Valentine's Dance

by Ivy Hearne

  So even as I began trying to help pull people out of the rubble, I was still, always, scanning for only one face.

  Part of the hall still stood—the Commons Room itself, where most of the people had been when the explosion had gone off.

  “How is that still there?” I asked.

  “It had extra wards around it,” Ms. Hush said. “Everywhere that hunters and their students gather, we put up additional defenses. We can’t risk losing everyone on our side in one fell blow.”

  “But that’s what the Lusus Naturae were trying to do here.” I stepped over a pile of rubble.

  “Indeed it is,” Ms. Hush replied, stopping at the same rubble I’d just walked past. “Look at this.” She bent over and pushed a rock away. “I think there’s someone under here. Hello? Are you okay down there?”

  I began moving rocks one at a time, praying that whoever was under them was still alive.

  When we uncovered a hand that didn’t move, I told myself that the victim had been knocked out and was lying under there completely having a lovely dream, courtesy of being cold-cocked by a bomb.

  But by the time we got to the last layer of rocks, I had already lost hope. And when I uncovered the face of the body in front of me, I let out a strangled sob and dropped to my knees beside Angelica.

  She was turned the wrong way. She’d been running back into the building—but why?

  As I uncovered her horse half, I realized the answer to my question. She had been headed back to ferry people out of danger.

  And now she was gone.

  “This is my fault,” I whispered.

  “Don’t you ever think that.” Ms. Hush’s voice was harsher than I’d ever heard it. “This is on the Lusus Naturae, not you. You are not to blame. They are. Don’t ever forget it. You hear me?”

  I nodded fervently. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We will come back for Angelica. Right now, our focus has to be on finding the living. Let’s keep moving.”

  We weren’t the only ones who had that idea, either. All around us in the smoke-cloaked darkness, voices called out names, or answered those calls. And some simply cried for help.

  Those are the ones who need us most.

  Then those were the ones we’d help first.

  We moved toward the smoke, keeping our mouths and nose as covered as well as we could manage to.

  But then, I heard a voice calling my name.

  “Reo?” I called out.

  “Over here!”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said to Ms. Hush. “I need to go see what Reo wants.” She nodded, waving me off as she continued to poke through patches of rubble.

  Reo and I Marco-Polo’d it back and forth until we found each other. I threw my arms around his neck as soon as I saw him. “I’m so glad you’re okay. Where’s Souji?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think he was out of the blast radius when it went off. He was headed around to the back entrance of the building.” He clenched his teeth. “But I need you for something else. Something potentially even less pleasant.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Reo glanced around as if checking to make sure no one was listening. “Let’s wait until we get inside.”

  “Okay,” I agreed reluctantly. “That’s fine.”

  I followed him, frowning in disbelief as he began searching for a place for us to have our conversation.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You do realize that we could have any conversation we wanted to on the grounds of the Academy, and no one would even blink twice. Even I know that.”

  He opened his mouth to answer, but never got the chance.

  A wave of percussive force hit the air near us like a second bomb going off.

  With the carefully honed instincts of a trained hunter, Reo dove on top of me, his weight bearing me to the floor. He rounded his arms over his head and curved his body around mine to protect us both.

  When a few seconds passed without another explosion, he risked a glance up. All around us, those students and instructors who had been in here searching were beginning to stand, to check on one another. Reo waved off another student's questions—he was still watching everything with a wary gaze—as he first stood, then helped me to my feet.

  I realized the moment we both saw it: a crack in the air. At first glance, I had dismissed it as a bomb-created flaw in the wall to our right. When I looked again, though, the crack had grown, and I saw that it floated several inches in front of the wall itself.

  “What is that?” I asked in the tone of someone one who had seen too much recently to doubt the answer, whatever it may be. But really, I already knew. I’d seen something almost exactly like it when I’d helped send the Santa demon back to his own dimension.

  Demons—that was where demons came from. Other dimensions, other worlds, places that were not nearly as nice as our own.

  I scowled at what I now believed was the beginning of an opening between worlds, then at Reo. “Something is trying to break through, into our world. You led us straight to this spot.” I took a step back and glared at him suspiciously. “How did you know they were going to do that?”

  “I didn't know anything,” he protested, but quickly turned his attention away from me and back to the growing rift. “This is where I was headed, too.”

  I glanced at the room. People were still picking themselves up and dusting off, but it wouldn't be long before someone else noticed the hole in space developing in their midst.

  “Let’s see if we can shut it down.” I stepped closer to the rift, feeling the magical power flowing through it and out into my world in heated waves.

  My own senses still reeled from the blast, and from trying to figure out what, if anything, Reo had known about what was going to be happening here.

  No time for that now, Kacie.

  I had to try to stop what was trying to come through here. I didn’t know if my psychic powers were strong enough to do it—especially not right now, still recovering as I was from the painful removal of the last Lusus Naturae spy-slug.

  But when I opened myself up to them, I could feel everyone around me—all the students and instructors, their pain, their confusion.

  I focused in on the marble wall behind the split in the air.

  The stone was cool, slow to care, slower to change. Its movements were at the atomic level, well below the ability of the human eye to detect. It didn’t want to support the rift in front of it, I was sure.

  I focused in on that, working first to impose my needs on the building itself, anchoring my will into the stone, then down into the mountain below us, tying myself to the Academy, the land, and then, finally, the people.

  As I brought my awareness fully back into my own body, I found Reo standing silently beside me, watching in wide-eyed wonder as I pushed my power outward. A bump against my hip told me to glance down, where I saw Souji. I bent down to throw my arms around my beautiful, perfect hunting partner.

  “You’re alive!” I exclaimed.

  “That was amazing,” Reo said, shaking his head slightly.

  “What was?”

  “The spell you just created.”

  “I haven’t really finished yet,” I said. “And I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing, either—I’m just kind of following my instincts.”

  “Well, then, your instincts are great. And just watching you work was kind of stunning.”

  I tilted my head to one side. “What did you see, exactly?”

  Reo shook his head. “I wouldn't call it seeing, precisely. But I ... knew ... that you were connecting to everything and everyone here.”

  “And what did the rift do while I worked?” I asked, too busy to give him more than a passing nod to acknowledge his understanding of what I had created as he watched, remaining somehow unaffected.

  “Nothing,” Reo replied, then shook his head slightly, and his voice took on a more clipped tone, a hunter giving a report. “At least, nothing new. It didn't change size or seem to
be preparing to throw off any more bomb-blasts. Hot air continued flowing out of it.”

  I nodded, taking in his military-style report. In my spell work, I had created something like a spell-bubble, running from the ground below us to the top of the building, where I had anchored it to the roof. It was large enough to hold us, the gap between realities still floating about three feet away from us, and the marble wall behind the rift.

  Its full force was focused on this room, though people elsewhere in the Academy might feel a moment of disorientation should their paths happen to cross near where the rift was, but it was a temporary and harmless side-effect.

  For now, we were safe from interruption, at least for as long as the demon on the other side of that gap refrained from widening it too much more.

  As if my thought had drawn the creature's attention, a deep rumble shuddered from one side of the split to the other, registering more as vibration than sound.

  “Ouch,” I said, shaking my head. “This one's strong.”

  “How many are we up against?” Reo asked again.

  I considered the opening, unable to see anything through it other than light. “Here? Probably only one. But its magic feels strong. And male, for some reason.”

  “Strong and male,” Reo said. “Anything else?”

  “I don't think his coming through here, in this precise spot, was an accident. And I don't believe that you bringing me to it was accidental, either, though I doubt it was in his plan.”

  “What can we do against him?” Reo didn't take his eyes off the rift.

  I considered how everyone at the school over the winter break had joined together to defeat the Santa demon, and I had a sudden flash of inspiration. I didn't know if it would work now—but really, what did I have to lose? If it worked, Reo would have nothing to complain about. And if it didn't work? He could go take a flying leap, for all I cared. I didn't need him to like me—just work with me.

  So I turned into his physical space, stood up on my tiptoes in my brand-new high-heeled shoes, tilted my chin up, and kissed him.

  To say that my kiss surprised Reo and Souji would probably be something of an understatement.

  I had been too focused on the impending threat of something trying to take over my world by way of the Valentine’s Dance to really consider how Souji might react to me kissing his brother.

  And I had forgotten how poorly Souji reacted to me flirting with other guys for exactly as long as it took me to decide to kiss him.

  Granted, it was an odd time for me to make that decision. We were under attack, even if the threat seemed relatively minor at that instant. Souji’s growl suggested that I would

  But the moment my lips touched his, I knew he could tell exactly what I was doing. I could almost read his mind as he figured it out.

  This wasn't a kiss. Not really.

  This was a power draw.

  And it was the most horrific thing I had ever inflicted on anyone.

  As my lips moved against his, his feet grew rooted to the floor beneath us. The rest of him became as motionless as the stones of the mountain, and almost as cold, as I pulled the life force out of him through his mouth.

  his lungs stuttered to a stop, and he couldn't even gasp out his agony. I could feel that if he'd been able, he would have screamed out with every last fiber of his being.

  Instead, all of that energy swept out of him, searing my tongue as it passed. Then it pooled in my throat long enough to burn fiery torture, dropped to my chest, then whipped through me.

  All of that happened in an instant. The next moment, the pain evaporated.

  Then I spun and sent the power shooting into that slightly glowing fissure in the air, the one that I had to turn my head away from and look at out of the corner of my eye to really get a fix on it, and everything inside the bubble I had created exploded around us.

  For a heartbeat, the world—no, two worlds—stopped. That hole between worlds, between what seemed like hell and our own reality, seemed to open up to something immensely huge, something that seemed so big that it simply had to rip apart everything in this room—in the Academy, the mountain, the country, the whole world—in its attempt to pass through the opening it had created.

  At the same time, it fell in on itself, folding over and over, crumpling its reality into a tiny ball that could fit all its billions of molecules through that same opening, threatening to take us with it, sliding into some new horror of a super-dense reality.

  All told, it felt like the televisions shows I've watched late at night on the History Channel in an attempt to overcome insomnia, those droning series where scientists with faraway looks in their eyes talk of how stars die, exploding in supernovae, only to crumple, and keep collapsing, until even the protons and electrons melt into each other.

  That was what we were up against.

  This is worse than a Santa demon.

  I flung out my hands to direct the remainder of the energy I had drawn from Reo, combined with my own magical force, clearly available to me for the first time I could remember.

  Chapter 9

  I didn’t stop with Reo’s power and mine, though.

  As the magic rushed through and around me, whipping my hair around my face in a windless storm, I sent my senses questing out past this room—past the crying people searching through the rubble, past the Academy buildings and the town down the mountain from us. Farther out than I had ever realized was possible.

  And I began gathering up everyone’s magic with my own.

  I could feel them as I did. The instructors and other Academy employees first. Ms. Hush, Mr. Meriwether, Dr. Qazi, Dr. Bernie, even Janice. Holding their power was like holding a bundle of strings in my hand—strings that led back them, as if each person’s magic was a kite that might take off at any minute.

  I let my magical sense continue to circle the campus, pulling in all the students’ power, as well. I felt Erin and her friend Collette. Tony. Souji.

  I knew more of them, but by now it was a raging hurricane of power, screaming silently as it spun around me.

  As I raised my arms to pull it completely under my control, I felt something else. Something far from this mountain.

  But it was headed this way.

  It was dark, and it was violent, and it was...gleeful. It wouldn’t hesitate to rip us all to shreds, and it would laugh as it did so.

  And it wasn’t allied with either side in our war with the Lusus Naturae.

  I added that to the calculations that were running through my mind now—the ones that I had never learned. But I had everyone else’s power, and I was no longer limited by what I had been taught.

  And then I began pulling together a spell of protection like nothing anyone at the Academy had ever seen before.

  First, I sealed the crack in reality. I poured magic into it, white-gold light pouring into it, closing it off from us.

  Preferably forever, I thought.

  Yes, the magic agreed, its voice echoing with the tones of everyone I had taken from. Forever.

  Then I healed the building, restoring it to what it had been before the Lusus Naturae had set off a bomb in it, the stones disappearing from outside and reappearing to rebuild—all in an instant.

  The people next.

  “No! Don’t do the people, Kacie!” It was an annoying buzzing, like a gnat or a mosquito. I blinked and glanced around until I realized Reo and Souji were still standing with me, even though everyone else had apparently fled when I began stealing power.

  I turned my gaze on Reo, and he recoiled, as if he’d seen something unexpected. “Why not?” I asked, my voice echoing with the magic.

  “They never come back right.” His voice was sad. “Too many magic users have tried to bring back the people they love—but we would only have to kill them a second time. And believe me, it’s worse.”

  I glared at him, determined to try it anyway.

  But then I felt Souji bump against my hip again. I put my hand down on the na
pe of his neck and felt calmer.

  He’s right. Souji’s voice in my head for the first time in a week was glorious. Death isn’t anything we can overcome. It’s part of the natural world. All we can do is mourn them, honor them, and let them go.

  A tear slipped down my face, followed by a surge of anger that flashed across my entire body, leaving me trembling with both power and rage.

  I needed to use that magic.

  And so I pushed it into the Academy itself. It infused the stones, the ground, the wards that had always been in place—but that hadn’t kept out all the attacks against me.

  It lay across everything, its giant, spinning, gold symbols first coating the Academy, and then sinking down into. Within moments, only the symbols in the snow and the slight, glittery shine on all the buildings showed that it had ever been there.

  When I turned to Reo and Souji to see what else I should do, I realized they had both collapsed to the ground.

  Apparently it was possible to take too much power from others.

  Carefully, I tied off the spell, set it so it couldn’t be undone by anyone other than me, and finally, let the magic run back out of my hands and into the people I’d borrowed it from.

  Then I waited for Souji and Reo to gather themselves up so we could leave.

  Reo pushed himself up off the floor. “Wow. No wonder the Lusus Naturae wanted to keep you hidden from the Academy. You have some serious juice.”

  Souji simply turned and walked away, stopping to check over his shoulder to make sure we were coming with him.

  I’m ready to get out of here, too, I told him.

  WHEN WE GOT OUTSIDE, Ms. Hush was waiting for us. “Come with me,” she said quietly.

  We all followed her through what had been part of the quad, but now looked like a battlefield, bodies strewn across it like broken dolls abandoned in the middle of play.

  I almost liked it better when the bodies had been covered with rocks. I kept passing people I knew.

  Ms. Hush led us straight to one of the bodies.

  It was Ms. Gayle.

  I let out a low curse. “Is this what the Lusus Naturae were after?” I demanded, turning around to stare intently at Ms. Hush, Reo, and Souji.