Something was always happening in Atlanta on a Friday night. There was a concert at the Masquerade. The clubs were hopping. There was a Hawks game that night. The ladies at the strip club were on fire. The SunTrust was getting robbed.

One of these things was not like the others.

I looked down from my little perch on the top of the building across the street. Honestly, it had been fairly quiet for the last couple weeks, since the whole ‘Battle for Atlanta’ thing. The racist assholes had either been chased off or were laying low. Either way, they weren’t being a problem for me, which was all I could really ask for at this point. But it did have the major effect that I was not having to deal with as much ‘fun’ as I had been. So I was happy for some nice, normal, non-powered crime to break up.

I could See six people in the building with my life force sight, all seemed like normal humans. Of course, that didn’t tell me too much, just that they weren’t obvious mutants or aliens or elementals or stuff like that, and they didn’t have any obvious augments that I could see. But that still left the ‘subtle’ mutants, and some forms of magic types, and other types of powers. Mutants and humans all ‘looked’ the same by their life force, so unless the shapes were different, then it was hard to tell them apart, and even harder for most of the magic types. Werewolves burned ‘brighter’, and undead were basically invisible to my Sight, since they weren’t alive. But a mage just looked like a normal human.

Even a normal human could cause trouble for me if they wanted to, though. Aside from my mutant abilities, I was what people called a ‘classical’ vampire. Fangs, stay out of the sun, drink blood, and all that. Problem with that was that most everyone who cared could find out some of my big weaknesses with just a bit of Googling, even if stuff specific to me wasn’t posted anywhere. Vampire lore was too prevalent, after all. I was just glad I didn’t sparkle. THAT would have been embarrassing.

I dropped down from the roof down to the ground, landing easily on two feet. It was only a thirty foot drop, after all. Silent as death, I moved at vampire speeds, looking through the broken door that was the first indicator that trouble was afoot. Once I was able to get eyes on the group, it was all I could do to keep from bursting out, laughing.

Five men, all big, brawny types that wouldn’t be out of place on the cover of a muscle magazine, each of them dressed in tight leather pants, with tactical vests, and black masks. They each had these weird, tribal/mystic style tattoos on their arms, and what looked like a dog collar around their necks. If you could picture the magic bondage episode of American Gladiators, then you know the theme they were going for.

The obvious leader was a… witch? Sorceress? Wizardess? Slutty whore? One of those, surely. Maybe more than one. Her costume, what little there was of it, was almost entirely pulled from a fetish or fantasy catalogue, and consisted of knee-high boots with a five-inch heel, a black thong that did absolutely nothing to hide her butt (which DEFINITELY belied her Latina roots), black elbow-length gloves, a silver belt, a corset of black leather with silver accents, and a silver crown upon her head. Her belt, gloves, boots, and crown were all emblazoned with skull accents and mystic symbols. Oh, and she carried a long magic staff, with a glowing black gem at the end of it.

That posed a bit of a problem for me. See, normally when I was patrolling alone, I liked to work in stealth as long as possible, and take down the enemy with sneak attacks if I wasn’t sure of their powers. No sense giving someone a fair fight when you didn’t have to. But with the magic user in the crowd, I might only get a single surprise attack and if I didn’t take the spellcaster out on the first shot, she’d have time to redirect her minions to attacking me, and if those slabs of beefcake were even half as trained as their muscles, then it would be a lot harder fight than I’d like. But I had to target the sorceress, because otherwise who knew what fresh hells she’d unleash against me. Always take the mage out first.

I turned to mist, and slid forward into the bank. The witch was better than I hoped, since she immediately turned towards the door, and yelled, “Someone’s here! Get ready, my pretties, and smash them when they show themselves!” Hmm. From that, I gathered that she probably had thrown some kind of early warning ward over the building, letting her know when people came in, but it didn’t serve to pinpoint my position, merely that someone had entered. Well, I was just guessing, but that made sense.

Surging forward, I had just made it to the witch when she finished casting some spell. A bolt of lightning passed through my incorporeal body, and I would have yelled in pain if I was capable of it, because that actually HURT, even though I was incorporeal. Shit, the woman must be prepared for spirits and the like. I was going to have to take her out fast! I turned solid behind her, though one of the goons spotted me, and yelled incoherently.

All five rushed towards me, their tattoos glowing green with a disturbing light that gathered on their fists. Of course the minions would be powered up in some way. This night was getting better and better all the time! With no time to think, I pulled the witch between me and the idiots, and tilted her head to the side as I began drinking from her neck. I am afraid I wasn’t gentle with it, so I probably hurt her some as I grappled her, but I wasn’t prepared to care at this point.

The minions possessed at least a low level of whatever cunning they had before they were bound to this witch, as they tried to circle me and get in behind me, rather than punching through their mistress as I’d hoped they’d do. Wasn’t very heroic to use human shields, but outnumbered six to one, I had to do what I could. We gotta do what we gotta do, y’know?

It didn’t take the bitch long to recover from the shock of being embraced and bitten by a vampire, unfortunately. I felt a pain in my side, as she managed to pull out a little silver dagger and stab me with it. Well, the pain wasn’t that much, but the silver burned differently from steel did, which got my attention. My resistance to getting stabbed was high enough that, with the woman’s low strength, it was only because the weapon was silver that I noticed the attack at all.

“Oh, you stupid bitch. You went and put a hole in my costume! I’d put one in yours to repay the favor, but you don’t seem to be wearing much of one. Decided you were going with the ‘perverted slut’ school of magic, hmm?”

The woman tried to stab me again, but this time I was ready for her, grabbing her hand and spinning her into the path of one of the five brutes who thought he’d managed to get to my unprotected back. The man stopped his punch the moment before he would have struck the witch in the face. Well, no, it didn’t look like he stopped, but more like he was stopped. Whatever magic bound them probably physically froze them whenever they were at risk of physically harming her. Kept someone from controlling her slaves and using them against her, or freeing their minds and letting them attack her with whatever ‘gifts’ she had bestowed on them.

Yes, I was making some assumptions about the witch and her setup, based on only a little bit of data, but during the last couple weeks, I’d been getting a crash course in arcane studies thanks to Temptress and her warning that the ‘pulse’ from opening and closing the rift had temporarily powered up magic types in the city. Apparently, that also included ‘magical creatures’ like myself, since I was feeling stronger and faster than normal. This witch probably took advantage of the boost to do some ‘recruiting’, and got herself a harem of boytoys.

Temptress had taught me that there was always a weakness in any spell. Sometimes, it was the fact that the user had to use long chants and stay still while casting. Sometimes, it was that there were no safeguards to keep it from being turned against you. Sometimes, like now, it was that the human behind the spell had woven the safeguards in a way that they could be used for my benefit. The human element was this weakness in the spell. The witch had never considered what would happen if someone used her as a shield against her own guards.

And then a wave of green flame shot up around us, and the woman kicked back, trying to send me through it, but I was far too strong for her. OK, the witch rose in my estimation slightly. She did have contingencies for people trying to get too close to her, but those contingencies apparently weren’t the kind she was willing to harm herself with. Didn’t seem to care about hurting her minions, if the smell of charred flesh was any indication, though. So, one of the clever types that talked a big game, but was a coward, when it came down to putting her own body on the line? That would fit with what I’d seen so far.

I spun the woman around so that I was holding her from the back, and held her close to me. If someone was watching, they’d definitely get the wrong idea, if they didn’t see the evidence of us trying to kill eachother. I needed to test whether this circle of flame was a static effect, or whether it moved with the witch. So, what better way to do that than to hold the bitch close, and dive into the circle?

Turned out, the circle was a static one, but the witch had indeed written protections into the spell, so that it deactivated if she was going to get thrown through the spell. That was the weakness in the woman’s magic. She certainly had power, that much I could plainly see, but she was a coward, unwilling to commit to the magic if it could possibly be used to harm her. She probably would have run already if I wasn’t so close to her.

The other goons decided, in whatever dim wisdom they still possessed, attacked me as soon as the green flames died away, and within moments, all five of the goons were frozen in place, their bodies unmoving, even the first one to be frozen, who had only a charred stump where his hand used to be. Now I noticed that all five of their collars were glowing red. That probably held the control spell keeping them enslaved to her.

I tried to stretch out, and touch her mind, but was rebuffed. Well, that was no great surprise. Even the most cowardly of magic types tended to have impressive mental defenses. Came with the territory of having to use your mind to master energies that mere mortals weren’t supposed to touch, I guess. But it did mean I had to do this the hard way. Twisting the woman’s arms behind her, I used restraints to bind her, and gagged her with some tape that was in one of the goons’ vests, before using one of their own sacks that they’d brought for carrying loot to bag her head and keep her from seeing anything. Which made her about as secure as I could manage until the cops got here. Speaking of which…

In a singsong voice, I called out to the person I knew was listening. “Oh the itsy bitsy spider…”

“…will redirect all your backup to other calls if you keep going with that, oh fearsome creature of daylight sparkling.”

I snickered as Web Mistress’s voice came back over the commlink. “Fine, fine. Ruin my fun. But I got six for transport at the Suntrust. Attempted bank robbery. They didn’t seem like they were concerned with alarms, so cops might already be en route. Warn them that we’ve got a spellcaster and five magically enhanced individuals that appear to be under some kind of enslavement curse.”

“Wilco. And Temptress wants me to remind you that tomorrow you’ve got to show up at the CNN building at 10 PM tomorrow, so they can get that interview with you.”

Ugh. I’d forgotten about that. They were hounding me for interviews, since I was the leader of the Misfits, and we’d been at the center of the Battle for Atlanta. For a while, I’d been able to put them off since I was pretty hard to find when I didn’t want to be found, but they’d quickly found Pyramaniac’s public persona, and began pestering her for interviews, so I’d decided to agree to an interview. And yeah, I shamelessly played the ‘creature of the night’ card to make them do the interview at Midnight on a Saturday night going into Sunday morning. Hopefully, that would keep them from trying to do anything like playing the interview live.

Now, why was I more scared about being interviewed by CNN than I was about fighting six magically powered goons?