He brought up his human hand and counted down from three.
At one, he pulled open the door. Zoe slipped her dagger around the corner and created a cross of razor wind.
A squelch came from within followed by a few thud and a few slopping noises. When no other sound reached her enhanced ears, Zoe peeked her head around the corner.
Pieces of a zombie lay in a pile on the floor, faintly illuminated by the green flame in Devon’s hand.
“Good thing that wasn’t Nel,” Devon said as he walked around the corner. “Or Arachne.”
“Nel wouldn’t be here. And Arachne… well, she could take it, right?”
“Maybe,” he said with a shrug. “Depends on how much force you put behind those.”
Zoe glanced down at the zombie. She hadn’t been holding back at all. Despite the zombies being squishy, their bones were still bones. Zoe had cut clean through the ribcage and spine with enough force left over to make a mark in the wall.
“Of course, if you did not kill Arachne, she would likely be upset. I don’t know how attached to your heart you are, but I know that I don’t want mine torn out of my chest.”
“She wouldn’t,” Zoe started with a frown. “Would she?”
“Depends on how clearly she is thinking at the moment.”
If she had just had a cross cut into her chest, Zoe doubted she would be thinking straight. “I think I will exercise caution in the future.”
“Whatever,” he said, leaning back to look up the stairwell. “Thirteenth floor, right?” He sighed and looked Zoe straight in the eyes for probably the first time since she met him. “If I survive this, I am going to lie down on Ylva’s bed and I’m not going to get up for a damn year. At least.”
Before Zoe could formulate a response, he turned and started trudging up the staircase. His grumblings about cutting the power and elevators did not slip by her enhanced hearing.
With a sigh of her own, she followed him up. The thirteenth floor was up there, but at least she had stopped needing the cane. Teleporting was impossible thanks to the nuns. But so long as their warding kept Sawyer and Nel inside, Zoe wasn’t about to complain.
As Devon incinerated a zombie at the next floor, Zoe glanced up and murmured to herself, “I wonder how Wayne is doing?”
— — —
Wayne gripped the collar of his coat and pulled it tight around his neck. Even with a few heat enchantments in place, his face was still exposed to the early December air. Being on top of a thirty story building in the middle of the night did not help matters.
In contrast, Genoa Rivas stood at his side wearing clothing that Wayne might have felt a chill in while standing in the middle of a volcano. She didn’t have any spells keeping her warm that Wayne could detect. She didn’t even huddle up on herself.
Genoa stood with her feet apart–most of her weight centered over one leg–and one hand on her hip while her other hand flipped a dagger around. She tossed it up in the air, caught it, spun it around in the palm of her hand, and twirled it between her fingers.
Frowning, Wayne looked out over the edge of the hotel. Not at anything in particular, he just gazed into the distance.
His partner hadn’t stopped fidgeting since they arrived. Either because she was nervous or she was itching to get a move on. Wayne had a suspicion that it was the latter. He just hoped she wasn’t going to be too reckless once things started.
Wayne sighed, wishing he had a cigarette–wishing he hadn’t stopped smoking years ago.
Raiding the lair of a necromancer was not in his job description. He was supposed to teach alchemy and recruit kids. Maybe help them out if they got in a little trouble.
This was beyond a little trouble.
It was only tangentially related to a student–and not one of his at that–if he considered Zoe’s theory that the nun’s magic could help Spencer. Possibly Spencer’s roommates as well.
But Zoe had asked. He wasn’t about to turn her down. Besides, he thought as he turned back to Genoa, zombies will make for good exercise after my hospitalization.
“You’re not going to slow me down are you, old man?”
“I’m forty-seven. I’m more worried about you.”
“Don’t. I’m not much older than you. They won’t know what hit them.”
“That,” Wayne said with a sigh, “is what I’m afraid of. I heard about what happened to your daughter, but this is here and now, that isn’t. Are you going to be stable in there? Are you going to keep your head?”
“I will get the job done,” Genoa snapped. “If Nel can find my daughter, I will move mountains to recover her.”
That didn’t give Wayne any peace of mind.
The lights on the roof blacked out before he could say as much.
“Try to keep up.”
Genoa pressed her hand against the rooftop access door. It melted to a puddle of flowing metal in seconds.
She strode through without a glance back. The metal trailed after her heels.
With one last look at the cloudy night sky, Wayne followed.
He pulled out his heavy tome and started filling it with magic. Pages full of spells charged to a faint glow, each ready to cast a complex spell that might otherwise require multiple mages. He performed the first spell upon himself.
Time appeared to slow as his mind burned through magic. Information flooded into his brain, was processed, and stored or discarded as unimportant. It happened far quicker than any regular human could hope to achieve. He didn’t accelerate his thinking to his limits. Experiencing one minute as ten was tedious and unnecessary for walking about.
But he wanted the edge of faster reactions. Wayne would be the first to admit that he was rusty. Not only because of the hospital stay. Teaching was a safe and relaxing job. Normally.
Being brought down by that jezebeth was an embarrassment that wouldn’t have happened in his prime.
Genoa’s hasty strides down the staircase turned to a casual walk in his perception, though her face lost none of the intensity. A scrap of flesh hung from a railing. One of the doors was dented inwards with bloody handprints.
A corpse lay still in front of the door. One hand still reached up, gripping the door’s handle.
No. Not a corpse.
Its eye twisted up to the rooftop access doorway.
Genoa’s head didn’t move towards the corpse. Wayne couldn’t see her eyes, but he doubted they were focused on it. She hadn’t made any move to destroy the corpse.
In fact, her focus wasn’t in her hand. It spun through the air in slow-motion while her hand moved to catch it.
For a brief moment, Wayne had half a mind to wait. To test his partner in this exercise and see if she was everything he had been told about her.
By the time his foot touched down on the first step, Wayne was ready for his second spell.
A ball of flames gathered between the pages of his tome. It took off down the staircase at a speed that appeared normal even to his heightened perception.
The zombie didn’t stand a chance.
Zombies were too dangerous to be used as a test. While their fluids lost potency to propagate the magical virus within seconds of being removed from the body, a single bite or scratch from a ‘live’ zombie could spell doom for their mission.
And he had never got a straight answer out of Spencer as to how she cured Ward.
While his thoughts flashed along, Genoa had turned her head. Understanding her slowed speech wasn’t easy, but this wasn’t Wayne’s first rodeo.
“I had it handled,” she said.
Wayne had to drop his accelerated thoughts just long enough to speak. “I handled it first.” He paused, then smiled. “Try to keep up.”
He accelerated his thoughts again.
They continued down the stairs at a sedate pace–from his perspective–occasionally having to destroy zombies or skeletons. None posed much of a threat to his flames or her macroferrokinesis.
Wayne grudgingly admitted that she was good. Most earth mages skipped ferrokinesis entirely. Those that learned it tended to only be able to do so by touch. When she dropped half a door on a zombie like some sort of guillotine from a whole floor above, Wayne only managed to keep his face straight thanks to processing through the shock in an instant.