Steve McHugh - Born of Hatred

I was at the head of the charge, next to Matthew and Gordon, as the wolves moved as one giant wall of teeth, claws and snarling rage, ready to tear their enemies to pieces.

The barren rushed forward to meet them, but the end result was never in doubt. The wolves crashed into the barren like a car through a paper wall. Within seconds the wolves were carving their way through the hundreds of barren which had left the confines of the LOA building.

I sliced through the throat of one barren with a blade of fire that I'd created at the end of my hand, before spinning around and catching a second in the neck, decapitating it.

The barren never stopped attacking, even if they had to scramble over the bodies of their comrades to get at us.

I kicked one barren back and stabbed him in the forehead with the fire blade, extinguishing the weapon and using air magic to fling his corpse back into a group of his kin before they could reach me. They toppled to the ground like bowling pins, and were quickly swarmed by wolves before they could get back to their feet.

I killed two more barren with a whip of fire, cleaving them both in two and leaving their remains behind as I noticed that Sky and Olivia were being attacked by a large group of barren.

The two women had used the initial charge as a diversion to sprint off to one side of the building, but at some point some of the barren had become interested in them and that had forced Sky and Olivia to pause to fight them off, something they didn't have time for.

I sprinted toward the quickly growing group of barren and launched a wave of hardened air at them, throwing several away from their targets, giving Sky and Olivia some room.

One of the barren closest to me had avoided the wave and now turned to face me, but another, even more hardened wave of air removed his head from his shoulders, along with two more barren directly behind him.

Although neither of them had any apparent wounds, both Sky and Olivia were panting as a dozen barren lay at their feet.

"There are a lot more of these bastards then when we were in Montana," Sky said.

"There's about to be a lot more," I said as a large group of barren made their way toward us. "Just go, I've got this."

Sky placed a hand on my shoulder. "Be careful."

"I will, now go," I said.

The noise of battle can play havoc with your sense of perception, so it's much better to watch your enemy than try to decide their position based on sound alone. So, even as I watched Olivia and Sky run off to the side entrance, I kept one eye on the rapidly approaching hoard of barren. When they'd created a suitable distance between me and them I unleashed a plume of flame that engulfed a dozen of them. The heat was incredible, and I poured more and more power into the magic, turning a dozen barren to ash in a few seconds and scarring the earth for twenty feet in front of me.

The remaining barren didn't stop, or even slow down, they just continued toward me as if nothing had happened. I drew my sword and ran toward them, slicing and cutting through flesh and muscle with every strike.

I killed six before one got too close and I was forced to pierce it in the throat at an awkward angle, before managing to spin it around into a second barren and narrowly missing being racked with its nails. I pushed the sword further into the first barren until it sank into the head of the second. It took a few seconds to remove the blade from the two bodies, and in that time a further four barren had made their way toward me.

I readied myself to fight once again, but Matthew barrelled into them with a mighty crash, tearing the four barren into sodden chunks of meat before my eyes. He fought with such a ferocity and viciousness that I would have been very interested in seeing him fight when he was human.

"You fight like a wolf," Matthew said as he threw aside a barren's arm.

I turned to study at the carnage all around me. The wolves were destroying the barren in spades, but there were so many of them that the dense packs of barren stopped any serious progress toward the front entrance.

"How about your wolves clear a path?" I asked.

Matthew howled and pointed at the barren before us and within seconds a dozen wolves tore into them, carving a path through them to the entrance.

"Take care," I told Matthew, who ran off to join his pack in their fight.

I ran as quickly as possible, using air magic to make me faster, heading for the glass front door of the LOA building, dodging pieces of barren as I went. At some point they had been living people, but to think of them now in such a way would do no one any good. The living had been replaced with rot and decay. Ending their torment was the only humane thing to do.

I reached the glass door and kicked it open, taking one last glance at Matthew's pack fighting with everything they had, before stepping inside the first building of the headquarters.

I'd prepared myself for what was going to happen, for the complete loss of my abilities, but it was still a massive shock to the system. I made it to a group of leather couches next to the reception area before I finally succumbed to what the security had done and dropped to my knees. I'd worn a sorcerer's band before; Merlin had wanted me to learn how to operate without my magic. But the fighting I'd done outside tonight and then the abrupt removal of my magic forced me to pause and take a moment to get my breath back. You never realise just how much you rely on magic, until it's gone, and you're just left with nothing but a void inside you. If this was how humans felt every single day, then their life was not something I wished upon anyone.

After composing myself, I got back to my feet as four loud thuds sounded from outside the building. Four things had struck the ground with massive force, causing one of the large glass panes at the front of the building to crack slightly. And then I saw one of them. The ghouls had arrived to back up the two hundred or so remaining barren.

"Good luck, Matthew," I said softly, before sprinting toward the stairs that would lead me to find Tommy and Kasey.

The four thuds that had sounded as the ghouls had hit the ground outside told me that I didn't have to worry about bumping into any of them as I made my way to through the two buildings. With one ghoul dead at my hands, Peter only had four left. And while that did leave the possibility that he'd made a replacement for the ghoul I'd killed, I doubted he'd hold it back to guard him when he had so little to be concerned about.

Even so, I jogged the forty flights of stairs, keeping an eye out for anything that might cause me problems. Blood was smeared along the walls on several flights of stairs, but nothing more concerning than that, until I hit the top floor and found the bodies of two LOA agents — a male and female. The smell hit me before I saw them. Their shirts were drenched in blood, their throats torn open. They'd been murdered in a cold stairwell, yet more victims of the lich and his men who needed to be avenged.

I left the two agents where I found them, there was nothing I could do done to help them-and opened the door to the top floor of offices.

The blueprints that Olivia had gathered showed three large meeting rooms on this floor, along with two bathrooms, and several massive offices. One of those offices was Olivia's, which sat at the far end of the floor toward the front of the building, overlooking the grounds below.

I crept down the corridor, glancing in the windows of two offices adjacent to one another, but found them empty. At the end of the corridor was a wall with the letters LOA spelled out in highly polished chrome. I was about to turn left, toward Olivia's office, when I noticed bloody scuff marks on the otherwise clean carpet. Someone had been dragged along the hallway here.