The world blurred around me, and Constantine's grip shook completely free.
The mist disappeared like fog on suddenly opened windows, and my magic exploded unrestrained. I looked around to see what my freed senses already told me. Constantine and I were forty-two kilometers to the west of where the Awakening was happening, on the edge of a different town. In the distance, I could see people walking down a main street, oblivious to what was happening less than fifty kilometers away.
There was a loud boom beside me as Constantine and the shadowed ball he'd been holding crashed to the ground. Constantine's wrist cracked against the pavement, his open palm scorched.
Magic coiled within me. How dare they.
The praetorian scouts rose, and the entirety of my rage ascended with them. This was my layer. A layer where my magic was king.
Save the town, save the non-magicals, trust in your friends.
I hooked a lash of magic, like a tail behind me, curling around Constantine and grabbing the praetorians and enfolding the five of us into the Second Layer's Death Valley.
Come and get us, I sent to Kaine in a call of magic.
Constantine spun out to a crouch as we slid across the hot sand in the blinding desert landscape.
The praetorian scouts rose, covered in moving shadow, one wearing Stavros's face.
“I'm disappointed in you, Miss Crown,” he bit out. “Enlisting others to do your dirty work.”
“Too like you?” I whipped sand into my palm and felt Constantine move into position behind me, disregarding his own broken bones.
Stavros's ruthless gaze focused on Constantine, and his smiles turned deliberate. “Interesting. I had thought them your loved ones, but I see that you are fully okay with them dying in service to you.”
Rage blew away everything else. I flung away the fingers of magic grasping at my sleeve. I ejected the two useless shadows and flew at the shadow wearing Stavros's face with all the magic within me, clenching it between my sun-struck palms.
I shot the incandescently charged magic straight into it. It shrieked in the full light of the sun, pieces of shadow and Stavros’ face falling from it like cracked clay and leaving behind a ragged man. A normal mage, broken and twitching on the hot sand.
My chest rose and fell in rattling heaves, and I stared at the shell of the man who was now absent of a shadow, absent of my enemy's face.
An ordinary man twitching on the sand.
“Ren,” Constantine said tightly. “We have to go.”
I let out a broken laugh, then shoved my hand out before Constantine could convert on the alarmed actions his emotions said he was about to take. “Wait.”
I forced myself to bring forward a careful mental pyramid. To construct something deliberate instead of blindly letting my magic take control. I concentrated, then shoved the convulsing man through the layer and to a point in the distance that Will's super encyclopedia-and-occasional-map labeled a hospital.
Then I shakily withdrew the port paper and enfolded the two of us into the Third Layer.
Chapter Seven: Coils of the Tempest
I could taste the acidic burn of paint working its way up my throat. I pressed my hand against my mouth and inhaled deep gulps of air to prevent myself from retching.
“Don't you dare feel bad for that praetorian,” Constantine said tightly, holding his broken wrist against his chest.
I took hold of his wrist, turning his palm upward where the burns curled across the skin.
“I can't just...” I clenched my fingers and loosened them in an unending bid to gain control and used the overloaded wards to heal his wounds, checking to make certain no shadow remnants remained. “I can't just do that to people.”
Destroy them, not save them.
He said nothing for a moment, as he made circular, loosening motions with his newly healed wrist and recently broken arm and I could feel threads of magic checking me. “No. But not because I give a shivit about some random flunky. You aren't built for the darker emotions.” He lifted my palms this time, examining something there. “They will destroy you in the same way Stavros means to.”
I stared at his quickly healing skin. “How are the others?” I hadn't felt any lights go out. All my connection threads were still thriving.
“Alexander and his minions? You think they can't take care of themselves without magic?” he asked, somewhat in amusement, though I could feel him searching me mentally for the answers as he knelt down to look at my ankle. “Against fighters who rely far too heavily on being overly-armed? You do remember that there was a non-magic category of fighting in the tournament?”
It was a strange category amid hundreds of events that relied on magic in a thousand different ways.
“Ramirez is the current collegiate champion in all non-magic fighting. Alexander is only second to him by a hair. Don't worry overly much about your pets. Not even when fighting the worst of the Department.”
“The Department. They keep... And the ferals...”
He gently touched my ankle with his thumb. I could almost hear the words he didn't say—you can't save everyone.
I shuddered. I could save some, though.
I pulled away from him, and with magic zipping from my fingers, threw the portal pad on the ground. “Get in.”
“No.” I could feel the hackles of his magic rise beneath his bland response.
“Stavros knows it was you with me.”
“Of course, he does. He's not an idiot.”
“He can publicly check. He can have the media check.”
“And?”
“And?” What kind of blasé answer was that? “He's going to verify your whereabouts then out you as my accomplice. Get into the pad and get back to campus.”
I should have pushed him back to Axer’s location immediately. I should never have allowed here to be here in the first place.
“I'm not leaping into that thing, especially not to go to campus.” He stretched out with his hands behind him on the floor, cracking his neck. His emotions were the opposite of relaxed. “You just shoved me through nine dimensions in forty minutes. Ten is asking far too much.”
“I'm not asking. You need to return to campus.” God, he needed to get back now. Why was he stalling? My heart beat a fast echo in my ears, overtaking background sound.
He gave me a bland look as he rose. “Do I?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Get in the pad, Constantine.”
He slapped both hands on the table, making magic ripple over the top in an echo of my earlier action, and showing his true emotion. “So, you can go running about on your own? You wouldn’t have survived today without us.”
“I know. And what do you think will happen next time?” Now that Stavros knew I was seeking help from others? “He’ll have plans for you, too. He knows it is you. Knows it is Axer. Once he has indisputable evidence he will destroy both of you.”
“He can try.”
“I can't keep you safe if you don't let me.”
He leaned forward and smiled—it was one of his meaner ones, the kind not often directed at me. “You can't keep me safe?”
“Not if you won't let me!”