Dead Man's Deal The Asylum Tales - By Jocelynn Drake Page 0,135

I knew was that the trio couldn’t be permitted to live. If they escaped, Gideon was dead. I was dead. The runaways were dead.

I dodged punches as best I could, and those I couldn’t avoid were at least reduced to glancing blows that would leave me sore later in the day if I survived that long. He was coming at me so fast I couldn’t catch a break to cast an attack spell that would buy me a little breathing room. I waited, just trying to stay on my feet with the shovel handle clenched in my fists. I was praying for an opening.

Unfortunately, the opening came from an angle I wasn’t expecting and didn’t welcome. Brazil pulled back from his last punch, but froze for a second when something off to his left caught his attention. I heard the movement, but I didn’t dare look. Tightly gripping the shovel, I swung it as hard as I could, slamming the metal spade against the side of his head. He went down like a sack of wet noodles.

“Gage! Watch out!” a young girl’s voice shouted. I twisted to see Alice and the other kids racing around the side of the small ramshackle house. They had gone around my locked door.

Time slowed down to a crawl. Alice sharply halted several yards away from me and swung her wand, sending out a bolt of red energy across the yard. A blast of bright white energy was already streaking across the street from the now-conscious warlock. But the white light wasn’t coming at me as it should have been. The energy hit Alice square in the chest and her small, thin body was thrown backward. Her long blond hair flared out from her in a pale cascade before she hit the ground with a lifeless thud.

“No!” I screamed. The warlock should have been aiming for me. He should have attacked me. But instead, he killed a kid.

The world grew dark as I turned to face the warlock who had killed Alice. Energy snapped and crackled like a downed power line. Black clouds churned and lightning jumped across the sky followed by the angry rumble of thunder. I wasn’t conscious of drawing the energy together, but I welcomed it. It danced along my skin while all the fine hairs on my body stood on end. There was so much energy in the air, I felt like I could pull the world apart.

The warlock looked nervously up at the sky and then took a step back as his eyes darted to me. Holding the handle in both hands, I snapped it near the spade over my knee with the help of a little magic. I dropped the metal spade with a thud and then drove the spike through the chest of the warlock I had knocked out only seconds before. He never stirred, never cried out, as I plunged the spike through his heart.

The other bastard snarled something at me, but I couldn’t make it out. Stepping on the dead warlock’s chest, I pulled the spike out and held it in my right hand like a bloody spear.

The warlock hurled a nasty attack spell at me, aiming to rip my flesh off, but I batted it away with a thick wave of energy. At the same time I threw a fireball at him with my left hand. A smile curled on my lips as I watched him predictably raise his hands in the proper countercurse to protect himself. Hefting my spear, I threw it at him with all my strength and the bulk of the energy shifting in the air. The broken handle hit him hard enough to plunge through his chest and throw him backward. The point of the spear slammed into a telephone pole behind him, pinning the bastard to the thick wooden beam.

The man weakly groaned, his hands loosely clasping the spear in the middle of his chest as the last of his life drained out of his body. Blood soaked his clothes and ran like a river down to the sidewalk.

I started to march across the street to make sure this kid-killing fucker died in as much pain as humanly possible, but Gideon stepped in front of me. I tried to shove him away, energy arcing between us. Gideon shoved me back and then backhanded me hard enough to make me stumble.

“Pull yourself together!” he said in a low, harsh voice.

“He killed Alice,” I snarled. Blind with rage and pain, I was