“Alexander Dare. The warrior. The prodigy. The protector of the people. The fighter for justice.” The person spit blood, smiling crazily. “Always keeping to the rules of the field. Stavros will remake you into a real warrior.”
Before the man could lift his hand again, there was one wrapped around the back of his head, gripping it. The man froze, as if his entire body had stopped listening to commands from his brain.
“Here's the thing,” Constantine whispered into his ear. “That most people don't know. Alexi and I are far more alike than anyone understands. You think he's the good guy.” Constantine laughed lowly, almost seductively. “That was your first mistake.”
The man dropped to the ground.
“The guards are tied into revivification wards in case of prison outbreaks,” Dagfinn said across the comms. “They will be shocked awake in eight minutes. I'm trying to see if I can recode the magic to put them out again immediately, restarting the eight-minute clock.”
I was forced to stop watching as the wards around me shrieked in alarm.
I held out my hand to Guard Rock, who nodded. The wards would hold for thirty seconds more. Now that we’d started, we needed every precious second.
Golems poured into the building, surrounding our warded circle and Kaine strode through.
Something about the golems made the hair rise on the back of my neck. “There's something wrong with the guards,” I said to the others. I shook my head slowly, and sent an image of the first guard through the communications loop.
“Yes,” Axer agreed. “Piecing enchantment. Watch for them to reform into something else—dragons, vampires.”
Kaine began thrusting shadows against the ward circle.
“I told you they’d come back in some grisly fashion,” Olivia said grimly. “Status check, I'm at my position.”
“They are...” I stared at them. Bile rose in my throat. The ears. The nose. The hair. The eyes. My mind did exactly what Stavros wanted—piecing together the separate pieces and forming a whole across the lot. “They aren’t dragons.”
“Do you recognize the pieces?” Stavros's mouth appeared on another portion—Christian’s eyes staring sightlessly at me over Stavros’s moving mouth. He sneered at the circle. “I feel your magic. Interesting, that you have recovered so quickly. How so, I wonder? And what do you think you are going to do?”
“Stop you.”
He laughed and reached toward the thinning ward. “How are you going to stop me and keep hold of those threads, my dear?”
“Now,” I shouted at Guard Rock.
He stabbed his pencil down and flipped the circle.
I barely kept my grip.
It took Stavros only two minutes to find us at location number two.
I shuddered as I observed my brother’s dripping features.
“It was time to overhaul the guards.” Stavros smiled. “You gave me an excuse and liabilities aren’t tolerated. You keep giving us pieces of you. We are piecing you together in the workshop now. A little Pinocchio girl. We will have your abilities, whether piecemeal or altogether in one package.”
Kaine shot a shadow under the circle and as it sliced through my shield, I could feel elements of my own magic in it. Flying backward, I hit the ground and my head hard. The threads almost slipped free.
“Ren!” Multiple shouts came through.
I gritted my teeth. “M'fine.”
“Do you need me?” Constantine asked tersely.
“No. I'm fine.” I dragged myself up.
I could hear Constantine swearing over the background of the battle noise and saying he should have gone with me.
“I'm going to take all of your little friends,” Stavros said. “And line them up one-by-one in front of you. I'm going to make you kill each and every one of them. Then I'll let you have your emotions back. Just for an instant.”
Another shadow started to breech the circle.
“Now!”
Guard Rock flipped us again.
I didn’t even try to rise from the ground this time. The magic was overwhelming. I could feel people dying. One, two, a thousand, a million. I had known, I had known this would happen. We had known there was no way to stop Stavros's first hit from happening, we just had to stop it after.
And that meant the cull would be successful, at least initially.
“Shivit, we just lost Delia, and at least a hundred students on campus. He targeted Second Layer mages with Third Layer ties.”
Tears fell down my cheeks.
Even Bloody Tuesday with the unreality, the disconnect of watching people I knew drop around me, hadn't been this brutal. This overwhelming feeling of death.
“Do you like my choice?” Stavros said, appearing again with Kaine and the horrible misfit versions of my brother. “So messy, those with ties between layers. We need things to be orderly when we make our real changes. But you could have saved your friend. I would have spared her. She—”
“Shut up.” And I was yanking the magic back, flipping it. Using the knowledge from Death Magic and The Twelve Black Steps—using the reverse of what the books were usually used for. I had ten minutes from the time the first person fell to revive them without consequences.
Somewhere in Spartine, Delia was heaving a breath.
“You fool!” Stavros yelled.
“Go!” I shouted.
Guard Rock flipped us.
We had one more flip.
“Can you take out Stavros?” Constantine asked me.
“No,” I said grimly. “He's protected. But I can save twenty million. He gave me the key. I've got them. Thirty seconds.” I gritted my teeth and pulled.
I felt his fingers sliding along my arm and, in the feed, saw him guarding Axer's back.
Axer was destroying the western wing of Spartine.
I saw Bialto, the Third Layer champion, and two others who looked too closely related to be anything other than family—along with an array of other Third Layer fighters behind them. They were wearing our cloaks. If they were caught, the Second Layer would blame the Third. Call them terrorists. Strip them of their legal rights to travel to the other layers. And still, Bialto had come here to fight.
Axer. He was fighting because Axer had asked—for a cause they had all agreed upon that week after the championship. A championship that Axer had influenced—a win for the Third Layer instead of a huge win solely for himself.
And now...it wasn’t just a good political move that Bialto was fighting for. The fight had just become extremely personal. Bialto's expression was absolutely and utterly enraged. How many people did he know who’d been targeted?
I pulled harder. Another million gasped a breath, two, three.
In the feeds, there were combat mages I had never seen, and more streaming in from all corners of the four layers.
Magical beings, creatures, shifters, and the largest feline dragon hybrid I had ever seen, were fighting the praetorians and devouring everything in their path.
War healers were weaving in and out of the fighters, casting their own magic to revive, to protect, to repel.
“You will regret this,” Stavros said coldly, his empty shell standing outside the last circle.