“What a stunning deduction,” Axer said sarcastically, shattering one man’s leg and breaking the neck of another.
I cocked my head and looked down at my chest and the silver blue coating of magic there.
I could hear the two of them arguing, even though their lips weren’t moving, and I had no frequency in place anymore.
“You let her leave,” Axer said. He viciously slashed a man’s midsection without a shred of expression showing the mental battle he was fighting with the man at his side.
“Right. Because I have so much control over her. Like a chidog leashing a feldragon.” Constantine was moving and ducking smoothly through the fight, dropping anyone his hand touched.
“You don’t, but you can’t seem to accept it.”
Constantine sent a blast of magic at Axer at the same time that he threw a bolt at someone sneaking in from the right. Axer caught the blast with an unamused look and threw it into the chest of a hunter trying to rise.
I looked up as the world swirled and the dawn sky darkened to unnatural night once more—far too quickly a day cycle. I gripped the hand held tightly in mine and knelt down to touch the ground.
“The mechanisms that can hold her are in the hands of people we don't want using them. We should be searching out those devices.”
“To control her. To limit her.” Axer snapped, hitting him back and neutralizing two others that were circling Constantine.
“To stop her from constant magical suicide.”
“You can’t stop her,” Axer said grimly.
A dozen freshly cloaked men ran down the street. With a forward motion of my right hand on the pavement, I sent a wave rolling down the street, throwing the reinforcements to the ground.
Both boys swung toward me.
“Er, hi?” I gave a small, useless wave with my non-dominant hand, at the same moment I realized why I hadn’t used my left. Rosaria was staring blankly, crouched beside me, as if everything in her world had been turned on its head. Her hand held a death grip on mine.
I found mine wasn’t any less clutching. I couldn’t make myself let hers go.
Constantine immediately headed our way, absolute fury smoldering under a blank expression.
“My brother died when my hands sparked,” Rosaria whispered, oblivious to the undercurrents, looking at the destruction around us. “Is this what magic does?”
I gave her hand a squeeze. “No. He’s going to be fine. It’s not all…death.”
Axer swung his hand and emptied an entire container of acidic magic into a man's face.
Chapter Ten: Cracked Pieces of Ice
I cringed. “Mostly.”
Rosaria’s face filled with horror as she watched Axer wipe through the remaining soldiers as if he had been warming up before, and now was finishing a workout. There was a reason he was feared. A reason people always said with hesitancy, “But he’s on the good side.”
It reminded me a little of watching him decimate a hundred opponents in Freespar on Will’s tablet that first peek into the magic world.
But I had also seen him rehabilitate and heal the most fearsome animals and opponents he fought, and restore the landscape, always making certain it contained magic.
I pulled magic into my palm and thought of Christian. I tugged at the light connection already formed between Rosaria and me and touched her feelings for her brother—the mixture of love, frustration, and the devotion that they shared—and pulled it into the magic I was creating through the layer and grid.
A butterfly clutching a rose unfurled in my hand and I placed it in her free one.
Guard Rock climbed to my shoulder and flipped into my hood, watching her from his favorite spot.
“It’s what you make of it,” I whispered.
She stared in wonder as a lush garden bloomed around us with alyssum, asters, and liatris, and dandelion seeds lifted into the air like fluffy stars. Her gaze met mine and she gave a stuttered nod.
“I am so angry with you right now, darling, that there isn't a synonym violent enough to describe my fury,” Constantine said mildly as Axer finished off the remaining hunters.
I cringed. But the wonder on Rosaria’s face and the feeling of my power was too much for regret.
“I needed to save them,” I said. I touched the ground as the layer cracked another small bit at the overwhelmed points. Far too much magic was exerting itself on a layer bound to non-magic.
The shaking world steadied and stilled, but the extra magic used around the layer that was pulling into my body was filling me almost uncomfortably. It was a heady, curious sensation.
“You are the one you need to be saving.”
I had no time to unpack the pieces of that, though, as praetorians suddenly surrounded us. And with them was Kaine.
Power surged through me. I opened the layers with my mind, clasped both of Rosaria’s hands in mine with a whisper of “It will be okay,” and shoved her to the same place that held Samuel with his connections and the girl reaching toward the stars.
Freed, I held one hand out toward Constantine to return him to the Third, and the other to Axer to send him to the spot where I had sent the ferals. But both were already in motion—Axer sidestepping and Constantine slipping around me before I could connect to either of them.
The praetorians swarmed, and like the shifting tile magic in the Midlands, I used the magic I had already channeled to flip the entire section of First Layer city pavement we were standing on into the Second Layer.
The fifty-foot patch of Taiwanese street shone starkly in the massive Saharan desert.
The praetorians rose, shrieking, and their shadows grew long and uneven along the dunes.
The first shadow hit the salt circle Axer threw and was sucked into the sand.
Kaine smiled and dove toward him.
“No,” I gritted out, and threw a paper from my cloak. I layered a shimmer of nasty enchantments over it as it whirled—the same wards that kept the portal pad safe from Kaine.
Another praetorian flew into its path.
The sacrificial praetorian screamed as the paper touched him, and his shadow cloak sizzled, leaving behind a normal mage, broken and twitching on the hot sand.
Axer thrust a sword through Kaine, then twisted his body just as a shadow pierced the air where his back had been, skimming the edges of his cloak in slowed motion. But Kaine’s shadowed fist pierced Axer’s other shoulder as he turned.
I took out the praetorian trying to clasp a metal gauntlet around my wrist, but the action left me unable to help Constantine as a praetorian ripped away his protective shield. Constantine hissed in pain and tried to block the shadow as it pierced the diminished magic of the cloak and reached for his face.
I whipped toward him, but it seemed that I was moving in slow motion as well. No, no.