In spite of everything, I still felt too many emotions where Kaira was concerned. Would she believe I had done this? Would the rest of the Hansley clan?
Take care of yourself. Those were my last words to the person who, in spite of everything that had happened, I loved with every fiber of my being.
I let my head fall back against the cinder blocks. All the pictures the detective had shown me swam through my mind. I had been so consumed by my own impending execution that I hadn’t given much thought to Penelope and what her family was now facing. Now, I couldn’t get the image of her bloody face out of my mind. I couldn’t stop hearing her mother’s screams.
There hadn’t been a magically-motivated murder in Boston in years, and now, everyone believed the top Natural student at the BSMU, a school that boasted about its mission to promote understanding and equality between the two groups, had committed the most heinous of anti-Magic crimes. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate the ramifications of this murder.
Who would do something like this?
My academic brain couldn’t let go of the question, even though it would very soon be irrelevant…to me, at least. I would go to my grave, and the killer would walk free.
Would the person murder again? The thought of someone like that out and about in the world without anyone the wiser made me feel sick.
I wrapped my arms around my bent knees and huddled in on myself, trying to ignore my too-quick pulse and the coldness that had stolen over me.
I tried not to think about being led into the sterile room where some prison doctor would administer my lethal injection. The process was supposed to be fast and painless, but I’d heard of at least a few botched executions that had caused the inmate a long, agonizing death.
I knew enough about pain not to be anxious for more.
Regret washed over me as I thought about the future I would never have.
I’d had so many plans. I’d had aspirations. None of them were worth a damn anymore.
Maybe this was all some kind of twisted cosmic justice for breaking the other two high laws without being caught. The difference with those crimes, though, was that no one had been hurt when I broke those laws. Still, some part of me appreciated the irony that I was about to die for the only high law I hadn’t broken.
I had never thought loving Kaira or lying to protect her had been worthy of the high crime designation, but some part of me couldn’t deny the circuitous justice of where I now found myself. My one comfort was that Kaira wasn’t in the cell next to mine.
Without warning, the cell’s harsh white light winked out. Everything was thrown into darkness. I couldn’t see anything except the red blinking lights in each of the four cameras. There was a mechanical whine. Then, the cameras went dark, too.
My first thought was that they were going to execute me without a trial. My second thought was that whoever had murdered Penelope was here for me. The buzzer sounded at my door.
I jumped to my feet. I searched the darkness for something I could use as a weapon, but of course, there was nothing.
My pulse raced as the cell door slid back with maddening precision. There were multiple voices and flashlight beams on the other side.
“Are you sure this is the right one?” an unfamiliar female voice asked.
“Smith said—” a rumbling male reply began, before it was cut off by someone else’s “Shhh!”
Three flashlight beams swept the inside of my cell.
“Gray?”
After a stunned silence, I found my voice.
“Kaira?”
CHAPTER 9
Three people crammed into the cell with me, their flashlight beams bouncing wildly and filling my vision with starbursts.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, bewildered and still trying to figure out if I was hallucinating.
“What’s it look like?” the other girl—not Kaira—asked. “We’re prison breaking your ass.”
“I don’t—”
“Gray, come on.”
Kaira grabbed my hand and tugged, but I didn’t move. I hadn’t gotten a good look at her face. It was possible this was all some kind of a trick. And who were those other two people?
Given my impending execution, I shouldn’t have been worried about getting murdered. But too many strange and terrible things had happened tonight. I couldn’t even be entirely sure that my brain, in some kind of self-preservation mode, hadn’t fabricated all of this in my desperation to live. Distrust and wariness prevailed, and I hung back.
“A little short on time here, Gray,” would-be Kaira said, tapping an impatient foot on the ground.
“How do I know it’s you?” I asked.
She huffed before flashing her beam of light on herself, which made her features warped and shadowed. It made me even more distrustful of what I was seeing.
There was another male voice that sounded like it was coming through a cell phone, but none of the people in here seemed to be holding anything except their flashlights.
“Smith, shut up for a second,” Kaira said. It certainly sounded like her voice, but again, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t my own brain playing tricks on me.
The cell phone babble went quiet, and Kaira turned back to me. “When we were twelve, you dared me to illusion both my cousins into warthogs. I did, but I didn’t have enough of a handle on my magic to know how to turn them back. They had snouts for two days, and I was grounded for a month.”
“Ohmygod Kaira, you didn’t!” the other girl in my cell exclaimed.
“We need to get moving,” the guy standing beside her said.
That had all happened just like she’d said, but….
“Someone else might have known that story,” I said. “Or everything you’re saying could be a figment of my imagination,” I muttered.
The woman who gave every indication of being Kaira sighed. “Go sweep the hall,” she told the other two. “We’ll be right out.”
That other, faraway male voice had started to yell again. Kaira reached up and clicked something near her ear. I realized she had on a headset, and the voice had been coming through the earpiece. The other guy’s voice abruptly cut off.
Kaira waited until the other two had left the cell before coming toward me. I wondered if the killer had been an Illusionist after all, and now that person was here for me, too. Or maybe it wasn’t Penelope’s killer, but an Illusionist who wanted to kill me for what had been done to Penelope….
My racing thoughts turned to a quiet hum in the back of my mind when Kaira reached up and slid her hands around my neck.
“It’s me, babe,” she whispered.
My breath caught. Before I could recover, she kissed me.
There was nothing illusory about our kiss or the way she felt when my arms came around her. There was no one else on Earth who could make me feel like this.
I would have stayed just like that, holding and kissing her, until they came to drag me off for my trial. But she pulled away.
“Convinced now?” She was breathless, too.
“Um….”
“Good. Let’s go.”
I let her pull me out into the hallway, which was still lit, although I had just enough brain space left to notice all the cameras were turned off. Kaira flipped the switch at her ear. She winced as a torrent of shouting came from the other end.
The huge guy who looked like some kind of bodyguard scanned the hall, his eyes squinting against the harsh light. A tiny blonde who looked younger than the rest of us…maybe eighteen or nineteen, was bouncing on the balls of her feet.
“Can we go yet?” she asked, her voice breathless with barely-contained excitement.
“Hall’s clear,” the guy said.
“Come on!”
I followed the three of them to the end of the hall where another door blocked our path.
“9174AXJ,” the voice yelled over Kaira’s headset. She punched the code into the keypad, the buzzer sounded, and the door opened.
“Go left!” the voice shouted.
We obeyed, our shoes slapping the cement as we sprinted toward what I hoped was the prison’s exit.
“Guards on your six,” the voice announced over Kaira’s headset.
I slowed, expecting the big guy and I would do what we could so at least the girls could escape.
“No, keep going,” the tiny blonde called to me.
She stopped running and blew on her fists. All of her skin that wasn’t covered by clothes, from her face to her ankles, turned a metallic silver.
“Stop!” a voice shouted. The air filled with a popping sound, and something pinged off the wall next to me.
“Rubber bullets,” the big guy said, holding up one of them like it was supposed to make all of us feel better.
“Bri, take care of them,” Kaira yelled.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the blonde girl race down the hall. She thrust out one silver, metallic fist. The nearest guard was flung against the wall and slumped to the ground. His gun went skittering across the cement floor. Bri didn’t glance back at him as she lunged for the others.
The next one went down after one sharp jab of Bri’s metal leg. He didn’t get back up.
It was her against six armed guards. She barely made it up to most of their shoulders, but within a few seconds, she had turned the guards to moaning, barely-conscious bodies on the ground. She was so fast, not one of them managed to get a shot off before they went down.
“Damn,” I muttered.
I was the only one who seemed surprised.
“More ahead,” the voice on Kaira’s headset announced.
Bri was vaulting back across the hall. She did a crazy front flip over a guard who was rolling on the ground and clutching his stomach. She looked like a tiny ninja, except she was dressed more like a southern belle. And her skin was silver.
She put down all three of the guards racing toward us before I finished taking a breath.
“You’ve got about thirty seconds before the next batch,” the voice on Kaira’s headset warned.
“Michael, do your thing,” Kaira told the big guy.
Nodding, he crouched down next to one of the guards lying on the ground.
“You didn’t see anything,” he said in a low, soothing voice. “Everything is normal. No one and nothing is out of place.” He put a hand on each of the guards and repeated his words.
He was obviously a Whisper, and a powerful one. Most Whispers could only make suggestions to people, but it seemed like Michael could convince anyone of anything.
Who the hell were these people?
Michael was scowling when he stood back up.
“You’d make my job easier if you didn’t knock them around so hard,” he told Bri.
“Got a little excited, I guess,” Bri replied with a shrug.
“Get moving, you idiots!” the voice shouted from Kaira’s headset.
Kaira punched in the code he read her for the next door. This time, I counted ten guards, all of whom had machine guns. I didn’t think these ones were filled with rubber bullets.
Bri raced down the hall. I flinched at the sound of gunfire. I think I shouted something, but I couldn’t hear anything over the roar of the guns. Bri stood there, tiny and silver, and utterly unconcerned. The bullets struck her and pinged off her metal skin. Shouts filled the hallway as the bullets ricocheted off her and went flying back at the guards.
I was rooted to the spot, barely able to comprehend what I was seeing. Bri didn’t share my paralysis. She sprinted after the guards, who had flattened themselves on the ground to avoid their own bullets. She kicked their weapons out of their hands and had them writhing in pain in ten seconds flat.
Michael Whispered to each of the guards. They seemed to go into a trance afterward and just lay on the ground, blinking at the ceiling and looking mildly puzzled.
“Hurry up!” the voice yelled over Kaira’s headset.
We continued our mad dash.
Incessant chatter continued to come through Kaira’s earpiece, and she was talking back.
“I don’t care about how you do it,” she was saying. “Just make sure those outside cameras are down and fry whatever recording they’ve already got.”
“Too many guards coming to fight,” the voice called.
“Damnit, Smith!” Kaira winced and rubbed at her ear.
“You’ve got approximately eighty seconds before they’re on you,” the voice said in somewhat less of a shout.
“Change of plans,” Kaira said to Bri. “Knock them out.”
I winced in sympathy as Bri went from guard to guard and clocked them on the head with her metallic fist. The guards were still placid from Michael’s Whispering, and they didn’t so much as make a peep as Bri stalked up to each one of them and rendered them unconscious with a single blow.
When Bri stood back up from the final guard, she no longer looked like the silver-skinned southern belle. In her place was a fearsome-looking male guard, complete with the full guard’s uniform. If I didn’t know Kaira’s illusion work when I saw it, I would have thought I was losing my mind.
When I looked at Kaira, she was gone. In her place was a large woman with light skin, brown hair, and a scar down her left cheek. It was an exact match for the guard lying on the ground in front of her.
Michael had become another one of the guards, and when I looked down at myself, I saw I was a black man with a beard, just like the guard who was slumped against the wall beside me.
“Gray, get his gun,” Kaira commanded me.
I did, the weapon feeling heavy and unnatural in my hands. I caught sight of my reflection in the glass above the door. I looked terrifying.
“Alright,” Guard Kaira said. “Act natural.”
We walked out of the last set of barred doors and found ourselves in the prison entrance, which was swarming with guards and police.
“What’s happening?”
“Where’s the prisoner?”
“That way!” the guard I thought was Bri yelled, pointing down a different hallway.
It was chaos as the guards and police pushed their way through the narrow corridor.
“We’ll check the front,” Kaira announced, walking purposefully toward the doors that led out of the prison. She waved to Michael, Bri, and me. “You all, with me,” she commanded.
The sky overhead was still dark, but floodlights bathed the entire front of the prison in harsh, white light.
I followed Kaira and the others. They were striding toward a white, unmarked van idling right outside.
“Hey, what are you doing?” a voice called from behind us.
“Keep walking,” Kaira commanded.
“Hey! Hey!”
Kaira broke into a run. The rest of us followed. Bullets pinged off the outside of the van. The door opened, and we threw ourselves inside. The last one—Michael, I thought—slammed the door. There was a tinny rattle as bullets struck the outside of the van.
“Go, go, go!” someone shouted.
The woman in the driver’s seat slammed on the gas. Tires screeched, and then we were peeling away from the curb.
CHAPTER 10
The van streaked down the access road between the prison building and the exit, but two cop cars were quickly gaining on us.
The interior of the van was open, with long, cushioned seats on either side. Kaira sat between Bri and Michael across from me. I was sitting next to a guy who was dressed in a pinstriped suit with a hot pink shirt and purple tie. He started to wave his hands like he was dancing.
“Oopsie, that wind can be so pesky,” he said.
I looked out the window and saw a dumpster fly through the air and land on the road behind us. It blocked off the road and forced the cop cars to come to a screeching stop.
Holy shit. The guy just lifted a dumpster…with his mind.
“That’s enough, A.J.,” Kaira warned. “I don’t want them to have any guesses about who we are.”
“But what about my
party tricks?” the guy, A.J., whined. He swept his long bangs out of his eyes by flipping his head in slow motion, like he was on Baywatch or something.
“You can show us and we’ll ooh and ahh when we get home,” the Indian woman in the driver’s seat said.
I lurched forward as the van came to a halt at the guard booth at the end of the access road.
“Open your window,” Michael ordered the driver.
The big guy leaned around the front seat and stuck his head out the window. He spoke to the guards in that same low, calming voice he’d used before.
“Open the gate,” he told the guard. “Don’t let anyone else get through after us. You don’t remember what any of us looked like, or even how many of us there were. You don’t remember anything about us at all.”
Nodding, the guard ducked into the booth, and then the prison gate was sliding back.
The two cop cars, which must have detoured onto the grass to get around the dumpster, were speeding toward us.
A.J. flicked his hand, and the first cop car fishtailed. The one behind it slammed into the first.
“Silly Nats don’t know how to drive a car,” A.J. cackled.
“Motorcycle police coming up on the right!” the Indian woman yelled.
Bri blew on her fists, and her whole body turned metallic again. She opened the van’s rear door.
I cringed out of instinct at the sound of bullets pinging off Bri’s impenetrable skin.
I watched in muted horror as she catapulted herself out of the van. She held onto ropes attached to the van’s ceiling, and her feet glided atop the asphalt like she was some kind of extreme water skier…minus the water and the skis. Fiery sparks flew behind her as she skidded along behind the van.
If we weren’t fleeing for our lives, it would be one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.
When one of the motorcycles got close, Bri balanced on one titanium leg and kicked out with the other. The motorcycle and its rider crashed to the ground behind us.
I looked away before I could see what kind of shape the motorcycle’s rider was in.
Mags & Nats 3-Book Box Set Page 6
