The Protection of Ren Crown (64 page)

The second ward activated in the balled stamp and the mutable material grabbed Godfrey's magic—the magic that had been used to erect the dome, no matter if it was through a device—and thrust it to the surface of the ball alongside my drop of paint. The ball of magic hit the Origin Dome with a splat.

Cracks immediately formed a spiderweb on its surface.

Olivia shouted into her scarf and Neph pressed hands against Will's chest.

The dome shattered. The mountain shook. Something split within me, sucking magic free as the magic in the dome mushroomed out. The enemy troops shouted. Shouted about Plan B.
The Midlands.

I made the magic mushrooming outward swirl upward, up, up, the mountain, then down into all of the Junior Department's boxes that Dare and I had tagged over the weeks—I twisted the magic, and flipped the box spells into projecting a barrier instead.

“Holy shivittrails!” Trick's scarf voice yelled. “The Midlands have been shut! I repeat, nothing is getting in, and that includes
magic.
Backlashes already gathering around the edges, watch yourselves!”

Someone yelled my name.

Students were spilling out around us. Some started fighting. Some ran.

The ones left behind simply stood, frozen in place.

Olivia was screaming at them to
move.

And Godfrey...Godfrey looked as if he was being physically shattered as well with the dome's backlash. But through the pain—and as his soldiers started cutting through my classmates—he stared at me with an incomprehensible look on his face that slowly morphed into painful glee.

“Grab her! Grab whatever device she is using!”

He was swallowed from view and Olivia yanked me backward. I held out my hand and called Kinsky's papers to me.

I felt Will's thread trying to snap back into place under Neph's sure hand. I saw Delia and Mike crawl—
alive
—into the surging crowd, leaving a trail of red behind.

Emotion rushed back into me, abrupt, soaring...horrific.

Students streamed around us, and everywhere, classmates fell.

Parchment crinkled in my fist. Parchment which had been put in place to save every one of these people, but that now resided in my palm.

Two girls fell to a flash of sapphire.

A swirl of meringue blew a group of five off their feet. A slice of gunmetal cut across another.
Slaughter.
The colors shot around me in a dizzying and sick array of light and intent. Lime green cut off a boy's arm. Coconut burst into a dozen milky shards that pierced flesh.

We were in the middle of Freespar, but this wasn't a war game people had signed up to play. It was a nightmare that shouldn't be happening. Not on campus.

Sheer student numbers were winning in a few places—a group of soldiers went down in one particularly violent charge. But like Dare and the other top-flight combat mages had been able to do, the soldiers took out massive amounts of lesser opponents all at one time. Freespar had taken less than ten minutes, and this...

I rejected the images, thoughts spiraling out and away from the carnage—and especially away from seeing the clear magic pulses that sliced through the air without warning. Magic hit my shields repeatedly, battering against them.

The papers in my hand dropped to the ground as a bolt made it through and three of my fingers sliced free. A man ran toward me, hand raised to finish the deed. I drew back my foot and kicked a paper at him, sending magic through my toes to direct its path. It curled around his face and sucked him inside.

The world tilted. Everything grew cold.

A man beside me gutted a tiny blonde girl. She dropped like an unwanted doll cast aside. I scooped up a paper with my intact hand and screamed incoherently as I thrust my hand through the air and against his neck. I heard the crack as he was bent in two and ingested by the parchment. It fell from my hand.

I stared down at the splayed girl, a crimson angel on the grass. I should have protected her.

A burning slice split my right side.

Everything was going hazy, and my cheeks were wet.

“Ren's going into shock,” Will's voice yelled from the fabric at my throat.
Alive.

The feel of Neph's magic immediately washed through me. “Olivia, I can't
get
to you
.
Ren's magic—her command—made it so I have to stay close to Will, Mike, and Delia and revive everyone that falls, and everyone keeps
dying.
But I can give you forty seconds.” Her voice was thin and strained and I wanted to
help
her
.

A blast of Neph's magic burst from my chest and made everyone around us stop in slack-jawed awe—staring at something only they could see.

Olivia's hand was suddenly clenched around my chin. She jerked it downward to make sure I saw her pointing at the blonde girl. “Resurrect her.”

“I don't know her.” I was only responsible for her death, not her life. I was responsible for Olivia's life. Will's. Neph's. D—

“Ren.” Olivia growled.

I dropped to my knees and laid my intact hand on the girl's torn stomach. Magic spilled into her. There was a cloud of magic still extending outward from where the dome had exploded and I grabbed it. Sunlight shot everywhere, haloing out my sight. Christian?

I pushed the enormous amount of magic into fixing everything in the body beneath my hand.

Magic—in a dazzling and sickening array of colors—was flying everywhere around the river I was channeling downward. Traps were springing in a perimeter around us one after another in technicolor brilliance. Olivia was holding concave shields made of magic and shooting colored balls at the soldiers. Nameless and faceless students ran, leaped, shot, fell, then rose again.

My gaze met Bellacia Bailey's in the mass. Her green eyes were slitted and her perfectly styled hair had violently loosened around her face. Her expression was apocalyptic. I wasn't going to be able to do anything against an attack from her. She drew her hands back, took a deep breath, threw her hands forward and
screamed.

Sound waves burst from her. In the thick magic of the field, they visibly rippled the air.

The sound waves shuddered the air above me and I could hear bodies falling behind me in the first wave of it—dropping enemies that had been drawing closer to me in my unaware state.

The waves turned into ripples and Bellacia stumbled, drained. Then Inessa was there, shielding her and pushing Bellacia toward a magical barricade some of the students had formed.

“You will finish this, then you will answer. You
will
!” Bellacia yelled at me as her friend manhandled her back.

Arms wrapped around my neck and words spilled into my ear in a foreign voice, as the blonde girl I had just resurrected clung to me.

“I think I'm responsible for you now,” I said absently. I let go of the conduit of magic and flared the rest outward toward anyone my magic considered a friend. The girl continued to utter words in my ear like a vow. “You need to hide,” I said.

She said something else incomprehensible, then sprinted off into the fallen grove like a pixie wearing shoes taken directly from the feet of Hermes—dodging between fighting mages, magic making her feet move faster.

I rose, and the gash in my side magically knit itself together, as did the repaired fingers on my damaged hand. The magical tingles were laced with Neph's remote magic.

“I didn't mean use
that
much magic,” Olivia hissed, flicking her fingers to finish stitching the job on my side. “You need to save some for yoursel—”

Will gasped, “Olivia, watch out!”

My mouth worked silently as the pull on my magic engaged and a violent blast of magenta impacted an inch from Olivia's chest. The barest hint of wings shimmered, and a butterfly rose in front of her, then burst into a hundred shards of smaller butterflies, each absorbing the magic, pulling a piece of my shield from me, then shattering. Saving Olivia. Saving her exactly as the caterpillar life cycle creation had been designed to do.

I clutched my head and tried to rebuild my shield set. Triumph mixed with other intense emotions. My magic had saved Olivia. The remote leech had worked. Exactly as designed.

I saw her look down at her hands in disbelief.

But I had no time to process her reaction as Godfrey's face came into view and his expression indicated that he had been granted every wish he'd ever made. His gaze followed the thread of magic in the air right to me. “It's her, it's
her, not a device
.”

And
that's
when the dome around the Magiaduct blew. The explosion rocked the entire mountain and everyone automatically ducked. Magic burst from me in response to the Origin Dome's collapse and I stumbled and fell. At my loss of control, I could feel the Junior Department's boxes explode, opening the Midlands once more, magic sucking through the boundaries and coiling inside.

Justice Toad gave a weird, ear-splitting shriek, ending his silence. It was very, very possible that even without the Administrative Magic, the tablet realized I was now truly expelled.

Contrarily, relief surged through the combined magic of the scarves as Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon yelled that the muses were taking up their flagpole posts and were calling all students. Everyone in the Magiaduct was streaming from the building, heading up to help the muses and to free the Administration Building.

Trick cackled in delight.

The teachers would be freed. And Marsgrove would hie down the mountain at top speed to arrest me. We were almost saved. The scarves were crowing with it.

The students around us started swarming, en masse, up the mountain, toward Top Circle as well—heeding the call of the muses to free the Administration Building, to end this.

But I couldn't move, hands curled into the dirt, shaking. The
Layer
was shaking. And no one seemed to be aware of it or else they would be freaking out too.

“Grab her,
now,
” Godfrey repeated, clutching his chest. As the originator of the magic, connected to whatever device or enchantment he had stolen, he was obviously also affected by a second dome shattering—and the magic was pulling on anything connected to it (Godfrey) or kindred in spirit (me).

His footsteps lurched toward me. “All personnel, to me.
Now
.”

“You will not
touch
her.”

The words preceded a flash and then Olivia was in front of me, battling like a demon freed from hell, throwing devices and magic toward the foe.

But Godfrey was also a demon possessed. “Forget the students. Forget the processor. Forget the mountain,” he yelled. “Here.
All
personnel to me,
now!
”

I crawled and tried to cover Olivia's back as she moved forward, offensively blasting enemy after enemy. All of the students were streaming away from us and up the mountain, and the soldiers were streaming after them, trying to cut them down from behind—either not hearing Godfrey or not able to hear him in his stumbling state. The Layer was shaking and it was all I could do to keep it steady and protect Olivia at the same time.

“Wait, wait! Don't abandon the battle fields! Neph! Get everyone back down here! Everyone! Everyone!” Will shouted mentally through my scarf. I could hear him throwing devices left and right in the background and I could hear Mike and Delia fighting as well. “Ren and Olivia need help! Neph!”

My elbows gave out and I face planted in the dirt. So much for Epsilon's theory that they could just blow the dome around the Magiaduct... Magic was sucking out of me as the detonated magic in the Origin Dome continued to spread outward. Black lightning crackled in the distance and a rip sounded. A tsunami in the First Layer, or a flood in the Fourth, or a plague in the Third...some natural disaster had just occurred somewhere in response.

I seemed to realize it subconsciously before consciousness grabbed hold. All of those things that had been occurring... Origin Magic backlash. Build a house of bricks, then remove a few bricks at the base willy-nilly, and disaster occurred.

Just like in the Third Layer.

Scarf chatter was suddenly shouting about backing off from touching the Administration Building's dome. They too now understood the danger.

“—
Layer cracking!”

“—
can't possibly—”

“
How did you get the battle field dome down, Crown?”

“
By Magic, everyone, stay away from the Midlands, I repeat,
stay away
.”

“
Crown? Answer!”

I couldn't answer. I was doing everything I could to stabilize the magic spreading outward and to guard Olivia's back.

“Constantine,” I croaked out. “Help. Leech.”

But Constantine didn't answer.

Fifteen balls of fuchsia burst around us, blowing back the students who were turning around to help.

Olivia was holding her own, but there were just too many enemies and we were too far away to layer our shields together. My shield was doing triple duty and incurring heavy damage just trying to keep me alive.

And the magical cloud was expanding, shuddering across the surface of the Layer.

“Just grab both of them, for shivit's sake!” Godfrey yelled.

I rose and used every tactic Dare had taught me, every tactic that I had observed and that our ragtag group had been practicing to dodge, trap, and evade. Wind enchantments threw the papers at charging enemies, swallowing them inside, but others just kept coming. And the shakiness in my limbs and the horror in my head kept increasing.

“This is a decided case of finders keepers,” a new voice said. “You always were behind the ball, Vincent.”

Emrys
.
He hadn't left
.

“And such a keeper. With some
sparkling
new additions,” he finished. His voice was somewhere off to my left.

I released a stream of magic forward and tried to sweep a paper toward a man trying to kill Olivia, while at the same time my peripheral vision saw a dart headed my way. A dart would bounce off my shield like a paper airplane, so I ignored it and concentrated on holding and dispersing the cloud of Origin Magic.