The Protection of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  Raphael's brow rose in profound amusement. “A developing Origin Mage who suppresses her magic and its use...is a catastrophe in the making. And deadly to all around her when the devastation unleashes.”

  I swallowed, deeply unhappy at what he was hinting. A glitter of gold caught my eye. Even here in the dreamscape my subconscious mind conjured the box he always carried.

  “Come, come. Let's make this a painless transaction.” Raphael smiled, and the box disappeared with a flick of his wrist. But I knew it was still on him somewhere. Since my Awakening, I had never seen him without it.

  Made from my magic. My Awakening magic. Thoughts tumbled and my mind pressed hard. My magic. I needed that box.

  Raphael's smile turned gentle. “One thing at a time, butterfly.”

  His finger pulled along the edge of the stars to the left of him, gently slitting the fabric of the dream, and hinting at a world beyond. “A little friendly advice—don't tarry long in the non-magic world once we've finished here.”

  He stepped one foot through the rip in the dream and I forced my gaze away from what lay beyond.

  “You will come with me whether you like it or not.” His amusement infuriated me. “However...there are things I can offer for swift cooperation.”

  No.

  “Count yourself fortunate that I need your promise fulfilled now, butterfly. Your merry little band of misfits can't fix the spells you ripped away when you consorted with that boy. Can't fix something that I specifically put into place. You cannot freely return to the Second Layer without my help. And you have bound your lovely companion to you. She won't leave without you, and what do you think will happen to her, trapped here with you, a ticking time bomb with that cuff upon your wrist?”

  “I haven't bound Olivia.” My anxiety ratcheted higher. “And I'll make her return, eventually.”

  He smiled. “Binding someone doesn't require force. Someone so bereft of genuine love and affection, once given a taste, will never let it go. But these are paltry matters. Come.”

  I stared at Olivia's relaxed form. My heart was beating too rapidly for a dream state. “I'll get Marsgrove to fix the spells.”

  “Didn't you learn from that mistake already?” Raphael's eyes sparked maliciously, but he quickly smoothed his expression into serious lines. “You are allowing yourself to fall behind mentally, butterfly.”

  The sincere voice he had wielded and the mentor persona he had worn in the weeks following my brother's death and before my Awakening, were as compelling now as they had been then. The sudden absence of madness in his eyes and the momentary glimpse of a long lost friend temporarily muted my hatred.

  “You've lost your focus here during this week-long lamentation of death.” His gaze was piercing and serious. “But you have no time to grieve. You will stay sharp or I will kill you myself.”

  The dreamscape started to unravel around us, and I gathered the tangles of dispersing thought. “You are the reason Christian is gone,” I said.

  “No. Those idiots who didn't realize what they had are the reason. I simply followed the delicious trail left behind and clasped opportunity by the throat. But that's all in the past. If you allow the Department to chain you when you get back to school, I will wipe you free of this Earth. Which would be dearly regrettable. Come. This is your last chance to follow and bargain freely.”

  He stepped fully through.

  Don't follow. I stayed where I was.

  “You will come anyway,” he said in a singsong manner. “And what might you find, should you follow freely?” His low voice beckoned from the other side of the void, reading my mind in my own scape. “The key to the protection of your family and friends? What sorts of answers live here in the beyond? What sorts of...things?”

  Raphael knew me well—had studied me and picked apart my brain when I'd been at my most vulnerable.

  Darkness followed the path of the unraveling dream as threads slipped from the sky.

  “What might you lose by allowing your anger to override opportunity? Have I not protected your home and family from discovery thus far? I know you want to be able to protect them apart from my machinations. How can you protect anyone if you stay here, neutralized in the non-magical world?”

  Brilliant colors and sounds flashed and echoed through the slit.

  Don't follow.

  A sweeping sound of melody and light pierced through and coiled around me. Thrice damned determination, curiosity, and purpose moved me forward. I felt the promise I had exchanged for the tube of paint urging me onward.

  The only way that I would beat Raphael and become more was through knowledge and experience. I touched the edge of the split dream—the sheerest silk in the deepest shades of purpled black.

  Don't follow.

  “What might you discover, butterfly? How will you finally break our tie?”

  I pressed the curled edge inward with my fingers and stepped through.

  Chapter Six: Holy Innocents' Day

  Olivia's news reader beeped incessantly for attention, but she continued to ignore it, watching me through narrowed eyes as I fumbled with my clothes, awkwardly pulling on a new shirt and trying to get out of the stretchy pants I had worn to bed.

  “The spell just snapped back into place during the night? That is the explanation you are going with?” she asked.

  “Mmmhmm. Sometime during the night, it just whooshed back.” I made a swooshing motion with my hand so I didn't have to meet her gaze. “Now we can return to the Second Layer.” I chewed on my middle fingernail, my gaze on the floor.

  My words weren't false. The spell had whooshed back into place. Raphael had just done the whooshing.

  “Ren—”

  A shrill noise issued and the needle on Olivia's grid detector registered five marks. A hologram burst up from her news reader as a weird sensation overtook me—like an enormous echo of my own magic pulsing somewhere far away.

  “Return now,” Olivia's reader slowly and unnaturally articulated. “We repeat—all Second Layer citizens must return to the Second Layer immediately and head to a designated safe zone.”

  The magical echo gave a final burst as a hologram of a man burst into view. A ruined town smoked in the background of the image.

  “Greetings from the once illustrious little town of Sassraf! We citizens of the Third Layer have endured long months of negotiations with your Second Layer politicians, and have offered much to regain what is rightfully ours—to rebuild our glorious and storied empire. Unfortunately, the politicians are without compassion or understanding for those possessing other nationalities, and for the people they serve as well! It is you, the people, who must rise against them.”

  On the street, a shot of a cowering crowd came into holographic view.

  “Your politicians told us to 'do our worst.' Such an interesting turn of phrase.” The man smiled, all teeth and sharp edges. “Your authorities can not protect you, not now, even if they want to.” The man tapped his lip. “Or perhaps we just haven't found the people they will protect. Nevertheless, these folks’ right to defense by their leaders seems to be absent. On today of all days.”

  Olivia's lips tightened. “It's Holy Innocents' Day,” she said to me.

  I thought of the painting by Reubens—The Massacre of the Innocents—that immortalized the biblical event.

  “No,” I said, as if the word could negate my sudden understanding of what was about to take place. “Turn it off, Olivia,” I said, as the man grabbed his first victim.

  “Hijacked feeds continue until the magic ends. They've done it before by targeting the broadcasting devices of every Second Layer citizen. The hologram can not be turned off.” Olivia's gaze didn't falter as the first victim fell forward and the next was pulled into place.

  Deliberately killed with magic. Like Christian. My eyes shifted focus as the second body in the hologram jerked and fell.

  “Even if you shatter the device, the magic will remain, and the hologram will continue,” Oli
via said, her expression shuttered. She didn't look away from the man's face.

  The leader looked directly into my eyes. It had to be the spell, making it seem like he was looking directly at the viewer. It spiked my stomach, though, as if he was insinuating that I was personally responsible.

  “We will grant you the amount of time in seconds that you have withheld from us in years. Give us back our homeland. Cease your greed and the greed of your politicians. Or perhaps next time we will find someone your leaders actually care about.”

  Like Olivia. Or Constantine. Targeted on the street. Or my parents, ordinary and magicless.

  Or like Christian.

  I distantly heard screams in my head. I stumbled, and my wrist pressed against the wall as I tried to steady myself.

  Sunlight coming through my bedroom window turned laser-scope red, and a massive boom shook the house.

  I pulled my hands together and looked down. Crimson. Numbly, I looked at the walls of my room, and the tinted paint made from my Awakening. The dried paint had started dripping again. My cuff...I had pressed it against the wall, inadvertently or not, and the remnants of paint were eating through the metal as I watched. Red lines seared paths from one edge of the metal to the other, then connected out to the paint on the walls, connecting to the tinted brown paint, mixing it to the color of stained blood.

  The red lines sank into the wards, sparking crimson...sparking the absence of my magic's control––the complete freedom of any intention that rocketed through my brain, save for freedom and destruction.

  I threw myself toward Olivia and we fell to the floor as a second boom rocked the foundation. Something flared in my backyard, and the man in the hologram looked behind him in sudden, virtual terror.

  The hologram combusted violently, the hijacked feed ending in whatever destruction had been about to overcome the man. I tucked Olivia under me. I could hear the crackling flames and smell the acrid smoke. The earth made a horrible rending sound beneath us. We were going to die. I was going to kill us and I couldn't stop it.

  A man's hand clamped painfully around my half cuffed wrist, excruciatingly pushing the flexible metal strands back together. The sounds, the shaking, the smell of fire...abruptly stilled. The redness sucked into itself, leaving behind brilliant yellow sunlight and a horrible silence.

  The clamped hand wrenched the broken cuff up my arm, tearing skin, and snapped a new cuff around my wrist. The flexible metal fused together, tightening fiercely to touch every bit of skin underneath it.

  Emptiness ached inside of me as my magic was abruptly consumed and neutralized once more.

  The hand squeezed the new cuff painfully, as the broken one was yanked away. A rustling of cloth signaled that the broken one had been shoved into a pocket. My gaze was frozen, though, on the paint drying to brown once more on the wall in front of me, and my thoughts rooted on what had almost occurred.

  “Olivia,” a rough male voice said.

  “I'm fine, cousin.” But Olivia, still trapped beneath me, stared at me, her expression unreadable.

  “On your feet, Miss Crown.” I let Phillip Marsgrove, Dean of Special Projects at Excelsine, yank me up. I didn't care where he had come from so suddenly. Just that he had stopped whatever I had started.

  “I didn't mean it,” I blurted, tears forming. There were so many things I meant with that statement that I wasn't sure which of them I wanted Marsgrove to hear.

  His arctic-gray eyes were cold behind his silver-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a black-and-silver pinstripe suit again, like some sort of First Layer armor. I blinked my eyes dry and focused on the top button—one of the many inconspicuous-looking masculine adornments—on his suit.

  “We are returning to campus. Now. Pack your things.” His painful grip remained on my wrist.

  This time when told to pack, Olivia didn't argue.

  ~*~

  Excelsine's dozens of terraced and enchanted mountain levels, and its never ending, stunning views from each, were hard to appreciate as Marsgrove pulled us through the screaming crowds that had collected in thick pockets at the top of campus. The overwhelming magic of campus, with its sensational architecture, strange animals, and dangerously whimsical atmosphere was smothered by a blanket of fear.

  The same despair that had been present after the destruction of Ganymede Circus, was tangible, at ten times that strength. Mages were crying hysterically. Accusing gazes darted everywhere. Judgment Magic was being wielded indiscriminately and with severity—attacking people who had told white lies that morning along with those who had an urge to kill.

  “Kill them! Kill them all,” shrieked a girl who was alternating between sobbing uncontrollably and screaming incoherently. A stray piece of Judgment Magic zapped her, physically punishing her for her ill thoughts, but the punishment only increased the volume of her vengeful cries.

  The mage who had cast the magic was also kneeling painfully on the ground. Anyone using Judgment Magic became subject to its backlash, as I had experienced with the Justice Tablets. But in such frenzies, those who felt it their duty to punish wrongdoers, stoically accepted the physical consequences that were returned.

  “Seneca needs us to be strong,” said a boy who reached down to lift the incoherent girl.

  Marsgrove's hand tightened. Olivia's impassive eyes met mine. “Seneca Holmes was in the hijacked feed. In the lineup. She's in the year ahead of us. Lives in Sassraf.”

  I shuddered. Had I blown her up too? I didn't know what had happened there at the end.

  Nor did I know what had caused that initial echo of my magic. Inside of my dream that wasn't a dream, I had given Raphael a cleaning spell wrapped inside a finishing cloth. It had seemed so harmless. It still did. Cleaning spells didn't destroy towns, or dodge government safeguards, or hijack communications.

  But the echo... My magic had clearly been used in some way.

  Manic, muddled thoughts overwhelmed me and I sought a focus to stop my burgeoning hysteria. My eyes snapped to the powerfully familiar figure standing at the grassy edge of Top Circle.

  Likely wishing he was out there fighting something, Alexander Dare's shoulders were tight with tension as he stared down the mountain while speaking to a mage in a dark suit. The man at his side turned slightly, just enough for me to catch a ragged breath. Dare's uncle—the same one who had tried to convince Dare to leave me for dead the night Christian died.

  Mages in similar severe, dark suits vigilantly cast dark gazes over everyone passing them by. The Department's enforcers had been highly visible in the Depot as well. With upturned collars and buckled dark chokers secured around each wearer's throat, they were impossible to miss.

  They had been here at the end of last term in order to determine what or who had been responsible for the chaos. They hadn't found me yet. But it was only a matter of time until they did. Perhaps minutes, even.

  An enchantment popped into my head, then wildly rippled out. The crowd screamed as the ripples grew and distorted the air in crystal waves.

  Marsgrove's fingers constricted painfully around my left wrist and a half-sob took me. The enchantment had just slipped out—and it was a spell I didn't remember ever learning—which meant that Raphael had given me the knowledge surreptitiously.

  The gazes of the choker-wearers darted everywhere, looking for a target to blast, but their hard stares slipped over me as if I didn't exist.

  Alexander Dare's gaze, on the other hand, directly connected with mine.

  Marsgrove yanked me down one of the alleys between the Top Circle buildings, as words fell hysterically from my lips. “I didn't… I don't—”

  “Shut up,” Olivia hissed around Marsgrove, on his other side. “Say nothing.”

  “I disagree,” Marsgrove said, his gaze murderous. “Feel free to expound at will. Loudly.”

  Then he grimaced, as if suddenly stabbed. That meant the contract spell that Olivia had placed on him had decided that he was attempting to breach the agreement by coercing me i
nto speech. He pressed his lips together and verbalized no more of the assuredly dark thoughts running through his head.

  But, as we marched down the mountain and toward the dorm, he never let go of my wrist. He hooked his free arm with Olivia's, providing the illusion of a double-armed escort rather than a jailor transporting his most dangerous criminal.

  In my room in the First Layer, Marsgrove had been able to affix the new control cuff—my third—without my permission because of the academic contract I had signed in blood months ago. It chafed my skin and magic worse than the first two cuffs had, but I had to believe it couldn't harm me irrevocably. Olivia had covered all bases in her personal contract with him, so the cuff had to be an administration-approved design.

  Even if it was going to do horrible things, though, it was too late at this point for me to do anything other than determine the best path forward. I let the thought bleed through my hysteria and infect the rest of my fears. Lamentation would gain me nothing. Dealing with and fixing things was my only path.

  We briskly entered the Magiaduct—the nine-story aqueduct-like stone structure that ran the circumference of the Fifth Circle and housed all of Excelsine's students.

  Marsgrove shoved us into our dorm room, and as soon as the door closed he started yelling. “The Department is swarming campus, finally getting their opportunity to implant their devices. They were here last term because of you and your actions. And now, with today's events they have justification for an actual foothold. They are placing “protections” everywhere on campus. And you—you—thought it a good idea to use Origin Magic on the Department while in the midst of a crowd?”

  My throat closed up and I could barely hear the expletives he reeled off in my direction.

  “Don't leave this room. Don't approach them. Don't do anything,” he said, his tone dark and containing no amusement. “You are going to destroy us all. You've already begun to, and my own cousin has made it so I can do nothing. I can't leave you in the First Layer, and I can't allow you anywhere else in this one.”

  I rubbed my wrist to relieve the deep indentations from his fingers. Numbness was starting to be replaced by anger. “You said you were going to check on us. It's the twenty-eighth. Where were you when we were attacked?” I asked angrily. “I care nothing about what happens to me. But Olivia? How could you—?”