Free The Minority Council by Kate Griffin Page B

stood on end and sparks flashed around his hands. He thrust his palm towards us as I turned, with the sweep of my arm catching a wall of pressure that nearly knocked me down again, and hurling it back at him. He covered his head with his hands and the spell parted around him, shattering the balcony windows.
    Now the people in the bedroom did get interested: a woman screamed, and someone shouted out, but the man in the dressing gown was shrugging off the spell like a loose towel. Opening his hands, he hurled a whirlwind of darkness at me, which condensed to tar smoke raging with internal fires. I ducked behind the sofa and deflected it overhead, then smelt fabric burning and felt smoke sting my eyes. With a flick of his wrist he batted the sofa aside,the entire thing lifting up and slamming into the wall above the minibar, hard enough to splinter wood. I threw up a cone of spinning warm air around me, smelling of ventilation ducts and kitchen steam, which caught and flung away the shards of glass he hurled at me next. The bedroom door opened, and now someone was embarked on full-scale screaming, a proper horror-movies wail. And where the hell was he getting his power from? I knew every sorcerer in the city, or both of them, and he was not a sorcerer. But this—this was more than simple wizardry.
    He moved towards me again, already midway through another spell. This looked suspiciously like a transformation: his skin was beginning to mottle over with concrete, his veins started to ridge and shimmer with an internal line of steel. I grabbed a fistful of electricity out of the nearest mains, and threw it. Blue-white lightning danced through the air and slammed into him, twisting his body and briefly disrupting his spell. I hurled it again and took a step forward. He reeled back, bending in on the point of impact, his dressing gown charring, and smoke rising up from it. I was nearly close enough to touch him. I threw another blast of electricity and, as he staggered, I swung round so that my elbow slammed into the side of his face.
    The concentration went out of him, body slumping back, hands to his face. I’d felt something crunch as I struck, and saw blood roll between his fingers from his nose. There was movement behind me but we ignored it, grabbed the bleeding, tottering man by his dressing gown, and snarled so loud and so hard that the lights across the floor hummed and dimmed with the force of it, “Where is Meera?!”
    It’s hard to throw spells with a broken nose. The painruns straight up your face, curls into the hollows of your ears, makes it burn to blink. Only yogi masters concentrate through that.
    I dragged the bleeding man by his dressing gown to the nearest elevator, and rode up to the top floor. I marched him down the corridor, knocked on a couple of doors until I found one where the light didn’t come on in answer, opened it, pulled him in, and closed the door behind us. I guessed we had a maximum of fifteen minutes until the police, by now curious as to this trouble roaming around town, arrived to ask annoying questions. I sat the bleeding man down on the end of the crisply made double bed, went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, ran it under cold water, and gave it to him to press against his streaming nose.
    “Jesus you fucker!” he wailed through blood and cloth. “What the fuck you do that for?”
    “In fairness,” I said, “I asked you for information and you tried to kill me.”
    “You attacked me!”
    “You were prone to deceit by silence, and we are not famed for our patience.”
    “I’m fucking doing you for assault!”
    “Sure, because you’re going to have fun explaining how you fought me off. Let’s talk dusthouse.”
    “Fucker!”
    “We could try snapping your nose the other way, see if the break runs in both directions,” we suggested.
    “I don’t know what the fuck you want!”
    “Yes, you do.” I sat down next to him. “Tell me about the dusthouse.” I felt his intake