Strange Magic: A Yancy Lazarus Novel by James Hunter Page B

Vim that comes from a taken life. Something—maybe a small animal or even several—had been sacrificed to help power the summoning.
    That energy latched on to one of Morse’s men: Uncle Frank, the good-natured, tree-trunk-armed guy from the bar—he would act as the anchor and the homing beacon for the summoned fiend. He was the primary target.
    “I’m running out of patience,” Morse said, his voice echoing around the room.
    Morse’s impatience was misplaced though, the waiting was over. A gargantuan form, shrouded in darkness and obscured by the grainy texture of the screen, manifested not ten feet from the front door.

 
     
     
     
     
     
    THIRTEEN:
    Fight Night
     
    I didn’t wait for the creature to get close enough to start throwing punches. I was well prepared and ready to figuratively smack the thing right in the damned kisser. My first defensive trap had been inlaid into the front lawn and concrete walkway: a seething mass of razor-thin strands of earth and rock, all looped about and reinforced with weaves of water and held together by my overburdened will. The creature surged forward with the speed and power of a stampeding elephant, but it didn’t matter, all I had to do was release the pent up Vis stored in the ground. It was the matter of a thought.
    Before the beast had gone three steps, a small forest of scalpel-sharp spikes, three-feet high—some the width of my wrist, some only the size of my pinky finger—leapt from the ground. The yard turned into something that vaguely resembled a porcupine. The spikes were a real piece of work. Instead of fortifying the LA top soil, I’d reached deep into the earth, pulling from the igneous and metamorphic bedrock, rapidly heating and cooling the substance until only scalpel sharp obsidian remained.
    The spikes tore through the thing’s feet and legs, gouged into its groin, and left it pinned in a pool of oozing black sludge.
    The attack should’ve been a deathblow and it surely would have been to any mortal unlucky enough to end up on that lawn.
    The creature was no mortal.
    A dreadful growl of frustration and pain rang through the night like a tornado siren, setting off car-alarms, while dogs of all sizes took up a howling chorus. A hurricane of force and will exploded from the pinned creature, turning my neatly manicured yard of death-spikes into a whirlwind of shrapnel—glittering obsidian blasted through the door and into the living room proper like a swarm of venomous bees.
    “DOWN!” I roared, as I thrust out my left hand, bringing my second defensive construct to bear. A shimmering bank of reddish fog coalesced into the air before me, fanning outward across the room and upward toward the ceiling. This was a super-charged version of the friction shield I’d use in the alley against Yraeta’s thugs—it would superheat the incoming projectile particles, breaking them down into smaller less harmful particulates, while simultaneously deflecting and dispersing forward inertia. In theory the plan was great—I’ve used this construct loads of times without ever having an issue.
    But the incoming projectiles weren’t bullets, they were thin pieces of sharp obsidian glass. My shield worked exactly as intended: it obliterated the large rough-cut pieces, resulting in a swirling cloud of glittering glass dust. The shit would temporarily—or perhaps even permanently—blind anyone who was unlucky enough to get a face full of the stuff. Smooth move Yancy … that’s why you’re the expert getting paid the big bucks.
    I heard several men—the few who had been too short sighted to don ballistic goggles—let out shrieks of agony as the powdered glass contacted their eyes. I let two of my partially formed defensive workings unravel, refocusing that pent-up energy into a large column of air, which sucked inward with a thunderclap of sound, before propelling the obsidian particulate cloud out through the front door and squarely into the face of the