The Protection of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  Torso on the ground and one leg sticking awkwardly in the air, I looked at his smirking face peering over the table's edge and sighed. At least he'd conjured me a pillow.

  “I can embed small spells and call them to the surface of the stamp, then throw it at something?” I said, absently examining the equations and runes he had written all over his ceiling. “That's awesome. I would actually have remembered that just fine if you'd simply told me.”

  “But you figured out what I wanted without me having to say anything. And I get to watch you extricate yourself from that position, which is quite the sight.”

  “I'm very nimble when it counts, I'll have you know,” I said as I gracelessly pulled my leg over so I could roll myself upward. The chair was fixed by the time I was upright, so I sat again—all feet on the floor. “Still”—I rubbed my neck—“that is pretty great.”

  I withdrew the stamp from where I kept it secured under my leather bracelet, and thought about how I could work with this new knowledge. I wondered if I could embed one of the Kinsky papers? Of course, with my luck, I'd probably create a black hole and suck everything in existence inside.

  “I have something else for you as well, darling. Specifically tailored. Watch what this lovely substance can do, if you are caught.”

  A metallic liquid rolled along his knuckles.

  I pinned him with a look, even as I leaned forward to see what he had created. “You are feeling guilty for something, and it's not the clicker.”

  “I have no idea what you mean.” He blinked innocently, gaze upon the metal caressing the back of his hand. He twisted his hand upward and the metal surged around the edges of his hand to collect in his palm, defying gravity. “I am merely bestowing an offering to my favorite. One that would gain me an article in the Journal of Scientific Magic and get us both imprisoned.”

  Constantine was like a deep river interspersed with choppy currents and large rocks.

  He showed me what the substance could do—which involved me splayed out on the floor again, but ecstatic at the possibilities. Olivia was certain Constantine would reveal himself as Scylla or Charybdis to go with the currents and rocks analogy, but I was banking on him being something else, in the end.

  We pulled out our modified version of Asafa and Patrick's controller and got to work on our next illegal project and leech.

  ~*~

  Emrys was unreasonably irritable at our Thursday session, as if something had happened during the night that had infuriated him.

  He kept knocking into me and I rubbed my shoulder for the fifth time that session, feeling far more exhausted than I should be.

  “Stop.” Dare took a deep breath and I could tell he was this close to blasting Emrys off the face of the mountain. “That is not how you call for reinforcements.”

  “I'm sure they won't be needed,” Emrys sneered.

  Dare clenched than released a fist. “Do it again anyway.”

  “Listen, you sniveling brat. I don't care who your mommy is or what competition you've won in the past or what magic you used to get this idiot”—he pointed to me—“to follow you like you own the sun. All that matters to me is—”

  One moment Emrys was sneering, then I blinked and he was flat on his back wheezing.

  “All that matters is the protection of campus?” Dare said, evenly. “Yes, exactly. Oh, and Crown, did that just register as a punishable offense?”

  Mouth agape, I quickly rallied and checked JT's log. “N-no,” I stuttered.

  “So, tell me when you are ready, Norr. And we will try it again. It's not punishable, so I can do it all day.”

  Suffice to say, Emrys, for once, did not stick around after our hour was over. Narrow-eyed, he stomped off. His stomp, too, was weirdly familiar. I was going to have to look up his lineage at some point. Or ask Olivia. She knew all of those things.

  Maybe I had seen him at Ganymede? The magical Special Forces had been sent out after Raphael en masse, that day.

  “I want him gone.” Dare stared at Emrys's retreating figure, lips tight. Emrys stopped abruptly before he reached the stairs, then made an immediate left toward the firesnake grove.

  “I—” I tried to say something positive, but the words wouldn't come.

  Dare's gaze swung to me. “There's something weird between you two.”

  “Yeah,” I said, giving up the argument before it even started. Sometimes it seemed like Emrys wanted to lure me to his side, and other times, he tried to expose me to campus. “I think I've seen him somewhere. He reminds me of someone.”

  Lots of someones actually, depending on the time of day, the light, my mental state... I was a little concerned for my sanity. I was hoping it might be some innate magic that he possessed to make him seem familiar, rather than my mental state.

  A pretty woman who worked the desk in the Administration Building was having lunch on a bench near the firesnake grove. Emrys strode up to her, a large smile on his face. She blushed and waved a hand at the seat next to her.

  “Don't trust him,” Dare said.

  I frowned. “Yeah.”

  I knew I shouldn't trust Emrys, why did magic keep making me want to?

  ~*~

  At dinner, a weird buzzing permeated the air, stretching and curling around the cafeteria's tiers.

  “What's going on?” I asked Mike and Will as I sat down.

  They looked at each other, then at me. “Two students were taken in for questioning by the Troop and expelled for bringing and creating an illegal port on campus. And four more were expelled for possessing illegal devices.”

  “What?” I said, jaw dropping. I thought of idealistic Provost Johnson who thought I could be rehabilitated with a billion hours of community service. “Expelled?”

  “Yeah, two of them were guys from my transport class last spring.” Will looked sad. “Good experimenters. A student group turned all six in.”

  I thought of the things the stooges had been putting around campus all term. “The student Department flunkies have been planting recording devices,” I said numbly. “To locate disturbances.”

  Mike nodded as if this confirmed his thoughts. “I locked up all of Will's portal projects.”

  My head jerked toward Will, who looked chagrined. “It's true. I got a lecture from Neph too. No more portal projects until the furor dies down.”

  “But—”

  “No.” Mike interrupted me and looked at Will, unapologetic. “I'm not letting you get expelled. You can work on something else for the next few weeks, then resume operations in the spring.”

  I chewed a fingernail. Mike didn't know about the extremely illegal projects we were working on with Constantine. “The other four students—what devices did they possess?”

  Mike frowned. “Some sort of control devices. Unspecified.”

  My neck swung Will's way. He shook his head minutely and relief made me sink in my seat. Not Asafa and Patrick then. And not Constantine. No one in our sphere.

  But we were working on control devices.

  “They said that anyone possessing control technology will incur instant expulsion,” Mike said.

  I thought of all of Delia's little toys with their suggestions. And even Bellacia with her voice.

  Will looked around surreptitiously and leaned in. “People are talking. The club is not pleased. There's talk of implementing some...reverse action.”

  A club of delinquents was assuredly thinking up some truly horrific things.

  “What happens when a student gets expelled?”

  “It depends on the infraction. You can apply for admission to another university—though no other school is nearly as good as Excelsine,” Mike said in a purposely boastful tone designed to lighten the mood. “But the Troop, and therefore the Department, was behind their ejection, and the Department carries a lot of weight in granting admissions throughout the Second Layer. They function behind the scenes in everything.”

  Will made a skydiving motion with one hand. “They can si
nk you before you start.”

  “And if you can't enroll at another university, they plunk you in work camps designed to make sure you can control yourself until you turn twenty-three. Either that, or you can elect to wear a null cuff,” Mike said.

  “Nullifies all internal magic,” Will added.

  Last term, expulsion had meant not being able to resurrect my brother—an unthinkable thought. Now, it meant the loss of my magic and friends, as well as probably getting leashed by some crazy government operative. Magic had crept into my being completely, and now it was like a second heart I needed in order to live.

  “That's—”

  “That's bad timing,” Mike said decisively. “People are crazed all across the Second Layer right now. Which is why Will is going to be on the straight and narrow for the next two weeks. Once the competition is over and the Troop is gone, things will go back to normal here, and you weirdos can experiment to your heart's desire.”

  Will and I exchanged quick looks—we'd have to discuss whether or not we'd continue the leech experiments, or whether to hold off until the Troop was gone. The good news was that Olivia and I had pried two links from Raphael's leash with the chip—one last night and one earlier today. Along with the one unhooked with Dare, the damage had to be making a nice little dent in Raphael's plans.

  I was about to give my vote to put everything on hold, when a bright and shiny girl sat down to the left of Mike and smiled broadly at me.

  “Hi! I'm Torvessa. And I wanted to know if you could introduce me to Alexander Dare?”

  I sighed.

  Chapter Thirty: Midnight in the Garden

  The Troop continued to run raids on student rooms, and four other students were suspended over the course of the second week. It was becoming more obvious that the Troop was more interested in regulating and discerning student life than in worrying about campus safety and Excelsine's monster-of-the-day phenomenon.

  The major rule breakers on campus knew how to hide things, but the Troop was starting to circle them like predators around a bait ball. Constantine's rooms had been searched three times already, Asafa, Patrick, Delia and a slew of others had been raided twice, and charged words between Dare and Emrys made it obvious Dare had received at least one visit due to his “living circumstances”—whatever that meant.

  Will, Olivia, and I had made it out clean so far by keeping everything at Okai. Olivia and I continued to use the chip leech there in the Midlands each night—where we couldn't be tracked and where Administrative rules didn't apply—and each night she did something really awesome with my channeled magic. We'd even started making it a game. She'd even managed to somehow port herself to the other side of the main room in Okai, startling Guard Rock completely.

  The second week with Emrys and the Troop, on the other hand, fell into an uneasy routine. Patrolling with Dare alone was great. With Dare and Emrys? Not so much. Emrys was increasingly grumpy, manic, and short-tempered. And Dare made sure to make Emrys's day worse each time we met.

  When all three squads gathered, things grew even more tense. It was obvious the Combat Squad was not pleased with their replacements, and that members of the Justice Squad were feeling overworked and unappreciated as the intermediaries.

  Outside of squad work and Troop irritations, I deflected people who asked perky or pesky questions about Dare, and stringently avoided Bellacia, who had been livid when she'd gotten released from medical.

  She had been charged with a Level Three Offense—upped from a Level Two due to her refusal to stop—for the magic she had used on me. Everyone in class assumed her convulsions on the floor had been a Justice Magic punishment. The upside to the whole event was that Professor Harrow had banned Bellacia from assisting our group for the rest of term. The downside was that Bellacia and her minions had been following me outside of class like hounds on a hunt ever since.

  Not that I cared about that when there was something much worse to worry about as the second week of the Troop's presence on campus drew to a close. Worrying, distressing, freaking out, tormenting, harassing, not sleeping! Not sleeping! Not sleeping!

  Because the combat mages were leaving.

  Tomorrow, the combat mages would depart, the tumbleweeds would roll, and I'd be the new sheriff in town.

  One week. I just had to get through one week, get Dare and his crew back on campus, then I could dive into a coma for a little while.

  One week. I could do that. It became a steady mantra in my head.

  I was exhausted, and it was pretty late, but I had a brainstorm for Constantine's dodecaplex project, and Dorm One was on my way back from one of Neph's bi-weekly recitals. The recitals were open to the student population and all kinds of awesome. It had been a varied line-up with different styles of dance, and many performers, but in my completely unbiased opinion, the other muses didn't have half Neph's mojo or spirit.

  I knocked on Constantine's door, which was not a good sign. Usually he opened the door before I made it to the threshold. Not answering meant he was either not home or busy.

  I grimaced. It wouldn't be the first time he answered half-dressed with a girl giggling somewhere in the background, but such a thing hadn't happened in weeks and I'd gotten used to not seeing a different girl with every wardrobe change.

  I started to turn, rooting in my bag for my tablet in order to send him a note, when the door opened. A rueful smile lifted my lips and I turned back. “I was just...”

  My words trailed and my smiled dropped. Constantine wasn't the one standing on the other side.

  Dare, barefoot, hair slightly mussed, in a white shirt and loose sweats, had his hands outstretched between the doorjamb and the edge of the door, physically taking up the space.

  My mind went blank. “Uh...” My gaze went to the number on the open door, sure that I had it wrong. But Sixty-Nine with an “I” in front of it—Constantine's stupid joke—stared back.

  “What's wrong? Nothing pinged me.” Dare started to lean back, probably to check his tablet. “I knew I should have stayed out. Seriously, the whole 'get a full night's sleep before the competition' directive,” he mimicked, “always seems to invite the opposite effect. But you didn't have to come here. I would have answered your note.”

  “Er, right.” He was Constantine's roommate?

  For all of the hundreds of notes he had sent me detailing various places to meet him around campus, Dare had never asked to meet in the dorms. I had long wondered if I should feel offended that he didn't want me stopping by his room.

  His eyes narrowed on my assuredly gobsmacked expression and all movement in his body stopped. “You're not... You're here for Leandred?” He made it sound like I was actively trying to contract a sexually transmitted disease.

  I felt disparate urges to defend myself and to defend Constantine. Okay, well, Constantine earned every bit of his reputation and reveled in it. It was always a little hard to defend him.

  The first thing that tried to roll off my tongue, ‘We are friends,’ was quickly swallowed. No one ever believed that. “I... We do business.”

  “Business?” His tone implied exactly what he thought any business with Constantine might be. Extreme disappointment laced it.

  “Not that kind,” I said, flustered. “The kind with favors. Business favors.” Hi, I'm a hooker! “Legal ones! Well, not legal, but not prostitution! I mean, the kind of favors that you exchange with business partners.”

  His expression was still tight, but there was a little amusement there too, now. “Business favors.”

  “Exactly.” I tapped the edge of my bag nervously. “Why are you here?”

  His expression turned deadpan. “I sleep here.”

  “That's...weird.” The look he gave me caused me to rally. “I've never seen you here before.”

  “You've been here so many times then?” His tone was back to being unreadable.

  The answer was close to triple digits at this point, but I didn't think that would be smart to say. “Enough to
be surprised at the presence of a roommate, let alone you. All those wards,” I murmured, “suddenly make sense.”

  As did Constantine's delight whenever something bad happened to Dare. Oh my God, Constantine had been amused when I'd asked him about his roommate directly after he had quizzed me about sitting with Dare in the cafeteria. I was going to kill him.

  Dare's eyes narrowed further. “You've been inside?”

  “Oh, please. Constantine invites everyone inside.”

  I felt a layer of magic lift from me—pulled from me. The magic flew out, scattered, and settled around the room in hues of red. The heaviest path, bloody in its consistency, led to Constantine's workshop. A more moderate level of crimson stretched to the chair I always used in the living room. No path led to the bedroom. A light pink path led to a spot inches in front of the room that was always heavily warded. I had tried to study the wards a few times. Dare's wards... Great.

  Which was somewhat embarrassing, to have that laid out in front of him.

  “I didn't know that was your private room,” I said quickly, feeling the need to defend myself. “I just thought the wards were fascinating.”

  He was studying the paths, though, his expression unreadable again. “He lets you in his workroom.”

  “There's no bed in there!” I clamped my lips together and shut my eyes. “You know what...? No. I don't have to defend myself.”

  I turned to leave. He reached out a hand to my arm. “No, you don't. I'm sorry. You took me by surprise. And I...was a little disappointed that you might be interested in Leandred that way.”

  He was probably disappointed whenever anyone was interested in Constantine, because he obviously held him in extreme dislike. “Why do you—?”

  I stopped the question. I knew the answer to the question of why they roomed together. Their magic had to be highly—extremely—sympathetic. That was the only reason two people who despised each other would room together at Excelsine.

  I wondered if Constantine also was protected from expulsion by rooming with Dare. Constantine's father was obviously highly placed and influential, but roommates were a big deal. The magic involved made the mages stronger, more rested. Dare was both feared and worshiped on campus—by the students and faculty.