Oblivion Heart (Darkling Mage 4)

A man in the front rank – loose tie, messy hair, his hand gripped tight around what looked like an incredibly heavy paperweight – lifted a fist and yelled at the top of his lungs. The others followed suit, some forty-something voices shrieking and bellowing in unison, and as one they fell upon us, scissors and box cutters and metal rulers flashing as deadly as daggers.

Vanitas soared forth in response, not even bothering to disengage his blade from his sheath. He smashed into the man who’d unleashed the first battle-cry, pummeling his torso to knock the wind out of him.

Sam had already waded into the fray, talking with his fists and surgically-placed chops to the throat, mowing down our attackers just as well as Prudence would in hand-to-hand combat. The glyphs engraved in his skin shimmered as he fought, probably the source of his inhuman strength.

I sank into the shadows, waiting for an opportunity to strike. I only had a few options. One was a Sneaky Dustin Special – I could shadowstep behind someone, reappear, then knock them out with a smack from a blunt object to the back of the head. The alternative was to get the drop on them, from a darkened spot in the ceiling, except that the newsroom was too brightly lit.

Option one it was then. I dashed and wove through battle, my blood pumping, my body moving to the soundtrack of people screaming and bones breaking. I tumbled as I reached for the very paperweight that man number one had dropped when Vanitas had finished beating the tar out of him.

A spindly woman screamed and came at me with a box cutter clutched in both her hands, using the weight of her body to drive momentum behind an overhead stab. I yelped and stepped into the Dark Room, sinking into the shadows underfoot. Above me the woman screeched her fury and stabbed her blade repeatedly into the spot in the carpet that had been my exit point. Holy shit. What the hell had Adriel done to these poor people? This didn’t seem angelic. Not very angelic at all.

Glass paperweight in hand, I dashed through the Dark Room. I chanced a look at it, narrowing my eyes as I recognized man number one’s picture embedded deep in the glass, along with a woman, and two smiling children.

Damn it. As if I needed another reminder that these were real people. We couldn’t very well hurt them, not when they weren’t in their right minds. But if we didn’t do something, the Comstock horde would surely tear us apart. I gritted my teeth, biting back my anger. I didn’t care how powerful Adriel thought he was. I was going to make him pay for this.

I sprinted through the pinpoint of light at the end of the Dark Room’s tunnel, emerging at the precise point I’d intended: right behind a portly man with rolled up sleeves and a huge metal beer stein in his hand. I whacked him in the back of the head. He crumpled to the ground with a loud thud.

This really was worse than fighting shrikes. With shrikes, I could have unleashed the Dark Room, or thrown some well-placed fireballs to fry them to a crisp. I picked out my next target, watching as Sterling punched and kicked his way through the crowd, very clearly holding back his strength.

Carver thrust both his hands out, a gout of pale fire lancing from his palms. It narrowed to a point, lashing like a whip across the room, and where it touched the hideous sound of bones breaking cracked across the floor.

I winced. These people were going to have serious medical bills when they came to, but getting hit by Carver’s bone-breaker was still a lot better than being turned to dust by one of his trademark disintegration spells.

I worked my way through two more attacks using my Specials. One was a younger dude, maybe an intern or a new hire. The other was a woman with a short bob, probably in her thirties. I felt bad about knocking them both out, but again, better unconscious than dead.

The newsroom was quieter. I looked around myself, panting, my arm heavy from the strain of lifting and actually attacking people with a paperweight. Wonder of wonders: the Boneyard, plus one angel, were the only ones left standing.

Both Carver and Sam looked enviably unmussed – Sam’s hair especially staying infuriatingly in place, as if sculpted that way by some celestial hairstylist. The tips of Sterling’s nails were caked in gore. He was pretty quick about flicking his tongue out to catch the last drops of blood dripping down the corner of his mouth, but we all still knew that he’d fed on at least one of the office-zombies.

“What?” he said, feigning innocence.

I shook my head. Vanitas flew to me, hovering by my side, the blood smeared across his sheath complementing the red of his garnets. I couldn’t tell you how I knew, but something about his demeanor told me he was happy. Appeased, even. I cleared my throat uncomfortably.

“That’s the last of them,” I said. “Now it’s a matter of finding Bastion.”

“And Adriel,” Sam said, his brow furrowed, eyes searching the expanse of the newsroom.

“That way,” Sterling said, sniffing at the air. “I’d know Bastion’s stink anywhere.”

Carver pointed down the same direction, to the end of a corridor, one of his eyes glowing. “Sterling is correct. We must proceed.”

We picked our way through the eerily abandoned office, moving carefully, just in case. Surely, for a space like the newsroom, there couldn’t have been just the forty or so people working that night. Comstock Media ran its own in-house studio, which I knew from catching a few broadcasts on the TV in the Boneyard’s break room – that is, when Sterling wasn’t watching one of his soap operas.

“Have your wits about you,” Carver warned. “I sense that there are more of these pawns lingering here.”

Sterling sniffed again. “Several. Lots. But Bastion’s smell is strongest.”

“It’s his frequency,” Sam said. “Adriel is doing a fine job of cloaking himself and his victims, but my brother has filled this Bastion friend of yours with so much power that he’s burning like a candle in the night.”

“More like a bonfire, really. So bright, in fact, that others can surely see him.” Carver threw his arm out. “Halt. Speaking of others.”

I whirled in place, my eyes checking for anything and everything suspicious. “Other humans? Ones that Adriel is controlling, you mean?”

Carver drew his lips back. “Worse.” Sterling crouched lower to the ground and snarled.

“He means others like us,” said a familiar voice, from somewhere within the labyrinth of cubicles.

Ah, fuck. I knew it. Not him again.