Ordinary Magic (20 page)

“If you’re afraid—”

“I am. For you.”

Trixie stared at the floor. “I can take care of myself.”

At some point the ropes slacked enough that I could reach the knots and start to pick at them with my fingernails.

Toward the morning, when light started to smudge the shadows at the window, I thought about their previous ord, who didn’t have friends and family coming for him (mine
were
coming) and I thought, he hadn’t fallen.

Trixie shook Barbarian Mike awake, and the two of them had a quick, cold breakfast. It was mostly quiet, except for when Mike nodded at me and asked, “What about her?”

Trixie tossed a strip of meat more like leather in my lap with a smirk. That earned her an exasperated “
babe
.” “Oh, I’ll help her eat,” Trixie replied. “When she asks nicely.”

They cleaned up and cast their glamour, and Trixie undid
the ropes around my ankles and jerked me to my feet. My legs had fallen asleep during the night; I stumbled and fell a bit before they woke up and remembered how to walk straight.

“All right, since we’re so worried about
damaged goods,
let’s patch you up proper.” She pinched the fabric of my sleeve, rubbing it between her fingers, and the green coloring seeped out of my dress, puddling on the floor and leaving the fabric a generic yellow. She rubbed my face clean and raked a comb through my hair, then spun me around. “My, my, haven’t we been busy. Here, let me get that for you.” Trixie slipped a finger under the ropes at my wrists and the knots fell away. For a second the feeling rushed back into my hands and I almost cried out. And then she yanked the ropes tight, and knotted them again. “There, that’s better.”

Trixie jerked a cloak over my shoulders, long enough to reach the ground. It had a hood that she pulled low over my face.

“I can still see the gag,” Barbarian Mike said. “We should take it off. Gags get attention.”

“If we take it off, she’s going to scream.”

“Then we’ll just have to convince her not to.”

“I could break her jaw …,” Trixie offered.

“Um, no. That’d get attention too.” Barbarian Mike pulled the gag off, clapping a hand over my mouth before I could make a sound. “People worry when they see a kid with bruises.”

“Bruises won’t show up for hours.”

“Trixie,
enough
. Okay, here’s the deal, Zoe. We’re not going
to gag you. We’re going to be nice, but in return you’ve got to be nice and not scream or nothing. You scream, you’re going to make Trixie angry. I have seen Trixie angry and you don’t want that. Understand?”

I nodded. And when Barbarian Mike slipped the gag off, I played nice.

Outside, the sky was cloudy and the city was quiet. With Barbarian Mike on one side of me and Trixie on the other, they guided me out of the alley to the street. We headed left, then right, then straight, then left again. This time I paid attention, looking at street signs to try and figure out where I was, but the city was a sea to me. I tried to spot some cops or, even better, Kingsmen. I hoped I would at least see some people, because if I was going to run and have a chance, I’d need a crowd to hide in. But normal eyes are a lot better than ord eyes, and if you have spells, you can sense stuff too. Barbarian Mike and Trixie would suddenly turn and head another way, as if they knew something was there. They even switched directions once because of a postal carrier delivering a package. I don’t know if Trixie suspected I might try to signal for help, but her fingers slowly tightened until they felt like they were digging straight through my shoulder.

If we would only hit a big road, a major road, but Barbarian Mike and Trixie kept to the side streets, strolling along unhurriedly and taking turns seemingly at random. Above us, brightly colored taxi carpets zipped in and out of traffic like dragonflies. We passed a restaurant, where a few people sat,
sipping their morning coffee, so relaxed it made my stomach churn. How could everyone be so calm? Did they ever even look out the windows? Why wouldn’t someone just look over and
see
me and
help
me? Horrible, selfish people. I hated them,
I hated them,
and I didn’t even know I was crying until Trixie shook me and told me to
hush up
. I heard Barbarian Mike saying I was fine, I’d just had too much fun at the fest, then Trixie said, so help me, I was going to
regret it
—

Why are you waiting for THEM?
my brain suddenly shouted at me.
Why aren’t YOU doing anything? DO SOMETHING!

And I launched myself at Trixie with the only thing I had—my teeth. I latched on to her wrist and bit and bit and bit. She howled like a wounded animal and tried to wrench me away, and we fell together on the pavement, tumbling over the stones and slamming hard into a vendor’s cart. Potion bottles shattered down around us. Then there was a loud
pop
and Trixie started yelling, hot shrieks of blind pain. Strong arms wrapped around my waist, and Barbarian Mike lifted me up bodily. I was twisting and kicking like a wild animal, and for one split second I twisted the right way, and he lost his grip and dropped me.

With my hands still tied behind my back, I landed awkwardly, the impact stunning me. But my body was beyond needing my brain at this point, and it scrambled to my feet even as my mind merry-go-rounded out of control. Barbarian Mike was there trying to latch on to my cloak. Behind me Trixie was still screaming awful curses, and in between that “My knee! My knee!”

There were pounding footsteps behind me but I didn’t look back. I was running—down the sidewalk, shoving between people, and corkscrewing through the crowds. If they caught me, I’d know it soon enough. I shoved past the wrong person and they shoved back, and I fell forward into the street, scraping along the cobblestones.

“Ord!” Two people. One lurching. I rolled onto my butt and managed to squeeze my legs through the loop of my arms to get my hands in front of me. Pushing up, I dashed into the street. There were angry shouts, and carpets and people whizzed around me, lurched over me, just missing me and barely missing each other. Too fast for me to grab any, to hop on. I pushed forward, across the street, to the opposite sidewalk, all the while ripping my eyes up and down, looking for police, a Kingsman, anyone. My chest was so tight it felt like it might shatter. They were coming, I wouldn’t get very far, I needed, I needed—

There. An alleyway between two buildings where the wind blew leaves up against nothing, as if there were an invisible wall. Right in front was a sign:
ONE WAY
:
NO ENTRY
. I raced for it, heart hammering, and sprinted into the cool dark of the alley as the adventurers caught up. Trixie was limping badly, and her knee had swollen up to the size of a dragon’s egg. Her mouth tightened as she looked me over. “I’ll handle this,” she said to Barbarian Mike.

Trixie studied the barrier and tried to grab the sign. It gave her a nasty, crackling shock. She let go and carefully flexed her fingers, then leaned forward and knocked against the barrier with one knuckle. “Little pig, little pig, let us in.”

Behind her, people were starting to gather. It looked like our run across the street had caused a carpet accident; nothing bad, just a little roll-up. But an accident meant an ambulance and officials—it meant
police
. Or it should. Eventually.

I couldn’t wait for eventually. “Somebody help me! Call the police!” What did Becky say? Be specific. “You!” I pointed to a guy in the gathering crowd. He flinched but he looked at me. “Call the police! Call the Kingsmen! Call Alexa Hale at the palace! Do something!
Why are you just
watching?”

Barbarian Mike was obviously thinking the same thing. “We should get out of here—”

“Just a second!”

“And there are witnesses.” He nodded to the gathering crowd.

“I can get her!
”

“Trixie, come on!” he shouted. “We can get another one. There’s rug burn in the road. Somebody’s got to have called the cops. We’ve got to go.”

Somebody had. There were sirens in the distance; I held on to the sound like an incantation. Barbarian Mike grabbed Trixie’s arm, but she ignored him. “The longer you draw this out,” she said to me, “the more it’s going to hurt.”

I didn’t care anymore. All I cared about was holding on a few more minutes as the sirens steadily got louder. Trixie blasted the barrier, but it bounced back, scattering over the crowd. There were shouts of outrage, and one guy charged up to Trixie, exclaiming, “Hey, that was my wife you got there!” She ignored him. Barbarian Mike wrapped his arms around Trixie’s
waist and hefted her up, preparing (I hoped) to carry her out of there.

“What’s going on here?” The two men pushing through the crowd wore the deep, dull crimson of the police. Relief left my legs shaky, and I sagged against the brick wall.

“Nothing,” Trixie said, “nothing. Put me
down,
Michael!” He did and she landed on her bad leg, wincing.

“We didn’t mean any harm, officer,” Barbarian Mike intervened. “We were just trying to get our … child. She’s had a little too much excitement this weekend, and got mad at us, and ran away.”

“They
kidnapped
me!” I screeched. “They kidnapped me yesterday and they were trying to sneak me out of here and you have to arrest them!”

“It’s only an ord,” Trixie said, her tone like honey. The cops looked at me very closely, and for a second no one moved. Then one cop looked at the other cop, and he started waving the crowd away, and talking quietly in his crystal. In the distance, there were more sirens. The other cop removed a length of gold chain from his belt and asked the two adventurers to lie down on the ground and put their hands behind their heads.

Instead, Barbarian Mike shoved Trixie behind him and … it happened so fast, I’m still not clear on what happened. Barbarian Mike shouted, and then the world exploded into lights and magic and noise. So bright, so
loud
, I flinched and clapped my hands over my ears. There were more police, there were—Kingsmen? Melting into being out of thin air, and somebody must have done
something to the crowd because they vanished and the street was empty except for us. There was so much noise and shouting, and I thought I heard Barbarian Mike’s voice, bellowing for Trixie to “Run,
now
, RUN!” She looked at me, agonized, but she did, her body turning into flame as she streaked away. Kingsmen flashed after her, and Barbarian Mike charged them, looking a hundred times more terrifying and heroic than in the stories. The air shook as he started summoning magic … a lot of magic. Trees bowed toward him, branches snapped off and swirled. Cobblestones cracked in half and lifted up from the pavement. Magic swirled around, through me, and it was strange how I could stand there, shaky but more or less steady, in the midst of magic while the sheer force of it ripped awnings up the middle and twisted street signs into loops.

Then there were arms around me and at first I kicked away, panicking—but it was all right because I
knew
those arms, and it was like the string that was holding me up snapped. My knees went to water, but it didn’t matter because Alexa was holding me tight, and everything was okay. Then we were moving. She was hurrying me somewhere, I didn’t know where, I just knew it was away. I couldn’t tell anything for the relief crashing over me. Alexa was
here
. She’d come for me. “Finally,” I murmured, and started laughing.

“Are you okay?” Alexa asked, her voice ragged. “You look okay. Are you okay?” Murmuring soft, broken nothings, she cast away the ropes around my wrists. The second they fell free I latched on to her.

I think I nodded. I know I asked her about Peter. “They didn’t find him,” I said. “He wasn’t there. He ran off.”

“He’s at the school, he’s fine. The police found him inside of an hour.”

I’m pretty sure I nodded again, but my head felt weird and bobbly and Alexa had to help me climb up on something—a carpet—and we lifted into the air. Looking back, I remember how it was quieter by that point. I remember looking down at the street and seeing it streaked with red, and realizing it was uniforms. I also saw the Kingsmen—there were Kingsmen there.