Unstoppable

by May Dawson

  As I stared at Rafe’s handsome, exhausted face, I understood what he’d tried to do. He realized we were stronger as a team, and he was trying to give all of us an equal voice.

  “No wonder I love you,” I told him, and he pulled a face.

  “I’d rather have you mad at me than loving me and dead,” he reminded me.

  “I can be mad at you and love you at the same time,” I pointed out. Angry love was definitely a part of our relationship.

  “I think you made the right call,” Silas told him. “I’ve been fighting you and that hasn’t been the right call either.”

  “We’re stronger when we all work together.”

  Rafe said flatly, “We’re in chains. Clearly, something went amiss.”

  “We are. But we’re not dead yet,” Jensen said.

  “That’s all the optimism he ever has to offer,” Silas said.

  “Hey, we’ve all got our roles around here,” Jensen said.

  Silas hesitated, then admitted, “I should have talked to you before I poisoned the entire camp’s guards.”

  “I shouldn’t have been such a controlling asshole,” Rafe admitted. He began by saying it to Silas, but his gaze cut to me. He told me, “I’m not going to apologize for wanting to protect you. But I will for the way I go about it sometimes. I don’t want to protect you when I’m doing so in a way that goes against who you are: the girl who protects everyone else.”

  I might have been in chains, but I couldn’t help but smile when a man groveled a little.

  “I love you, Rafael Hunt,” I told him.

  “I love you,” he answered.

  We might have gone on, but a smooth voice interrupted our conversation. “What a touching scene of final words.”

  Silas snorted, staring at the figure as if he recognized him. A man stood framed in the doorway, the light behind him so it was hard to see his features at first.

  “You are sorely mistaken in thinking those are last words,” Silas informed him. “They’re unbearably cheesy.”

  Rude.

  “Warren Campbell,” Silas went on. “You have a very unhealthy obsession with me.”

  “You are very cute,” I reminded Silas. “I’ve been obsessed with you since we met.”

  “Thank you,” he said with a wink.

  “The most powerful, most famous rebel magician of our time,” Warren said. “And I brought you down.”

  He sounded so self-satisfied.

  “Ah yes, you should get a nice two dollar raise per hour for that,” Silas said. “And bragging rights at the bar. You might be able to get a date once a month now.”

  He flashed Warren a tight smile.

  “I’m going to get a date right now,” Warren told him, as he stepped close to me. There was suddenly a knife in his hand, glinting under the dim light. “What’s under those skirts, sweetheart?”

  Chains suddenly clinked against the wall as my men were all straining toward him, except for Silas, who shook his head as if Warren were a personal embarrassment to him.

  Warren cut my skirts away, and the magic sizzled and fell away under his hand until my dress had dissipated into nothing.

  “Where is it?” Warren demanded, waving the knife dangerously close to my skin. “Where’s the shield?”

  I gave him a smile in return.

  He looked at my face, horror writing across his features. Maybe he would be nothing to the Establishment if he’d captured Silas and yet we’d gotten away with the shield.

  “Tell me,” he growled, his voice warning, his hand with the blade dropping to my thigh. The blade was so hot that I could feel its heat on my skin even though it hadn’t yet pressed against my skin. I wasn’t sure what that magic would do when it touched me instead of fabric.

  “I don’t like your odds,” I told him softly. “I was trained by Rebel Magicians to hold my tongue.”

  Silas’s lips turned up at the corners. That smile was still proud.

  The ripple of my magic, opening a portal into the academy grounds, would sound an alert. My men would find it.

  We would save our people, even if we never made it home.

  “If you hurt her, Warren,” Silas said, and his voice was ice, “you’ll pay.”

  “That really only makes it sound sweeter to me, Silas, because you’ll never make me pay. You’re going to die today. Too hard to hold, according to the judiciary. Flight risk, immediate execution.” Warren smiled as if he knew he’d won.

  He leaned close to me. “Tell me your name, sweetheart. Easy.”

  I knew that once I told him anything, it would be harder to hold back. If the Establishment thought the shield might still be in their world, there was less risk of any of them trying to cross over into the academy. The guys had enough to deal with back there.

  The guys. Longing rippled through me as I thought of Chase and Lex and Penn; I missed them all so much. Fate had taken us on separate adventures. I couldn’t help but feel as if maybe that was why we were in trouble—because we all belonged together.

  Warren leaned close to me, resting his fist—that gripped the knife—against my upper thigh. My back stiffened, the chains clinking with my involuntary movement.

  “I’m so sorry I got you into this mess,” Silas told me. “Warren loves to torture women because that’s the closest he gets to any kind of meaningful communication with them.”

  “Pretty one-sided,” Jensen said.

  “And yet, his victims probably still like him better than the woman he tries to talk to in bars.” Silas shook his head sadly. “He’s a laughing stock among the Rebels. I’ve heard so many stories.”

  I knew what they were doing—trying to draw Warren away from me—and I shot them a look, shaking my head. Silas gave me an innocent smile in return.

  One of the guards huffed the faintest sound of a laugh, and Warren whirled. He couldn’t see who it was.

  Instead, he lunged at Silas and grabbed him by the hair, yanking his head back against the stone wall. Silas let out a hiss of pain.

  “Tell me where the shield is,” Warren growled as he held the blade up to Silas’s face. “Are you sure even your magic can heal this, Silas?”

  “Does it matter?” Silas asked wearily. His gaze found me, even with Warren pinning him against the wall. “Will you still love me if I’m not pretty anymore, Madeline Northsea?”

  Warren’s face changed. For a second, he looked horrified. I frowned, trying to understand why. What had Silas said that freaked him out so badly? Was it my name?

  Warren stood back, the knife dropping to his side.

  “She tried to use magic to escape,” he told the guards, who weren’t quite close enough to have overheard exactly what Silas said. “Gag them all.”

  Why was Warren Campbell so afraid of my name?

  Chapter Fifty

  Tyson

  “You know, no Fae would allow another Fae to put them to sleep like this,” Raura teased me as the two of us walked deep into the woods. “We can’t be trusted.”

  I stopped abruptly, and she turned to face me. A playful smile lingered over her lips.

  “Are you trying to scare me, cuz?” I asked her. “Because you can’t.”

  The sleeping spell would simulate death, but only for a moment—just long enough for Raura to push me into the portal. Then I’d wake again in the soft grass at the academy.

  And yes, Raura could kill me if she were so inclined instead. The magic would make her heir as soon as it registered my death, but some of our Fae family certainly would take the surest possible method and erase the other heir.

  But Raura didn’t want to kill her way to the throne as her father had.

  “You’d do anything to get back to Maddie,” she said, a wistful look on her face. It turned out my cousin was quite the romantic. Then she said, more skeptically, “Even return to Dirtside.”

  “Going home means I get the chance to see if my mother’s still alive and just deep in the spell,” I reminded her. I knew how to co
ntrol that kind of magic now after my time in the Fae world. I could wake her if she was.

  “Tell me you’ll come back and visit me now and then,” she said.

  I hesitated. “I’d like to come back and see you as queen.”

  “But you can’t make any promises,” she said. “I know. Just… don’t forget me.”

  I snorted. “Well, Raura, you are definitely unforgettable.”

  She rolled her eyes at my jab. Then a moment later as we walked through the forest, she tripped me, slipping her foot between mine, and I stumbled. I caught myself though, resting my hand on hers.

  “We’ll still be family, even if we can’t be together.” I reminded her, giving her shoulder a squeeze.

  “I know, but I finally managed to find a halfway functional family, and you’re leaving me.” Her tone was glib, but I didn’t have any doubt that it hurt.

  “You’ll have Arlen and Lake,” I reminded her.

  She scoffed at that. “I said halfway functional.”

  We reached the altar in the woods, a long marble slab surrounded by trees that seemed to whisper to each other in the wind.

  I hugged her tight, and she seemed surprised for a second before she hugged me back. “I am really glad we got to know each other,” I told her. “I never had a cousin before.”

  “I never had a crazy half-Fae, half-shifter king who was obsessed with his moral code before,” she said into my shoulder.

  “Oddly specific,” I said.

  She smiled up at me, but her eyes were sad. I didn’t know when or if we’d ever see each other again, so there was nothing to say. I squeezed her shoulders gently and then stepped back.

  Golden magic sparked at my fingertips, and she walked me through how to make a portal. I could feel the magic alive in me, more magic than I’d ever had before; I couldn’t form a portal back at the academy, but now I wrote shimmering lines of magic in the air as I drew my door.

  The magic felt good, a flush of power through my body, and I could understand why witches found it so addictive. I wondered if I’d ever feel anything like it again. I’d leave the royal Fae magic behind when I left this world; it would belong to Raura now.

  I turned to face her. “You’ll be a good queen.”

  She smiled faintly. “I know.”

  She sounded so cocky, but then she told me, “I didn’t have much of a model in Turic, but you were a pretty decent example.”

  “No matter what,” I promised her, “you’d figure it out on your own.”

  The two of us looked at each other for a long moment, and I could’ve sworn Raura’s eyes shimmered with unshed tears. She’d been through so much in her life, beginning when she was just a little girl and her father killed her mother…and her mother cursed her to keep that secret with her dying breaths. Raura deserved a happy ending. I wished I could be there to see it.

  “Get on the slab, Tyson,” she said.

  I hoisted myself to sit on the edge of the marble, gathering my bag over my shoulder. I’d brought all of our academy swords with me, and they clinked in the leather bag. There’d be nothing of us left in this world.

  She formed golden healing magic in one hand and carried a blade in the other.

  I raised an eyebrow at her. “Does there have to be so many knives in Fae magic?”

  “There really does,” she told me. She pushed me down on the table, and she raised her knife.

  I closed my eyes, trying to ignore the way my heart suddenly quickened in my chest.

  I was trusting an awful lot to my dangerous cousin.

  She plunged the knife into my chest. Pain seared through me, and my eyes opened involuntarily.

  There were tears in her eyes, but she tried to smile.

  My heartbeat was already coming to a stop as darkness washed over me.

  I woke up suddenly, still in the dark. Everything was cold, then hot, and in that moment between words, I heard Maddie’s voice as a soft whisper. Familia.

  I could feel her fear, and her strength and resolution, and I caught the quickest glimpse around her of stone walls, of Silas and Jensen and Rafe and the guards. Her emotions pulled at me and I wanted to be there with her, to help her. My heart was already galloping with fear for her.

  I slammed into a damp cobblestone street.

  My shoulder, then head, took a lot of the impact. Pain jolted through my body, and I rolled onto my back, looking up at unfamiliar buildings.

  This wasn’t the academy.

  This wasn’t my world.

  Voices murmured around me indistinctly. Wherever I was, I needed to get up and get out of sight so I could formulate a plan. Her spell had called me, had pulled me to where Maddie was, so this must be the Greyworld.

  And she must be in trouble.

  I was already rising to my feet, ignoring the pain in my shoulder. I raised my hand to the people who were a blur around me, most of them giving me wide berth as they went about their business. Then I darted into the first alleyway I saw.

  Down the alleyway, there was a stone wall with a hole blasted into its side. Fallen tree branches still lay in the street, which had obviously fallen from the trees on the other side of the wall.

  It seemed as if I was following pretty closely in my friends’ footsteps, unless someone else had the same knack for attracting death-and-destruction they did.

  I was trying to decide what I should do next when I heard one woman in the nearby street exclaim to another, “Oh, Agnes! It’s so nice to see you. I should’ve known you’d never miss an execution party.”

  Well then. I’d bet that was where my friends had found themselves.

  I gripped the strap on my bag a little tighter and stepped out into the street.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Maddie

  Jensen, Rafe, Silas and I were all still gagged with our wrists bound behind our backs as we were taken out to a very public hearing. There was an enormous crowd waiting, and we were led onto a marble terrace that overlooked the crowd.

  To one side were a row of wooden beams, and the marble beneath them was black. It took me a second to understand.

  In this world full of wizards, they used magic to burn witches at the stake.

  Panic hazed my vision for just a second, then I blinked and it was gone. We could find a way out of this mess. I looked at Rafe, and Jensen, and Silas in turn as we were all shepherded into the defendant’s box. We were together; we always found a way.

  A panel of three judges came out and sat down at the long table, and the crowd cheered as if they were pro athletes.

  “Here are the accused,” a guard read out. “Silas Zip, who was previously found guilty of assault, arson, theft, theft from the Establishment, theft from the Crown, altering prophecy, blackmail, murder, unauthorized creation of portals, unauthorized use of portals, unauthorized tampering in other worlds…”

  Even through the gag obscuring part of his face, I could’ve sworn Silas looked proud when they read out his list of crimes. The sight of his face brought a familiar glow of affection for him, and some of the tension in my chest unfurled, just a little. The boy wonder as Jensen had taken to calling him always escaped.

  Campbell lied and said the rest of us were Rebel Magicians who had refused to give our names.

  “These Rebel magicians stole one of our priceless relics,” one of the judges said, fixing us with a steely look. “Rest assured that we will find it.”

  Doubtful.

  It didn’t take long for them to return a verdict. Guilty. And because we were impossible to hold, they pronounced a penalty, too—death.

  For the first time, Silas struggled against the bonds. His gaze met mine, and his eyes were full of apology. I tried to smile back at him despite the gag, hoping that my eyes would crinkle at the corners and he would know. I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t afraid.

  We’d gotten the second half of the shield back to our world. We had to trust that we’d helped Chase and Blake and Skyla, Penn and Lex and Tyson. We had to
believe.

  I’d be looking for a way out, for another chance to fight, until the end. But no matter what happened, if we protected the people we loved, well, that was a life well-lived enough for me.

  They took us toward the same beams that had stood alongside us while we were tried, which really made their whole justice process seem a little suspect. When my feet crossed the burnt marble, I came to a stop, pushing back against the guard. The soot beneath my bare feet sent me into panic mode, no matter how much I meant to be brave.

  But the guards pushed me against the beam and forced my arms back, locking me into place against it. From the corner of my eye, I could see them doing the same to my men alongside side.

  One of them pulled my gag loose, fixing me with a cold smile. “Time to hear you scream, Rebel.”

  And then the world erupted into chaos.

  The guard suddenly slumped forward, falling to his knees in front of me. He stared up at me in shock before his face thumped into the marble.

  Magic sparked around me, a bright silver haze. Suddenly my hands were free, and the beam behind me crumpled into nothing.

  In the crowd, I saw Tyson limned by light, his hands spread and forming magic. Tyson. He’d come to us.

  My familia spell had worked across worlds.

  “I’ve still got it!” Tyson yelled, his face full of wonder, and I had no idea what he still had, but all I wanted to do was kiss him. My heart was full of joy. He was alive…and he’d come back to me.

  He tossed our swords to us and the fight was on again. I gripped my academy sword in my hand, feeling its familiar balance and weight, and hope rushed through me.

  The five of us ducked and whirled, fighting with swords and magic, blasting our way through the crowd. There were so many Establishment magicians.

  My men needed their wolves.

  I’d been able to summon mine. I could slip into her again. Silas had been amazed at how much power I seemed to have now that we were in his world. Maybe that was why.

  A wizard blasted magic at me, and I slammed him with my own. For some reason I thought of what Piper’s husband Callum always said.