The Protection of Ren Crown (32 page)

I put the paper egg on the table between us.

She narrowed her eyes at my obvious diversion. “Your gift to Nephthys was not what I was going to discuss first.” But her fingers automatically reached for the egg and its embedded magic. She stopped herself just shy of grabbing it, her training deeply ingrained. Olivia didn't usually touch magic from others without weaving ten different revelation spells first.

I said nothing as she hesitated, but when she lifted it into her hand a moment later, it was all I could do to withhold the fierce smile that threatened to overtake me at her implicit statement of trust.

She moved the egg around her palm, examining it carefully. I could see the magic thrumming through the paper's surface and attaching to her as she touched it.

I knew she felt the magic, and the connection, and that she likely guessed at some of what I had done. “Ren?”

“It's a small protection.” I tried for a light, slightly dismissive tone.

“You used paint.”

“Yes.”

Her fingers curled possessively around the egg. “You shouldn't waste paint on me.”

“It's anything but a waste.”

She didn't respond; her gaze focused on the gently curved paper.

“Just keep it on you. Please?” I said softly.

After a moment, she gave a stiff nod.

“Great,” I said, relieved. “Thanks.”

She pinned me with a dissecting gaze as she tucked the egg carefully into her shoulder bag. “Is this why your magic felt exhausted at the beginning of lunch?”

I waved a hand. “It's always exhausted.” That was usually a good thing for other people, as it drained me from doing anything accidental and destructive. “But I feel
great
now.”

“That's Nephthys' doing. She—” Olivia hesitated, and her fingers dipped into her bag, touching the egg again. She shook her head. “Nothing. I'm happy you are recharged.”

As we dumped our trays, she still looked hesitant, so I badgered her into talking about her morning class, encouraging her to dissect all of the ways in which her classmates were idiots.

She accompanied me to a henge of five arches. One arch in the cluster would send me to the squad's meeting point, and another would get her close to the main law building. I waved. I wouldn't see her until late. She wouldn't be at dinner, due to her class load, and I was on duty alone for community service tonight.

She glanced at her bag, and at the egg inside, then she returned my wave with focused attention—she was still unused to such casual gestures of friendship—and stepped through the arch.

Stay safe, Olivia.

I couldn't trail her everywhere on campus. She had the egg for protection now. It had to be enough.

Chapter Seventeen: Criminally Yours

The squad group meeting was...lengthy. The entire Justice Squad and six members of the Combat Squad, tromped around the far corners of the mountain and examined ley line positions and tested protection points. We received checklists of what to search for and what to record on our rounds…a rotation list to follow
, blah, blah, blah.
It was a good thing we'd only be responsible for protecting and monitoring campus for the single week when the combat mages were gone. This was so
not
me.

There was no way Dare painstakingly filled out forms every day, so the Combat Squad had to have some system that eliminated the busywork—maybe some sort of mental frequency recording at point of observation. But Justice Squad members weren't given that privilege. Fighting monsters wasn't my thing, but filling out the horribly long and detailed forms they were handing out to us now as examples of what we would have to do
really
wasn't.

Dare wasn't part of the inter-squad group training, but I had the horrible feeling that he would quiz me on all of this information tomorrow. With that in mind, I paid extra, careful,
painful
attention.

~*~

Mike poked at his food at dinner. Mike, Delia, and I were the only ones currently occupying our dinner table, and I was pretty sure Delia had only joined us because Olivia was absent. Olivia and Delia had been avoiding each other like the plague due to what Mike deemed “grade school conflict.”

“I still think the administrators should have waited to start school,” Mike said.

Delia smirked. “Rain class sucked, huh?”

“I am a horrible, horrible rain dancer. It was like watching a frost chicken run on two feet instead of three.”

I quickly accessed an image of a frost chicken on my bracelet encyclopedia. It was a colossus cow/chicken hybrid that had a large extra limb for stability, and that achieved a frozen internal temperature perfect for food preservation. Right. Someday I was going to have to make a trip to the Fourth Layer.

Bellacia Bailey passed our second-tier table and smiled. “Good afternoon.”

Delia and Mike both stopped speaking for a moment, and smiled thinly back, echoing her greeting. I didn't bother; I was too busy watching the way the air vibrated with the sound waves of her magic.

Magic flowed through the air around her with every warm and rich word that emerged. Fascinating.

When she was finally out of sight, Mike nudged me. “So, how was architecture?” he asked.

“Great!” I made an effort to form my potatoes into a careful pyramid, so as to avoid their gazes.

“You didn’t go,” Mike said, obviously not fooled by this tactic.

“Nope.”

Instead, I had visited Constantine after squad practice and we had fiddled with a vortex he was constructing, skating the thin edge of a write-up once again. What was with him and vortexes anyway? It was like he was constantly trying to get expelled. But at least we had re-established our normal relationship as partners in crime and I had been able to help him with something.

When I finally looked up, Delia laughed and winked at me. “Already slaffing? And on your first day?” she teased. I frowned for a moment, before slaffing translated with great effort into skipping. Great, Bailey had set my translator on the fritz again. I rapped the bracelet Will had given me—as if I could fix the bad reception signal—then tasked my magic to fix the “circuits” on its own. Some magic attached to the leather and some washed right over the top. The bracelet gave a half-ping, as if rebooting.

Grimacing, I just put my mind to paying better attention.

“Individualized study guidelines say I can attend anytime,” I said, pointing my fork at Delia. “Will and I rescheduled the feed to sometime tonight.”

“Sure you will.” She smirked. “Right after you find something unbearably interesting to work on.”

Before I could respond, my magic gave a sudden tug and my gaze shifted upward. Dare sat down in his customary seat at the table in the corner of the first tier, his back to the rest of the room.

“We'll see how rescheduling works out.” Delia leaned back in her chair, bangs brushing her eyebrows. “When you stop by during
service
duty tonight.” She tapped her lip with one lacquered fingernail and tipped her head to the side as if thinking hard. “How did you get community service again? Following rules?
Hmmm
.”

I poked my potatoes. “Very funny.”

“It is, but I love your two-hour shifts.” She withdrew a small weaving she'd been working on from her bag and pulled five of the end threads together in a complicated series of knots that she made look easy. “I'm planning something amazing and diabolical tonight that should only ring as an itsy Level One. You'll love it. Make sure you grab the call. But in the likely event you happen to miss it, I'll show you when you come by for help on some
other
new project you rope yourself into.”

“I will get it all done,” I protested.

Delia examined me through her bangs in a way that indicated she thought my self-awareness deserved a setback. Her fingers kept manipulating the magical strings steadily. “Did you use the fastening I showed you? The one that took thirty minutes of your nonexistent time a few nights back to learn?”

I put my hand to my forehead. She was right, I'd probably end up with ten more projects tonight. That was just how my life worked. “Yes, it was great. Will and I used it on something we designed for Neph. Thanks again.”

She smirked and addressed Mike without taking her gaze from me. “Ten munits says Ren doesn't do the class feed tonight. And that Will plunges her headfirst into something else instead.”

“Twenty. They are both insane. They'll plunge, but then still manage to shove in the class feed when all rational people are in bed.”

“Bet.”

Magic circled around them, then settled.

“Thanks a lot, guys.” I speared a ravioli. “Feeling the love.”

“You would be feeling it if you stop looking like a vagabond once in a while,” Delia said, then added something extra-saucy about how
hard
I could feel it that made Mike choke on his food.

Delia smirked at him, then refocused on me. I quickly hid my grin. I chewed my pasta and quirked a brow, waiting to hear today's “Aggrieved Fairy Godmother” report.

“Ratty ponytails and random streaks of charcoal and magic on your cheeks and clothes, Ren, are not really selling the availability of a nubile, young mage in need of some serious—”

“Manticore!” an angry voice yelled.

I jerked my head toward the voice, expecting to see the monster of the day, but the cafeteria was blessedly monster free.

“I'm telling you, we should do the manticore,” the same unfamiliar voice said, liberal curse words punctuating the statement.

The table of gamers five tables over from ours started arguing loudly, drawing attention from the rest of the second tier.

“No, a one-horned beast first. Then the manticore on Level Two.”

“Don't be a jally-bot, ladtoe,” said a redheaded boy to a boy with hair that defied gravity.

“Conceptual shalley planning. If you don't start out smaller, Trick, you have nowhere to go.”

None of the unfamiliar words translated into anything G-rated.

They started arguing more vociferously until the redhead threatened, “I'll give you a one-horned beast.”

Magic swirled and shot from his hand. The other boy ducked to the side, saving himself and his hair. The bolt swept up toward the corner of the first cafeteria tier, directly at Dare, whose back was still incongruously presented to the rest of the tables. It seemed an even stranger position now that magic was flying toward him.

I waited for Dare to spring out of his chair, whirl around, and counter the attack.

He didn't do anything of the sort. Leaning back, he played with something on his plate and was likely smirking at the raucous conversation that always enveloped the most popular combat table. But I saw Ramirez—the dark and deadly boy sitting next to him—turn slightly.

A combat mage sitting across from them who had a clear view of the room said something, but it was far too late. I watched in morbid fascination, wondering what Dare was going to look like with a unicorn horn.

He never moved. The spell hit, then ricocheted violently—blasting the redhead who had cast the spell clear out of his seat and against the railed edge of the second tier. My translation spell took that moment to fix itself completely, ringing loudly and clearly in my head as the boy furiously swore.

Three horns emerged from the redhead's face—one from his forehead and one from each of his cheeks.

Dare never bothered to turn in his seat. A few mages at his table who could see the results laughed, and I could hear, “Do that in practice today,” and, “Cast that at Johnson on Friday.”

Either Dare had countered the redhead’s spell without movement or visible care—very possible—or one of Dare's natural shields had a three-power force—three times the effect, reflected back at the caster.

Mike shook his head. “Never shoot anything in the direction of that table, or toward any of the other combat tables...especially now. The combat mages go a little batty during competition season while practicing for the combat qualifier and games. They hold full defenses and shields in place for stupidly insane amounts of time. And some of them
always
hold them.”

I looked at the boy trying to stem the growth of his three new pointy additions.

“Noted,” I said, a little awed at the horns.

“Brilliant,” the redhead's companion said as he helped him stand. “Add a horn geometrically at each level until the final beast has ten of them shooting out magic in a whirlwind of directions.”

“For sure, lad! For sure!” agreed the redhead, excitement in his voice as they put their drastically dissimilar heads together to hash out their new plan.

“Idiots,” Delia said, though her tone was fond, indicating that she knew the two boys. But her next few words required active translation making me frown down at my bracelet.

The translation spell was likely on the fritz again because of Bailey.

Mike shook his head, still watching the gamers wildly plot their games and the combat table discuss battle spells. “Wait until you see the combat qualifier. It's insane.”

I absently wiped my cheeks, hoping I'd get the charcoal off without having to be active about it. I had seen enough of Dare's fighting tactics. When it did come time to practice defensive maneuvers with him, I was going to be frost chicken feed.

~*~

“We are aiming to rid you of the leash completely, and I know that you want to try a temporary leech solution to see if you can break some links, but if we go right for multiple leeches with increased power, you could subvert things far faster,” Constantine said later that night, his finger tracing a diagram in one of the books we were sharing.

I nodded. “Sounds like a horrible plan. We should try it.”

His expression turned sincerely amused. “You should be shocked and appalled and calling me all sorts of names over the threat to your health and independence.”

“Self-preservation is for losers.”

He leaned forward, spreading his fingers over the pages. “You are my finest entertainment.”

I patted his hand and looked at the particularly horrifying illustration he had been tracing. “I know. Now tell me about this design.”