Sprinkler trick

This time, I knew exactly what Harry would do. I lifted my sonic wand and sent my voice down to the far end of the hall, behind him. “Hi there, Froggy. Is it as hard as it looks, holding up villain clichés, or does it come naturally to you?”
“You dare mock me?” the Fomor snarled. He threw a spiraling corkscrew of deep green energy down the hall, and it hissed and left burn marks on everything it touched, ending at the doors. When it hit them, there was a snarling, crackling sound, and the green light spread across their surface in the pattern of a fisherman’s net.
“Hard to do anything else to a guy with a face like yours,” I said, this time from directly beside him. “Did you kill those girls, or did they volunteer once they saw you with your shirt off?”
The Fomor snarled and swatted at the air beside him. Then his eyes narrowed, and he started muttering and weaving his spatulate fingers in complicated patterns. I could feel the energy coming off of him at once, and knew exactly what he was trying to do: Unravel my veil. But I’d been playing that game with Auntie Lea for months.
Lord Froggy hadn’t.
As his questing threads of magic spread out, I sent out whispers of my own power to barely brush them, guiding them one by one out and around the area covered by my veil. I couldn’t afford to let him find me. Not like that, anyway. He wasn’t thinking, and if I didn’t get him to, it was entirely possible that he’d be too stupid to fool.
I couldn’t have him giving up and leaving, either, so when I was sure I’d compromised his seeking spell I used the sonic wand again, this time directly above his head. “This kind of thing really isn’t for amateurs. Are you sure you shouldn’t sit this one out and let Listen give it a shot?”
Lord Froggy tilted his head up and then narrowed his eyes. He lifted a hand and spat a hissing word, and fire leapt up from his fingers to engulf the ceiling above him.
It took about two seconds for the fire alarm to go off, and another two before the sprinkler system kicked in. But I was back at the door to room 8 when the falling water began to dissolve my veil. Magic is a kind of energy, and follows its own laws. One of those laws is that water tends to ground out active magical constructs, and my veil started melting away like it was made of cotton candy.
“Hah!” spat the Fomor, spotting me. I saw him send a bolt of viridian light at me. I threw myself facedown on the floor and it passed over me, splashing against the door. I whipped over onto my back, just in time to raise a shield against a second bolt and a third. My physical shields aren’t great, but the Fomor’s spell was pure energy, and that made it easier for me to handle. I deflected the bolts left and right, and they blasted chunks of marble the size of bricks out of the walls when they struck.
Lord Froggy’s eyes flared even larger and more furious that he’d missed. “Mortal cow!”
Okay, now. That stung. I mean, maybe it’s a little shallow, and maybe it’s a little petty, and maybe it shows a lack of character of some kind that Froggy’s insult to my appearance got under my skin more effectively than attempted murder.
“Cow?” I snarled as water from the sprinkler system started soaking me. “I rock this dress!”
I dropped one of my wands and thrust my palm out at him, sending out an invisible bolt of pure memory, narrowed and focused with magic, like light passing through a magnifying glass. Sometimes you don’t really remember traumatic injuries, and my memory of getting shot in the leg was pretty blurry. It hadn’t hurt so much when I actually got shot, and I’d had a few things occupying my attention. Mostly, I’d just felt surprised and then numb—but when they were tending the wound in the helicopter later, now, that was pain. They’d dug the bullet out with forceps, cleaned the site with something that burned like Hell itself, and when they’d put the pressure bandage on it and tightened the straps, it hurt so bad that I’d thought I was going to die.
That’s what I gave to Lord Froggy, with every bit of strength I could muster.
He wove a shield against the attack, but I guess he wasn’t used to handling something so intangible as a memory. Even with the falling water weakening it, I felt the strike smash through his defense and sink home, and Froggy let out a sudden, high-pitched shriek. He staggered and fell heavily against the wall, clutching at his leg.
“Kill her!” he said, his voice two octaves higher than it had been a moment before. “Kill her, kill her, kill her!”
The remaining pair of turtlenecks in the hallway plunged toward me. A wave of fatigue from my recent efforts, especially that last one, almost held me pinned to the floor—but I scrambled to my feet, lurched to the door to room 8, and pounded against it with one fist. “Andi! Andi, it’s Molly! Andi, let me—”
The door jerked open and I fell into the room. I snapped my legs up into a fetal curl, and Andi slammed the door shut behind me and hit the locks.
“What the hell, Molly?” she demanded. Andi was soaking wet, along with everything else in the room—including the Fomor’s bomb.
I got up and scrambled toward it. “I couldn’t take apart the veil over the bomb from the outside,” I panted. “We didn’t have time to build up a fire, and I can’t call up enough of my own to set off the alarms. I had to get Froggy to do it for me.”


Brief Cases, Bombshells, Page 264-267