“Stay out of the way.” Victor turned and ran into the fray.
I wasn’t going to do anything until I knew my hands, my body, were my own. I shook my hands, making sure my dad was not using them. It creeped me the hell out when he did that.
You’re welcome, his sardonic voice said in the middle of my head.
Shut up. And leave my body alone.
This isn’t your battle, he said. There is so much more you were meant for. So much more you and I could do to make this right. Death isn’t the end, nor life the beginning.
Save it for the encore, I thought. I am a part of this. My friends are in there.
You do not know who your true friends are.
I ignored him because, really? Busy trying to figure out how to lend a hand here, and the last time I’d let him tell me who my friends were, I was six. I set a Disbursement, headache, and traced a glyph for Sight. The entire field opened up like I’d just flipped the switch on a floodlight.
The scene was gruesome.
Several things were happening at once. On the compass points of the field, four people had backed off, and now stood with their hands above their heads and forward, feet spread for balance, in some kind of weird yoga pose that was actually sustaining the flow of magic into the shield. The Georgia sisters were three of them-I could tell because they each stood with one hand on their staff, and one extended skyward-and I think Carl, the brother twin, was the other. They were wet, shaking, and chanting, though I couldn’t hear their words, and held their focus and concentration with grim robotic determination.
Inside that circle that reached to a domed height maybe six stories above us, at least as high as the trees, was magic. Wild magic pounded in the sky beyond the bubble and fluttered around the bubble like a bee to nectar.
I didn’t know what it looked like on the outside, but I could guess. I guessed that it looked like a storm, a regular thunderstorm. Even the best magic users wouldn’t be stupid enough to try to tap into the wild magic to cast spells like Sight. So all they’d see was multicolored lightning rolling across the sky in vaguely glyphlike shapes. There were probably strikes in other parts of the town, caught by the Beckstrom Storm Rods, but the flow of magic here would be mostly invisible. Magic is so fast, it cannot be seen by the naked eye. And with plain old ordinary lightning blasting through the sky, I doubted anyone even knew what was going down behind the dome of Illusion in St. Johns.
So long as the four magic users held their concentration and kept the dome intact, this would never hit the news.
Inside the circle was a battlefield. Mostly, it looked like the magic users had chosen two sides. The one against Chase and Greyson and the one for them. With this many people fighting for Chase and Greyson, it was no wonder Greyson had escaped.
And with this many people on their side, I considered them against me, and responsible for Zayvion’s lying unconscious. I knew which side I belonged on. The side with Maeve, Victor, Hayden, Sedra, Dane, Shame, and Terric.
Chase and Greyson worked together, Liddy standing close by them, and not doing anything to stop them.
Over and over Chase called up gates for Greyson to leap through. He tore into magic users, pinning them, and drinking the magic out of them. He was mostly man now, wearing pants and no shirt, but still a wild thing, all muscle and pale skin, his hair long, his eyes more human than they had been, but still filled with an animal’s intelligence. No, the intelligence of a killer.
He attacked La, the other twin. She swung her scythe and magic so hard, it should have cut his arm off. But it didn’t even nick him. He shoved hands into her chest like he was digging for bones. He tipped his head back, the disk pulsing silver green at his throat, and howled over her screams as he sucked the magic out of her. Her twin, Carl, holding the east side of the dome, yelled out too, but the dome did not waver. He endured.
Big Hayden was having nothing of it. He wore the bomber jacket, but the shotgun and broadsword were no longer over his shoulder.
He fired the rifle at Greyson. Missed his head by an inch. Greyson ducked and rolled, using the unconscious La as a shield. Hayden swung his sword, and a sound wave pushed against my skin as if a hundred voices were calling out in a chant, a prayer, a force. There was magic in that sword-I don’t know what kind, but it was old. It wrapped around Greyson, dug into his muscles as he ran, slowing him and leaving lines of blood behind. Then there was a gate, and Greyson was through it.
Hayden was hot on his heels. Before the gate closed, Greyson grabbed a handful of it-of the magic Chase used to create the gate-and threw it like a hand grenade at Hayden.
Hayden sheathed his rifle, and caught most of the magic with his hand, diffusing the magic so that it froze into a cloud of shattered glass that fell and burned the grass at his feet.
Magic should not do what Greyson and Chase were doing with it. They were using so much magic, they should be unconscious by now. Someone had to be bearing the price of their magic use, but I didn’t know who it was, although it could be the other magic users on their side acting as Proxy.
Or maybe more magic users somewhere else in the city were standing Proxy. How far did this break in the Authority run? Were they fighting in Salem? In Eugene? Was there an uprising in Washington? California? Or was this just a local war?
I glanced at Chase. Stop her to stop Greyson. The flaw of that plan was that Greyson had now drunk enough Life magic, light magic, to transmute back into the form of a man. Which meant he had hands, and could cast magic as well as any of us. But I knew he wouldn’t stay a man for long. Not without a constant intake of magic.
Chase worked the southern end of the fight. Liddy had shifted to stand behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other drawing spells. Liddy whispered and traced glyphs, pouring magic into Chase, providing her with the magic to give to Greyson.
Liddy was a bad guy. Great. How was I going to get past the teacher of Death magic to get to Chase?
We don’t need the Closer, Dad said in my head. All we need is the beast, to take back what is mine.
Wrong, I said. We get the Closer, we get the beast. They’re Soul Complements. They’re one. And she’s going to be easier to take down.
I glanced around for Jingo Jingo. He might be a freak, but he was good at what he did.
Jingo Jingo was in a deadlock with Maeve. Jingo’s Death magic absorbed the Blood magic Maeve threw at him, sucked it down like a well with no end. He strolled toward her, almost as easy as a Sunday walk, nodding as if he understood why she was fighting him, and maybe would regret killing her. I think I heard him humming a song, an old gospel about babies and the devil and bones. Maeve wove spells with blood and blade, not about to back down.
Sedra, nearby, was locked in a cage work of magic like nothing I’d ever seen. It had to be technology, something my dad would have built.
Maybe it wasn’t just the disks the Authority had broken into the lab for. Maybe they’d come in and demanded that cage too.
That wasn’t in the lab, Dad said. I developed it years ago. It was taken from me years ago.
Like something out of Victorian clockwork, the cage was a collection of gears and glyphs and metal twisted into the shape of holding spells. It hinged in every section, as if it could be shaped into any spell, and shaped around any person.
Holy shit. It was a physical carrier of magic, like the disks, but specific to single spells.