Hexomancy Page 8

  “You brought your team,” Ree said, embarrassed at how obvious her dialogue was coming out. Ol’ stars-and-stripes had a knack for stating the obvious. Next time, she was going with Brubaker Cap. He was subtler.

  The Derby Strega grinned, showing a cracked incisor. “Yep. Name’s Connie Clothos-Line, and these are the Fighting Fates.”

  “We seem to have forgotten the rest of our team back at home. Can I interest you in a rain check on the bout?” Eastwood asked.

  “No chance. My sister should have punched your ticket months back, and I’m here to do what she couldn’t.” Connie pulled up a whistle and blew.

  And we’re off.

  Ree had seen only a handful of derby matches, unless you counted Whip It. (She didn’t. Maybe if she were a Cinemancer.) But these women were all athletic and ranged from tiny and fast to three nearly as big as Connie—powerful women crackling knuckles as they took formation.

  First things first—spool up her props. Ree focused on the shield, which became heavier, more solid, in her grip. She wound up and hurled the shield softball-style at Connie’s knee level, hoping to take the Strega off her feet. She bet that the prop would do what the real shield was supposed to do, as long as she hurled it right. She’d heard through the Geekomantic grapevine that Cap shields were useless, otherwise.

  She hoped.

  Jack and Joe were with her this time, and the shield hurled forward in proper fashion. Connie pushed off, skating to one side. Her hands contorted in a Ditko-fingers fashion reminiscent of Lucretia’s Hexomancy. In addition, the woman shouted, “Foul!”

  The shield wobbled, glowing with energy the same green as Connie’s helmet, and then the prop went wide—way wide, bouncing off the ramp behind the Strega.

  Hexomancy. Her least favorite thing. As long as the Strega could do the gestures and speak the curses, Hexomancers were nearly untouchable. You’d slip, fall, get a Charlie horse, or any of a hundred bits of bad luck, all adding up to a one-way ride on the failboat.

  Ree ran forward at a diagonal, building up a buffer between her and the Strega. First step would be getting her shield back, second was to down Connie’s backup. Then she and Eastwood could double-team Connie. But where Lucretia was weak sauce in hand-to-hand combat, Connie looked like she could tank with the best of them.

  Dozens of wheels made a solid droning on the concrete as the women moved forward in formations. At least it looked like the other Derby girls weren’t Hexomancers, too. Then they’d be properly fucked. Eastwood had his blaster out and was stunning the skaters left and right, until Connie called another foul, gesturing like a derby judge. Eastwood’s blaster slipped from his hands, dropping to the floor with a lifeless clunk.

  “Go-se!” Eastwood shouted, diving for the prop as the skaters closed in on him, throwing elbows.

  A pair of derby girls closed in on Ree, but what they didn’t know was that she was filled with righteousness and the resulting super-strength. With Connie’s attention on Eastwood, Ree threw a roundhouse that picked one woman up off the ground, then punched the other one in the sternum, sending her sputtering to the ground. She’d automatically calibrated her super-strength for KO and not kill, which was a blessing.

  Those two down, Ree dropped and slid down the skate park ramp, letting the buff coat take the abrasion. She came out running and bent down to pick up the shield when she heard another foul called, and instead of snatching the prop up with a slick smooth motion, her gait changed last second and she kicked the shield, sending it skipping across the concrete and slamming into the wrong side of a ramp.

  Ree opened her mouth to say, “Screw you!” but all that came out was “Dangit!”

  It took her another seemingly interminable thirty seconds or so to retrieve the shield. She was finally far enough out that Connie ignored her, leaving her to the four skaters bearing down on her, using ramps to gather speed.

  Ree picked up the shield just as a thickset blocker leaned into a shoulder check. Ree planted a foot on the rear ramp out of the park and pushed on the shield.

  Magic and body mechanics met mass and momentum, a not-quite-as-momentous immovable object versus irresistible force. The end result? A massive clang as the skater deflected off the shield. The derby blocker went out of control, taking a header into the ramp and cracking her helmet. Ree suppressed the sympathetic wince and took the initiative to drop into a crouch to trip the next skater behind the knees. The skater fell defensively, landing on her pads, but hard, thanks to the head of steam she’d built up.

  Ree copied the skaters and built up speed, running up a ramp and jump-slamming into the next two, leading with the shield. She landed on the shield, which ate up the impact, Vibranium proving its awesomeness once again. But the shield wasn’t a high-end prop, and it would only be good for another couple of hits in all likelihood.

  Looking back, she saw that none of the skaters were getting up, but all were still breathing. Just how she liked it.

  Back around Connie, Eastwood was getting the full cartoon mob treatment, pinballing between beatings as he scrambled to recover a weapon, any weapon.

  Skaters took turns buzzing him, throwing elbows as they passed by. And behind them, the other team members kicked the weapons away, separating the Geekomancer from his tools—blasters, lightsabers, playing cards, dice. The floor of the skate park was as messy as Grognard’s had been when Connie’s “sister” had trashed the place.

  Eastwood wasn’t taking it lying down, for sure. He threw elbows and knees, getting in good shots here and there. But with Connie bearing down on him and being outnumbered six to one, he couldn’t hold his own without weapons.

  “Get out of the park!” she shouted to Eastwood, who had gotten to his feet, a trio of smaller women closing in on him, probably regular jammers. Connie had her focus trained on Eastwood, so Ree had the time to get off a throw. Probably.

  Ree chucked the shield at the trio, aiming high and hoping for one of Cap’s patented ricochet shots. Connie called out a warning, but it was too late.

  The shield bounced off of one, two, and then three helmets, cracking the first two with Vibranium might.

  But between the second and third helmet, the shield reverted to a plastic disk, and clattered off the third woman’s helmet with no effect.

  Which meant it was time for another tool. The lightsaber was out, since she wasn’t going to turn the skate park into a bloody soup if she could avoid it. Eastwood’s lightsaber could do this weird thing where it only stunned, but hers was all or nothing.

  The Captain America power would fade soon, but Ree’d earned black belts in Taekwondo and Hapkido before she thought of her Force FX lightsaber as anything other than a cool way to signal her geekdom and something to have fun waving around in the dark privacy of her own room.

  Ree proceeded to jump-kick, roundhouse, and shoulder-toss her way through the derby team, stronger and faster than any of them, thanks to the magic. Or that was the plan.

  But the plan didn’t account for Connie. The Strega’s Hexomantic curses thwarted Ree at nearly every step. Her jumps were too big or too small, her footing was terrible, and her shoelaces came undone.

  And every time Ree went for Connie directly, she would trip, slip, or just end up running the other direction—she was like a super-magnet with the same charge as Ree, or they were like a lead pair of detectives in a buddy show who were not going to get together anytime soon.

  Several of the women clearly had martial arts skills in addition to their derby chops, though a few got in lucky shots.

  Too lucky. Strega cheater lucky.

  Ree launched herself into a sliding sidekick that should have folded the woman in two, but she slipped on the concrete, catching herself in a safe fall that still burned all along her thigh, side, and forearm.

  The Cap magic kept the impact from opening her leg or arm, but the theme music was dwindling
fast.

  Ree decided to expedite things, pulling out her phaser (which was set to stun by default). She’d been hoping to save it for Connie, but Eastwood didn’t have much more time. He was about as tenderized as hamburger meat, definitely the same shade of red-pink.

  Dropping the closest two skaters, Ree rolled under the clothesline thrown by another of the thick blockers. She zapped the woman as she tried to turn, then jumped into a back-kick to clothesline a woman who’d come up behind Ree.

  “Your team isn’t doing so hot, Connie,” Ree called out to the Strega, who was going one-on-one with Eastwood.

  Four on one, really, as a trio of skaters kicked and punched at Eastwood’s flanks.

  As Eastwood swung his holdout knife, trying to keep the other women off him, Connie caught him across the jaw with a shredder-claw-enhanced cross.

  “Shnikes!” Ree said, getting a bit tired of Cap’s filter. But the power was fading, the patriotic brass distant in her mind.

  Ree unloaded a burst of stunning phaserocity into Connie, who turned the ray aside on her reflective armor, sending the beam up and into the clouds.

  Nice armor, Ree said to herself. Chances were, that’d apply to the lightsaber as well. So instead, she pulled out her butterfly knife. She could do a lot of damage with a knife without killing, though she wouldn’t get nearly the reach advantage.

  Connie made another Ditko-as-referee gesture and called, “Foreign object!” and Ree’s knife slipped right out of her hands in the middle of her figure-eight opening.

  Well, that’s that. It was time for some good old-fashioned infighting.

  And that meant infighting. And clearing out the rest of the team. Two more derby girls advanced on Ree, and she used up the last of her Captain America mojo to thump one on the head and crescent-kick the other across the jaw, putting them both down. The music was gone, leaving Ree as only herself.

  “If you swear off this hunt and GTFO now, with your team, this can all be over,” Ree said, hands open but ready.

  “No can do, twiggy. Sacred duty and all. My sister calls, and I answer. Scruffy here isn’t part of the Plan anymore,” Connie said, rancor capitalizing the P quite effectively. While the Strega talked, Eastwood circled around, so that he and Ree were flanking the woman.

  “You sure?” she asked. “Your team looks like they could stand a week of recovery time, so now it’s two on one, with no refs to save your bacon. Discretion, valor, all that crap.”

  Connie spread her stance and put up her dukes, turning to keep both Eastwood and Ree in her peripheral vision. “Bring it.”

  “Gladly,” Ree said, shuffling forward as she drew another knife, cutting herself a path in to striking distance.

  Connie pushed off and came at Ree, hunkering down into a metal-capped battering ram. Ree dodged to the side, her jumps no longer backed by super-soldier strength. Connie’s knee bashed and cut Ree’s shin, but Ree got in a slash across the woman’s back in exchange. From the other side, Eastwood closed and swung with brass knuckles, each finger styled with a ward. Looked like a prop out of Supernatural, or maybe Dylan Dog.

  Ree was hoping for Supernatural.

  Fighting two on one, they should have been able to keep Connie on the defensive. But the Derby Strega was used to power plays and made offense her best defense, wheeling and turning to keep Ree and her sometimes mentor closer together so she could parry both of their strikes in the same motion.

  Ree’s knife made sparks on the Strega’s armored cops as the Strega blocked, dodged, and weaved. The Strega got in a solid jab to Ree’s head, blowing through Ree’s block with her mass advantage but landing only her fist, not the blade.

  As Ree stumbled back, Connie grunted, arcing over in pain. Eastwood jumped back, then charged ahead immediately, opening up to draw Connie’s attention.

  But it was no good. There was blood in the water, and Connie pressed her advantage, rolling forward and grabbing Ree from waist to shoulders. Connie grabbed and squeezed the woman in a destructive bear hug, locking down Ree’s knife hand along the way. She fought back but lost her grip on the blade as she tried to flip it around into a reverse grip.

  She was too short for a proper headbutt, so Ree opted for the second-best option, which was a stiff knee to the groin.

  Her knee found only hard plastic. And a jill, too? Fucker.

  Connie laughed, squeezing harder.

  Eastwood pounded at the woman’s back, but her grip held strong. Ree fought, puffing herself up as best as she could, then, taking Eastwood’s timing into mind, deflated and dropped a half beat after Eastwood’s brass-knuckled rabbit punch.

  She didn’t get all of the way out but slipped down to Connie’s waist level. Ree dropped into the splits, scuffing one knee along the way, but it got her under the derby Strega’s grip. Ree threw an elbow into the side of Connie’s knee, above and just behind the armored knee guard. At the same time, she knuckle-punched the woman’s upper thigh, all notions of clean fighting thrown out the window.

  Connie grunted again, and Ree rolled back and up to her knees, the world spinning. She stood slowly, guard locked down tight.

  Times like this, I really wish I was Chaotic Neutral. A Chaotic Neutral Ree would have just blastered and lightsabered the woman into ribbons and walked away for a hot dog.

  Connie caught Eastwood with an uppercut that hit like a ton of bricks, and Eastwood stumbled back.

  Ree jumped up on the woman’s back with her best “little kid with enough grappling skills to be dangerous” grip, trying to snake her way around to a half nelson.

  She held on as tightly as possible, wrapping the woman up into a triangle choke hold. Unsurprisingly, the woman dropped straight back, hoping to crush Ree under her substantial bulk. But Ms. Smith didn’t train no chump.

  Ree unlocked her legs and swung back, landing on her belly instead of becoming the squishy middle of a Strega-concrete sandwich.

  “Now!” Ree said, wincing with the force of the impact. Connie rolled over to try to keep Ree on the ground, but Ree scuttled back to her knees, getting clear.

  Giving her a great view of Eastwood landing the coup d’grace, clocking Connie in the back of the neck, below her chromed helmet.

  Eastwood’s blow made a meaty thud, supplemented by the slap of metal on flesh. Connie grunted once more, then collapsed to the concrete. Ree held her guard, in case she pushed on, but the woman seemed out for the count.

  “Holy crap,” Ree said, massaging her jaw, which would soon be blooming into impressive shades of purple bruising.

  Eastwood had found time to take a minor healing potion or the like during the fight; his cheek was no longer slashed open like the cover of Wolverine #50.

  “That could have been a bit easier,” Eastwood said. “I’d take an easier fight next time, yep.”

  “What do we do with the team here?” Ree asked.

  “Well, I sure as hell don’t want to burn through the cards it’d take to BAMF them all back to the Dorkcave, and I definitely don’t have the space or equipment to lock them all up long enough to do anything useful. I say we leave them and just take Connie here. I’ve got an idea.”

  “That’s never good news,” Ree said, scanning the edges of the park to look for reinforcements, further ambushes, or stray velociraptors. “This doesn’t involve sacrificing puppies, right?” She went over to where the shield had fallen and retrieved the child’s toy. She’d be better off with a full-size prop, but magic was magic.

  By way of response, Eastwood’s face scrunched up into a pucker of disapproval. “Just get over here, and grab an arm.”

  Eastwood grabbed one of Connie’s muscled arms, and fished a collectible card out of his jacket. He held up a card, showing a Fleer Nightcrawler from the early ’90s. Ree held on to the wave of nostalgia and lifted the woman’s other hand with both of hers, counteracting the extreme gravi
ty compliance of bludgeoning-related unconsciousness.

  The older geek took the card between his teeth. With the sound of tearing paper, the world.

  Went.

  BAMF!

  Chapter Nine

  BAMF!

  With the familiar sound of teleportation, Ree, Eastwood, and Connie popped back into the world, through several scary dimensions that Ree wished she’d not read the comics issues about, believing very firmly in blissful ignorance when it came to hell dimensions, and popped back into the Dorkcave, Connie between them, now lying on the floor in front of Eastwood’s media wall.

  “Tie her to the stacks while I get the ritual ready.” Dropping the woman’s arm, his focus went back into the rows and rows of merch.

  “Sure, Eastwood,” Ree said as she tried to move the woman, “I’ll just drag the unconscious burly derby girl with fifty pounds of gear on. No problem!” Adrenaline from the fight bleeding off, her efforts to drag the woman on her own added up to an express ticket to nowhere. Without the magical superpowers, she was back to being small, sleep-deprived, and hungover, none of which were helping.

  Harumphing, Ree let the woman’s arms drop back to the floor. She turned around to Eastwood’s media setup and cued up “Chosen” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, watched for five minutes, then ten minutes, temporarily forgetting why, then pulled herself away from the show and tapped into Buffy-level super-strength to haul Connie over to the stacks.

  Once she was in place, magical yellow handcuffs from Green Lantern went over a basic plastic zip-tie. The most important thing with Stregas was cutting off their ability to do all the gestural bullshit that Hexomancy required to make people slip on bananas that didn’t exist and to get jams with guns that had just been cleaned and inspected.

  Ree kept an eye on Connie, imagining that a tough witch would come to fairly soon.

  Which reminded her of another thing. She grabbed a roll of duct tape and ripped off a five-inch chunk, pressing it over the woman’s mouth, making sure to avoid the nose. She wanted the woman unable to do magic, not unable to breathe.