Lilith crossed the campus in a flat-out burst of speed, running uphill toward the largest concentration of students on campus, the Davis Student Center. She wove through the shadows of the autumn dusk, her dark giant form only visible as a blur. Anger and rage did little justice to describing her mood. No one had told her this juvenile witch had access and skill with elemental magic. It had been implied that he was important to the Summer Queen for something to do with Fairie, but while it had been divulged that he could access the same powers that the sister Queens had drawn on for millennia to power their battles and keep enemies from their world, it was outright implied that he could only do that on Fairie, and then only in his own territory. But it had never been disclosed to any agents of Hell that he could do the same on Earth.

And then there was the residual pain from the projectiles and beams of those hateful machines. The bullets must have been imbued with some Holy essence to hurt that much.

But the kid was the real problem. No Earth-grown witch had dared mess around with Earth’s elementals in well over five hundred years, if not longer. That he could wield such magic and with not one, but two forms of elementalism, Earth and Air, was a massively unwelcome surprise. Choosing to confront him in the classroom, now, when his associates were closing in on her, had been a finely calculated risk, one she’d been comfortable with before this came to light. Knowing there was even the slightest chance of elemental interference would have taken a war hammer to those equations. And the fact that he could access elemental power through artifacts was outright unheard of.

Now her plan was in shambles and she was on the run. But Lilith, Duchess of Hell, had been planning and executing contingencies for eons of existence. It was time to go to the backup. But first she had to disappear.

She slowed her headlong rush, sliding deeper into shadows long enough to pull the necklace over her head. The expended 30mm depleted uranium projectile, strung on a chain, had served its purpose but it inhibited her ability to cloak herself from human eyes. She dropped it behind a cedar bush, then strode out into the glare of the campus streetlights. Clusters, pairs, and individual students didn’t so much as give her a glance.