“Healthy,” Michael said. “Helpers. Not parasites on the world.”
Jeremiah barked out a mirthless laugh. “How naïve, all of you.” He aimed his gaze at me. “I would hope, Ms. Parker, that you might spend some time thinking critically about your friends and whatever lies they told you. They are a boil on the face of magic. They imagine themselves to be saviors, rebels, a mutiny against tyranny. They are wrong. They create strife, division, amongst us when we need solidarity.”
“Solidarity to take lives?” I wondered aloud. “To take the strength of others?”
Jeremiah clucked his tongue. “It’s a pity that you’ve succumbed to their backward belief that the magic they’ve been given is inherently evil. That it is inherently bad. Those are ideas for the small-minded, for the ignorant, who do not understand or appreciate the gifts.”
“Those gifts degrade,” Jamie pointed out. “They rot you from the inside.”
“So you’ve been taught,” Jeremiah said, taking a step toward us. “But what if you’re wrong?”
“Wrong?” Scout asked hoarsely. “How could they be wrong?”
“You steal other peoples’ essences,” Michael said, pointing at Scout, “from people like her, in order to survive. Does that sound right to you?”
“What is right, Mr. Garcia? Is it right that you would be given powers of such magnitude—or in your case, knowledge of such magnitude—for such a short period of time? Between the ages of, what, fifteen and twenty-five? Does it seem natural to you that such power is intended to be temporary, or does that seem like a construct of shortsighted minds?”
I glanced over at Scout, who frowned as if working through the logic and wondering the same thing.
“We agree to give up their powers,” Jamie pointed out, “before they become a risk. A liability. Before we have to take from others.”
“A very interesting conclusion, Ms. Riley, but with a flawed center. Why should you protect humans who are not strong enough to take care of themselves? What advantage is there in stepping forward to protect those who are so obviously weak? Whose egos vastly outpace their abilities? Those who are gifted with magic are elite amongst humans.”
As if bored with the conversation, he waved a hand in the air. “Enough of this prattle. Are you willing to see the error of your ways? To come back to the fold? To leave behind those who would rip you from your true family?”
Reaper or cult leader? I wondered. It was hard to tell the difference with this one.
“Are you high?” Michael asked.
Jeremiah’s nostrils flared. “I’ll take that as a juvenile ‘no,’ ” he said, then turned on his heel. “Ad meloria. Finish them.”
21
“Aw, this is my favorite part,” said Alex, then outstretched her hands.
But before she could shake the earth, Jamie wound up her left hand as if bracing for a pitch. “Keep your issues,” she said, then slung her arm forward, “to yourself.” A wave of heat blew past us as pellets of white fire shot from Jamie’s hand like sparks from a sparkler.
“Holy frick,” I muttered, instinctively covering my head even though the fire wasn’t meant for me. But it was enough to temporarily subdue Alex, who drew back her hand and hit the ground, wrapping her arms around her head to avoid the burn.
“Help me off this thing,” Scout muttered, grasping my arm. I pulled her to her feet as Michael glanced around at the movement.
“Green,” he yelled over the crackle of falling sparks, “get behind the table!”
“Garcia,” Scout said, fingers biting into my hand as she kept herself upright, “I’m the spellbinder here. You get your ass behind the table.”
“They’re reloading,” Jamie said, turning to grab my arm. She pulled me behind the table, and I dragged Scout with me. “Let’s all get behind the table.”
We’d just managed to hit the deck when the pressure in the room changed. I knew what was coming, deep in my bones. I clapped my hands to my ears against the sudden ache, as if my blood and bones remembered it, feared it.
The air in the room vibrated, contracted, and expanded, and the light seemed to shift to apple green, the table suddenly flying above our heads with Sebastian’s burst of firespell. I covered Scout’s body with mine and we were both saved the impact, but the move stripped us of our cover. We were all but naked, nothing but air between us and two Reapers who appeared to be better equipped for the battle than we were.
“I’m on it,” Jamie yelled, turning from her crouch, fingers outstretched in front of her, her irises shifting to waves of flame again. There was another crackle of sound and energy as a wall of white fire began to rise between us and the Reapers. I kneeled up to sneak a glance and saw Sebastian on the other side, black brows arched over hooded blue eyes. He stared at me, his gaze intense, one arm outstretched, his chest heaving with the exertion of the firespell he’d thrown, lips just parted.
I don’t know why—maybe because of the intensity in his eyes, in his expression—but I got goose bumps again, at least until the growing barrier of flame blocked my view. I guessed it was a foot thick, nearly six feet tall, and it crossed the room from one side to the other, a blockade between us and the Reapers.
For a moment, as if entranced, I stared at the wall of white fire, the heat of the dancing flames warming my cheeks. “Amazing,” I murmured, turning to gaze in awe at Jamie.
“More amazing if it could withstand that earthquake business,” she said as the ground rumbled beneath us. “I braided the strands of flame together. It’s hard to penetrate, at least at first, but it won’t hold forever. Flame acts like a fluid. It flows, sinks. The strands will separate.”
“Scout,” Michael called, “can you do anything? Reinforce the wall?”
She squeezed my hand, closed her eyes, and was quiet for a moment. And then she began to chant.
“Fire and flame/in union bound/from parts, a whole/ from top to ground.” Her body suddenly spasmed; then she went limp. I glanced behind us at the wall. It shivered, seemed to ripple with magic, then stilled again.
She’d tried, but whatever she’d done hadn’t quite taken.
Scout tightened her grip on my hand, then opened her eyes and glanced over at Michael. “I can’t,” she whispered, tears pooling in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I don’t have any mojo left. They took it, Michael.”
“It’s okay,” Michael said, pressing his lips to her forehead. “You’ll heal. It’s okay.”
“I can spark them again,” Jamie said, “but I need to recharge for a minute, and the wall isn’t going to keep them away for long.”
I inched up to peek over the fire, assessed, and quickly sat down again. “There’re two more of them. Are we toast?”
“Reaper toast,” Scout agreed, then leaned into a fit of coughing.
“Scout?” Michael asked.
When she looked up at him, there were tears in her eyes. “It was a nightmare, a black hole. They trapped me, and they’d have kept going until there was nothing left. No energy, no magic—just a shell.”
“They must have doubled their efforts,” Michael said, his eyes scanning her face, like a doctor checking her injuries. “Siphoned more greedily than their usual one-day-at-a-time protocol. Probably weren’t sure how long they’d be able to keep her.” He glanced at me. “Energy taken from Adepts is more potent, more powerful, than energy from folks without gifts, so they’d have taken what they could get while they could get it, passed it on to elders like Jeremiah. You said they trashed her room, right? Maybe they were looking for her Grimoire, her spell book, something to try and capture some of her gifts, as well as her energy.”
“They’ll keep coming,” Scout said quietly. “They won’t kill us. They’ll just suck us dry until there’s nothing left. Until we leave everyone and everything else behind and do exactly what they want.”
“Like magical brat packers,” I muttered, sarcasm the only way I knew to deal with a future that terrifying.
“What c
an you do?” Jamie suddenly asked me. “You said something about lights? If we could distract them, maybe we could make a run for the door? Scatter through the tunnels?”
I nodded, my heart pounding, and looked up at the fluorescent lights overhead. I stared at them, concentrating, trying to speed my heart into whatever state was going to trigger the magic. Into whatever state was going to turn off all the lights.
“You can do it, Lil,” Scout whispered, leaning her head against my shoulder. “I know you can.”
I nodded, squeezing my fingers into fists until my nails cut crescents into my palms.
Nothing.
Not even a flicker, even as my heart raced with the effort.
“Scout, I don’t know how,” I said, staring up at the lights again, which burned steadily—not even a hiccup—in their fixtures. “I don’t know how to make it happen.”
“ ’ S okay, Lil,” she said softly. “You’ll learn.”
But not fast enough, I thought.
The ground rumbled again, the flames shaking on their foundations. It was another of Alex’s earthquakes, and that wasn’t all—the wall vibrated, wavered, at three or four other points along the line. They were hammering at it, trying to break through.
And despite my chest being full of fear, there wasn’t so much as a flicker in the lights above us.
Maybe it had been a fluke before, a power surge in the building at the same time I’d been afraid or excited, and not magic after all. Maybe I had been a fluke.
But there was no time to worry about it . . . because the wall began to unravel.
I watched as the strands unbraided, listened as Reapers began to yell around us.
“It’s going,” Jamie warned over the motion and noise.
She was right, but it had help.
The air pressure changed again, the light turning a sickly green.
“Firespell!” I yelled, both Michael and I hunkering down to cover Scout with our bodies, my arms wrapped around her head.
The very walls seemed to contract, then expand with a tremendous force. The shot of firespell Sebastian threw across the room turned Jamie’s fluid fire into a brittle wall that shuddered, then exploded, shards flying out in all directions before crashing to the ground like shattered glass.
When the air was still again, a haze of white smoke filling the room, I glanced over at Jamie. Her eyes were closed, and there was blood rushing from a gash in her forehead.
“Michael?” I asked, shaking white powder from my hair.
He muttered a curse in Spanish. “I’m okay.” He sat up again, chunks of white . . . stuff . . . falling around his body. “Scout?”
I moved my arms and she lifted her head. “I’m okay, too.”
“I think Jamie’s hurt,” I said.
Michael looked at her, then glanced around. The room was in chaos, Reapers yelling at one another, smoke wafting through the room.
“We’ve got to make a run for it,” he said, “use the chaos to our advantage. It’s our best chance.”
I nodded, then put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and shook gently. “Hey, are you okay?”
Her eyelids fluttered, then opened. She raised a hand to her face and wiped at the blood streaming from the gash at her temple.
“Here,” I said, pulling off my plaid tie and wrapping it around her head tight enough to put pressure on the wound and keep the blood out of her eyes.
“Can you get up?” I whispered. “We’re going to try to make a run for it.”
She nodded uncertainly, but it was a nod just the same. I helped her to her feet as Michael helped Scout behind me. As stealthily as we could, we began to move through the smoke and back toward the door, picking our way through the remains of the transfigured wall, me trying to hold Jamie upright, Michael all but carrying Scout.
We made progress, the haze aiding our escape, and managed to get halfway closer to the door . . . at least until a voice rang through it.
“Stop.”
We looked over. Alex emerged from a swirl of white, Sebastian beside her.
She stretched out a hand. “You can come willingly, or I can knock you all on your asses.”
Reapers—the ones we hadn’t been introduced to—began closing in from the left and right.
“Michael?” I asked.
“Um,” was all he said, his own gaze shifting from side to side as he tried to figure a way out.
I’m not sure what made me do it, but I chose that moment to glance at Sebastian, who stood just behind Alex, his hooded gaze on me again. And while I looked at him and he looked back at me, he mouthed something.
Let go.
I frowned, wondering if I’d seen that correctly.
As if in confirmation, he nodded again. “Let go,” he mouthed again. No sound, just the movement of his lips around the words.
I stood quietly for a moment as the Reapers gathered around us. Somehow, I knew he was right. And although he was supposed to be kicking our collective butt right now, I knew he was trying to help.
I didn’t know why, but I knew it as surely as I knew that I was standing in the midst of people I wanted to protect.
People I could protect.
I took a chance.
“Get down,” I told Jamie, Michael, and Scout.
“Lily?” Scout asked, confusion in her voice.
“We know what you’ve got in store,” Alex said. “We know what you can dish out, and I think we’ve demonstrated that it ain’t real much, so it’s our turn to teach you all a lesson. To teach you about who matters in this world, and who doesn’t.”
“Trust me, Scout,” I repeated, suddenly as sure about this as I’d ever been about anything else. I was where I should be, doing what I should be doing, and Sebastian had been right.
After a half second of deliberation, Scout nodded to Jamie and Michael. I waited until they’d all crouched down beside me, and then I did as he’d directed.
I stopped trying to make magic.
And I let the magic make itself.
I outstretched my arms and trained my gaze on Sebastian, and felt warmth begin to flow through my legs, my torso, my arms.
Firespell.
Not Sebastian’s.
Mine.
My magic to wield, triggered by the shot of firespell I’d received a few days ago, but mine all the same.
I held my arms open wide. He nodded at me, then put a hand on his head and crouched down behind Alex.
I pulled the power, the energy, into my body, the room contracting around us as it filled me. My eyes on Alex, one eyebrow arched, I pushed it back.
“Bet you didn’t know about this,” I said.
The room turned green, a wash of power vibrating through it with a bass roar, knocking down everyone who wasn’t already crouched behind me.
It took a second to overcome the shock at what I’d done, at what had seemed natural to do. I shivered at the power’s sudden absence, wobbling a little until the pressure in my head equalized again.
The ground rumbled a little, an aftershock; then the room went silent, a spread of unconscious Reapers around us.
Michael stood again and helped Scout and Jamie to their feet. “Well-done, Parker. Now let’s get out of here.”
I offered an arm to Jamie, then glanced back at the dark-haired boy who lay sprawled on the floor a few feet away. “Let’s go,” I agreed, positive that I’d see him again.
22
We regrouped in the catacombs, Jason, Jill, and Paul emerging from their tunnel at a run. Jill and Paul both went to Jamie—sisterly concern in her eyes, something altogether different from the brotherly concern in his.
Jason’s eyes had shifted again from blue to the green of flower stems, a color that seemed unnaturally bright for a human . . . but better for a wolf. His hair was in disarray, sticking up at odd angles, a bruise across his left cheekbone. His gaze searched the crossroads, then settled on me, ferocity in his eyes.
His lips pulled into a wolfish grin, dimp
les at the corners of his mouth. I swallowed, the hairs on my neck standing on end at the primal nature of his gaze. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to run and hide, or stand and fight, but the instinct had certainly been triggered.
He looked me over, and once assured that I was fine, checked out Michael and Scout. She was on the ground, sitting cross-legged. Michael sat beside her, holding her hand.
When the two groups had reunited, everyone had made sure that everyone else was okay, and everyone had been debriefed about the rescue, Scout spoke up.
“Thanks, everyone,” she said quietly. “If you hadn’t come—”
“Thank Lily,” Michael said, smiling up at me with appreciation in his dark eyes. “She’s the one who led the charge. She did good.”
“Parker showed some hustle,” Jason agreed, offering me a sly smile, his eyes now back to sky blue. “She’ll make a good addition to the team.”
Scout humphed. “She’ll make a good addition if Varsity lets her join, but that would require Varsity pulling their heads out of their butts. Katie and Smith are being total jerks.”
“They’ll unjerkify,” Jason said confidently. “Have faith.”
“I always have faith in us,” she said. “It’s them I’m not too sure about.”
“Have some water,” Michael said, passing her the bottle I’d pulled from my messenger bag. “You’ll feel better. And when we get back to the enclave, you can tell us what happened to you.”
Scout snorted defiantly, but did as she was told.
I stood up and stepped away to a quiet corner and looked down at my hands, still in awe at what I’d managed to do.
And I was still unsure how I’d managed to do it.
Okay, that was a lie. I knew exactly what I’d done, the sensation of doing it somehow as natural—as expected—as breathing. It wasn’t that I’d suddenly learned how to do it, but more that my body had remembered how to do it.
I just had no idea how that was possible.
Jason walked over, pulled a candy bar from his pocket, ripped off the wrapper, snapped off an end, and handed it to me.
I took it with a smile, then nibbled a square of chocolate-covered toffee. I didn’t have much of a sweet tooth, but the sugar hit the spot. “Thanks.”