Disclaimer: I don't own DCMK

A Curse Marked Fate

37: Nightfall

For a single, heart stopping instant, the night turned to day. Every vehicle, every building, and even every street light stood out in stark, blue white relief at the head of shadows so black they looked as though the world within them had been cut away. In that harsh, unforgiving light, there was only light and dark and the horror of those who stood frozen, eyes aglow with the flames. With the blaze came a flash of heat so intense that it struck them like a physical blow.

"Dad!" The word escaped Kaito's lips in a gasp. His thoughts whirled. His father had not been answering his phone. He had said he would be spending today working in his lab at the Institute.

The very lab that happened to be located in the very wing of the institute now sending fire and smoke sheeting across the sky.

Kaito was running before he'd made the conscious decision to move.

That first flare of blue white intensity had faded, leaving the building a crackle with orange flames that were licking out of the windows and climbing up the walls in ribbons and streams of pure gold. A detached part of his mind noted that this was, in itself, a kind of miracle. The ferocity of that first explosion would have taken the entire top off of most buildings. It was only because of the heavy magical reinforcements laid into every inch of the Institute that there was still so much building left to burn.

This understanding did not reassure him.

"Kai, wait!" Shinichi cried out as he scrambled off of the Sky Cycle and raced after his friend. His small hands rummaged through his pockets until they found his phone. In his haste, however, he fumbled it, and the little device went skittering across the asphalt. Letting out a cry of frustrated surprise, Shinichi dove after it, scooped it up, and finally managed to punch in the number for the fire department.

Then he was running again towards the building as he yelled into the phone, trying to tell them what was going on when he had no idea himself. He didn't know the Institute's address either, but, fortunately, whoever was on the other end of the line did.

"We think the archmage might still be in there," Shinichi rushed on. He knew he was babbling, but he couldn't seem to stop. His feet were out of his control as well, racing after Kaito because he couldn't afford to let the Sky Mage out of his sight. But, inside, his thoughts were still reeling. Was this really happening?

"Calm down," the person on the phone told him, sounding very calm indeed. Which helped. "Are you a Sky Mage?"

"What? No, no, I can't use magic," Shinichi blurted out. "But I'm here with Kaito. He's a Sky Mage."

"In that case, tell Kaito that he should do his best to help keep the fire contained until the fire fighting mages can get there. The most important thing is to make sure it doesn't spread. Can he do that?"

By now, Shinichi had caught up to Kaito, who was standing at the front doors of the building but looking up at the burning wing.

"I'm going up," he announced, face setting into an expression of fierce determination.

Shinichi grabbed his sleeve. "Wait! The firefighters are on their way. They want to know if you can contain the fire until they get here."

He could see even as he spoke, however, that he was wasting his breath. Kaito obviously wasn't listening. Shinichi couldn't blame him.

Indigo eyes narrowed in concentration, Kaito began murmuring under his breath as his hands wove deftly through a series of complicated gestures. Then he tapped himself on the chest, and a soft, blue glow spread over and around him in a rippling wave, leaving his entire body enveloped in icy light. The fire protection spell in place, he launched immediately into another spell—one much more familiar to Shinichi. Between one breath and the next, a series of glowing magic circles materialized like a series of steps up the front of the building.

Kaito was running again before the first spell circle had even fully solidified.

Shinichi hesitated for only a split second before leaping after him, trusting that Kaito's magical stepping stones would hold even after the Sky Mage had passed because the older boy would be sure to keep his path back to safety open.

"He's going after his dad," Shinichi blurted into the phone. "Can you call an ambulance and the police for us? My phone is getting low on battery."

"I'll do that," the fire department rep assured him, somehow still managing to sound like calm personified. "But be careful."

Assuring the man that they would, Shinichi hung up and turned his full attention to jumping from step to step after Kaito. The Sky Mage hadn't been thinking about the needs of certain detectives' short legs when he'd made these steps, and his own natural athleticism and driving sense of urgency were having him bounding up the face of the building like a mountain goat.

He knew those windows from which the unnatural flames had erupted. Two of those windows had belonged to his father's personal lab, but several of the others had been the windows to storage rooms and computer labs—places not meant for magical experimentation but for the compilation and analysis of information. This fire hadn't been the result of an experiment gone wrong. No, the only reason a fire like this, one so obviously magical in source, would have erupted from those rooms was if someone had come to the Institute with the express purpose of destroying their research data.

But he couldn't think about that now. What mattered now was that he'd seen his dad's empty car in the Institute's parking lot, and his mother had said that Toichi hadn't been answering his phone all evening.

And now this.

Something was wrong—more than wrong. His father might even be—

But Kaito couldn't think that way. His father was an archmage. That meant he was the best of the best—a mage who truly understood the inner workings of magic and had the knowledge and skills necessary to create brand new spells from scratch.

There was simply no way a man like that would be done in by one stupid explosion.

Kaito told himself this again as he reached his father's main office window. The glass had actually melted, he noted in horrified amazement, and the heat had warped the metal of the frame completely out of shape. As such, he had a fairly decent view of the space beyond. Flames were licking across the walls and crawling over the remnants of furniture and shelves, slowly but surely eating away at the spells meant to prevent just that where the initial explosion hadn't already obliterated them. Kaito cringed inwardly at the thought of what blossoming creations might have been lost, but, on the bright side, he didn't see anything remotely person-shaped.

Extending his magical platform until he had created a walkway for himself, he opted to peek into the information storage centers first because the fire was burning more fiercely there. Again, however, he saw nothing but burning ruins. Having established his father's absence, he was off like a shot to the window of his father's workroom.

At first, he didn't understand what he was seeing.

There were flames here too, but they weren't moving. Instead, they hung in shining, motionless sheets like vivid splashes of color painted across a photograph. There was a particularly large plume of blue white brilliance right beside the workroom's open door. Beyond that door, Kaito could see the flicker of much more natural firelight as well as a gathering haze of smoke, but none of it was making its way into the workroom. Dragging his gaze from the doorway, he squinted through the strange, immobile veils of fire and eventually detected what appeared to be a human figure—or figures?—on the floor near the center of the room.

His heart skipped a beat.

The window of this room was still intact, as were the spells on those windows that reinforced them against magical mishaps. Kaito, however, had learned quite a bit about the limitations of such spells during his own experiments, and, after one embarrassing incident where he had accidentally filled his workroom with a cloying, acrid smoke, he had developed a spell for the express purpose of shattering this type of enchanted window.

He applied that spell now and watched in a grim satisfaction as the glass sloughed away in a shower of glittering, white powder. Dusting off his hands, he leapt lightly onto the undamaged sill then into the room—or tried to. At this point, he reached a snag in the form of…well, nothing that he could see. It was as though there was an invisible wall eight inches in from the window: a wall that had no texture or color and made no sound when he rapped on it.

"Is that a stasis field?" someone asked, and Kaito jerked his head around to find Shinichi standing on his Sky walkway and peering over the windowsill at the odd tableau beyond. For a moment, Kaito had actually forgotten that the younger boy was with him. Seeing him here now though helped the Sky Mage gather his roiling thoughts in order. It was as he drew in a breath and his head spun for a second that he realized he hadn't been breathing. No wonder he couldn't think straight. Letting out a sound that was half a sob and half a laugh that had Shinichi looking up at him with alarm, Kaito sank down to sit on the windowsill with his legs dangling inside the room as some of the tension drained out of him. His father was alive—not out of danger, but alive.

"You're right. It is a stasis field," he said, eyes never leaving the tableau in the room. "Dad must have put it up for protection against the flames. He knew a regular shield could have been blown away, but a stasis field is different. All it does is keep everything inside it suspended in time at the exact moment when it came into effect. That also means dad is still alive. He just can't get out or answer me because he's suspended in time too."

"Is he alone in there?" Shinichi asked.

Kaito frowned. "I can't tell. There are too many flames in the way. But I think there might be someone else."

"Do you think it could be whoever caused all this?"

Kaito's expression went dark. "If it is, I'll make sure they regret it."

The pure venom in Kaito's tone chilled Shinichi to the bone, and he fell silent, not sure how to deal with his friend when he was in this mood. Though he had come to know Kaito quite well, he realized that there were still sides of the Sky Mage that he had never seen. This was one of those. In this mood, Kaito was dangerous.

Sirens sounded. They were soon followed by voices and a sudden increase in activity on the ground below.

"The firefighters are here," Shinichi said. "Did you want to go help them?"

Kaito frowned into his father's frozen workroom once more then sighed and climbed back out onto his magical walkway. "I'll go see what I can do. But can you stay here and make sure no one tries anything on this room until I get back? We're going to have to be really careful about how we take the stasis field apart if we don't want another explosion on our hands." One which, he didn't have to add, would likely be the end of anyone inside that room.

Shinichi nodded and sat down on the vacated sill to wait.

Even with magic, it took the firefighters and Kaito nearly an hour to get the blaze everywhere else in the building put out. All Sky Mages could manipulate fire, but how easy a fire was to control varied. The size of the fire was a huge factor, naturally, but there was more to it. If a mage had created the flames himself then controlling that fire would be relatively easy. Fires started via more natural and mechanical means such as a lightning strike or a match were slightly more difficult to tame, but working with such fire was still considered to be a relatively basic skill. Manipulating fire that had been conjured by another mage, however, was an entirely different story.

And the flames they were battling tonight were of this last variety. It was persistent and fought back against the half dozen Sky Mages working to quell it. Sparks almost seemed to leap away from a bank of flames just before it was snuffed out to catch in a convenient curtain or burrow into a shattered desk, where it would promptly flare up again, bright and hot and defiant. After a while, the crackling sound they made started to sound to Kaito like the laughter of some unhinged mind.

It put his teeth on edge. But in some ways the strength and sheer survival instincts of these magical flames was also a blessing because it took every ounce of his knowledge and concentration to chase them down, box them in, and snuff them out without letting them spawn. Half his mind was also occupied with maintaining his Sky Platforms, which the firefighters had also found to be a great help in improving their mobility. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he noted that that was one area in which the wind walking spell would lose out. Since that one worked only for the caster, where the Sky Platforms were open to anyone who wasn't afraid of heights. Wind walking was still more cool though, he mused. He liked how it made him look like he was walking on thin air. Not a magic circle in sight.

But he digressed.

The head of the firefighting team gave him a thumbs up, and he nodded, but his thoughts were already back in his father's frozen workroom.

"We're not used to dealing with magic like this," the man informed him as they gazed into said room from the door that had once connected it to the main hall. The room beyond was the only one still filled with fire, but not a single tongue or spark was moving. Some were hanging mere millimeters from the ground. Others were caught in frozen torrent of tightly coiled, blue radiance.

"Dad's in there," Kaito said with the absolute certainly of the boy who must believe his father is all right. "He must have set up the stasis to try and prevent the last explosion, but he was a fraction of a second too late, and now its caught in mid eruption, and he's in there with it."

"There's someone else in there with him," a childish voice called from the window across from the door, and they saw Conan standing on the sill and leaning forward to peer with concerned concentration between shining sheets of fire. "I think it might be Aya. And I think she's hurt. Her leg is bent at an odd angle."

"The paramedics are here," one of the firefighters reported, glancing down at the parking lot below. "I'll tell them to stand ready."

"I don't know much about stasis magic," the leader of the firefighting team said, tapping at his chin. "Is there some way for us to extract the people inside without undoing the whole thing?"

It was Kaito who answered.

"Unfortunately, no," he said, tone even despite the situation, though Shinichi could hear the underlying strain in his voice. It was clearly taking him every ounce of self control he had to present the calm façade. "In laymen's terms, a stasis field stops time for everything inside. That includes the air itself. That's why it feels like there's a wall around the area. Only light moves freely through the field. We don't know why."

"I guess that explains why they don't use it on patients in the hospital," one of the other firefighters mused out loud. "I've wondered. But if they're literally stuck in time along with the air around them, you couldn't even properly examine their wounds."

"Yeah," Kaito agreed. It was where the little lady's powers trumped what modern mages had created, he thought, and perhaps another example of why people coveted the powers of the Cursed. Ai too could suspend a person in time, but she could also operate on them, take the time and care needed to diagnose their problems correctly, and mend that which could be mended. It was an incredible power, and half of him wondered if it were at all possible to bring her here now. But it probably wasn't, and he didn't think this stasis field would last much longer.

"What is it?" the lead firefighter asked, catching sight of Kaito's grim expression.

The young Sky Mage drew in a deep breath, glanced over to where Shinichi was watching him with wide, concerned but supportive eyes, and turned back to the man who had asked about extractions.

"Stasis fields are a newer form of magic. It requires the melding of Sky and Earth magic. Typically, it is impossible for a single mage to raise a stasis field. But Dad has been creating these prototype devices that can store half of what you need for a stasis for emergencies. He must have had an Earth Stasis canister with him when—when whatever it was happened, so he set it off. Those canisters create a very powerful stasis field, but they aren't designed to last for a long time."

Shoulders and backs straightened as eyes grew alert.

"So how much time we got?" the team leader asked. "And what's gonna happen when it goes?"

"I don't know how much time exactly. It depends on how much power Dad put into it when he set it up. But I can start the degeneration process if we want to speed things up. Once the process begins, everyone inside the field will move rapidly from being frozen in time to living at full speed with, in this case, all the fire and brimstone that comes with it."

"Could we use another stasis to catch that explosion by the door? If we can keep that one from going up the way the others did, it'll save us a lot of trouble and greatly reduce the chance of casualties."

Kaito shook his head slowly. "I don't think so. I have one of the prototypes, so I could set up a field, but I couldn't do that and break this one down at the same time. It would make more sense to try and redirect the blast. If we could put up a fire dampening field over this whole area first then raise a few layers of shielding between the explosion and Dad and Aya the instant the stasis comes down then I think we could get them out. But the timing will have to be just right."

The lead firefighter clapped Kaito on the shoulder, startling the younger mage from his contemplations. "I was thinking along the same lines. You've got a good head on your shoulders there Kid. All right everyone," he continued, raising his voice so that the entire team could hear. "Gather 'round and listen closely. We got to do this right because we're not going to get a second chance."

TBC

A.N: Haven't been feeling very well the last few days, so I'm going to go rest now. Thanks for reading and take care!