The Rise of Ren Crown

by Anne Zoelle

  “Ren.”

  I leaned my head back. “Yeah. I know. But sitting here, doing nothing? Not heroic.”

  “You can't fight every battle yourself. You have to rely on your team and your soldiers. And to do that, you have to pick the right team.”

  I swallowed. “The first seventeen years of my life were all about relying on Christian. One other person. I didn't need anyone else. And then he was gone. And...”

  “And you repaired and moved forward. It's not a disloyalty. You would still do everything you could for him, were he here. But he's not. Death is preserved and unchanging, but life moves.”

  Never stagnant. Olivia's words uttered in another world through a dream. Always moving and changing.

  “If Kaine catches them—”

  “Verisetti has stayed free for a long time. He's been wreaking devastation for over half a decade. He is also very difficult to kill.”

  “Olivia is not,” I said, voice strained as I opened my eyes to look at him.

  He said nothing for a moment, fingers moving along the armrest, tracing patterns with ultramarine magic. “What did you see? In your dream?”

  I told him all of it.

  He tapped a finger against the leather. “Kaine's shadows watch and observe. Anything that happened between him placing it on you and it escaping is suspect.”

  My breath caught.

  “The multiple fields maintained in Medical, and the ones Leandred and I separately use, should have been enough to disrupt him there. And Bellacia is full of tricks. But anything might have slipped through in either place, so consider any of that information compromised.” He looked at my bag. “Nothing is fully safe.”

  I looked down at it and moved my foot away.

  “He might have disengaged from you in order to go through your things—and Bellacia's—after you fell asleep, but it is more likely that he stayed with you in order to travel through your head and your dreams.”

  Nausea swept me. Without permission, my fingernails started clawing at my ears.

  Dare reached out and stilled my wrists. “In order to make the jump, he would have had to go through completely. Nothing remains.”

  “He knew. When he let us go.”

  “Yes,” Dare said simply.

  I looked sharply at him.

  “I never underestimate Kaine,” he said. “And he always seeks revenge. There were variables that couldn't be controlled and sacrifices that were possible.”

  “Raphael looked so angry,” I whispered, looking at the balloon. “What if...?”

  The toying with Olivia, the verbal sparring...that indicated that Raphael found her amusing, and he kept amusing things alive.

  But madness existed between Raphael and Stavros and Kaine, and I had accidentally sent Kaine there. And Raphael reacted poorly when things slipped from his control. Olivia would be—was—in the crossfire.

  “If Marsgrove fails, then you spin the webs that Verisetti doesn't want you to spin.”

  “If you think he doesn't want me spinning webs, then—”

  “The webs he doesn't want you to spin.”

  I tucked my chin against my chest, over the space where guilt was gnawing an aching hole.

  He tipped my chin up, eyes serious. “You know what a shadow feels like now?”

  I thought of the slide of it with its tiny cat-tongue-like barbs. Rough and slippery at the same time. Haunting. I nodded and swallowed, his fingers following the motions. “I think so.”

  “Then it won't happen again.”

  His fingers dropped, and that seemed to be the extent of his recrimination. Guilt settled in my stomach.

  “I'm sorry.” I closed my eyes. “Maybe you should have let Julian take me. Wherever he meant.” I waved a hand in the air.

  “Don't tempt me.” His voice was intense. “Not yet.”

  I opened my eyes and tried to figure out what he meant. Unable to do so, I stared at the hollowed paper, at the thin magic swirling in the interior. “I had thought I had gotten past the feeling. Of being lost.”

  His expression softened and he reached forward as if reaching toward the tie dangling from my heart. “It's been a very long day. And you snapped your tie to your home.”

  Yes. And it still hurt. It hadn't stopped. I was a drifter now. No home tie to my parents, a muted, restricted one to Olivia, one that was insidiously trying to connect to Bellacia Bailey via Community Magic, and one that tentatively recognized this room.

  “I couldn't let Helen Price get their location,” I whispered, anguish rushing through me again.

  “I know.” His voice was soft. “You did the right thing.”

  I smiled with difficulty. “You should have seen your face. I'm not sure I've ever seen you shocked before.”

  “It takes a lot. And snapping a tie like that is...” He looked off into the distance. “But family...family is something you guard. Sometimes you are born to that family, and sometimes you create it, one connection at a time.”

  I looked at the balloon.

  “And sometimes a part of them can be returned to you,” he said, something unidentifiable in his voice.

  I looked at him.

  He flicked his wrist and carefully caught a shrouded, sphere-shaped object that came whizzing out of his workroom. He held it out to me.

  “I tried to give this to you before leaving for the competition. Perhaps there has been no more opportune time than now, though.”

  I unwrapped the shroud. A glass orb sat inside. As soon as it was free of its covering, magic burst free from whatever concealment or protection spells were in the cloth. The magic immediately wrapped around me. I gasped for air, unable to breathe.

  I could hear Dare cursing as he reached forward. I stumbled out of my chair and backward, tripping, clutching the orb to my chest as I fell, then scrambled along the floor. No one was taking it away. No one!

  “Shh, it's okay.” He stopped reaching for me, palms down. “I should have told you what it was first.” He kept speaking, cursing Ramirez and his overly secretive influence.

  But I was still trying to breathe. Loud, half gulps of air that couldn't make it past the constriction of my closed throat. The light in the orb was touching points of the glass like a plasma ball, and each time it touched me it ignited points all over my body with my brother's magic.

  Christian. I gave a sob.

  “How?” was all I got out.

  Dare was kneeling in front of me.

  “It was what was left of his magic. At the time...you didn't register as a mage. And in the First Layer...our senses don't work as well. But in hindsight, it is easy to see. You absorbed nearly all of his Awakening magic before we got there, didn't you? Then went dormant.”

  “The man...had my brother's bracelet. Put Christian's magic all in there. I grabbed it.” Hazy and half-dead, I'd still felt the pull of my twin and I'd grabbed the magic.

  Dare nodded. “Twins. You would probably have Awakened soon after your brother did. For a period of time, his magic nullified yours, for lack of a better word. Enhanced it, though, in the end.”

  He was looking at me, concern carefully, but not quite thoroughly, hidden.

  “I know,” I tried to reassure him, heartbeat still fluttering like a hummingbird's wings. Raphael had told me most of it. Raphael had kept me in the pressure cooker of dormancy as long as possible, trying to make my Awakening as explosive as he could.

  Dare looked as relieved as he ever showed—relieved that he wasn't telling me new, painful truths. “We gathered the remnants in the air as evidence. I...retrieved them for you. Later.”

  I stared at him, still clutching the little glass ball to my chest. “When?”

  “A month ago.”

  After we had been working for a while together around campus.

  Four days ago, before he had left for the Combat Competition, he had told me he knew I was the girl in the First Layer. That he had known since the day in the library when I'd stupidly transferred the search
spell directly to him. Touching someone directly with magic enabled a deeper connection and he'd known then.

  He had anonymously sent a beautiful Firework sphere to me for the Lightning Festival. So that I could use it as a remembrance of my brother. The sphere had looked a lot like this one.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  Dare pulled a hand through his hair, acting like Will for a moment, when Will didn't know what to say. It was an unusual gesture for Dare.

  He waved a hand toward me. “Just in case.”

  “Of?”

  He shrugged, looking around the room in some strange attempt at avoidance.

  “Things? Stuff?” I deadpanned.

  He smiled.

  I rolled the ball around my cupped palms, staring down at it. “How do you hide it?” I didn't specify what “it” was, but I figured he'd understand without trouble. “Do you use it? At the competition?”

  “No. The tests they give record and stamp a baseline. Anything that charts off of that is held for review. I've never used any abnormal abilities in competition.”

  Everything about Dare was abnormal. Abnormally competent at controlling himself, abnormally good at fighting, abnormally hot.

  “Being a prodigy seems a little abnormal.”

  He spread his hands. “All abilities that are within measure, though.”

  “Have you ever used your powers in battle?”

  “No. It's never wise to rely on skills that you want to keep hidden. I've never used them in practice at all outside of the island.” He gave a twist to his lips. “Though, I would have, there against the Bone Beast, as you called it. I was readying to do just that when you ported to me.”

  The look of resignation he had shown. He had been resigned to using his restricted magic to save campus. I had thought, at the time, that he had been resigned to death.

  Maybe they had been close to being one and the same, though, considering how people seemed to react to the idea of his powers.

  I curled the ball more tightly against my chest, feeling the magic. Magic that Dare's powers had given me.

  “What about the...?” I waved my other hand toward my ankle, where the vine had been wrapped. “How come it didn't register? Kaine seemed to know that something had been there.”

  “He sees much that I wish he didn't. But the vine has its own magic, and it swallows all magic around it. Thus, the absence of an alert.”

  “Can we get more of them?”

  “I don't know. It depends on what happened in the Fourth Layer.”

  The reports were conflicted and sketchy. People kind of stopped talking when I came within range. If it weren't for my armband, Justice Toad, and Bellacia, I'd have started to live in a bubble of silence.

  “The vine swallowed my magic on your command. Did it turn it into one of those odd rock bones you pocketed?”

  He smiled, and there was something sharp about it for a moment, before smoothing away. “That is a question for another time. Get some sleep.”

  “I'm not tired.”

  “No, you are exhausted.”

  I huffed out a breath.

  “You can't do anything right now,” he said, rising. “And the best thing for your magic is rest. Sleep, Ren.”

  “You mean watch Bellacia cast up-to-the-minute feeds on the Third Layer situation all over the walls? No thanks.”

  But he was right, I couldn't do anything right now and the best thing I could do was to recharge so that I would be up to potential when I could do something.

  I could go to Neph's. Curfew was over. It was early—dawn just peeking through—but Neph would open her door. I walked back to the chair, keeping a firm hold on the orb, and grabbed my bag, my toiletry items nearly slipping out.

  Dare looked at me strangely. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to Neph's.”

  “Do you know who her roommate is?” He must have seen the answer in my expression. “Ren—”

  “I'm not going back to Bellacia's.”

  “Of course you aren't.” He frowned. “That's why I gave Bellacia the recharger. You are staying here.”

  I fumbled my toothbrush holder. “What?”

  “Here,” he enunciated. “Your magic will fix itself faster here than anywhere outside of Bailey's room and Medical. You can even have your muse come when she wakes.”

  I pinned him with a look, trying to decipher what he meant by that. “I'm not getting rid of Neph.”

  “I think that's been made perfectly clear.” He raised a brow.

  “So...stay here? Sleep? Where?” I sank back into the chair keeping my gaze away from the bedroom. I knew what it looked like now since their suite had a duplicate layout to Bellacia's. There was no space for a third bed.

  He looked amused and waved a hand. A flat couch appeared beneath me and my back—no longer supported by the club chair—fell with it. I flailed and caught myself on my hands.

  “Very funny.”

  He headed toward his work room. “Today is going to be messy. Sleep.” He left the door wide open, and I could hear him moving inside and could feel the hum of his magic.

  With Christian's orb tucked against my chest, Olivia's balloon carefully tucked in my hand—far away from my pillow—and with the sounds of Dare close by, and the room's comforting magic swirling around me, I did.

  Chapter Twenty-two: Waking in the Same World

  I woke up with a blanket tucked beneath my chin and the raised brows of Constantine staring from a chair across from me. I smiled at him before realizing where I was.

  I jack-knifed upward, blanket slipping down. I grabbed the orb and balloon before they could fall, and curled them back into my lap. “You're back.”

  Since there was a bag at his feet and he looked like death warmed over, then frozen, then warmed again, he must have just arrived.

  “From the mostly dead,” he responded. There was a scratchy edge to his usually smooth voice.

  I pinged the connection threads, subtly checking him for spells. Dare liked Stuart Leandred about as well as Constantine did—which had not filled me with confidence.

  Magic zipped clumsily into my fingers as I reached for him. I stopped and looked at them. I had magic. Taking a good internal look, I felt so much better. My magic was making it through paths that had partially opened and fixed at some point while I slept.

  I grimaced. Whatever magic enhancement Bellacia had swapped her soul for worked.

  Testing, I waved my hand in a circle and a butterfly made of fiery light appeared on my palm. I swirled my fingers around my palm and a silvered dragon appeared next to it, sparking rays of light. I tossed my palm up and they lifted into the air, flying in opposing arcs, then dove into Constantine's chest.

  He lifted a brow at me, expression clenching, but said nothing while I investigated his state.

  The paint that I had wiped across his brow gave me insight into his physical state, as well as allowing me...other things that I never planned to use. His state registered increased stability—large leaps from both times I had seen him.

  Relief swept me, and I let the magic go, leaving it to swirl around him at his control.

  I inflated Olivia's balloon. The thin magic still swirled inside. She was still alive.

  Staggering relief.

  Constantine pulled my magic from his chest and put it into a small pouch, then carefully pulled the strings closed. He tucked it into a pocket while looking at the paper balloon, then raised his gaze to me.

  “You screwed up,” he said bluntly.

  I closed my eyes. “You have no idea.”

  “I have a pretty good one, actually.” He held up a hand and headlines swirled around his fingers and drifted into the air.

  I snatched a few of them, reading about the dozen attacks that had taken place all over the Third Layer. The reports had Raphael, Marsgrove, and Kaine stamped all over them.

  “Yeah.” I released them to the recycling grate and slumped back, rubbing my eyes as the bed refor
med into an upright couch.

  I filled Constantine in on the pertinent parts of what had happened with Kaine and Raphael.

  He leaned back—looking like he was knocking on death's door again. “I don't know whether to strangle you or embrace you,” he finally said, eyes closing. The strange thing was that I felt a humming satisfaction ringing through our connection. He was pleased about something.

  He had been furious with me in Medical.

  “Where is Dare?”

  Constantine waved a blind hand toward Dare's workroom. It was devoid of the thousands of wards that were usually upon it. Dare had stopped blocking his presence from the room, or at least from me. I wondered what he was doing in there.

  “Can he hear us?”

  “He's busy. His precious mother opened a line to the room. Or else he would have been out here interrogating me already.”

  “How do you know what he's doing?”

  He waved again without opening his eyes. “What is the plan?”

  I didn't respond.

  He cracked open an eye. “Oh, darling. Are you deluding yourself now?”

  I shifted. “You don't think Marsgrove will succeed now?”

  Constantine hummed. “Do you?”

  I picked at the blanket, and gave a mirthless laugh. “I'm magically unstable. I'm being continually tracked. And I'm going to have a harder time getting out of my room than I will getting off campus.”

  He opened both eyes, examining me, looking for...I didn't know what. “Yes, I heard about your new roommate. I have been thinking of all sorts of lovely ways to remove you from that situation.” He smiled.

  “Without hurting her,” I said hurriedly. I pictured him pitching Bellacia's body off the Magiaduct, safety spells in place or not.

  Bellacia was one of the people in the very small fraction of the population Dare had referenced who Constantine cared about. And not in the good way.

  “Of course, darling. You made me promise when you destroyed my lovely toy. I was thinking more of mental pain,” he said with a smile.

  “Without hurting her. Emotionally counts.”

  His smile grew. “Not a problem.”

  “She's not a cyborg.”

  He waved a hand. “She doesn't have enough emotion to be one.”