long, focused attack, an arc like a tidal wave.

For the briefest moment, I didn’t move. I didn’t know if I had the strength to move and stop the attack. And if Vic died, nobody would know about my magic. And the assassin had left themselves vulnerable; I could rush them, take them out while they focused on Vic.

But.

I sprinted sidelong. Right into the path of the attack. Only my outstretched hand reached it. A ring of faint light formed around my fingers and struck the arc. It split and deflected, carving its way through concrete and my outer calf. I screamed but didn’t fall. Blood soaked my jeans, ran into my sock, and filled my shoe. Vic sprinted back and got an arm under me.

The assassin grunted. Their shoulders rose and fell. The rapid attacks must’ve tired them, too. We’d almost reached Vandagriff, but with my leg, I wouldn’t make it.

‘Rush ’em,’ I said.

Vic grit her teeth, dragging me along. ‘What?’

I repeated myself, got my knife out of my pocket, shoved it at Vic, and pulled away. I faced the assassin. They faced me in turn, stances equal and mirrored. They spoke:

‘Are you the new mage?’ They had an ordinary feminine voice. No malice. No roughness. I nodded at the question. ‘Tell me how you acquired it.’

Vic kept to my back. Good. My calf bled in aching pulses. I felt faint. My foot made a wet, sloshing sound when I applied the slightest pressure. In response to the assassin, I offered my middle finger.

‘Your magic shouldn’t be lost,’ the assassin replied. ‘Tell me how it can be acquired.’

Silence. A moment passed. Instantly, the assassin whipped their arms and went for an assault of pure quantity. At least a dozen arcs soared at us.

‘Go!’ I shouted at Vic, raising my fists. The arcs reached me. I punched one, and a second. Punching worked better. More precise. Felt clearer. I used a hook to deflect four arcs at once. C’mon, c’mon. Tendons between my bicep and forearm felt ready to rip. Seventh, eighth, and ninth arcs got deflected.

Vic had sprinted away, circling the darkest part of the street to rush the assassin from the side. She’d almost reached them. She’d opened my knife. The metal gleamed.

I deflected the tenth and eleventh arc.

The assassin turned. Vic wasn’t close enough. At that range, an attack was unmissable. The assassin pulled their arm back.

I hadn’t moved. I couldn’t. The twelfth and final arc rocketed toward me from the side. Coldness ringed my upper arm; Xandria circled. The implicit message reached me. Cupping my hands, I “caught” the final arc and spun on my good foot. Rings of light held the arc between my palms. Like a hammer throw, I released the arc at the assassin.

The assassin readied to swing at Vic. No attack manifested. No chance.

The sound: Like tearing open a massive envelope.

The arc I threw had slashed through the assassin’s elbows. Two forearms and hands hit the street and rolled away. The assassin fell to their knees, and a moment later screamed. I had never heard screams like that. Visceral. Primal. Endless. Their voice filled the street and surrounding alleys and might’ve reached Vandagriff.

I hobbled closer. Vic hadn’t moved, knife still ready to plunge into the assassin’s gut. Blood dripped from Vic’s hair, and splattered her face and torso. The assassin’s screams failed and she slumped forward, passing out from blood loss or shock. Their shoulders twitched for a couple seconds, before going still.

An uncanny calm fell upon me. I lost my sense of self, my sense of place, as if a character coincidentally also named Amborella Cole had done the act. I took the knife from Vic, closed the blade, and pocketed it.

A car’s headlights rounded the corner ahead and drew near. A window rolled open. In a panicked voice, the driver said:

‘Are you hurt, Miss Victoria?’

#

Blood pooled under my foot. The driver went to Vic first, but she sent him to get medical supplies from the car. The driver came back with a lot more than bandages. Popping open a leather satchel, he revealed sprays, vials, clamps, tape, wipes, gloves, and, yes, bandages.

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

Vic and the driver helped me to the back seat, where I lay down, injured leg dangling out. Teeth bared, I breathed in pained hisses. Yet, despite the pain, I noted unbelievable softness of the car’s leather seats.

The driver pulled on gloves and cut off my jeans at the knee, before using a Circinus-infused spray, sensory magic, to numb my leg. He cleaned the wound and followed with three lighter sprays: Cancer for survivability, Auriga for speed, and Ursa Major for growth. The combined scents of burnt sugar, sandalwood, citrus, and flowers made me dizzy. There still wasn’t a way to infuse something with multiple types of magic, so individual use was the only option. Finally, he stitched the wound, applied a bandage, wrapped it, and fastened the whole thing with tape.

I inhaled and exhaled slowly. I didn’t feel much from the leg, except a subtle and disturbing “tug” of the skin. The combined magic sprays accelerated healing, so I literally felt my leg reforming.

With my leg treated, Vic and the driver got in the front seats. We left the armless assassin in the street and drove in the direction of the Fornax household. Vic called ahead. ‘Do we have anyone at St Vincent’s?’ she asked.

I tried to listen, but adrenaline drained, replaced with fatigue. Sweaty and bloody, yes I was, but also warm and empty and resting on some of the softest seats I’d ever experienced.

Phone off her ear, Vic craned around her headrest. ‘We’re having people sent to Cecilia.’

I gave a mixed grimace-smile, and throat bobbed as I nodded. The call continued, with confused sounds coming from Vic. I feared the worst, but she craned around again and said:

‘There’s already a Faceless Carrier outside her room.’

‘Huh?’

Vic looked at me with unfocused eyes, listening to the phone, relaying info. ‘Apparently Cecilia is the package. She’ll be transported back to Vandagriff after she recovers.’

‘Trap?’ I grunted, but didn’t believe. The Faceless Carriers didn’t mess around. Their core business model revolved around neutrality among dozens of clients that hated each other. If they started to break contracts, their whole system collapsed.

‘It sounds like she’s safe,’ Vic said. ‘Do you still want to go to the hospital?’

I considered. I wanted to see Cecilia, but I doubted seeing me would help. Better to deal with the cause: Wira Kusuma. I guessed we had some time before he learned his assassins failed. We needed to act before then.

‘We need to find Kusuma,’ I said. Vic agreed, and told her driver to stay on the path to the Fornax home.

Xandria’s coldness coursed from my injured calf to my hip. ‘You’ll be glad to know nothing critical was hit,’ she told me.

‘Great.’

‘I would have liked to observe the fallen assassin,’ she added. ‘For pedagogical reasons, of course; it is not every day one gets to witness life draining from a body.’

‘Maybe afterward we can—’

The driver swore. The car swerved and I rocked to the side and hit my head on the window. Outside, water covered the road. Not puddles or heavy rain. A small portion of the street had been flooded. We swerved again, sending me into the opposite door, and a moment later my forehead slammed into the back of the driver’s seat. The air bags hadn’t gone off; it wasn’t a collision. I rubbed my head and looked out the window. The water beneath the car had turned to ice, freezing the wheels to the road.

‘Get out!’ Xandria ordered me.

Vic and the driver fought to open their doors. I pressed the button to lower the window, but thin jets of water crept up and froze the glass. I pressed my palms against the frigid surface and tried my magic, but the ice had set and become a “natural” thing. Changing tactic, I lay back on the seats and kicked with my uninjured foot. The glass bowed, but one foot wasn’t enough.

My struggle got interrupted; a screeching hiss resounded in the car. Vic yelped and pressed her back against the passenger door. A thin jet of pressurised water carved a hole in the floor. It went toward the front of the car. Toward Vic.

I reached out without thinking and used my magic to create a shield slightly wider than my palm. By instinct alone, I pushed the shield over the water. The jet lost pressure, turning into a gurgling fountain before falling away entirely.

Cecilia, Vic, and I were on the Auroch. Three people. An assassin went after Cecilia, another found us on the street. It seemed we’d found the third.

We in the car took ragged breaths, each of us in unison understanding we needed to get the hell out.

‘Get on the floor,’ Vic ordered me. I slid down, wincing as my calf hit my other leg. With the back seats clear, Vic climbed over me, copied my previous position, and kicked the window. It broke on the third try. Her driver passed over his jacket to cover the fragmented glass.

I heard it: Sirens! Police! Red and blue lights got brighter. They must’ve been the police going to Vandagriff because of the situation with Cecilia.

The police car stopped in front of us and two officers got out. They approached with caution, steps slow across the puddles. They got close enough to identify us, stopped, and shined a light through the windshield. A new jet of water formed behind them.

‘Turn around!’ Vic shouted, gesturing wildly.

The officers looked back for a couple seconds. The vertical jet of water sped along the ground, cut, and hurled a huge chunk of an officer’s leg onto the windshield. The officer fell, gushing blood into the pooled water, staining the ice bright red. The jet whipped back and forth across the downed officer, finishing what it started. The second officer stumbled onto hands and knees, trying to reach the police car, but the jet honed on their position. They didn’t reach their car.

Vic’s driver covered his mouth and rested his head against the steering wheel.

‘We can’t stay here,’ Vic said, climbing through the window, hands on the icy exterior.

‘No!’ I seized her hips and wrenched, a second before the jet of water sped past the door. Part of Vic’s fringe, fell to the ground.

Vic breathed. She stared at nothing. ‘Thanks.’

Because of the police officers, I got a sense of how the water jet moved. The assassin didn’t know our exact locations. They couldn’t see us. They needed contact with the magic-controlled water or ice to direct their attack.

In the car, for a few minutes at least, we were safe.

Vic’s phone rang. She put it on speaker, and the voices of a man and woman came through. They wanted to know how close we were. ‘We’re not,’ Vic stammered, and gave a shaky outline of the situation, with assistance from the driver.

‘Stay there. We’re coming to get you.’ This, the man’s voice. It reminded me of Solomon; their voices shared a piercing clarity. The man’s words, droplets of peace in a whirlpool of terror. ‘Stay on the line.’

It had gotten too quiet outside. For safety, I triggered a shield across the floor of the car. It proved lucky, since a minute later the hissing of pressurised water through metal reoccurred. But, again, the jet slackened when it contacted my shield. I couldn’t sustain it, though. My entire body ached, and the bandages around my calf bled. Using my magic to continually cover the floor felt like holding a tree trunk overhead.

‘How close are you?’ Vic asked.

‘Five minutes.’ An engine’s roar made it through the speakerphone. ‘Perhaps less.’

‘They won’t make it,’ Xandria said. Pessimistic or realistic, I couldn’t tell, but I agreed. Either my magic faltered, or the jet came from another angle.

The driver craned around his seat, face pale, lips twitching. He told us to move. He’d climb out of the window and cause a distraction.

‘You’re not going out there,’ Vic commanded.

Brave, stupid, or a bit of both, either way, the driver’s sacrifice wouldn’t have been worth much. He’d have been carved apart like the police officers.

‘Where is the attacker?’ This, the woman’s voice. It reminded me of Tea; their voices shared a vast awareness. The woman’s words, hope to dye despair.

Vic and I looked out the windows, but we couldn’t see anybody in the street. Vic relayed this, so the woman replied:

‘If you give us a landmark, we can do the rest.’

‘Can they?’ I asked Vic, to which she nodded. I thought back to our fight against the second assassin. I’d told Vic to rush them, and she’d done it without question. She’d stayed with me. She’d trusted me.

Well, I didn’t trust Vic, not fully, but I didn’t want to be indebted to her. Steeling myself, I crouched on the floor of the car, tested weight on the balls of my feet, and…

Vic noticed. ‘What’re you—?’

I leapt past Vic and out the window and hit the icy ground. Pain bloomed from my shoulder. I slid from the momentum. An immediate jet of water followed, carving through the ice. I nullified it with a shield over my palm. It manifested in the same location and restarted. I nullified it. In the process, I backed through the watery street toward the dry sidewalk. The jet followed, and each time I countered. With each new jet, I could practically feel the assassin’s frustration.

But, like I figured, my body gave out. Calf bled. Legs cramped. I collapsed to my knees. Heart hammered. All I could do was shield the parts of my body in contact with the ground. Jets started and stopped and started and stopped. A horrifying water show surrounded me, like snakes striking at a glass cage.

‘Four minutes,’ Vic called.

‘If you perish,’ Xandria said. ‘I perish, as well.’

I bit my lip and tasted blood. The feeling had gone from muscle strain to utter agony, joined by a rolling hot-and-cold sensation. ‘Then do…’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. Xandria offered no suggestion.

The jets slowed and stopped.

There!

At the intersection, a figure emerged. It had to be the assassin checking why their magic didn’t work. See it, I mentally begged Vic.

‘Outside the storage facility with the green awning,’ Vic said into her phone.

‘Got it,’ the woman replied.

Light exploded overhead. Fireworks? No: A sphere of roiling fire. It came toward us. I felt the heat from down on the street. I had to look away, yet the powerful light reflected off the water. Shadows vanished. The assassin sprinted up the street, toward us, looking back all the while. The sphere of fire descended like a meteor. The assassin raised a shield of futile water, a bucket to stop a bushfire. The fire crashed upon them and stayed in place. They managed a few steps, but the sphere of fire followed with a hellish deliberateness, almost gentle in how it consumed.

Water around the assassin boiled and exploded through the fire and instantly steamed. The worst smell I’d ever experienced followed, and I spotted the source lying on the steaming pavement once the fire cleared.

I couldn’t move.

Vic and the driver climbed out, and helped carry me to a drier place.

A few minutes later, a new car arrived at the scene. Man and woman stepped out. Victoria had been the first Fornax I met, but I was about to meet two more.