"Thanks, Bethany. I have to go," said Pi, running towards the west side of Big Dave's Town.
"What are you doing?" shouted Bethany.
"I have to stop her," replied Pi. "I have to keep Jade from bringing down the Halls."
Bethany said something afterwards, but Pi was too far away to hear. She was already so far behind. It was probably too late, but she had to try.
The only question was how she was going to get in without being noticed. She was already not welcome in Arcanium, which meant the defenses would consider her a threat, not counting the Cabal students that were likely posted around the Hall.
It took too long for Pi to reach the fifth ward, where Arcanium was located. She left the Red Line, pushed out the train doors as soon as they opened, and ran towards the towering castle that looked nearby, but was still a couple of blocks away.
The sky was filled with big, fluffy white clouds, and the brightness of the day made Pi squint until her eyes adjusted. The streets were packed with tourists snapping pictures on their cell phones. She passed a gaggle of kids carrying plastic light-up versions of the Spire as they pointed them at each other and made noises as if they were space guns.
She approached Arcanium from the south side, the opposite direction from the bridge that led to the main entrance. She hoped to get someone's attention at a window so they might let her in, or at least to warn them. She was jogging to a stop, when she saw a group of mages climb out of a black SUV.
The identity of the mage in the tailored all-white suit was unmistakable—Alton Lockwood—as was the identity of the one in a gray suit with a black-and-white striped tie, but not because of his clothes, but because the last time she'd seen Sunil, his lifeless eyes were staring back up at her. Four more male mages climbed out of the vehicle and spread out into a line.
"Surprised to see me?" asked Sunil.
The words stumbled out of Pi's lips. "You can't come back from the dead."
"Lucky for me, I wasn't dead. Close, but no cee-gar. The fine doctors at Golden Willow healed me. A damn miracle if you ask me, though it took months of recovery."
Her gaze flicked over to Alton, who was concentrating on her as if she were a complex math problem.
"We met in Golden Willow. Sunil tells me that I hate you. I don't remember the reason, but what you did to him is enough for me," said Alton, pulling a wand from his pocket.
The binding she'd placed on him years ago should have kept him from using magic, but a trinket could be activated with only a tiny amount of faez. If he was recovered enough to be able to speak to her, then he could probably use the wand.
"How did you know I was coming?" asked Pi as she scanned the area for an escape route. If she'd been prepared, she would have felt more comfortable facing off with six mages, but she'd been busy trying to work out a way inside Arcanium.
"I figured out how you were tracking us down," said Sunil. "Cybermagics are pretty new, so I wasn't aware of their capabilities until I had a long talk with Dustin Davies."
"He's not my friend," said Pi.
Sunil shrugged. "Either way, he's dead, but not before he informed the rest of his friends that hacking your betters is not a good way to remain a viable Hall. In the future, they will do what they're told."
Pi hadn't liked Dustin Davies, but she felt bad that he was dead because of her. A fate it seemed she was likely to soon share.
The standoff was coming to a close, she sensed. Their fingers itched with spells. Pi knew she was only going to have one chance.
The shield she threw up deflected the first attack—a hailstorm of ghostly daggers—but the second and third were angled high, and over her barrier, as if they'd guessed what she was going to do from past battles.
Pi conjured a shield, courtesy of her Daring Maid soul, and knocked the majority of the falling weapons away, but a handful went through her, sending waves of agony through her limbs. They did no physical damage, but wracked her body with pain.
Distracted by the first three attacks, she did not see Alton Lockwood wave his wand, which elicited a warbling song from the slender stick, and turning the concrete around her boots to mud, until they'd sunk overtop, trapping her in place.
Sunil followed it up with a privacy barrier at either end of the street that would keep anyone from seeing what was happening to her.
Pi tried to work a counterspell that would vibrate the concrete into dust, but a second volley of ghostly daggers flew over the barrier. As each one zipped through her body, not damaging it but feeling as if she had been speared through the middle, she coughed out a scream, each cut short by the next impact until she was reduced to blind agony.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The gun was huge. It looked big enough to blow a hole in a concrete wall.
"You must be Jade."
Jade nodded, moving to the end of the bed, but keeping the gun trained on Aurie. Jade was wearing Pi's leather jacket and her hair was sopping wet.
The Engine whined like a symphony of strings scratching their way across the high registers. The vibration rattled Aurie's gut and made the corners of Jade's eyes squeeze together. There wasn't a lot of time before the buildup of energy in the Engine had to be dealt with.
Aurie could see why her sister had fallen for Jade. She was strikingly beautiful, the kind of girl that could be the cover model on a hardcore biker magazine. The flowery tattoos on her dark skin softened the image, but Aurie saw something else, a familiar darkness in the eyes, full of rage and fear.
"You came in through the moat," said Aurie, trying to engage Jade so she didn't pull the trigger before someone else could arrive. "I assume you borrowed Pi's jacket to protect the gun from the water. But how'd you get past the Watcher?"
"Those idiots in Coterie figured it out," said Jade, her gaze dancing around the room, trying to figure out where the noise was coming from. "I just stole it from them."
Aurie was standing to the side of Semyon. She was only two steps away from Jade, but that might as well have been a mile considering how easy it would be to pull the trigger. If a mage was prepared, guns were trivial to disarm or ward against, but Aurie wasn't prepared, which meant both she and Semyon were likely going to die.
"Is my sister okay?"
Aurie broke out into a cold sweat, until Jade screwed up her face. "You're her sister? Aurelia?"
"Yeah. Is she okay?" Aurie asked cautiously.
"Shit, yeah. I guess I should have seen the resemblance. She's okay. Probably mad as hell, but she's not hurt," said Jade, a little frown at the corner of her lip. "Don't do anything that makes me shoot you. I came for him, not for you."
"If you kill him, everyone in Arcanium will die."
Jade seemed to consider this, not as something new to discover, but as a choice she'd already made but pushed away the consequences.
"Yeah," she said regretfully. "I'm sorry. But this has been a long time coming."
Aurie went cold again, and not because she might die. A long time coming. When Jade had first come in the room, hot with anger, ready to pull the trigger, Aurie had seen something in her gaze, a familiar hate.
The Rider.
She wasn't about to lament the bad luck that it'd gotten to this point. Whatever the patrons and Invictus had done centuries ago hadn't banished the creature. It also meant that she wasn't likely going to convince it not to kill Semyon, though it had shown some affection for her sister.
Jade pointed the gun at Semyon's head. His unconscious form was like a mummy in a sarcophagus: eyes closed, lips slightly apart. The beep of the medical instruments was slowly being drowned out by the Temporal Engine as if the whine were rising waters of sound.
Aurie saw this as her only chance to stop Jade. If she lunged over the bed, she might be able to knock the gun away, or at least force Jade to shoot her instead, then maybe if another Arcanium member heard it, they could stop her.
She hesitated, only because getting shot was not going to be pleasant, and probably fatal. But if
she didn't, everything she cared about would fall apart. This is going to hurt.
The muscles in Jade's hand started to tense.
Aurie lunged forward, reaching out to grab the gun.
The barrel swung towards her.
A cacophonous sound filled the room.
Aurie was punched in the shoulder, pushing her away from the gun.
Before Jade could bring it around for another shot, Aurie slapped her hand out towards the Engine, and pushing through the pain in her shoulder, she touched Jade's arm at the same time.
The world revolved around her.
They landed on a dirt road in the middle of two lines of trees. Aurie collapsed onto her knees, hand over the bloody wound in her shoulder, warm blood running between her fingers.
Jade wheeled the gun around, looking for Semyon.
"What in the fuckity-fuck just happened? Where did you send us? How did you teleport us like that?" Jade cried out. She brought the gun around to Aurie. "Send us back, right now, or I swear to whatever Creator you pray to, I'll put a bullet in your head."
Aurie was dizzy. She wasn't sure if the bullet had gone all the way through, but it felt like her whole shoulder was on fire.
"I can't, and even if I could, I wouldn't. Shooting me won't fix the problem, and would likely make things worse, since you don't know how this place works."
Jade wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, swiping at a few gnats that had descended upon her. The sky was a pale blue, and the sun hovered over the edge of the trees, bringing a punishing heat upon them.
Eventually Jade pointed the gun back to Aurie. "Maybe I'll shoot you and find out. What have I got to lose?"
"Everything if you want out of here."
"Dammit." Jade stomped her foot in the dirt.
Aurie thought about keeping Jade in the dark about where they were, but she wanted to live, and not knowing might lead Jade to pull the trigger.
"I can explain if you let me fix this," said Aurie, grimacing.
"I thought you couldn't do magic, or you'd hurt your patron."
"I can here because we're in Semyon's head."
Jade spun around, head craning in all directions as if she could see the inside of his skull beyond the clouds.
"You'd better start fucking explaining," she said.
Aurie wouldn't be able to fix the damage completely, but she could at least close the hole in her shoulder. As sweat rolled down her arms, she leaned over and scooped up some dirt, forming it into a ball, which was challenging because she needed both hands, so she manipulated the dirt near her waist. Once it was roughly the size of a golf ball, she held it in her right hand, the side with her injured shoulder, and manipulated the spell with her left. She wasn't as ambidextrous as her sister, so getting the fingerings correct was difficult, but she managed. As the dirt glowed with faez, she slapped it against the wound, crying out from the impact.
Almost immediately, the dirt ball spread out, closing the wound and stopping the blood loss. The spell dampened the pain only slightly, so she had to keep from using her right arm.
When Aurie turned back to Jade, she caught a raw expression which made her wonder if she was truly a Rider. There was solace and regret in the rounding of her eyes. Or maybe like the patrons, the Rider had changed over the centuries.
"Explain."
Aurie tilted her head. The sound of horses reached her ears. "First, let's get off the road. We don't want to be seen right now."
They moved into a copse of trees and hunched down in the grass. Jade kept the gun pointed at Aurie.
"We're inside Semyon's dreams, much like a dreamstalking spell. But different. The Temporal Engine speeds up this place, so we experience a considerable amount of time in comparison to what's going on outside. For example, neither you nor I have probably hit the floor by now. If we were able to return to our bodies, we'd be in mid-fall."
The sounds of horses grew nearer. They were pulling a carriage. Peeking through the trees, Aurie couldn't see them yet, but it sounded like there was more than one.
"Like a dreamstalking spell," said Aurie, "it's unwise to let the dreamer know you're inside his mind. Because anything that happens to you here, happens to you outside. And in this case, it's much worse because of the time dilation between here and outside. We have to survive here until someone can pull us out or the energy of the Engine has dissipated enough that it'll kick us out."
This wasn't the complete truth. Aurie knew a spell to get out, but she needed at least a couple of minutes to cast it, and then another hour for it to take effect. If she could get away from Jade, then she could strand her inside of Semyon's mind. This would not only give her a chance to survive the gunshot, but help with the Engine transference.
The crunch of horse hooves grew louder. A line of soldiers on horses was headed their way. They wore the red jackets and white pants of the English army. There were three carriages behind the first line of horses.
Under her breath, Jade said, "What time period is this?"
"Mid 1700s," said Aurie softly, wondering if the Rider inside Jade would remember.
When the horses and carriages stopped, Aurie and Jade crouched lower. She was trying to hear the conversation when a half-dozen soldiers came around the trees, pointing muskets in their direction.
"By the queen's order, you are under arrest."
For a moment, Aurie thought Jade was going to resist, but then she stood and held up her hands. Aurie joined her. A solider removed the gun from Jade's hand, and they were led back onto the road.
The lead soldier leaned into the nearest carriage, handing over the pistol. "We captured some rebels, Colonel. One of them had a small rifle, make of which I've never seen before."
Aurie eyed the way behind her, wondering if she could make it to the woods before someone fired on her. If she could get past the tree line, she could use some magic to put distance between her and the soldiers, but then the chase would be on, and Semyon's subconscious would be alerted to their presence. For now, it was better to stay inconspicuous, she decided.
The carriage door swung open, and the colonel stepped out. He had dark skin that stuck out against the white crossed sashes on his chest.
When he rounded the door, Aurie sucked a breath in through her teeth in shock. It was Semyon Gray.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The concrete had trapped Pi up to her ankles, keeping her from falling to her knees in agony as they strafed her with ghostly daggers. She could do nothing to stop them. Pi screamed until she was hoarse, her voice sounding like loose pebbles in a tin can.
Then through tear-soaked eyes, she watched as Alton and Sunil, along with four other mages, approached.
"If she moves a muscle, kill her," Sunil said to the others.
Alton strolled near, a curious expression on his face. "I wish I could remember what it is that you did to me. I wonder if this revenge goes far enough, or should we make you suffer even more?"
"I spurned you because you have a small dick," said Pi.
The slap came like a thunderclap. The left side of her face stung.
As blood trickled out of her nose, she said, "It's amazing how such a small thing can drive you to rage." She chuckled under her breath at her joke, waiting for the next blow.
But they were not paying attention to her. The six of them had their heads up, looking down the street towards the privacy barrier.
Pi was halfway through the spell when the first explosion rang overhead, scattering Sunil and his ilk. Pi managed to turn the concrete to dust before Alton remembered she was still there. He fired his wand, but she deflected it with a ghostly shield, sprinting into an alleyway.
"Die, you pig!" screamed Bethany, blasting force bolts at Alton.
The Misfits burst through the barrier. The battle was engaged, and with six against six, there was little time for fancy spell work. Quick fingers summoned the Five Elements, leaving the air crackling with energy.
Sasha pounded them wit
h earth magic, stones that grew into boulders as they soared down the street. Bethany fired force magic at Alton, unerringly, one after the other, like an automatic weapon. Nancy and Yoko twisted their fire and ice, which burst through counters and turned the air to steam, while Sisi moved like a supernatural creature, collapsing air pockets, causing thunderclaps that punished them sonically.
Lurking from her alleyway, Pi flanked the enemy mages, firing solar spears into their midst, forcing them to retreat. Once the first mage went down, Sunil and the others broke and ran, abandoning the fallen one and their SUV.
The Misfits cheered when they were gone.
"That was amazing," said Nancy, breathlessly. "I want to do that again."
They high-fived and hugged, except for Bethany, who was standing off to the side, crying.
"What's wrong? Are you injured?" asked Pi, checking the semi-translucent girl for blood.
"No. I almost had him. I made the spell just like you taught, but it wasn't enough. One of the other mages blocked it, and he got away," said Bethany.
"Alton?"
She nodded, using two fingers to wipe the tears flooding down the valleys on either side of her nose.
"You did great," said Pi. "If it weren't for you coming here, I'd be dead right now. We'll get Alton eventually, I swear to you, but today's not that day." She turned to the others. "At a later date I'm taking you all out for gourmet cupcakes in thanks, but for now I need your help again."
"We're in," said Sasha. "Bethany told us what happened."
The others added their grim nods, which warmed her heart. She almost felt sorry for Jade.
"She went in here, I think," said Pi when they reached the edge of the moat. The water, which was normally crystal clear, was brackish, covered in dead leaves, soft drink bottles, and colorful food wrappers.
"Why don't you go in the front door?" asked Nancy.
"I'm not welcome anymore, and those weren't the only Cabal goons around. I need to get in there fast before we get attacked again." Everyone looked around. "And I don't think I have much time. I might be too late."
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