“I thought it was a faded tattoo, but it’s just a huge magical mark. You used skin-toned ink to hide it—”
“Pretty damn smart, Dakota,” Transomnia snarked.
“No wonder you tried to have me killed,” I said. “I’d have pulled it off him the moment I got him in my chair—”
“That you would have,” the Archmage said. “I have no doubt. You’re very powerful—”
The wolf now stood abreast of me, snarling, and Lord Buckhead’s hunt began to quail. What few animals could survive in the concrete jungle no longer had the fighting spirit of the wild, and they cowered and fled from the snarling monster before them.
Buckhead had no such limitations, and stepped forward. “Alone or with an army,” he said, raising his staff, “I will still defeat you.”
“Bold words,” the Archmage responded. “Wulfgang… eviscerate them.”
Wulf advanced, snarling, past me. Nothing human remained. I wanted to cry.
“You didn’t lie about your name after all, did you?” I said sadly. Wulf’s eyes flickered sideways—and then he looked at me, and whined. His eyes flicked back to Buckhead, who smoothly relaxed and crossed his arms, averting his eyes, motioning his remaining followers to do the same; thus appeased, Wulf turned back to me, eyes dimming from gold to a warm, glowing green… not unlike the glow of Buckhead’s staff.
For the briefest moment, I saw the real Wulf inside those eyes, and he leaned forward and licked my cheek.
“Oh, hell, you’ve tamed him,” the Archmage said, and I heard the smooth shing of metal on metal. “Well, there’s more than one way to skin a cat,” he said—and plunged his silver dagger into Wulf’s neck.
Wulf yelped like a kicked puppy and flinched aside, and the Archmage twisted the dagger out in a spray of blood that went over me, Transomnia, everybody.
“No, no, no—” I cried, but Wulf went down, collapsing to the side, whimpering, as the Archmage jammed his dagger back into his staff, making it blaze with evil red light.
“He was at the end of his useful life,” the Archmage said. “But that stray you picked up is young, strong, smart—and pretty. Perhaps I should make her my new slave—”
“Not in my domain,” Buckhead growled. Electricity danced between the antlers of his staff like blue fire, and he thrust the staff at the Archmage and roared a mystic phrase that crackled with power: “Ot’iyagleya cicastaka.”
Lightning leapt from Buckhead’s staff, born in blazing fire between its prongs and striking the grille of the Archmage’s fasces. Sparks and arcing bolts danced around the chamber, throwing Transomnia to his knees and forcing the Archmage backwards on the dais. But just when it looked like the old wizard was about to crumble, he thrust the staff upwards in the air and roared, “By Ba’alat of Gebal, fall at the feet of your lord.”
The Archmage rammed the staff down into a socket in the central design, completing a circuit between the floor and horns of the altar. With a thunderclap his staff released all its mana, burning my skin like fire, knocking Transomnia flat to the floor… and piercing Lord Buckhead through the heart.
“NO!” I screamed. But Buck just slumped to the floor, his staff falling to the ground with an impotent, hollow clatter like any old piece of wood.
“Like bugs drawn to the light,” the Archmage said, cloak thrown back by the force of the blaze. “All too easy.”
Skin crackling with fire, crying with pain and loss, I twisted forward and craned my head up, at last seeing the face of the wizard behind this all.
My heart stopped.
It was Christopher Valentine.
42. UNVEILED, THE ARCHMAGE
“And to think, when I began stamping out rivals, it involved months or years of painstaking work—detecting, divining, even the odious art of dowsing,” the Mysterious Mirabilus said to the unconscious crowd, spinning the bronze-handled, triangular-bladed silver dagger in his hand with a broad, disarming grin. “But in this ‘modern’ age all I need do is divine the right city, scan the yellow pages for likely practitioners, lay out a few bodies and—BAM!”
The dagger stabbed home into the altar right in front of my bound hands, and I jerked back. My hands didn’t move, and I slouched back against the altar, sheltering my head between my forward-stretched arms, trying anything I could to get away from that knife—perilously aware this thrust my exposed backside into the air.
“All too easy,” Mirabilus repeated, hand resting on the dagger. After a moment of silence, I glanced up cautiously and found him staring