The Protection of Ren Crown (65 page)

Only the swirl of gold magic in the dart made me look at it twice. My shield pulsed companionably in response.

To the
gold
. No.
No
.

There was nothing I could do to stop its impact anymore. In a millisecond, mathematical equations of angles and speed rushed through my mind. Whatever was heading my way had been created by Raphael. And with my magic releasing elsewhere, I couldn't form enough preventive magic soon enough to intercept it in time. It was going to pierce my shield and do...something terrible. The satisfaction in every line of Emrys's body made that apparent.

I thought of Christian.

My gaze met Olivia's. Horror, fury, and despair. Her expression compressed, then become determined. The empty cocoon was already in her fist and magic was flaring outward, pinching space. No.
No
.

Magic yanked inside of me, pulled,
leeched
, and hands pushed me, shoving me from the path of the blast. I landed hard on the grass. Cracks formed in the sky as the cloud of Origin Magic abruptly released from my grasp.

Splayed out, hair falling in my face, I saw Olivia standing in the position of space that I had just occupied. In a horrible, horrifying repeat of what I had done for Dare last term, Olivia had used my magic to impossibly port herself across campus and into my position of space. She had been practicing porting with a leech inside the Midlands—where Administrative rules didn't apply. She had been practicing for
fun
, a smile on her face.

And when her cocoon had hatched into a butterfly a few short minutes ago, she had figured out that I had put a leash to me inside. She had used it to port to me. She had taken my place.

Gazes connected, I could see satisfaction mixing with her underlying terror. She had known, and she'd chosen to port to me anyway.

Olivia's skin burst into gold.

“No, nononononono!” I scrambled upright, but she was already disappearing, her body breaking up one tiny burst of gold at a time, starbursts of golden light vanishing pieces of her body bit by bit, like Lightning Festival magic. “
Nononono
!”

“Stop! Don't touch me!” Olivia threw a hand forward as I stumbled to try and reach her.

And that was the problem with leeches—even the ones
we
created. They rendered the leeched mage magicless during the leech's use and for
precious
seconds thereafter.

“
Olivia
.” I stumbled, lurching forward uselessly like some horrid nightmare. I wasn't going to make it in time.

She gripped her brooch and tore off her scarf, throwing it away from her disappearing body. The working of her bare throat showed her anxiety as the shimmering burst faster. Gold dust puffed out as the scarf fell on the grass. Her hazel eyes were a maelstrom of emotion.

Then they too burst with gold and vanished. The scarf was the only thing left to show that she had stood before me. The world swam as I fell on it. I saw the blurred image of a man readying another dart as the group of soldiers closed in around me.

The aftermath of the leech ended. Magic rushed back into my control.

Coldness. Numbness. Rage.

Rage.

The waiting cloud of Origin Magic dove into me like a meteoric swarm, then
pulsed
outward as I threw my arms to the sides, blowing away everything in my vision. Black shapes toppled like dominoes in a broad circle around me.

The earth cracked and creaked.

My hands hit the ground roughly and a trench opened in front of me. I could wrench the earth in two. Force this world to eat itself. Here, on the edge of existence.

A pull, a crack—tiny in the melee of destruction that I could wield—yanked at me and footsteps sprinted toward me. A strong forearm diagonally banded my chest, then I was being pulled upright and hauled away from the trench. The arm felt familiar. Someone was pulling me away from the edge, and it didn't matter if it was friend or foe. The enemy had killed Olivia.
Olivia had sacrificed herself for me.

Coldness. Numb rage. Right in my chest. Right where Olivia's thread pulsed green. Still...pulsed... green?

Numb rage turned to
fire,
and my magic exploded.

The arm holding me dropped. The earth thrust back together. Mountains in the far distance shook and crumbled. I thought of Dare in the Midlands.

Dare.

A wave of the dome's magic ripped from me and the spells blocking the ports blew open with the explosive sound of a million shards of detonated glass.

Mouths opened in screams, and terrified student faces—with gazes focused on me—were rejected from my view. I didn't have time for fear. Only for rectification and retaliation.

I tore the magic away from the ports in a fast flowing mist of piercing screams. Connected to campus, I could feel Dare and the rest of the combat mages streaming through the port on Top Circle. Coming through so quickly, as if they had been balanced on the balls of their feet on the other side, notified and
waiting
for this exact moment.

I could feel Dare. I could feel his magic enveloping the dome around the Administration Building. Then the connection to him snapped. Dead.
Dead.
I lurched and fell forward. Then the connection snapped back into place—almost too quickly for me to truly process his death. A moment later the mountain rocked as the Administration Building burst free.

Cheek pressed against the Earth, I could feel Marsgrove too—his magic striping the air. There were dozens of unfamiliar touches as well—other combat mages or Department types—but the figures were moving too fast for me to keep track. Justice Toad was back online and croaking gutturally and burning my lower back through my bag. And I...I just didn't care. I threw my bag to the side and rolled to my back.

I was shaking. I realized it the moment that sound returned. I was shaking uncontrollably, and I felt empty. Exhausted. Drained. No one was still standing in a fifty-yard radius surrounding me, and that included a portion of the level below. From above, it had to look like the blast radius of a detonated bomb.

The connection to campus was draining quickly—a tenuous thread, barely supported by the empty well of my magic.

I was fried. I gripped my chest. Olivia was
alive.
But I had no idea
where
. She had been taken via that golden burst, and a mathematical proof or artistic rendition wasn't going to help me. I needed magic, and someone up top had already funneled all of the magic from the Administration Building's dome. It had to have been done
immediately—
so quickly that the dome's magic must have been the only thing that concerned whoever had done it. In the midst of a thousand deaths, some official had done that first? That wasn't reassuring.

Through clouded eyes, I stared at the scarf puddled on the ground next to where Olivia had stood. She had shed it. She had shed the scarf so that the enemy didn't get it. The scarf that controlled the others.

Adrenaline sputtered from some hidden well, and I rolled and grabbed the scarf, and yanked it on over mine. Frantic questions and shouted directions immediately assailed me, and I realized that I had ended the communication magic threaded through my scarf at some point—and probably through everyone's scarves—but now that Administration Magic was back in play, our communications were online naturally again, at least for everyone else.

I yelled directions through Olivia's scarf to assist and update the combat mages. The enemy forces were still actively fighting all over the mountain. Dare would have told his own forces at this point about aiding anyone wearing a scarf. And as far as I was concerned, he was back in charge.

I unwrapped the scarf again, and crouched on the spot where Olivia had stood. I put my palm to the earth and pulled a portion of the combined magic from the scarf network into my other hand—we had set up the scarves to allow the lead scarf to use a small portion of embedded magic from all of them, if needed. I needed.

I pressed her scarf against the ground and focused the magical circuit. I pressed down on my more unhelpful emotions—loss, despair, failure—and concentrated on the question I needed the remnants of Olivia's presence and magic to answer.
Where did you go?
An indecipherable six-sensory response shot through the loop and I shakily captured it in the scarf's threads.

I let go of the combined magic in the scarf, and wrapped it back around my neck.

Voices were shouting even more loudly. Over-buzzed on emptied adrenaline and mortal peril I could hear Neph and Will,
thank God
, and a stream of other voices I was happy to hear yelling at me. Friends and associates who were alive and accounted for.

The battle was still raging, but their voices were crowing that the tide was turning. Exactly as the attackers had foreseen and tried to prevent, once the combat mages were back on campus, the teachers released, and the students no longer contained, the extremists were unable to maintain control. The terrorists excelled at being a hit squad, not warriors on an equal battlefield. Sections of the enemy force who had realized their fate were starting to flee.

Still, with my hands gripping the dirt and only the smallest bits of magic recharging in me, I was seriously vulnerable. Even with the thick ring of downed bodies from the blast surrounding me, there had been plenty of time for magic to arc over the top of the ring and end me. I looked around, slightly confused by why I was still alive.

Constantine stood behind me, wielding his ribbon like a whip in an eight foot circle around us, snapping each piece of magic that ventured close. Blood was dripping down his forehead. His right fingers, hand, and forearm were bubbling with burns. Comprehension was swift. Constantine had been the one who had grabbed me.

There was a very interesting smile on his lips as he studied the chaos around us, and as he looked at the reactivated arch nearest to us. His burned arm hung at his side as if of no consequence. He batted away streams of magic coming at us with easy motions of his left hand. As with the fight in the First Layer, he didn't lift a finger to aid anyone else. Bryant's scarf dangled from Constantine's back pocket.

I shakily pushed myself upright and put a hand on his arm, activating the shields in both scarves that I was now wearing and spreading them to his as well.

“Get what you needed?” He asked, somewhat distantly, as he wielded a blast back at the woman who had thrown it. Most of the attackers were now fleeing in earnest.

“Hopefully.” I touched Olivia's scarf, then the crisped flesh of his wrist as gently as I could. “I'm sorry.”

“Never be sorry for such magnificence of magic.”

“If you weren't so hot, you'd be a dork,” I said, voice shaking like everything else in me. I could feel the magic of our latest leech prototype in his belt, under the edge of the scarf. I unclasped the metal stud, flipped it, and pressed it against the burn on his limp arm. “Heal.”

I was burnt out and my magic channels were raw—magic itself was like a severely overworked muscle that I didn't feel I could flex again. But there was a little leftover juice from the scarves running along my skin and Constantine knew how to heal himself.

His eyes, heavy-lidded with amusement and pain, were fever bright. “You simply do not understand danger, darling.”

Before he even finished the sentence, he began pulling the last dregs of the scarves' magic out of my body. His crisping skin sizzled and smoothed to pink, then tan. Gold seeped down his arm and a full bodied shiver rippled through him.

He scraped through my magic—burned out as I was, the feeling was akin to fingernails raked down the inside shell of a melon, as if he was trying to dig out the last bit of fruit.

“What have you done to yourself, Ren? Any magic you try to channel will be a horrible mess. We can't have that.”

His magic thrust through me and gripped the gold edge of the Layer hovering around us.

The ground shook. Shouts echoed. The mages fighting near us stumbled and fell. Constantine was looking around us with a strange, dark anticipation, as if waiting for something.

“
Constantine.
”

At my strangled call, he looked down. “You should know better than to give me such toys to play with, Ren.” A grinding sound echoed and he pulled the magic through me, rehydrating the husk of my body. Magic flowed over me and healed as it went. I flexed my fingers as the leftover ache in them eased. The magic connecting me to the leech released.

The earth trembled again.

I squeezed his newly repaired arm, digging a nail in. “If that caused anything other than some poor woman's toilet to explode in the First Layer, I will beat you.”

“Bound to have made some woman's day more exciting, and don't make such lovely promises.” He flexed the newly repaired flesh of his wrist.

I gave a shaky laugh. I had to find something funny right now, otherwise I was going to sob.

“You always were a smart boy, identifying the real prize,” a rough voice said. The leech was blasted from Constantine's fingers.

Constantine pushed me behind him as Godfrey rose from the dead. Godfrey looked terrible—scorched and drained—but his eyes were manic.

I couldn't call up a thread of magic, but I expected Constantine to blast Godfrey. Instead, he was carefully examining each face as the soldiers rose to completely surround us. Godfrey's personal force had obviously been laying in painful wait.

“Blow the Midlands,” Godfrey said to a soldier at his right. “The combat mages are in there right now and the muses will never be able to hold campus together without them.”

“I can't reach the men, sir,” a soldier said apprehensively. “The combat mages engaged our forces and are sweeping through the processing factory, dismantling our bombs and traps.”

Dare was in the Midlands. Relief rushed through me. He would take care of everything. And Constantine would whip out some insane device at any moment.

“No finale today, then,” Godfrey said tightly. “But we are gaining something far greater than terror. Leandred.” He beckoned forward with his hand. “Bring her here.”