The Rise of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  He must have seen something pretty devastating on my face, because his expression softened slightly and he swirled a hand over the crystal, gazing inside. He moved nimble fingers over the cloudy swirls. “I can give you...approval for twelve hours. Okay? Room Twenty-five here has a bonus layer of magic from whenever Price was without a roommate. It allows it to tap into campus. Not great, but not debilitating either. I can hook it into your mix in the Dorm One room to give that tiny bit of flexibility.”

  I swallowed, insanely feeling like I was going to cry. “Couldn't I just stay in twenty-five, then?”

  “No. Twelve hours spent in a room with an assigned compatible mage gives the base benefit in an emergency situation.”

  Twelve hours with Bellacia? Even split into parts, that was horrifying.

  “Listen, kid. It's best for you to have stabilizing influences around you at all times. And that muse of yours is going to be on thin ice for the foreseeable future.” He looked at Neph.

  What? I opened my mouth to ask what he was talking about, but he waved a hand to forestall me.

  “Crown. Stop. Even the dorm had trouble not assigning you to Medical.” He waved at the walls around us. “Probably why it offered that strange other choice,” he muttered.

  He shook his head. “You need this. Your magic is twisted and tangled, like barbed wire on a magical fence. You shouldn't even be upright.” He examined me clinically, like a scientist who had found a strange, new animal. “I've never seen someone with magic twisted like that who wasn't screaming.”

  I stared back.

  His gaze slid away first. “Listen, kid. This is temporary. Just get better and worry about other things later. But if Price doesn't show in a week, your temporary assignment will be permanent.”

  “No.”

  He heaved a sigh. “Don't kill us all, okay?” His ouroboros ring started moving again.

  “Yes?”

  He closed his eyes and adjusted the crystal ball. “Don't make it a question, Crown.”

  “Right. Yes.”

  I pushed away from the table. I would get Olivia back before the week was up. Until then...Bellacia Bailey was going to get her feral roommate.

  Chapter Ten: Bellacia Bailey

  I knocked softly on the door, sounding the death knell of my dorm life. A door opened further down the hall and I turned to see Dare looking out at me, eyes narrowed on the duffel bag around my shoulder.

  The door in front of me opened and I hastily turned.

  Bellacia smirked at me, hand lightly on the frame. But it was an odd smirk. Tension and unease were layered beneath it.

  She pushed away from the frame and allowed me to walk inside.

  “Daddy thinks I'm crazy to room with one of you, even for a sennight,” she said as she closed the door with a click of finality. “But I told him that it would be worth the fear. And Daddy knows risk is worth it when it is as fantastic an opportunity as this one is.”

  “I passed the test,” I said woodenly, not wanting to think of my own parents.

  “Of course you did.”

  I took a quick glance around. It was like Alexander and Constantine's suite. There was a main living space, a bedroom, and two workrooms. I had never been in their bedroom, so I walked in that direction. A bathroom was off to the side.

  The bedroom was far smaller than Olivia's and mine—just two beds, nightstands, and closets—which made sense considering the added space in the rest of the suite.

  Seeing the empty bed against the window wall, I walked over and plunked my things on it. The view out the window was all wrong, looking up the mountain instead of down, and on the sixth floor instead of the second.

  “And if you think I want to room with one of you,” I said, looking at the firesnake grove in the distance, a level up. “You can tell Daddy that you are crazy.”

  I turned in time to see her eyes flash. Her Sirenic abilities were just as freaky to me as my Origin ones were to everyone else.

  Her expression smoothed out just as quickly as it always did and she laughed. “This will be so much fun.”

  “Yup,” I said woodenly. “A real joy.”

  She smiled and sat cross legged on her bed, entirely too close. “Get cozy. We're roommates now.”

  “Temporary roommates.”

  She waved her hand. “Let's get better acquainted. Why don't we start by having you tell me exactly what happened on campus today.”

  “You were there.”

  “Should I go first then?”

  I plopped hard on the bed and whacked the back of my head against the window. I started a six-hour timer ticking in my head and concentrated on setting out the few things that I always kept near my bed.

  “You will explain everything to me by the end of the night,” she said, voice lilting.

  “I actually will not.”

  “Tell me, Ren. What did you do today?”

  I could feel her voice wrap around me. And as it did, my pocket warmed.

  I removed the warm, sand-colored scarab stone, and held it up. The waves of sound produced by the enchantment of her voice moved around the scarab as I moved it in the air. The scarab was blocking the waves from attaching to me.

  I looked over to see her poleaxed expression. “Try again, Bella.”

  Fury overtook her expression. Had she really thought that this was going to be that easy?

  “Where did you get that? They never... From your little muse? How is that working out for you?”

  “Very well, thanks.” Oddly, I was calming in the face of her rage. Muses weren't allowed in Bellacia's room—and I would be doing something about that once I knew how to keep Neph safe from her—but Neph had tucked this into my hand on the way over and told me never to remove it.

  “You owe me,” Bellacia said, voice harsh. “You owe campus.”

  “I owe one person, and she's not you,” I said pointedly, tucking the stone beetle back in my pocket.

  “Your last roommate? Price? They've listed her as missing, not dead. Where do you think she is? Such an interesting tidbit for our readers,” she said bitingly.

  “Go to hell.” I shifted and laid the back of my head against the foreign pillow and closed my eyes.

  “I don't think so,” she said melodically, poisonously. “You owe me.”

  “Thanks for the save today,” I said, eyes still closed. “Surprised the hell out of me. There. All done.”

  She laughed, a tinkling thing. “I don't think so.”

  “No? Then you can kiss my ass and thank me for saving you from suffocating to death, along with all of your Magicist friends.”

  “Such language. Are all those born to the First Layer so linguistically challenged?”

  “Most. Normal people are good that way.” I kept my eyes closed.

  We sat in silence for a good minute. It probably wasn't wise to let someone like Bellacia regroup, but I was exhausted.

  She hopped off her bed, landing on cat feet, but in the silence it was like planting a steel post in the ground.

  I cracked an eye, on alert. Olivia had shown that roommates could do ill things to each other, if opportunity presented. Of course, I wasn't going to hook myself into the wards here like I had done for Olivia. I wasn't going to leave myself vulnerable to Bellacia.

  She stood above me, eyes narrowed on something near my head.

  I hadn't been able to leave Christian behind.

  She cocked her head, examining the picture. “He looks familiar.”

  I frowned, then the blood drained from my face. Under Raphael's hand, my golem, looking exactly like my brother, had very likely been seen fighting Marsgrove. By some anonymous student. By someone who would sell such memories to the press.

  I shoved it under my pillow, closed my eyes again, and tried to keep my breathing even. “Probably. The terrorists used some sort of familiarity enchantment to make themselves look like loved ones.”

  A tinkling sound of laughter, far too close. “How interesting. What new t
ech is that?”

  “How should I know? Look it up.” I turned toward the wall. Twelve hours in here. Maybe I could figure out how to get the workroom to hook directly into the rejuvenation wards and sleep there. But if Dare couldn't... He had a thousand things set up to ignore Constantine, but he still had to sleep in the same room.

  I focused on breathing.

  “Why would I look it up?” I could hear her sitting back on her own bed. “There are plenty of people who can look through captured memories and find the edges of the magic—to see what was actually at play today.”

  “Where's your roommate?” I asked, going on the offensive. With someone else, I'd never dare risk bringing someone pain. At the moment, with Bellacia, well, I didn't quite care.

  “She switched temporarily to her sister's room,” she said lightly. “Her sister's roommate is in Medical, and they set up a triangulation. She'll be back on her feet in a week.”

  She laughed. “It's perfect really. You'll be here for just the right amount of time, then everything will be back to the way it used to be.”

  I understood clearly. The way it was before I came to campus. Because after a week, she was expecting that I'd be gone. Locked away for the good of all.

  “Because of what you are, of course,” she said in a musing tone.

  “Female?” Everyone knew what I was at this point. They just couldn't yet prove it.

  “What I don't know is how you got onto campus and where you came from,” she said, ignoring my response.

  I said nothing.

  “Maybe I need to find the boy in the picture. Women would do a lot for a guy that looked like that. He's gorgeous.”

  I laughed, the sound short. “Sure. You do that. You find him.”

  “Hmmm... I think I will.”

  I wanted to see that. I'd pay for a lifetime subscription to her stupid newspaper.

  “I need the full story after all.”

  “There is no story.”

  “No? Not in how you are able to wield and collapse Origin Magic?”

  “I found a device on the ground,” I said flatly.

  “No. You pulled a device out from under your bracelet. Constantine Leandred wields a similar one, and he seems...enamored of you. Perhaps he made you one? Illegal, I'm sure,” she mused. “Where is it?”

  “You are the one who saw something,” I said to the wall. “You tell me.”

  “So very interesting. But the evidence of it is unimportant. You were recorded by nearly a thousand memories.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to do deep breathing exercises.

  “And those papers? The ones Praetorian Kaine was so very interested in. You used them, but no one else touched them. And while Delia and that boy—Michael Givens, isn't it?—looked shocked, two of your other little friends seemed unsurprised by your display.”

  Bellacia had gathered a lot of information. And she was stitching things together at an incredible rate.

  It was obvious what she was implying with her name dropping. The underlying threat to my friends.

  She should be thanking her lucky stars that I couldn't eke out any magic at present, and that my control cuff was completely intact. Subconsciously, I would have already tried to destroy her for such threats.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  We wouldn't be talking if she were planning on simply outing me and making Constantine, Neph, and Will into my accomplices, with a side of Mike and Delia. I recognized this opening gambit from debate practice with Olivia. This was the beginning of a negotiation. Or blackmail, to be less euphemistic.

  “Why, dear, I want you to rest and recuperate.” She clucked her tongue, her voice still melodic around it. “You saved campus. Such actions deserve a grace period.”

  A grace period. Right.

  “The information that you willingly share will extend such a period, of course,” she added.

  “Why not simply tell your little story—what you think you saw happen?”

  “You don't understand the news at all,” she said patronizingly. “Why have one delicious story, when I can have three?”

  “There is more information out there right now than can be quantified.”

  The events of the day were all over the feeds. They were all over the Baileys' papers.

  At the end of the battle, the student magical community had been freed to use frequencies again, and had “live updated” the crud out of everything. Conflicting information abounded, but much of it was damaging. Students had seen crazy stuff without being able to record it, but they could still describe their experiences.

  “But that information is not real,” she said.

  Images of people dying flashed in my mind. Phantom sense memories of explosions rocking the world around me. “Seemed pretty real.”

  I rubbed my arms and wished Neph had been able to accompany me—but, no, I needed to keep her safe from Bellacia. Overcoming the muse block on the room seemed less desirable now.

  “The reports. The accuracy. The truth. It needs to be told.”

  “I thought you were a Second Layer Magicist, first and foremost.”

  “I am. And accurate information will benefit the cause. However, I'm also a capitalist. With subscribers and quotas to fill. And you, you are a story that I will have on my front page whenever I need to put you there.”

  “I don't think so.”

  “Oh, you will.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “Be happy with your grace time, Miss Crown. It is all downhill from here.”

  Knock, knock.

  I was so startled that my eyes shot open to look at Bellacia. I figured she wouldn't allow anything as pedestrian as someone knocking on her door. Hooked into all of her social and political media, it seemed like she'd find physical statement distasteful.

  But that was my bias showing itself. An early lesson in the magical world had taught me that competent mages tended to practice many things without magic, so that if they drained themselves, they weren't completely helpless. It was like using my right hand sometimes to do tasks that were better suited to my left.

  Still, when not being attacked, Excelsine tended to be a limitless zone, magically, and many mages took advantage of that fact.

  There had been a dearth of “knocking” in our household growing up, but it was all the more important here in a world where information could be gleaned so quickly, and where a probe of magic could be taken as an offensive maneuver.

  Bellacia's expression pinched, then grew wide and gleeful. She knew who was on the other side.

  She leaped from the bed and gracefully disappeared from view.

  “Axer,” she said, voice charming, as I heard her open the door.

  I scrambled upright and flew to the bedroom's doorway.

  “Bellacia.” Dare was looking past her, his gaze on me.

  “What can we do for you?” she said sweetly.

  “I am borrowing Ren.” He looked at Bellacia as he said it, and didn't look away again, waiting for her answer. There was a challenge here that I wasn't privy to.

  “Of course,” she said finally. “Are you returning to the competition tonight or first thing in the morning?”

  “Ren?” he looked at me, pointedly ignoring the question.

  Even though I was still angry with him, a stupid thrill of vindictive glee ran through me at him ignoring her. “Yup. Coming.”

  I grabbed my bag from the bed, grabbed Christian's picture, and ran out after him.

  Chapter Eleven: Words We Dare

  Their door was only five down, and on the other side of the hall, from Bellacia's suite.

  “Convenient, at least,” I muttered, as he did something complicated over me, stripping magics from me. Whatever they were—probably listening or tracking enchantments courtesy of Bellacia—I didn't care at the moment.

  I trooped in after him and he shut the door behind me. It was nearing eight, and the adrenaline highs from the day and my overextended magic use were taking their toll at an
increasing rate.

  “They assigned you Bellacia Bailey?” Darkness underlay his tone.

  “Yup.” I let the 'p' pop. “Great, isn't it?”

  “Ren—”

  “Constantine back yet?” I dumped my bag onto the round table that had suddenly appeared in their living room. I more carefully placed Christian's picture on top. I had a feeling that I was going to be carrying a lot of things around with me until I got Olivia back.

  Dare eyed me, leaning back against the door, perfectly proportioned features taking me in. “He will be released in the morning. Something happened to the healing dynamics of his room that sped up his recovery.”

  “Hmmm. Imagine that.” I collapsed into an armchair. “What do you want?”

  He sighed and padded toward me.

  “No.” I leaned forward in the chair. “You do not get to sigh like I'm the unreasonable one.”

  Exhaustion was starting to affect me, obviously, because I could feel tears threaten.

  He squatted in front of me, balanced on the balls of his feet, forearms on his thighs, fingers crossed, and held my gaze. “What, exactly, did you think Helen Price was going to do when you refused to hand over that scarf?”

  I pressed my lips together. Nothing intelligent was going to emerge from my mouth.

  “Kaine was on his way, Ren. It was all Phillip could do to keep the barrier in place that keeps Kaine out of the Magiaduct. Marsgrove did the only thing he could. And so did I.”

  “That scarf was the only way to track Olivia,” I said, voice hitching.

  His hands unclenched as if he was going to reach toward me, but he crossed his arms over his knees.

  “And Phillip still has it on campus, Ren.” He kept his gaze locked on mine. “Marsgrove burned a lot of favors to do that. And, even so, the Department will have all the scarves in their possession within the next twenty-four hours.”

  That was even worse news. But— “Marsgrove won't return the scarf to me.”

  “No, he won't. He knows what you'd try to do with it.”

  I closed my eyes again and leaned my head back. “You are full of good news.” I could take a small nap. Right here. With their wards humming around me. Surely something would look better afterward?