The Awakening of Ren Crown (56 page)

“What? No way.”

She gave a bodily sigh, so obvious was her relief.

“Unless it means you are tethered to me? Are you sure I'm not making you be friends with me?”

“No. It doesn't work that way. I can still influence whomever I want. That is why it is more of a burden on you. On the other hand, you made friends with
me
, not because you wanted to gain energy. That gives you...benefits.”

I shrugged. “I have to tell you, I'm not sure I'm muse-able. I still suck at dancing,” I said frankly.

She laughed again, and this time it was a much deeper sound. “That's not quite how it works either. Dancing is how I power my energy and release it. It doesn't make anyone else into a dancer, unless that is their passion already.”

“Well, I should probably work on making that my passion instead. Dancing is way better for social cred than drawing.”

She touched my wrist and I felt a soothing tendril of magic. “No, you have so much potential. Your magic is like a blinding light sometimes that I cannot focus upon.”

I blinked. I could feel her magic spread. I felt like I was on the right path. I wanted to draw, to paint, to create. Ideas and plans flew through my mind, connecting and threading. “Wow. You really are a muse. I feel like Da Vinci.”

She laughed. “Better not. You might need more muses, if so.”

“Sounds sordid.”

She laughed harder.

The eyes of the watchful students on campus might draw more closely to me. But standing out enough to make friends...was worth it.

“
I want you to be happy like this. I want you to stop trying to free me, Ren,”
Christian said.

“
Pain!”
the other voice cried.

Milestone red was tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Reality in Death

I had procured a twice-blessed teaspoon through Will, goblin blood through another club connection, magical pomegranate seeds from Delia, and
two
whale-squished rats through Chen Lifen. Constantine had even infused my mirror shard with a suggestion enchantment and taken legal punishment for it in exchange for a third paper box—one that had taken me three more hours to design with him, bickering together while I drew.

They needed to seriously rethink community service. It put all the pranksters, malcontents, and crazies in thick contact with each other.

And Constantine...I was starting to wonder what he had begun constructing in his lab room. The vortex in his ottoman was one thing, but the whirlpool in the bottle of liquid that looked like magical Drano was weird. At some point he must have decided I was trustworthy, because the last ten times I had visited he had been pretty lax in letting me see his experiments and functioning workspace. His chemistry workshop always contained foaming potions, rotating drawers, and swirling bottles when I was there.

Daddy obviously paid well.

But who the devil was his roommate? I could see a second bed with a pillow and expensive-looking bedspread through the open bedroom door, but no identifying pictures or items existed in the living room. There was nothing personal to indicate a second person lived there at all. There was the other connected door, though, that I had never seen opened.

I was getting much better at distinguishing wards, but the door contained so many magic threads entwined together that it looked like a big, dark blur had been overlaid.

Either his roommate was horribly suspicious of Constantine, or Constantine kept him chained up in there. Both explanations were possible.

Constantine looked seriously elated—and elation was a disturbing expression on him—when I finished the storage paper for his chemical materials.

The design of the paper forced my mind onto other paths, as I'd needed to put wards inside the box space to prevent the chemicals from interacting with each other. And later that night, after leaving him, I had figured out how to magically suppress the judicial detection field from seeing the contents inside one of the storage box drafts by creating a hypercube.

It had taken an additional drop of paint to facilitate the added dimension, but it was worth it. Why hadn't I thought of a tesseract before? Could I do a penteract? I flipped through Mbozi's syllabuses and papers looking for research aid possibilities.

Upon returning to my room, Justice Toad informed me that I had five more hours of community service as punishment—added to my tally—but the paint jar suspended inside the hypercube wasn't taken...until ten minutes later when it had ejected from the sketch and spilled all over my floor.

It had zipped off to the Midlands at that point and Justice Toad had racked me up another five hours.

The suppression field only lasted for a limited amount of time—though I had great hopes for future field trials and tweaks. But for delinquents, ten minutes meant the difference between enrollment and expulsion.

And I still only had a limited amount of time to work off my community service. The added hours each time I was caught were a big deal. But in order to make useful products that I could trade on the club circuit, I needed to test them outside the Midlands in areas where I could be caught by the Justice Squad.

However, if I couldn't get my offenses under control, I was going to be doing community service every hour of every day soon.

Constantine always had the best illegal stuff, though, and he would want one of those detection suppression boxes for sure, which would give me a significant exchange value.

Two hours later, after a festival of blood, seeds, rats, stones, mist, three rituals, two herbal sacrifices, and an enlargement enchantment on the golem—because, hey that four foot zombie was just not going to cut it for my six foot two brother—I was pretty sure something in my right wrist was permanently broken. There was a deadened space there now that my magic wouldn't touch.

Christian babbled apologies over and over in my head, his words barely making sense.

I swallowed the thread of despair and loss. I had other rituals to try. I drew with my left hand. It would be fine.

I trudged out of the Midlands and back across top campus. It was going to be rough using a broken wrist for the hour of community service I had scheduled tonight, but I would have to make do. Pain was a product of my mind that I could suppress with enough will. My end goal was worth it.

A narwhal appeared in the air ten feet away, looked confused for a moment, then flopped bodily onto the grass.

“Narwhal!” Someone yelled, and people scattered.

The narwhal looked completely nonplussed, and blew out a stream of magic water from its tusk and rose into the air, surrounded in a field of magic water. I looked at it and covered a yawn with the inside of my good elbow. With a little over six weeks under my magical belt, I had started to wonder why people yelled so often. Weird things happened everywhere here for no apparent reason at least three times a day. Sometimes that number bumped to twelve. I would think people—
mages
—would grow used to it.

Without urgency, I retrieved my justice tablet with my good hand. I had branched out from toads, and was now getting the other amphibians—frogs, newts, salamanders, wormy things, and mudpuppies. I briefly contemplated what a salamander with a long pole protruding from its forehead would look like.

Zap.

The narwhal turned into a tadpole just as it was about to impale someone. A tadpole. Huh. I tucked Justice Toad back into my bag, unscrewed my bottle of water using my armpit and good hand, and scooped the tadpole inside. The tusked tadpole looked pretty irritated, floating there. I could release it down in the river after service. Fresh and saltwater currents ran side-by-side there, so the narwhal would survive in one of the currents as it made its way to icy waters.

Or perhaps flew away in a magic water bubble.

I shrugged, screwed the cap back on using my armpit and good hand, then stuck the bottle of water in the back pocket of my bag.

Cold water. Hmmm... If I used a cold water base, could I keep the blob matter going for a
fourth
period of thirteen days? Or was I going to need to freeze my golem? If he wasn't Christian-ready, what did I want to freeze him as? If I got to that point without meeting my end goal, should I make him as Christian-y as possible, and hope for the best? I chewed my nails and mulled the issue all the way to the service break room.

My schedule called for another ritual tomorrow. I had given in to my panic a few days back and tried to use the lavender paint on the blob, but as I drew closer, my hand had vibrated fiercely and been forcibly pushed away. It had unnerved me enough to wait for one of my soul rituals to work.

One
working ritual. Just one, was all I wanted and needed. Why was I so useless?

I had nicely simulated flesh and features with the blob, but I would need to do some side projects animating statues and dolls, just in case of failure so close to my endpoint.

And still, while the paint made things animate according to my will, producing the
real
Christian—versus a version my intentions would produce—was still a key philosophical issue I struggled with. I needed a soul ritual to work. I had even drawn up a soul version of a dream-catcher inside of a storage space, hoping that it might call Christian to it eventually.

Tomorrow. I would have to patch myself up enough tonight to hope that I would be punished on the right side of my body again. I was hoping that some of the swell reduction pads, like the ones Neph had, were in the squad's supply closet. I could worry about consequences later.

I was awkwardly pawing through the pad container with one hand when two squad members entered.

“Have you figured out the overflow magic?”

“No.”

Ding.

Ding, ding.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

“Not again.” Large sigh. “Level Four. Illegal vortex portal. Expelling offense, right there. Should be a Level Five, shouldn't it? Can't get a good read on where for some reason.”

I froze, left fingers stuck in gauze. Illegal vortex portal? And magical misdirection? I had given Constantine a rock from the Midlands earlier, enchanted to misdirect serious activity for ten minutes' time. At the ambrosia party, the student who had wanted to hunt me had given me the idea. The Midlands hid magic, and through trial and error I had found that the nullifying magic would carry over for a ten minute time period on campus, if used within twenty-four hours from when the item left the Midlands.

I ducked out of the room and raced to Dorm One, holding my broken wrist painfully against my chest. Constantine had an enchantment to downgrade the offense level on illegal magic performed in his room. In fact, he had hinted that it downgraded
more
than one level. That meant he was doing something seriously Level Five. I wondered if there was a Level Six that no one spoke about.

He opened the door as soon as I reached it. He somehow always knew now when I was approaching. Proximity ward or something. I didn't care at the moment.

“Whatever did you do to your wrist, darling?”

I pushed inside and closed the door firmly with my good elbow. “A portal, seriously? You idiot. I don't even want to know what you are really doing.”

Actually, I did want to know. Maybe it would get me off campus?

Later. “They will be here in seven minutes to arrest you.” I reached into my pocket with my good hand and pulled out my newest storage paper. “I modified the design again. Put everything you can fit in here, then bury it outside. It holds crazy crap inside a field for two hours. You
have
to get everything out of this paper before the two hours are up.”

I didn't have time to read him the consequences. During testing, he had seen early drafts blow me across the room and destroy everything inside. And Constantine was always quick on the uptake. After our many drafting hours spent together, I was sure he would quickly figure out how to work a tesseract that came from my mind.

He regarded me, all heavy eyes and dark insouciance and didn't reach for the paper. “Are you protecting me, Ren?”

“Yes.”

Constantine had kept my status as a new feral secret, along with whatever other suspicions he had about me. For his own aims, most assuredly, but the repulsion I had initially felt for him had simmered weeks ago into simple distaste with his personal life. We worked well together. I enjoyed working with brilliant people, and our magic was very sympathetic, making joint projects easy. I wanted him to stick around.

“And we haven't even slept together yet.” He gave a slow smile. “I'm getting better every day.”

I turned.

His hand caught my arm. “Wait.” His smile dropped like the false mask it was.

I looked at him expectantly, though I wasn't expecting much. Constantine had armor as thick as Olivia's, except his was disguised as a slippery, shallow façade. And I didn't think highly enough of myself to think I would be able to pierce it. His other hand dropped and slowly pried the paper from my left fingers. I willed the paper to share ownership between us before letting go completely.

“Why?” he asked, voice low.