Magic to the Bone (15 page)

“Never lucky,” she muttered. “Great. We’re locked in with a freaking bomb.”

The old lower field wasn’t used much except by the Ultimate Frisbee team. It was tucked down into the woods surrounding Juniper and a bit of walk down a hill from the main part of campus. The woods around it were kept clear of invasive species and brush, but otherwise left to grow wild. Vollan was in his bear form, but he pointed with his muzzle in the direction of the field, his silent intent
clear.

I was to go that way. He and Alek would go along the perimeter and alert his men to the change in plan.

I leaned into Alek’s chest and he curled his arms around me. We didn’t risk words, just stood for an all-too-brief moment.

“I love you,” I mouthed to him as we pulled apart finally.

Alek smiled and mouthed “Good” back to me.

There was nothing more to say. He shifted to tiger, and
then he and the huge white bear disappeared into the trees, moving quickly and quietly, Alek’s black-and-white tiger blending into the shadows.

I turned and made my way to the edge of the field. Magic and adrenaline flowed through me, washing away my fear and my fatigue. This was it. The last midnight. The boss fight.

First would come the talking in the hopes I could distract him so he didn’t
blow up my friends.

Yeah. Some things never change.

I felt his power in the form of a ward on the field before I stepped out of the trees. The field was pristine with snow, except for a huge charred circle burned into it. Samir stood at the center of the circle, his honey-sweet power rippling around him. A stone box carved with ornate patterns I couldn’t quite make out at this distance lay to
one side of him. Balor’s head, I assumed. Samir was prepared for the ritual, waiting for moonrise.

Moon wasn’t up yet. I walked out of the trees, ready to shield myself and hoping nobody shot me in the back. I’d been shot enough for one lifetime.

Samir didn’t seem surprised to see me. He stood silently watching me approach. When I reached the edge of the circle, he held up one hand. I stopped,
mostly of my own volition. I wasn’t ready to provoke him yet, so there was little harm in doing what he wanted. For the moment.

He was dressed more like a man attending a nice dinner than someone preparing a winter ritual. He had on dark grey pinstripe slacks and a maroon sweater. Samir’s only concession to the snow and cold were a very functional-looking pair of black boots. Not a hair was out
of place and his face still looked thirty, handsome and unlined.

His golden eyes were wary, tiny creases giving away a hint of strain. I might have been imagining that part. Wishful thinking is a powerful thing.

One thing was painfully clear to me. I was not ready for this. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. My heartbeat slowed. My fingers tingled with more than the chill of the air. I tried
to think up something clever or snarky to open with, but my mind wouldn’t obey.

“Jade,” Samir said. “I had a feeling you would come.”

“What? Miss you trying to do something this stupid? Never,” I said.

“Stupid?” His golden eyes narrowed slightly.

“Raising Balor? A god of blight and other bad shit? You think he’s going to stand here while you eat his heart?”
Keep him talking
, I thought.
Let’s
go
.

“No, I don’t intend to let him stand at all. This circle isn’t just for resurrection.” Samir motioned to the black circle and I saw there were other patterns cut into it, burned down into the bare and blackened earth. Looking at them made my brain hurt.

“The Fey are letting you do this because they think the gods will return. You won’t be the baddest thing out there anymore,” I said, playing
one of my trump cards. I doubted that Samir cared, but I was willing to say just about anything to keep him talking.

“You always were too clever,” he said. “I underestimated you, Jade. I don’t do that often.”

I snorted. “Really? You might want to reexamine your track record.”

His eyes were slits now, his mouth tight. Samir definitely didn’t like me laughing at him.

“Raising Balor will not
break the Seal,” he said. “But it will weaken it. More magic in the world is a good thing. The humans and other animals have ruled too long. We used to be revered, not hunted and hiding in the shadows.” So, he knew about the Seal. And didn’t care. Not a surprise there.

“What if I smudge this line?” I asked, poking a toe forward at the black line.

“It’s representational. The magic is in place.
The lines were just there as a guide. Mess with it all you want.” Samir shrugged, too casually. His eyes flicked over my head.

I worried he had noticed some kind of movement in the woods, and then I realized that the moon would be rising in the direction he looked. He was keeping track of the time. Which meant I was running out of it. Samir would want to end me before he had to do his ritual.

“Moon up yet?” I asked, not wanting to turn and look. I knew it wasn’t. Not quite. The sky was still too light. The sunset made the woods behind Samir look like they were on fire.

“You will know when it is,” Samir said. “We’ll be celebrating with a bang.”

“The bomb you have under the Student Commons?” I said. His eyebrows went up. He hadn’t realized I knew. “I don’t think so.” It felt so damn
good to be able to surprise him.

His cloying magic rippled out from him in the direction of the college center. To my dragon-enhanced mage-vision it looked like a thick cord running up the hill. Until he awakened it, I hadn’t noticed it among all the other magic stacked up around us. His line to the sacrifice. I was going to have to snip that somehow.

But not yet. No telling what effect that
would have. I decided to wait on that as a last resort. Seeing magic was apparently a dragon thing, not a sorcerer thing. It was a big advantage that I had. Samir could probably detect magic. He’d dodged my spells easily enough in the past, but I bet he had to use concentration to do it. I had for the most part, until my dragon-self had fully integrated. Now I just saw magic if I looked for it.

“I’m surprised you are here, then,” Samir said. “Not up there, trying to save them. Going to let them all die just like before?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m going to stop you.”
Keep him talking, and nobody explodes
. Time was running out like sand through my fingers. I hoped that Vollan and Alek were ready. I hoped that Cal had made it to the bomb.

Samir laughed, the sound chilling me far worse
than the icy air. His magic coalesced around him, and I knew time wasn’t just running out… it was gone.

The grenade had collapsed a section of the tunnel just inside the doorway. It must have found some kind of old structural weakness to cause this much damage, Harper thought. She scrabbled
at the debris, pulling bits of stone and twisted rebar away. There was no telling how thick the cave-in was or if the stairs behind the door were safe. If Levi was safe.

She pushed that thought away. No point worrying about him when she had no way to know. At least nobody was shooting at them anymore.

“This is like that scene at the end of
Cabin in the Woods
,” Ezee said. He had stripped off
his coat and was working beside her.

“What? Waiting around for the world to explode?” Harper made a face at him in the dim light. She’d been relatively clean before, but digging in rock debris had fixed that.

“I guess I’m the fool and you are the virgin,” Ezee said, pulling free another chunk of concrete. More dust and rock slid into place in the dent he’d just created.

“Hey now,” Harper protested.
“How do you know it isn’t the other way around? I’m pretty funny. I have antics.”

“Honey,” Ezee said, his dark eyes glinting in the light filtering out from the boiler room, “I am no virgin.”

“Neither am I,” Harper said.

“When’s the last time you had sex?”

“Whoa now. Just because the Sahara is a desert doesn’t mean it never rains there.” Harper gave up on her section and walked a few steps
down the hall. The dead mercenary was still heaped there. It was a testament to how much rock dust must have been in the corridor that she couldn’t really smell the blood anymore.

She nudged his body with her foot. They were going to die here because of this asshole. It was totally unfair.

“It’s all fun and games until someone throws a grenade,” she said, punctuating her words with a hard kick
to the corpse’s stomach.

A rectangular piece of plastic shot free of the body and spun into the corridor.

Harper looked at Ezee. “Radio,” they said at the same time. She kicked herself for not remembering one of the first rules of adventuring.
Always loot the corpse
.

Harper snatched it up. Ezee followed her down the hall to the boiler room as she brought it into the light for examination.

The radio seemed intact. A red light blinked on it.

“How do we call for help?” Harper asked. “This thing has numbers on it. Must be the channels?”

“It’s the bad-guy radio,” Ezee said. “They’ll be monitoring the signal. Is it even working? We haven’t heard it.”

“Volume was all the way down,” Harper said, twisting the nob. “What are the odds that Levi or Cal are near a corpse?”

“And not buried
under that rubble?” Ezee said, his face grim.

He’d clearly been trying not to dwell on his own fears for Levi. Harper empathized with that.

“Worth a try,” Harper said. She clicked the side button to talk. “Leviticus,” she yelled into it. “This is Fox paging Leviticus, over.”

Levi hated his full name as much as she hated hers. Hopefully if he were alive and could hear the bad guys’ radios, he’d
find a way to answer.

The radio crackled almost immediately, making Harper flinch, as she still had it near her face with the volume all the way up.

“Azalea,” a voice said. It wasn’t Levi’s, but Cal’s. “Channel not clear.”

“He didn’t say ‘over’ yet,” Harper said as Ezee tried to grab for the radio.

“I don’t think anyone actually talks like that,” Ezee said.

“I’m a condemned woman,” Harper
said, motioning toward the bomb she was trying not to look at. “Don’t ruin my paramilitary dreams.”

“Ask him if Levi is okay,” Ezee said.

“He called me Azalea. I’m sure Levi is fine. But he said channel not clear.”

“We’re on the bad guys’ channel. See those numbers? We have to change somehow, but if you say a number to switch to, they can just switch to listen in or jam it or something.”

“Not if we use code,” Harper said, her mind racing. She studied the numbers and then clicked the button. “Zerg cheese, I repeat go to Zerg cheese,” she said into the radio.

“Zerg cheese?” Ezee raised an eyebrow.

“Cal is a gamer. He plays Zerg. He’ll know.” Harper clicked the dial over to the channel, praying she was right and that this worked.

“Six pool,” the radio said. “Funny.”

“Is Levi okay?”
Harper asked, relief flooding through her. He’d understood the channel change.

“I’m okay. We’re pinned down but safe enough,” Levi’s voice came through the radio. “You guys?”

Ezee fist-pumped and muttered a prayer of thanks to the ceiling.

“Ezee is here with me. We’re good. Except this bomb.”

“Um, Harper?” Ezee said, looking at the bomb.

There was what looked like a circuit board on top of
a pile of orange-putty bricks. The board had a line of lights. Lights that had been dark except for a single red one earlier. Now they were green and blinking on and off in a line.

“The bomb just started blinking,” Harper told Cal.

“Describe it,” Cal said. “And describe where you are, what tools you might have.”

Harper took a deep breath and looked around the room, then back at the bomb.

“Red bricks, maybe twenty of them all wrapped in gold wire? It’s just a block in the center of the room, on the floor. There are wires from a circuit board thing going into the bricks. Two sets of wires with metal at the brick parts. Not much else here. A sink. Some folding chairs. No tools.”

“I’ll check the corpse,” Ezee said, heading out the door.