Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) by Glenn Michaels

blow to its head from
the impacts.
    Capie herself lay unconscious and unmoving, covered with concrete
dust, and bleeding from several cuts, her body squeezed up against the building’s
outer wall.
    • • • •
    There were now two Oni chasing him! Blast it, where
were they all coming from? Geez, the building seemed to be positively crawling with them!
    Paul hurled himself down the corridor as fast as possible,
firing BBs at the two Oni in an effort to slow them down, at least.
    The hospital suddenly shook itself violently, the hallways
visibly rolling as if from an earthquake, an enormous clap of thunder striking
a physical blow at him.
    What was that?
    “Capie?!” he screamed. “Are you okay?”
    There was no answer.
    He needed to get to her! How was he going to get rid of
these monsters chasing him?
    It was past time to think outside the box.
    He burst into an unoccupied patient’s room and, on the fly,
he aimed and fired a single BB at the window. The explosion totally
disintegrated the glass as he punched through the center of the blast and out
into the warm night air.
    Turning sharply upward, he leveled off twenty feet above the
smashed window, spun around and counted off two seconds…
    …And then held down the trigger on his rifle, spraying the
windows of the room he had just flown through.
    A rapid series of explosions tore at and then pulverized the
entire outside wall of concrete, not only for the fifth floor but the fourth
and sixth as well, blowing smoke and bits of concrete shrapnel in all
directions.
    The blast pushed at him, threatening to dislodge him from
his position, but he used a spell to hold himself in place and protect him from
the flying debris.
    He took his finger off the trigger, and used a spell to
clear the air. He waited a moment, to see if anything would emerge through the
huge gaping hole in the hospital, but there was nothing now but the sound of
sirens and loudspeakers near the hospital entrance in the background. Nothing
moved.
    Until the shattering of glass off to his far left and the
roar of another Oni.
    A blast of plasma tore past him, grazing his left leg and
burning his jeans. He cut the spell that was holding him in midair and dropped
out of the path of the next plasma blast.
    He fell forty feet before he re-engaged the flying spell,
angling around the southwest wing of the hospital. With surprise, he saw the
shattered windows there and the outward bulge in one wall. That was probably
where Capie was and where the explosion that had shaken the whole hospital had
been. He cried out in pain and anguish, and his whole soul screamed at him to
go to her aid.
    But another plasma bolt howled through the air, barely
missing him yet again. As much as he wanted to go to her, he could not, at
least not until the Oni behind him had been dealt with.
    He flew up, doubling back over the roof, crossing over to
the space between the north and south wings, then through the hole in the fifth
floor that he had created only a minute earlier, through to the other side and
out the window missing its glass there. And then he went back up, over to the
southeast wing, to the east of the helipad.
    There was an Airbus AS365 N3+ Dauphin helicopter sitting on
the pad. Paul angled behind it, using it for a screen.
    And then two plasma blasts hit the helicopter dead square
on, the blasts gutting the fuselage like a sardine can. Worse, it touched off
the three hundred gallon fuel bladders under the passenger cabin. The fireball
of explosion lit up the night sky for miles, hurling Paul through the air and
throwing him onto the roof of the Arthur Rubloff Intensive Care Tower.
    Stunned and bleeding from several small cuts, Paul slowly
rose to his feet.
    Boiling mad, he was!
    He lifted up into the night air, looking for and seeing the
Oni that was skirting the site of the raging fire of what used to be the
helicopter. And he saw it spot him. Turning, he looped around the utility
mechanical room of the building’s