by Anne Zoelle
I felt the tears trickle down. I never wanted to hurt Christian. But those books were full of lies. “He calls to me.”
Neph immediately moved toward me and gripped my hands. “My Father died three years ago. I felt the same way. It's normal, I promise. They teach the consequences to us early because it is such a normal reaction. I can help you create keepsakes. Capture memories. They aren't the same. I know that too. But it will help. Ok?”
She was telling me that I needed to let him go.
“He calls for me to help,” I whispered. “He's not at rest.” And I didn't know how to let him go. To rip apart that part of me that he held and always would.
“Magic and emotion do funny things to us sometimes.” I could feel her magic trying to soothe me. “Let me help you later. But we have to fix this now.”
I nodded without speaking, then wiped the back of my hand over my face. “Yes, of course. I need to fix it. I know I do. I do.” The bone giant roared in the background.
I verbalized the thoughts running through my head, trying to make sense of the situation. “It is a two-pronged problem. The immediate one.” The roaring repeated. “And the growing repercussion. Every time I did an experiment, something happened outside of it. Something smaller. This is none of those. I didn't use black-and-white drawing patterns in any part of the rib experiment—I used them in an earlier one. The magic is collecting.” I knew I was babbling almost incoherently to them, but I didn't have time for explanation.
I grabbed the storage paper containing my research. I turned it over and concentrated. My magic came out shrill and uneven to match my emotion, but the books and papers and tokens poured onto my bed. I pointed at the three of them, my friends. “I need you to stay here and figure out why. Because the collection problem has to be neutralized separately—or else each individual attempt would have done so—I don't have time for more explanation. This is all of my research. The journal is detailed. I have to go get rid of that thing.”
I grabbed the beautiful, perfect charcoal pencil Stevens had given me, and shoved the tip in the hole of the haunting lavender paint tube. “Whatever you do, do not touch the paint tube,” I yelled as I ran to the door, lavender sparkles swirling along the surface of the pencil. “Give it to Stevens, if I don't make it back.”
“Ren!” Will and Neph both shouted.
Olivia stepped behind me, blocking them, as I slipped through the door. I had known Olivia would understand. She saw the big picture—she was a general, a queen. I was merely an errant knight off to do my duty. A general didn't waste all of her pieces on the frontal assault.
~*~
I didn't have far to run. The rampaging smoked bone giant was approaching Dorm Twenty-Five, leaving a path of devastation behind him.
It was like a piece of war art come to life. The visual and sensory details displayed in fine detail. Combat mages running forth even as their comrades fell, crushed at their feet. Flung like ragdolls to the side. Students were running in every direction, ripped clothing on usually impeccably dressed mages acting as tattered flags flying in the wind.
Combat mages were sprawled to all sides of the beast's path, broken. Only five minutes had passed since Isaiah had broadcast his feed. Five minutes for this type of complete ruination to occur.
Five more minutes until some of these mages wouldn't be able to be revived.
“What is it?” someone yelled.
I rubbed my ribs and swallowed. The beast whipped around and I caught sight of its face as it swatted another mage to the side and roared.
“Christian?” I whispered.
“I've never seen such a thing. Argh!” Another mage went down, her dark hair snapping against the dirt.
This, then, is what my experiments and magic had produced. My feet were firmly stuck to the ground, and I was unable to do anything but watch as the beast’s patterned eyes swirled and its large bones turned to smoke, spells cast by defending mages passing clear through. It returned to a solid state and swung. Another mage down.
Christian? My lips formed the word without sound.
It roared and its intended target ducked. Another two mages went down, but two others slid on their knees beneath a strike. I blinked and looked more closely at the group. A contingent of five combat mages was working together as a unit within the melee, and they were clearly getting the most accomplished.
Alexander Dare and Camille Straught were two of the five. The other three were guys I had seen often around Dare.
Their cloaks whirled and sliced, black scales rippling down to points as the edges lengthened, then rippling up to reform.
Camille whacked off a piece of a thigh bone with a red-edged sword. Dare had traded in his staff for a sword as well—this one deep black. He severed an elbow with his thrust and the knobby chunk of bone rolled off. The beast turned to smoke, rippled, then reappeared, completely intact.
“Third form!”
Camille and one of the other guys thrust their sword blades through the swirling black-and-white eyes. When they pulled them out, the blades were gone.
“Son of a—” Camille Straught looked gorgeous and pissed. She did a magic-enhanced backflip to avoid the bone arm headed her way, and landed on one knee, hand upon the ground. Her fingers gripped a blade of grass, and she pulled a green sword from the ground.
One of the other guys knocked off a piece of the giant too, but the bone smoked, then repaired. “It's no use, it doesn't—”
“It doesn't matter,” Dare shouted back sharply. “Just keep it occupied.”
I looked around me at the rescuers dragging the wounded to two of the campus portal arches, and understood his plan.
“We've been keeping it occupied. It is almost to the dorms!” one of the guys yelled.
“Pay attention!” Dare shouted.
Bone whacked flesh and the guy who had yelled went flying, then lay still.
The faces of the remaining four grew darker, but none of them ran to their compatriot. They stayed on task, fighting. Dare's cloak swirled out, amputating an entire giant leg as his sword severed an arm. The bone giant touched the fragments, rippled, and stood completely reformed.
I saw someone in a white coat dart in, grab the fallen combat mage, and make for the arch.
The bone beast saw the motions too, and was enraged by the loss of its prize. It surged forward, howling, but Dare leaped between the retreating mages and the beast and drove it back in a flurry of swirling lights and flashing sword. The bone beast stumbled back, but hefted a large rock—a piece of some building that had once stood here—and threw it at the retreating medical mage carrying the fallen soldier through the portico. The arch shattered, emitting a concussing blast of magic in all directions.
But the two mages had made it through.
The beast raised its face to the sky and bellowed—a great wail that sent icy chills through me. It was moaning the loss of its dead.
I grabbed my throat in response, as if the howl was emerging from my own gut.
The beast started heavily walking forward, forcing Dare away from his position, and stomping toward Dormitory Circle where students were fleeing. It would find its dead there. Surround itself with them. I could feel its thought.
Oh. God.
Christian.
The magic around the beast slowed and solidified to my eyes. Ugly green mixed with tarnished gold. But the eyes were covered in neither green nor gold. They were black-and-white swirls with a haunting lavender film over the top. Like the paint that was splotched all over my cuff; the paint now in my pencil.
It roared again and tried to charge. Dare did something to stop it, but it struggled against the bonds and broke an arm free. I could see how this was going to end. The monster's path was going to take it crashing right through Dorm Twenty-Five. Through...our dorm room which had a window facing down the hillside. Olivia, Will, and Neph, if they were still inside, would never see it until it was destroying the building around them.
I rea
ched down numbly and picked up the fallen elbow bone Dare had severed, letting it burn the skin of my palm, watching intensely as the green and gold mixed. Christian... No, not Christian. That wasn't my brother. Even the golem which I had finally made into a reasonable facsimile wasn't my brother. The sculptures and dolls weren't, and neither was this.
But what if...
No.
I pushed the emotion down and drew a precise series of splintered black-and-white spikes across the surface with the enhanced pencil. I tucked the bone against my body, uncaring of the seeping burn, and picked up the smaller sliver of thigh bone Camille had chopped. I repeated the design, channeling my thoughts, my pencil focused.
I could see Alexander Dare, alone now, standing between my monster and the dorms. The last three combat mages were splayed on the ground around him, their bodies still but the edges of their cloaks jerking up and down like the last gasps of flopping, dying fish. Camille's blonde hair was spread out around her, the perfect, fallen heroine.
Dare threw a concussive wave of magic at the monster that blasted it into a thousand pieces and took out two buildings that had survived the initial carnage. But like it was made of boned blob matter, the monster's pieces rolled back together, quickly reforming the whole. A one-headed Hydra that continued to reform.
He threw another powerful wave of magic at it and his sword turned back into a staff and I saw him do a maneuver I had witnessed in the Midlands. Twirling twice, he struck the ground with the end of the staff and one knee. Blue lightning spread from the strike, shooting along the ground toward his foe. The earth didn't shake, it fully shifted, and the monster exploded into particles as fine as sand, spraying in every direction.
Destroyed. My pencil paused and grief filled me as I watched the destruction. My hand dropped.
The energy around Dare dimmed completely, as if his shields were no longer powered. He was watching the explosion, still kneeling, and his mouth was pulled tight. He was watching the explosion with...resignation. My hand lifted and I quickly finished the strokes.
The mist of sand swirled, spiraling out and around in loose beige curls then gradually pulling back in a slow motion rewind. The sucking sound of my inhaled breath was a thousand times magnified. The regenerated monster bellowed a horrific battle cry and thundered toward Dare in rage, lifting its mighty arm to whack the last obstacle, who was now unshielded. Ugly green tendrils whipped around it, spiked and deadly.
Mages whose injuries were too severe didn't survive magical death.
Everything in me focused on the boy rising from his bent knee, holding his staff for one last strike. The boy who had saved me. The boy who had given me, an ordinary girl, his precious First Layer container magic. The boy who had given that girl one last cherished moment with her twin.
The patterned drapes in my mind swirled and ported me straight through the Academy magic to the exact space where Alexander Dare stood. The energy pushed him back two steps. I held out the two bone splinters, as he stared at me in complete disbelief, his sword raised to deflect the blow that would not now hit him.
“Throw them into his eyes.”
I felt Dare's hand touch mine, then something exploded at the back of my head—Christian, I'm so sorry—and the world went dark.
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Moving Forward
The world opened to white.
“Welcome back again, Miss Crown.”
“Why are you calling me miss, Christian?” I muttered.
“Hmmm...are you feeling like Jell-O?”
What? I turned my head to see Dr. Greyskull passing his scanner over me.
I shut my eyes. “I'm alive?”
“Barely. Mr. Dare carried you to me promptly, but...your damage was high. It was close.”
“What about...” I had to clear my throat twice. “Everyone else?”
Greyskull was silent for a moment. “We got to everyone in time. A student sent an emergency call to the Department, bypassing all protocol. They sent fifteen full medical teams. It was just enough.” He shook his head. “I'm happy everyone was saved. But they will do a full investigation now, and that is never pretty.”
I briefly wondered who might have a bat phone to the Department. But I was glad. Glad that everyone was alive. That I hadn't killed anyone.
I'd hand myself over to the Department for that.
“Talk says your quick thinking enabled Mr. Dare to defeat the beast.”
“My thinking was the farthest thing from quick.” I had to be the slowest person on this mountain.
“Well, I'll bet you get a thousand hours shaved off of service for this.”
“I don't want my hours shaved,” I said hollowly. I needed to serve for the rest of my academic existence.
“That is good work ethic. But they likely will do it anyway for your part in enabling the beast to be destroyed.”
So Dare had killed it. It hadn't really been my brother. It had been a failed experiment. A creation by a poorer Victor Frankenstein. The unraveled emotions the beast had displayed had been a reflection of my own anger and grief.
I desperately wanted to convince myself that I hadn't created something alive, even if completely by accident, only to allow it to be slaughtered. Or that I hadn’t formed a true piece of Christian, then handed over the necessary tools of his destruction—knowing. I curled onto my side.
“Miss Crown?”
Christian was silent. Not in my head. Gone.
“I think I'm in shock, doctor. If Skeletor comes, it's ok to let him have me, ok?”
“Miss Crown? Miss Crown!”
~*~
I trudged slowly back to Dormitory Circle in the dark, walking through the path of destruction in penance. It was eerily quiet on campus. Greyskull said the traveling ban had been lifted in the wake of the attack and many mages had ported home in order to relax and recuperate with family over the weekend.
It was also eerily silent in my head.
Stupidly, I felt more rested than I had in weeks. Probably fourteen weeks, to be exact. Greyskull had done something to fix me. He had thought the magic drain and exhaustion were due to a combination of fighting the beast and my resulting wounds, so he had fixed both.
More stupidly, an insidious voice inside of me was wondering what spell he had used to restore me and fix my need for sleep.
I had mentally castigated Marsgrove for being overconfident and exhausted, but I hadn't paid attention to my own state of health and judgment. Desperation was an emotion incapable of producing self-awareness until after the damage was done, I decided. But after, it was great at showing what an idiot a person was. Joy.
I walked into my room, unsure of what to expect.
Will, Neph, and Olivia looked up as one.
I couldn't look at their faces. They knew. They knew that I was a monster. Of course they did. And they could piece together the rest, if they hadn't already. The creation paint, the data disks I had never erased, the margin notes in my papers. Nothing was explicitly written, but it was all there—all the random tidbits of information. The processes and experiments. The successes and failures. The concepts and connections that had formed. The sum of which indicated the type of dangerous mage I might be.
I had placed a dozen different cloaking spells on my research box. I had taken every one of them off when I'd dumped the contents out.
“The Department was called,” I said softly. The ruse was over. I put my now-painted pencil down carefully. “They'll come for me eventually. You should disavow me now.”
I took my courage in hand and met their eyes.
Neph's eyes were steady. “You are my friend,” she said simply.
Will looked surprised, as if he hadn't realized that such a declaration was necessary. “Mine too. Of course mine too.”
Olivia's gaze was even. “I will keep this secret.”
Emotion so profound rushed through me that I sagged against my desk. Maybe they didn't know everything then, but they weren't turning their backs on
me yet.
“Er.” Will rubbed the back of his neck. “So, let's figure out how to remedy this. We've been going through your notes. Discussing theories. I just got to your notes on Ganymede Circus and the Midlands and have a thought. Ren, my Layer project last year—”
I straightened, pushing the suffocating cocktail of emotion to the side to deal with—and make amends for—later, and let crisp logic connect Will's words to others running through my head.
Twisted magic.
“Of course. And with a third—”
“—and a foam block—”
“—mixed with evening enchantments—”
“—and a granite base—”
“—and Mbozi's four person containment spell.”
“—I think it will work.”
We smiled brightly at each other, and I felt a bit of hyper energy weave around my bones. Though sometimes our magic threads felt oddly similar, Will and I were neutrally aligned magic-wise—neither sympathetic nor antipathetic. But our minds were frequently directly in line.
“What are you two discussing without us?” Olivia demanded.
“You get used to it,” Nephthys said sympathetically to Olivia.
“I know a mass containment spell we can utilize, and Will did a Layer project last year on smoothing the wrinkles that gather to promote shifts. He was able to smooth the space around him for fifty feet.”
Olivia looked at him. “My Mother was on the judging committee for that project.”
Will looked horrified. “I'm sorry.”
Olivia's facial expression didn't change, but there was something very strangely satisfied to it. “It was the highlight of my Spring.”
“Well, there were obvious kinks,” Will said, cheeks red. I hoped he wasn't picturing Olivia's mom naked. “And I stopped working on the technology as an alpha project when I saw that it was a dead end for at least a few years—until the press died down.”
“That means he only works on it every third weekend,” I said. Will didn't give up on much.
Will continued to blush. “Well, yes.”
