I stared at the primed grenade and then into the frozen eyes of each of my companions. The elevator door was shut, and we had no way to do anything about this from inside here. After all that…one grenade in an enclosed space was going to kill every last one of us.
The first thing I tried to do was open the elevator doors. Nothing. The Bureau must have done some pretty thorough enchanting when they prepped this place because when I tried to interact with the doors a sudden flare of blue magical symbols physically prevented me from making contact.
Ditto for every other surface inside the elevator. It was like whatever protective enchantments floating around the elevator were treating my knee-jerk Temporal Fractal—which I had not even known I could cast—like hostile magic, meaning that so long as time was frozen, I was stuck here.
My left arm had gone full dino when time froze, and my skin had that scaly coating to it that usually meant I was impenetrable, but I had my doubts about how well that would hold up inside of a metal box. Tabitha’s healing factor might allow her and I to recover, maybe… eventually, but Boris’s goons would finish us off well before that could happen.
Io, Euna, and Blitz would be turned into paste.
It was over.
Unless…
I gripped Euna’s shoulder and pulled her slightly, dragging her into the temporal fractal alongside me so she could see into this little frozen speck of time. Her eyes blinked open and she took in our statuesque companions in surprise before she noticed the grenade, and my expression.
“Euna, I’m sorry to ask this of you. Can you dissolve this grenade the same way you dissolved that Signal emitter Blitz gave you?”
Euna’s eyes flared in panic. “N-no, Ryan. I can only dissolve dead or inert objects. There’s an active process taking place inside that thing that I can’t stop with my acidic structure.” Her voice got very small as she glanced around the elevator once more. “But there is something I can do to save all of you. I’m going to need your help though. Is that okay?”
I nodded. “Anything. We’re all dead unless we can think of a plan.”
Euna swallowed nervously and her pink biomatter suddenly faded until it was closer to white. The little core of semi-solid matter floating around her navel suddenly drifted forward and popped out of her belly button, landing in her waiting hands.
“Can you hold this, and keep it safe, no matter what?” she asked.
I blinked, staring down at the gooey orb she was trying to hand me. “What is it, exactly?”
“It’s me, Ryan. This is the very core of my being. All the rest of me, the slime I accumulate and will into different shapes? That’s just matter that I control. I can make it take any shape that I want. This is the real me. So long as it survives, I survive. You’ve already saved me before. So saving you and Tabitha now is the least I can do.”
She pressed the orb into my hands and then stepped over to the grenade, balling up her pink biomass into a beach ball-sized sphere which then condensed in on itself until it was roughly the size of a basketball.
“Okay, Ryan. I’m ready,” Euna said.
Unsure of myself, I raised up my dino-arm and prepared to snap my fingers.
“Euna?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you for doing this. When we’re safe and you’re all regrown, Tabby, Io, and I will owe you one. We’ll help you track down every last one of those emitters and destroy them. One by one. Alright?”
“Well, I thought you were already going to do that,” Euna said, her voice taking on a mischievous lilt. “If we’re talking favors, then I already know what I want.”
“Name it.”
“Oh don’t worry, Ryan. I will.”
Smiling slightly at the prospect of whatever naughtiness she had planned, allowing myself to temporarily forget about what was about to happen, I snapped my fingers and the Temporal Fractal collapsed.
The blob of pink biomass suddenly popped, marking everyone left inside the elevator with pink slime like a water balloon filled with paint had gone off in our midst. Considering the alternative was all of us being consumed by a contained explosion, I suppose this was preferable.
Tabitha and Io both looked from the spot where Euna had been standing and then to the gooey orb clutched in my hand, putting the pieces together for themselves.
“Where’s Euna?” Io asked without taking her eyes off the core in my palm.
Tabitha already knew the answer, gleaning it from our psychic bond.
Blitz dry-heaved for a second but got himself under control.
I transferred the baseball-sized orb into my dino hand.
“I’ve got her. She saved us all. Let’s keep moving.”
At the bottom floor of the hotel, the doors dinged open to reveal our private garage. Our K-9 SUV, an ambulance, and a garbage truck were all ready and waiting.
Unfortunately, so was another squad of Hunters. Along with a familiar face.
“Derek?” I shouted incredulously.
Derek, looking quite different in his tactical mage outfit than he used to in his gas station attendant uniform, spun around to sneer at me. White tendrils of energy swirled around his forearms as literal dark shadows suddenly appeared around his eyes. “Hello again, traitor!”
“‘Traitor?’ What the fuck did you just call me?”
All of the Hunters surrounding him swiveled to face us and pointed their rifles our way.
A couple of Io’s drones sprang out of the elevator and hovered before us, projecting energy shields that I was pretty worried would not hold for very long. But at least she had some form of defense for us.
“You heard me asshole! You betrayed your own kind just so you could go shack up with a bunch of monster-whores! Tell me, is every position considered doggy style when you’re fucking a werewolf?”
That brought me up short. He did not just insult Tabitha.
On one hand, Derek had been a true friend to me during the roughest year of my life. On the other, he just insulted my girlfriends. Nobody calls my girls ‘whores,’ nobody. I had an undeniable urge to raise my right hand and fire a round into his skull, especially since he was here with the same crew that was trying to kill us.
I compromised and fired back with an insult of my own.
“This coming from a guy who’s been simping after an actual succubus who seems to be fucking someone new every day. You might as well call her public transport since half of Eastport’s been inside of her, pal.”
Going from zero to a hundred real quick, Derek’s magic suddenly flared up as he let out an otherworldly shriek. He threw both of his hands out towards us and let loose a wave of white-hot flames.
Smirking, I transferred Euna’s core into my human hand and snapped the fingers on my dino-hand; stalling time for the second time that day. I was getting better at this shit. I quickly pulled Tabby, Io, and Blitz inside of the Fractal and got us moving towards the SUV when things started going sideways.
My vision blurred and I lost my balance. Time sped back up to normal speed. Both of my hands were human again, and my skin had lost the protective scaliness.
Derek’s spell washed over the elevator, snapping enchantments left and right and sending out blue sparks that skittered across the cement as the flames engulfed the wall of the parking garage and scorched everything it made contact with.
Tabitha wasted no time adjusting to the sudden loss of our stolen time. She just raised her rifle and fired two tight, controlled bursts into the throats of the nearest two Hunters.
I shook off the dizziness and followed suit, firing off two cryo grenades from my Roulette Rouge that flash-froze a couple of enemies.
Derek threw up a magical shield that rose between us, warding off our bullets.
“Io, can you do anything to help us out?” I asked.
“Of course I can!” Io replied tersely, tapping away at her tablet from behind cover. The dump truck suddenly came to life all on its own and backed over three Hunters, flattening them beneath its massive weight. Her pair of magical drones suddenly let out sonic screeches that deafened several nearby Hunters, leaving them stunned long enough for Tabitha and I to take them down.
In seconds, the population of the garage had plummeted until all that remained were the four of us—five, including Euna—, Derek and two Hunters who had hunkered behind his shield, and one of Boris’s hellhounds.
The latter finally made its move; sprinting around the vehicles to avoid our shots and leaping towards Io, the most vulnerable member of our party!
A single shot rang out through the garage.
The hellhound fell past Io as she recoiled out of its path, and the creature collapsed to the ground with dark red vapor rising from a fresh wound in its bony skull. Gunsmoke still rose from Blitz’s pistol, and he was staring down at the monster in horror as it was already struggling to rise to its feet.
With my gun in my left hand, I fired off a volley of four concussive grenades that popped Derek’s shield and let Tabitha drop the pair of hunters. In the same instant that I moved between Blitz and the hellhound and struck with the blades of my Roulette Rouge, still clutching Euna’s core. Both energy blades sliced through the horrifying canine’s neck, decapitating its foul head from its emaciated shoulders in a single attack.
I met Blitz’s gaze and nodded. “Good choice.”
“Does this mean I can get more ammo?” he asked hopefully.
“No.” I turned back to Derek and fired off a hail of cryo rounds, letting them super combine on the frail bastard and flash-freeze him completely solid. Hopefully the ice would hold long enough for us to complete our next mission.
I raised my gun and aimed at his head, ready to pull the trigger, when Tabitha set a hand on my forearm. “Hey. I get it, Ryan, but chill. Derek’s still your friend in there somewhere, he’s just under Bianca’s spell. You don’t need to kill him.
“He called you whores,” I stated firmly.
“I know, Ryan.” She gently tried to lower my gun arm, but I kept it where it was and glared at her. “But he didn’t mean it. It’s succubus magic. It’s sort of like…a drug addiction. When he’s away from Bianca he’s experiencing withdrawals. If we leave him here encased in ice for long enough, or we break her hold over him, he’ll get her magic out of his system and go back to his normal self. She does this every so often; picks a boy she wants to keep like a playtoy for a few months, fuck them up inside with jealousy and impotency, and then tosses them aside when someone new catches her eye.”
Some very, very strong protective instincts were telling me to just pull the trigger and be done with it. Nobody insults my girls. But Tabitha was insistent, and she knew more about this world than I did having grown up in it. I didn’t like it, but I chose listening to her over exacting revenge…for now. I settled on killing—or at least maiming—Bianca for turning my bro into a simp. That would have to suffice. But if he said anything like that again, he was done.
Settling my breath, I looked to Tabitha and nodded. The matter was settled.
“Alright ladies, and Blitz, everybody load up. We’re leaving,” I announced.
“Where are we going?” Io asked, her eyes still locked on the dead hellhound.
I holstered my gun and moved towards the SUV, an idea forming in my head for how best to phrase this. “Only place we can. We can’t trust the Bureau. We’re going to go through the backdoor.”
Smirking, I climbed into the driver’s seat and took the lead. I was done taking orders and getting moved around the board like somebody’s pawn. It was time to take the fight to the guy who started this whole thing. And end it, before more innocent monsters got hurt.
But first? We were going to need some allies, and I knew just where to find one.