A bloodied and battered fellow listlessly swinging a baseball bat came galloping out from the general area where the Spark had crashed into the hospital lobby. Grace responded to this threat with a little hop and kicked him in the chest – sending him to the ground gasping like someone having a heart attack.
Grace went back to drag the other guy off the hood of the Town Car “I heard somewhere that Bruce Lee said you should never try to kick someone above the knee.” She deposited the groaning man next to Christie “I know you were in a car crash and that did most of the damage, but I still think that kick was pretty effective.”
Christie was clutching his ear and the gun at the same time, which made it look like he was trying to stop the bleeding with the gun. Is that irony, trying to do first aid with a gun? Not really sure how irony works.
He was rocking back and forth “Oh, god, my fucking ear!”
Grace slapped his hands away and grabbed his head “Shut up.”
Christie was about to say something else but stopped, astonished as Grace healed his mangled ear with her magic. His eyes about bugged out of his head, which I’m pretty sure would have been ironic given what they were involved with.
“How did you do that?!”
Grace had a confused expression “How did I do that? Magic, what the hell do you think! Now it’s your turn, are these people all bugs or what?”
Christie tugged on his ear in wonder “I never . . . . I didn’t . . . . I-I . . . . how did you do that?!”
“Focus Christie, forget about your damn ear for one second.” She nudged/kicked the groaning and bleeding man she had dragged over “Is this guy a bug?”
Christie looked at him for a moment “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean you don’t know?!”
Christie threw his hands up “I mean I don’t know! I never saw anything like this before!”
“What are you talking about, you’re supposed to be the bug expert!”
“Don’t get mad at me, I don’t fucking know! The old guy in the car we were following is a bug for sure, I know that, this guy here . . . I don’t know what he is!”
Grace held her hands up “Okay, let’s just calm down here, this guy looks normal to me, what does he look like to you?”
“His eyes are all white, or like gray. There’s no color or pupil or whatever. And his skin his weird, like ashy maybe.”
“What about his lips? Are they black?”
Christie gaped at her “Yeah, how did you know that?”
“Stella never told me that the signs would be invisible to the naked eye.” Grace cocked her head “ Maybe that’s a secondary spell to hide the symptoms, wouldn’t make much sense to have them walking around looking like that. People would notice a thing like that.”
Christie had a wild look in his eyes “Who the fuck is Stella?”
“A necromancer. These men are zombies, Christie Lane, which means that the bug guy is most likely also a necromancer in addition to being powered by bug magic, which sounds like some bad shit to me.”
Christie scrambled backwards away from the man on the ground “They’re dead?!”
Grace smiled sadly “No Christie, zombies are living people whose minds have been overthrown by ritual magic, that stuff about zombies being dead bodies is Hollywood bullshit. Stella would have been very upset if she heard you talking about zombies like that. It really bothered her when people used the Z word incorrectly.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
Grace shook her head “Nothing, let’s just use your bug magic sucking spell and see if it works on zombie magic too.”
Christie finally got to his feet, stepping gingerly on his smashed foot “How am I supposed to do that? I have no power.”
“Well Harry Potter ain’t coming over the hill, Christie, so I guess I’ll have to do.”
He clutched at the car like a drunk that thought they were going to fall “What do you mean?”
“Jesus, you don’t know anything do you? You draw the energy you need from me, Christie. Magic, like making love, is better with two people than one, and like sex, the more people you involve, the more you can do.”
Christie is the worst apprentice since Micky Mouse.