The Protection of Ren Crown (19 page)

Rip!

I sat straight up and my hand went to my chest as a strange, unconnected rip tore through me. Justice Toad gave two loud croaks. I fished him out of my bag and saw that Two Level Twos had just occurred in the Politics Building next door.

I quickly logged that I was on my way.

Neph and Will continued what they were doing, both of them used to my community service routine. “Leave your stuff,” Will said. “We'll be here.”

As I walked to the stairs, I could still feel the unidentified, but familiar gaze tracking my movements. I rubbed my chest. The dull ache was still beating there, and I fought a thread of unease as I headed to my first service call.

Chapter Nine: Olivia

Striding into the brick and glass Politics Building next door, I initiated the temporary enchantment I had mastered last term for a quick energy boost, then scrolled the call stats. Two offenders, curses thrown, a debate gone wrong in the debate auditorium.

I'd make sure to tell Olivia all of the unprotected details later. Even if she was still out of sorts, I was certain she'd be amused by a debate duel.

I stopped cold in the auditorium's doorway as I watched my roommate shoot a dart at someone and heard my tablet beep again. The beep meant that the offense had been upgraded. Possibly due to what looked like a
poisoned
dart. A poisoned dart that my cool, collected roommate had just thrown at someone's throat.

I hastily whipped the tablet forward and pressed a ready-made enchantment. All action stopped, all limbs froze. The girl on the receiving end of the dart, a lanky, brown-haired girl, froze in the act of falling—a violent red curse outstretched on her fingertips. Olivia's face was frozen in a mask of furious, deadly intent.

The debate audience sat at the edges of their auditorium seats, enraptured by the scene playing out in front of them.
Cretins.

A tailored boy who looked to be on the upper edge of twenty-two, belatedly hurried up the steps toward the frozen combatants. “Okay, okay. I realize we might all be a little on edge with what has recently happened. Let's take a fifteen-minute break.”

People reluctantly began rising from their seats.

I pushed the tablet's re-right button. The magic pulled Olivia and the other girl upright and extinguished any remaining combat magic, shooting the unfulfilled magical components and any half-formed enchantments to the Midlands for modification and dispersal. The girl was vaguely familiar. I racked my image memory as I executed the steps needed to contain two combatants.

The Contract Magic was pretty creepy, as always, in the way it subdued mages. And enrollment contracts were signed in blood.

The tablet's built-in first aid enchantment stabilized the poison, but the girl would still need to go to medical or to the Neutralizer Squad. It was the student's call which avenue to take.

The vaguely familiar image of the girl slotted into place. She was the one I had tried to spell with Justice Toad after she had insulted Olivia last term. Unfortunately, the karmic magic had promptly turned
me
into a toad.

This was obviously not the first time that she and Olivia had crossed verbal swords, though maybe it had been the first time they had resorted to physical ones.

I looked at her name on the incident log. Inessa Norrissing. Another image connected as my gaze hit the three rings on her right hand. She had been sitting at the magicists' table where I had first placed a cafeteria tray––sitting next to the emerald-eyed girl, who had greatly overshadowed her. Magicists were old magic. That meant she and Olivia probably went way back, and obviously not in a good way.

Great.

I withheld a sigh, then released both girls. “A Level Two and Level Three,” I announced. Patterns were important in the justice system. Forms had to be followed.

Inessa was immediately in motion, neutralized fingers pointing at Olivia. “I want her punished!”

I gripped my tablet. “Punishment
is
the point of me being here, Miss Norrissing.”

“Watch how you speak to me.” Her finger turned in my direction. “I know who you are, and we are watching you,” she hissed.

I looked down at Justice Toad and tried to keep my intentions semi-stable as my body grew both hot and cold. “Looks like cleaning the facilities in the Eighteenth Circle field house is an available punishment.”

JT helpfully listed fifty toilets in the scrolling description of the task. Even if the Norrissing girl cleaned with magic, it would still leave her magic feeling like
it
had cleaned a toilet. Magic was part of a mage and each use left a temporary mirrored mark. Unpleasant, if one used magic for things other than creating rainbows and butterflies, as I knew well.

Her lips snapped shut and sharp spikes of black shot out of her aura. Even if I'd lost the remnants of the enhancement spell, I bet I would have seen those; they were so strong.

Justice Toad scrolled a few other interesting possibilities. “Or, look at that, I could give you animal—”

“I will clean the facilities in the Eighteenth Circle field house tonight, by my magic I so do vow.” The black spikes crystallized into a carbon film and small noises of rage worked the passageway from her throat to her nose.

The taste of her wrath was as unpleasant as if I had licked a dirty fireplace.

The spells inherent in the Justice Magic gave me the power to physically remove her from the conflict premises. I pointedly dismissed her, which made her back away from us with stilted, wood-burnt steps. I turned my gaze to Olivia, who coldly looked back.

Her pink-furrowed lips were stretched and tight. I was already highly attuned to her and the extreme emotional and physical responses she couldn't control at the moment nearly made me forget my own name.

Justice Toad vibrated in my hand. I wiped a finger across the smooth skin of my forehead, feeling the pounding in my skull underneath.

“Well?” Olivia demanded. “What am I cleaning? Or am I going to run pointlessly for three days?”

To my knowledge, Olivia had never been in trouble, though she had seen enough service workers give me punishments to know how the system worked.

A thought wiggled around insidiously, my senses clinging to it from multiple directions. “Do you...? Do you want to shadow me for fifteen hours? It would increase your punishment hours, since you wouldn't be doing the penalty alone, but you could use this as an opportunity to get a first-hand observation of the system and meet future clients.”

Her expression went flat and unreadable. “You would sacrifice your time?”

I would be required to put in twice the hours, in order to compensate for the justice aspect of the parceled magic—which
was
a crushing sacrifice in the wake of all of the research I needed to do—but Olivia was worth it, and I needed to let her know that. We could share in this.

“Yes. It will be fun, doing this with you.”

Something broke in her eyes and a ripple of smothering tightness gripped me even though she physically turned away. A second later, I felt the ripple ease, and when she turned back she was composed once more. “By my magic, I so do vow.”

She turned and strode quickly away. I let the contract magic wash over me, then made to follow.

“Ren.”

I turned to see Delia standing behind me. I hadn't seen her in the crowd, and I wondered how long she had been standing there. I had programmed Justice Toad's default setting to silence proceedings from strangers' ears, but I hadn't thought to add a shield against friends too. And Delia, in particular among my friends, was prone to mischief. Our first meeting had resulted in me almost getting eaten by a swamp monster due to her deliberate deception. I was really hoping she hadn't heard the entire conversation.

“Hey. How are you?” A stupid thing to ask when the world was going to Hell. I awkwardly gripped my tablet.

“You shouldn't have done that.” Her expression and eyeliner darkened. Her clothing, too, grew more severe with her emotion—lengthening and growing sharp edges. “You shouldn't give Price more than she deserves.”

“What do you mean, Delia?” I asked carefully.

“Your personal loyalty is one of your best qualities. It is not one of hers.”

“That's not true.” I thought of all the secrets Olivia knew and had kept hidden for me.

“Give it time,” she said bitterly. “You forget that I have known her longer. Magicists are loyal to their governments, not to their fellow mages.”

I wondered what had produced the bitterness underscoring her words, since Delia was friends with numerous magicists.

“Olivia isn't a magicist.”

“No, but if you investigate her mom, you will see she is something even worse.” Delia stepped away as the club was called to order again. Her eyes were now completely rimmed in coal, and her charcoal eye shadow was extending upward. “Protect yourself.”

~*~

I quickly retrieved my items from the library, reassured Neph and Will that everything was okay, then set off in search of Olivia.

She was sitting on the west face of the mountain, the setting rays of the sun igniting her face with light almost too brilliant to focus upon.

“Hey.” I sat down on the grass next to her. A balmy breeze blew over us, in stark contrast to the winter snow and bundled up skiers, snowboarders, and sledders three levels down. Weather magic was a beautiful thing, especially in the midst of emotional turmoil.

Olivia and I sat silently for a long time, watching the sun sink beneath the peaks of the distant hills. The waning sense enhancement gently pulsed with conflicting feelings from her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked quietly.

“Norrissing said—” Olivia cut herself off and smoothed the hair above her forehead, straightening the already perfectly straight locks. “Well…what she said is hardly relevant.”

“It's relevant to me.”

Olivia looked off into the distance. The view was stunning here—at five thousand feet in the air, we had an uninterrupted vista for miles around, with zero altitude effects—but I had a feeling she wasn't seeing any of it. Her gaze was far off, but inwardly focused.

“My path has become hazy,” she said.

I weighed my response carefully. Olivia had never deviated from the path she had been born to—that had been obvious from our first meeting, and Delia's words had strengthened that observation.

“I think that happens to a lot of people our age. All those self-help books say so.”

“It doesn't happen to me.”

“Perhaps your path is becoming clear? Maybe you are only seeing the haze you have been in as the path clears before you now,” I said.

She didn't reply and we watched the last rays disappear.

“What did that girl, Inessa Norrissing, say to get you so angry?”

“It matters not.” Her voice was strange—half-revelatory and half-bemused. “My path. Yes, you are right. I am in charge of my own destiny.”

She rose and brushed off her tailored skirt. “And she is an ant beneath my shoe. Come. Let's sign up for classes, like the rest of the lemmings. Then we can go to the cafeteria. I'm hungry, and you haven't eaten enough in the past two days.”

Startled, I nearly lost my grip on my bag's straps.
Olivia willingly wanted to go to the cafeteria?
“
Really?
Great!”

Her gaze held mine. It was painful, the anguish and uncertainty that resided beneath her cool facade.

I wanted our friendship, and our group camaraderie, to be the new normal for her. I wanted to envelop her into
my
family.

As the winter sun faded and the magicked lamps on campus brightened, we fell into step and I nudged her. Some of the tension eased from her shoulders. A pained look stole across her face.

“Thank you,” she said.

I nudged her again. “Hey. At least your bad days don't come with jumbo-sized monsters.”

“Not all monsters are large,” she said quietly. She straightened her shoulders. “Now. Service. Let's discuss how we are going to bring miscreants to justice and help my clients stay out of trouble.”

That
sounded like my roommate, which was a huge relief.

But as Olivia continued ticking off points on her fingers, the hair on the back of my neck prickled. I surreptitiously looked around. I couldn't see anyone, but there were eyes focused on us.

Watching.

Chapter Ten: Close Encounters of the Good and Worse Kind

The relief of being united again was strong when Olivia and I finally sat down at the cafeteria table we had inhabited at the end of last term. Mike and Neph were already seated. Neph smiled at me and floated over a scratch paper that I had forgotten in my mad scramble to reach Olivia.

I watched her easy use of magic wistfully. I could do some extraordinary things, but because I hadn't been brought up with magic, the easy, everyday magics still eluded me.

“You are the best, Neph. Thanks.” The paper had a list of possible classes on it, along with animated doodles I had made around the ones I liked best. “We just signed up for classes.”

That made me sound normal. Normal mages signed up for classes. Normal mages didn't worry about how their magic might be used to destroy civilization.

Normal!

The calming magic that was actively pushed throughout the cafeteria touched me. Everyone else was allowing it to blanket them—even Olivia—and Neph wasn't doing anything to make it stop like she had at Top Campus, so I drank the calm down too, wanting to be chipper and not paranoid for my friends.

Positive thoughts—cross-layer peace would be achieved, magicists from all layers would clasp hands together and sing a united anthem, and Raphael would retire from evil, then gift my magic to an orphanage.

“Hated to miss your birthday, Ren. We are totally rescheduling that celebration,” Mike said, pointing at me. He looked tanned and healthy, and not at all like the corpse he could have been if he had been part of our First Layer parking lot adventure.

“You didn't miss much. Rescheduling sounds good.” I grinned.

He returned my smile. “Good. What classes did you sign up for?”

I relaxed into calm thoughts and smiled at him. “Individualized Architecture and Design, Layer Politics 101, and Engineering Concepts in Warding. I'm also continuing Personal Study with Stevens.”