Spell Book Ch. 05

"Ow," I said. I lifted my head and saw that all three of the warlocks were on their feet. They looked angry.

Riley stood between me and the warlocks, her hands raised and legs spread in a balanced position.

"Run," I told her.

"Oh, shut up," she said.

The first warlock I hit with lightning charged her, his fists engulfed in flames and smoking. He swung at her and she ducked, hitting him with a flurry of blows in the stomach and chest as she came up. He doubled over with a grunt, and then straightened back to his full height. He sneered at her, a look full of unrestrained lust which promised vile acts.

The second one I hit with lightning was walking up behind the first. I needed to get up and help her, or she was going to die.

I lifted off the ground. My back made a sticky, ripping sound as I sat up, and I could see a dark smear in the street light leading up to where I had landed. Road rash, I thought, but I didn't have time to think about it anymore. I managed to get to my hands and knees and fired off another lightning bolt at the approaching warlock but the fucker had a shield ready and deflected the attack. It arced down into the pavement.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the third warlock getting up. I was feeling pretty beat to shit, and Riley wasn't going to be able to help me for long. Once one of the warlocks tagged her with a spell, she was going to be out of the fight and helpless at best. Dead at worst.

I needed a way to even the odds, and fast.

"What the hell do you assholes want with me?" I demanded.

"We're going to kill your women," the warlock closest to me said, "and then you won't be a slave to them anymore. We will free you from the tyranny of the witches, and you will join us. Be one of us."

"Tell you what," I said, lurching to my feet. "You have your people call my people, and we'll work on your sales pitch together. It's not the most refined. Little extremist. I'm sure we can find a nice middle ground, where you might have a hope of convincing me that you're the good guys. Right now, you just aren't selling it right."

"You won't understand until your connections to them are severed. The sooner the better." He stepped in close to me and swung a fist full of fire at my head.

I stepped to the side, sweeping his fist aside with my forearm against his. I answered his punch with a right-left combo of my own, doing my best to ignore my entire back screaming at me in pain. "You'll forgive me if I have a hard time seeing your benevolent tendencies in this. You're trying to kill my friends."

I couldn't risk a glance away to see how Riley was doing against the other two. He feinted, and I fell for it, blocking a punch that didn't come. He followed my movement with three sharp, super-heated punches up my left side. I spun away from him, gritting my teeth against the pain. My back was torn up and screaming at me. My front was burned and blistering, and my side was lighting up in similar pain.

"You should stop fighting us. We could overthrow all the witches with your help. We would no longer be fighting a constant war. We could destroy them all. They just want to control us." He came at me swinging, the flaming arcs of his fist leaving trails in my vision. I dodged him as well as I could, but he still landed a blow on the side of my head. I stumbled away from him and he let me. He wasn't trying to kill me, I realized. Just keep me busy.

This wasn't the fight I should be paying attention to.

I risked a look at Riley. She was doing the best she could against the other warlock, but the third one was coming up behind her.

I fired the combo spell I had used a few minutes ago; lightning and ice sprayed from my hands and slammed into the warlock sneaking up on Riley, sending him rolling across the street away from her.

And my opponent took advantage of my distraction.

He waded in, throwing a flaming haymaker into my face, connecting solidly on my cheekbone. I fell to the ground, rolling, the heat sending the nerves on my face into overload, my back screaming in pain from rolling and using the torn muscles. It was like being hit in the face with a white-hot poker while fire ants feasted on the torn flesh of my back.

I pushed myself up, my left eye swelling closed. I lifted a hand to my face and activated my cold spell; steam fogged my vision as the cold met the heat of my face. I grimaced against the pain.

"You can't stop us," the warlock loomed over me. "You can't even beat one of us. We're going to kill your coven, and then you'll have no choice but to join us. We can give you power you haven't even dreamed of."

"You've never worked in sales, have you?" I grunted. "If you can't convince someone to buy what you're selling, your best bet is to make a connection with your buyer. People love doing favors for each other. Right now, you're making all the wrong connections."

"I don't have to sell you anything. I'm just telling you how it will go."

"Oh. Well. That's a whole different ball game, then." I lifted to my knees and spat blood on the ground. I pushed my hands together and began gathering power between them.

I pushed to my feet and turned to face the warlock. Behind him I could see his friend getting back to his feet. He glared at Riley, and started moving towards her.

Fuck it, I thought.

"Sho..." I started, moving into a crouch, both hands gathering power.

"Ryu..." The power began to take shape, a swirling combination of cold and fire and lightning all mixed together. I quickly searched for a fourth spell, and the air around me began swirling and roaring, creating a vortex that encompassed the entirety of the spell.

"Ken!" I slammed both palms forward and sent the combination of magics careening at the warlock in front of me, then dropped, landing hard on my hands and knees, and then flat out onto the ground. The ball I'd created slammed into the warlock, lifting him off his feet and hurling him into the warlock once again trying to flank Riley. The ball of energy carried them both into the air, until it exploded in mid air.

The explosion sent them tumbling across the street. Lightning arced back and forth between the two warlocks, and as they sped past their last friend, lightning sparked across from the nearest warlock and hit him smack in the chest. He spun through the air like an Olympian ice skater doing a triple-axle. His landing sucked, though, as he flopped bonelessly to the street.

Riley was shoved back into the bushes on the other side of the sidewalk, and she bounced forward, landing hard on her hands and knees.

Cally and Aria dropped down out of the air next to me. "Shit," Cally said. "What did they do to you, baby?"

Riley looked up at that. "Baby?"

Aria turned to her and helped her up. "Are you okay?" she asked. Riley nodded, looking from Aria to me.

Cally cradled my head in her lap and began murmuring a spell. "You--are you okay?"

"Yeah, just peachy. There's a Street Fighter joke I should make right now, but I'm a little..." The last thing I saw was Cally's concerned-leaning-into-panicked face above mine, and then everything went dark.