Just Cause Universe 2: The Archmage Read online

  Hotaka and Kanayo rushed the intruder. Frazier moved in a blur and used his magic to counter theirs. Hotaka’s chitin blades flashed as Frazier deflected them with his own swords. Kanayo used her magic to make her curtains constrict him. He struggled to move against fabric as unyielding as steel. As Hotaka closed in on him, a cloud of pitch darkness filled the room. Frazier’s swords flared orange in the unnatural darkness.

  Will closed his eyes against the black and concentrated on finding his fingers again. He knew they were still there; his body had the memory. He just needed to reestablish the paths of his nerves. Magic coursed down his arms and overcame the spell which held his fingers fast. He began to play once more. A pinched harmonic on the high E string dissipated the darkness as quickly as Frazier had created it.

  Hotaka and Kanayo fought on full defense, hard-pressed by Frazier’s attacks. Fresh gouges in Hotaka’s armor smoked where the would-be Archmage’s flaming blades had cut it. What seemed like several acres of cloth swatches were strewn across the floor, their edges charred. A deep cut in Kanayo’s side stained her fabric armor with her blood. Frazier appeared unharmed, and even seemed to be enjoying himself.

  Will swore that if nothing else, he would wipe that stupid grin off Frazier’s face.

  His fingers danced over the frets as he wove magical energies in a storm to compete with nature’s own pyrotechnics outside. His force interposed itself between Frazier and the Saitos to protect them from his flaming swords. Then it gently lifted them over and behind him. They might not be out of harm’s reach, but at least he’d moved them out of melee range.

  Frazier’s smile fell as his kills were robbed from him. He snarled and his swords vanished. He drew power into him in preparation for the incantation which would destroy Will. Will could feel it draining from the very air around him.

  Will compressed as much of the magical force around Frazier as he could and shoved him once again out into the rainstorm outside. He pulled off a difficult two-handed arpeggio up and down the neck of his guitar and built up to a climax which should crush Frazier into powder.

  A sparkling shield emerged from within the enemy mage and pushed back against Will’s energies. Even though he worked hard to defend himself, Frazier still found enough power to go on the offensive. He released a glowing yellow cloud that drifted through the air, unaffected by wind or rain. Will changed tactics from technical prowess to sheer balls-to-the-wall speed metal. The cloud broke apart and flowed past him in thin yellow streamers.

  The Saitos! Will realized.

  He whirled around just in time to see the yellow cloud envelop the two elder mages.

  “No!” screamed Will as he tried to find the right chord to fling the poison away from them.

  Hotaka took his wife’s hand in his own and smiled even as blood began to trickle from the corner of his mouth. She in turn nodded at Will before she closed her eyes. They both pitched forward to crumple into heaps which decomposed into dust.

  And their energies poured into Will.

  “No, it was supposed to be mine! Mine!” shrieked Frazier.

  Between them, the Saitos had nearly two hundred years to absorb magic, and those energies flowed out of their remains like water from a fire hose. If the power had been lightning, it would have sought the ground. But this was magic, and it sought the nearest conduit of eldritch ability.

  It sought Will.

  Brilliant white light surrounded him. He stopped playing; he couldn’t have continued even had he wanted to. His body went completely numb. The concentrated power protected him from Frazier’s sneak attack, a bolt of power which rebounded away to dissolve a large hole in the apartment’s wall.

  The landlord’s gonna be pissed, thought Will, drunk on the power as it coursed through his body. He immediately understood the appeal of becoming an Archmage, if it felt like this all the time. He turned, only dimly aware that his feet hovered several inches over the floor.

  “No matter,” grumbled Frazier. “I’ll get their power when I kill you.”

  Options poured through Will’s mind like sand through a sieve. There were so many new things he knew he could do with the fresh influx of pure power: invocations, evocations, transformations. Choices overwhelmed him and he floated, helpless, unable to decide on one. Another of Frazier’s power bolts blasted against Will and shattered the magical shield between them.

  At last, Will understood discretion was the better part of valor. His mind latched onto a spell he hadn’t known before. His fingers flexed on the guitar to form the chord to unlock the power. Might as well look good doing it, he laughed to himself. “You’ll have to find me first,” he mocked.

  He pointed the neck of the guitar straight up in the best stadium rock tradition and struck the chord.

  When the swirling purple energies around him dissipated, he found himself back in his studio in the Lucky Seven’s Chicago headquarters. Frazier’s scream of fury still echoed in his ears. The incantation seemed to have worked properly, since Will had been transported to a place of safety. Furthermore, he was masked from Frazier’s magic, and effectively invisible to magical detection.

  So many new ideas ran through his head that his legs grew wobbly and he had to sit down. Maybe there really was something to all the book learning that most mages followed. Nah, he decided. Studying was for the birds. Satisfied with that rationale for now, and secure and comfortable in his studio, Will began to play again. This time he played not for the magic, but for the music.

  The magic simply happened anyway.

  Chapter One

  “One of the myths about superhero teams that perpetuates is that we’re always busy fighting the so-called Forces of Evil. The truth is that there is far more down time than action. It can actually be pretty boring.”

  -Jack “Crackerjack” Raymond, appearing on The Late Show With David Letterman, August 28, 1998

  May, 2004

  Denver, Colorado

  Just Cause Headquarters

  Jason’s alarm chirped. Sally groaned, rolled over, and felt around for the clock as she tried to avoid opening her eyes. After a minute or so, she still hadn’t found the elusive alarm, so she cracked open one eyelid and tried to resolve the blurry images into something familiar. He’d moved his clock again, the sneaky jerk. It mocked her, just far enough out of her reach that she’d have to get out of bed to shut it off. He knew her proclivity for sleeping in, and had moved it before he’d left for his shift in the control center.

  “Dammit, Jason.” She grumbled as she got to her feet and trudged across the room to shut it off. Shenanigans like this would irritate her to no end if it had been anyone else but Jason doing them. She wouldn’t let something this trivial get her all riled up, especially now they were sort of living together. Sally stripped off Jason’s oversized t-shirt which served her as a nightgown and headed for the bathroom.

  A splash of red and yellow made her glance toward his computer. His screensaver showed the picture they’d had taken together the day she’d been inducted into Just Cause. He mugged for the camera in his brown and gray costume, blond hair flopped over his face, chin unshaven, while she smiled from behind her goggles. Her slender form, wrapped in her bright red and yellow speed suit, contrasted with his thick muscles and earth tones, like a hummingbird beside a bear. She rarely noticed how much smaller she was than him except when she saw that picture. She was a third of his weight, and only reached up to his shoulder if she stood on tiptoes.

  He treated her as gently as if she were made of delicate porcelain. When they made love, he took great care not to crush her. To that end, they’d started to experiment with some different positions they’d found on a website. A couple of them made Sally blush just thinking about them, although she liked the one called the cowgirl. It made her think she ought to get a special hat to complete the experience.

  She decided she’d better wash her hair since it had been a couple days. Conventional wisdom for super-speedsters was to keep hair short. She re
jected that trope, and kept hers long enough to touch the small of her back, in spite of the hassle. Super speed presented its own unique hair-care concerns: split ends to give beauticians nightmares, thatched tangles like birds’ nests, and the ever-present danger of catching it on something and turning her head into a five-hundred-mile-per-hour tetherball. She went through conditioner as fast as she did tread on her boots. More than once she’d considered cutting it all off and going with something short, cute, and sexy. But Jason loved her long hair, and when he ran his fingers through it, it gave her the best kind of shivers.

  She shut off the water, dried herself, and dressed in a short-sleeved hoodie and shorts. She slipped out of Jason’s room barefoot and with her hair still dripping, and headed up the hall to her own quarters. She paused by Sondra’s door and considered whether to knock, but Jack had just come off monitor duty and they were probably occupied with one another. Jack and Sondra, known respectively as Crackerjack and Desert Eagle in parahuman circles, were her two best friends.

  She let herself into her quarters and wrinkled her nose at the slight stuffiness. Just Cause members rated their own private suites as nice as any in an upscale hotel, but the windows weren’t designed to open except in an emergency. She hadn’t known this and had set off a general alarm the first time she propped hers open. Team commander Juice had been very nice about the whole thing, but dropped a thinly-veiled suggestion that perhaps as the newest member of the team she might read her book of rules and regulations. All she’d wanted was to feel the spring breeze and to air out her suite.

  She slipped on her knobby-soled trainers, grabbed her costume goggles, and headed for the nearest exit. Most people took showers after they ran, but Sally wouldn’t be working hard enough to even break a sweat. She mostly just did it to dry her hair. A couple of laps around the Just Cause compound at a nice, easy sixty miles per hour would take about as long as fighting with a blow dryer, plus she’d get a tan.

  She slipped the goggles over her eyes as she stepped onto the pavement outside the dormitory and took off. Cool air blew against her bare legs and helped wake her up a bit more. She needed to do anything she could to wake up. Between Control Center shifts, training, public relations, volunteering, and the occasional date with Jason, it felt like she never got enough sleep. And when the need arose, Just Cause heroes responded no matter where they were, or how much sleep they’d had.

  Sally kept well inside the perimeter fence for her morning jog. She had once thought the locals in Denver would be used to parahumans with Just Cause Headquarters and the Hero Academy both in the metro area, and had gone to run along a bike path. Then some morning commuter caught a glimpse of Sally as she ran twice as fast as traffic, spilled his coffee, and rear-ended the car in front of him. They all had a good laugh about it at a subsequent staff meeting.

  When it happened a second time, it wasn’t nearly as funny and Juice called her into his office for an explanation. Since then, she tried to be a lot more careful about using her powers out of uniform and off-duty. It seemed she’d spent more time in Juice’s office than out of it ever since becoming a full-time member of the team. She wondered if everyone new got into as much trouble as it seemed she had.

  She reached her first marker, near the northwest corner of the compound property, and turned to the east to run toward the morning sun. The heat on her face reminded her of Phoenix, where she’d grown up. Her hair streamed behind her like a blonde flag and flapped itself dry. Speed beckoned to her with its tempting call, but the winter had been mild and the spring dry, and most of the land on which the Just Compound sat was covered with prairie grasses and weeds. If she stepped carelessly on a stone and it glanced off something the wrong way, it could spark and ignite a grassfire. Over time, she’d worn a clean track from her daily runs, but kept her speed down just to be safe.

  Her phone beeped from its clip on the back of her shorts. She sighed and skidded to a stop in the dust. Never really off-duty. “Sally, go ahead.”

  “Good morning, beautiful,” replied Jason’s voice. “Enjoying your run?”

  “Well, I was until you interrupted me. You couldn’t have waited another ten minutes?”

  “Hey, you’re a speedster. I figured you’d be done already.” He laughed.

  “Liar,” said Sally as she bent down and touched her toes to keep herself limber. “You’re probably watching me from the satellite feed right now.”

  “Uh, no I’m not,” stuttered Jason, and she grinned with the knowledge she’d caught him.

  “Oh, good. What’s on your mind, sweetie?”

  “Juice asked if you could stop by his office when you’re done this morning.”

  “Am I in trouble?” she asked. Going to see the boss during downtime usually meant a reprimand of some sort.

  “No, he said he wanted to ask you about a couple paras you might know.”

  “And his fingers are broken so he couldn’t call me himself?” She turned to walk back toward the headquarters building, some five miles away from her current location. She could have covered the distance in seconds, but she wouldn’t be able to talk and run at the same time, and she didn’t mind making Juice wait so she could keep talking to Jason.

  “He seemed pretty busy. Bustled through the Command Center and barely even said hello. I suppose maybe he thought you’d rather talk to me than him?”

  Sally laughed. “I might. Anything on your mind, Jase?”

  “Not really. Just grumpy about monitor duty on opposite hours of you.”

  “I could always start sleeping really late.”

  Now it was Jason’s turn to laugh. “More than you already do, you mean? I think you’d sleep for twenty hours a day if you could.”

  “Yes, please,” chuckled Sally. “It’s my metabolism. Super-speed is a rough power to use. It really wears you out.”

  “Nice try, babe. I almost bought that.”

  “Yeah, pretty convincing, wasn’t it? I almost believed it myself. Oh!” She caught her foot on a rock which protruded from the ground. Her lightning-fast reflexes saved her from a tumble. She caught her phone before it hit the ground. Like most Just Cause equipment, the phones were made from pretty durable construction, but they still had the unfortunate luck to always land on a fracture point.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I just tripped. Hang on.” Sally checked around to see which rock was the offending culprit. It had to be the odd-shaped dirty gray one. She blinked at it. It didn’t look like a rock; it looked more like the end of a bone sticking out of the ground. Curious, she crouched down for a closer examination.

  It had to be a leg bone because of the ball-shaped knob on one end. She wondered if it was from one of the deer that ran wild across the territory. She looked around and found a sturdy stick and scratched away the hard dirt around the bone. After a few minutes of rapid scraping, she had the bone exhumed. The shape looked familiar; she didn’t think it was from a deer any longer. She held it up against her own leg for comparison. It matched in length. “Hey, Jason?”

  “Yeah?”

  “See if Jack’s busy or if he wants to play amateur archaeologist with me. I think I’ve found a dead person. Really dead. Like maybe for decades.”

  “You found a body?”

  “No, not a body. Just a bone, but I think it’s human. You’d better mark this spot on the map for reference.”

  “I’m buzzing Jack now,” said Jason. Sally scratched around in the dirt a little more.

  “Sally?” Jack’s voice came over the phone. “What’s this about you finding a body?”

  “I didn’t find a body, I found a bone.” Her stick uncovered what she thought was a tibia and fibula. “Make that bones.”

  “Well don’t disturb them. It could be a crime scene.”

  Sally looked at the stick in her hand with sudden guilt. “Uh, okay.”

  “Let me get some gear together and I’ll be right out. Mind if Sondra comes along?”

  “Of cou
rse not.”

  Ten minutes later, Sally heard the sound of an engine and saw Jack ride an ATV up over a hillock. His brown hair, starting to gray at the temples, flopped in the breeze behind his yellow-tinted tactical glasses. Sally could see his grin the second he came into view. She must have interrupted paperwork or some other thankless misery with her find. Sondra wheeled overhead with her large brown wings spread wide. The full-blooded Apache woman wore cutoff jean shorts and a string bikini top, one of the few things that she could wear easily over the huge brown and white wings that sprouted from her muscular back. She fluttered lightly to the ground and flexed her primary feathers before she tucked her wings against her back. Sally hugged them both.

  “Hey, now… people are going to talk.” Jack sounded pleased. He opened the tool box strapped to the rack of the ATV and rummaged through a haphazard lot of tools. “I didn’t know what all I’d need, so I grabbed everything,” he said.

  Sondra examined the bone Sally had unearthed. “Well, I don’t think this is a crime scene. Or if it is, it’s only of anecdotal interest. This is really old.”

  “We can take a sample back to the lab guys and let them carbon date them.” Jack staked out the site. Since he was invulnerable to physical harm, he just held the stakes on top and hit his hand with the hammer, which made both Sondra and Sally cringe and wince.

  “I hate it when you do stuff like that,” grouched Sondra as she looked away.

  Jack grinned. “I know. You suppose this is like an Indian burial ground or something? Maybe we’re going to get swamped by angry ghosts. You moved the gravestones but you didn’t move the bodies!” Jack whisper-screamed the last, a quote from the movie Poltergeist. He was a movie buff, and tended to spout off lines at opportune moments.

  “Last I checked, dear, we were still calling ourselves Native Americans,” said Sondra as she shook out her raven-black hair and punched him in the shoulder.