Read Hard Magic for Free Online

I’m gonna give you an ass whoopin’, you realize that, right, Fritz?” Jake stated calmly. He checked. The majority of his Power was still in reserve and he began to gather it.
    “I can take care of myself, buddy,” Delilah told the stranger. “Were you planning on arresting me, Jake?”
    “If I don’t want to go back to prison, yeah,” Sullivan answered, glancing back and forth between Delilah and the new threat. Delilah was a known quantity, the other guy, not so much. “That’s kinda the plan.”
    “Too bad,” she answered as she grabbed the heavy metal luggage cart, picked it up as if it weighed nothing and threw it at him.
    Sullivan reached out and increased the pull on the cart. It slammed into the floor, digging a divot through the tiles and coming to rest at his feet. At the same time the stranger hooked his shoe under Purvis’s shotgun and kicked it into the air, smoothly caught it, and turned it toward Jake’s head. Sullivan barely had time to Spike, gravity’s pull changed direction, and the stranger was jerked off balance to the left. A round of buckshot harmlessly shattered a window. The Power twisted him again, pulling the German in the opposite direction, as if he were in sideways freefall.
    But rather than collide with the wall, the stranger turned blurry and passed through the concrete as if it were water and was gone. “Damn, Fades,” Sullivan muttered, turning his attention back to Delilah, just in time to see that she had crossed the room and her fist was flying at his face. He ducked and the concrete wall exploded into dust overhead.
    Delilah had gotten faster over the years. Sullivan leapt back as she just kept swinging. He’d boxed in the service, but nothing like this. He went between her fists and slugged her in the face with a brutal hook. Pain crackled through his knuckles, down his bones, and through his torso as he drove all his considerable weight forward. The blow was hard enough to topple a gorilla.
    She blinked. “I think you smeared my makeup.”
    He barely had time to Spike himself dense before she hit him in the chest. Mass increased, his boots cracked into the floor, and she still managed to shove him back ten feet in a cloud of broken tiles. His back hit the wall and shattered a mirror, leaving a cracked indentation of his shoulders in the concrete. He stepped out, shrugging off the broken glass.
    It was not something that a normal Heavy could do, but apparently Delilah didn’t have the time to think through the philosophical implications. “I’ve punched trains that were softer.” The Brute paused and shook her aching hand. “You’ve learned some new tricks!”
    “You too,” he answered, breathing hard. “Too bad you took to murdering innocent people.”
    “Innocent?” she sputtered, reaching down and grasping a wrought-iron bench and ripping its bolts out of the floor. “You’ve got a weird take on innocent .” She swung the bench like a baseball bat and Sullivan barely had time to throw himself to the ground as it whistled past.
    Sullivan rolled aside, finding himself staring up Delilah’s dress as she brought one foot down to stamp him through the floor. Distracting as that was, he managed to focus, Spike, and Delilah suddenly fell up. “Son of a b—” she shouted before crashing into the glass ceiling, twenty feet above. Sullivan held the pull for a moment, but he’d burned through too much of his reserve, too fast, and lost control. Gravity returned to normal, and Delilah fell in a cloud of broken glass, screaming, to the ground.
    She must have used her own Power, as she slammed into the floor hard enough to shatter the tiles in a six-foot circle, but immediately rose, unharmed but angry, dusting off her dress. She’d lost the fur stole and the fancy hat was stuck in the ceiling. Delilah picked at the shredded red dress in disgust. “You know how much I paid for this thing? It’s French !”
    Sullivan was still on the floor. “I hate