Spark (Academy of Unpredictable Magic Book 1)

by Sadie Moss

  “That was a very powerful spell you cast on his body, Raul,” Roman says casually, authoritatively. Even in this totally inappropriate moment, that tone sends a shiver of heat up my spine. “Who taught you that? That’s not the kind of thing you can learn on your own—how to keep someone from being able to raise the dead.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Raul sneers. His chest is rising and falling faster, his gaze darting quickly between me and the guys.

  We’ve got him outnumbered by a good amount, but a rock of fear still sits in my stomach. Roman’s not wrong. Raul may be a first year like me, but he’s obviously got a hell of a lot of power at his fingertips.

  And the five of us are the only thing standing between him and what he wants.

  Chapter 27

  “Raul, please.”

  Holding my hands out placatingly, I take another tentative step forward. If I can get close enough, maybe I can try tackling him. It’s not the fanciest move, but in moments of high stress, I tend to revert back to what I know works. And I’ve always been a good scrapper.

  “Look, I get why you’re doing this.” One more step forward. “I was so angry with my dad when he left. And I was angry with the Circuit for just waltzing in and taking my sister. And for telling me I could either come here or lose my magic. I felt like I didn’t really have a choice, and that sucks. But hurting innocent people? Do you really want to do that? What are you even looking for here? What are you hoping to achieve?”

  Raul shakes his head. “No, I can’t tell you.”

  I hear someone inhale sharply and glance sideways out of the corner of my eye.

  While I was moving toward Raul, Asher was moving toward the crate. He can see into it now, and whatever he’s seeing, I don’t think it’s good.

  “Are you serious?” he whispers, looking up at Raul. “What are you even planning to do with this?”

  “What is it?” Roman asks, still standing several feet away with Cam and Dmitri.

  Asher swallows. “It’s a Brimstone Orb.”

  I have no clue what that is. My gaze flicks to Raul, my brows pinching together. “A what?”

  “Think of it like an insanely powerful, massive grenade that also causes fire to rain down from the sky,” he says, “and you’ll have a pretty good idea. ‘Brimstone’ as in fire and brimstone—hellfire raining down.”

  “Nobody thought to call it the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch?” I ask.

  Silence. The guys all blink at me.

  “Monty Python and the Holy Grail?” I glance around, shocked despite my fear. Or maybe I’m just focusing on Monty Python so I won’t pee my pants. “No? None of you? Goddamn it.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Raul cuts in, waving his hand in a slicing motion to show he’s done with this conversation. “I need this orb. We need it. And I really, really hate to do this, Elliot, but if you don’t walk away right now…”

  “No.” I take the opportunity to shuffle another step toward him. He tenses slightly, and I know I’m getting close enough that he’s going to have to react soon. “No. Don’t give me a little speech about how you’ll spare me if I walk away. I’m not going anywhere. This has to stop.”

  His jaw clenches, his cheeks reddening. “I thought you would understand. You, of all people—”

  “Well, I don’t, Raul. Because I may be a bitch, but I’m not a pyscho. I’m not a killer.”

  He shakes his head, raising his arms. “Then I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this.”

  I can feel magic crackling in the air around me and I start to draw some of it into me. This is what we practiced for. This is what I’ve been taking classes for all semester. I can do this.

  “Yeah,” I say grimly. “Neither do I.”

  Before I can blink, Raul throws his hand out and unleashes a massive bolt of lightning.

  Fuck! I didn’t know he could do that.

  Despite all my training, my sonic boom is too damn slow to respond. Death, in the form of white hot light, barrels toward me, and my breath suspends in my lungs.

  “Elliot!” one of the guys yells, I think Dmitri, and a millisecond later, I’m tackled to the ground.

  It’s Cam on top of me—he must’ve used his teleportation power. That’s the only way he got to me so fast.

  “You okay?” he murmurs, and despite the fact that his massive body knocked the wind out of me when he took me down, I nod. I’m fucking alive, thanks to him. I’m more than okay.

  Coughing as I struggle to get my breath back, I peek past Cam’s shoulder. Chaos has erupted over our heads. Asher has his hand thrust forward, his fingers splayed out, and he’s squinting hard in concentration. He’s trying to control Raul’s mind, I realize. It’s clearly not easy, though, and Raul’s throwing everything he can at the men, especially Roman.

  It makes sense—as the professor, Roman’s got more magical knowledge than the rest of us. He’s the bigger threat.

  Raul reaches out with a hand, and one of the nearby crates bursts open, whatever’s inside flying across the room to him. It’s some kind of staff. He thumps the smooth stone floor with it, and suddenly the stone ripples like a massive wave. We’re all thrown backward, crashing into more crates. Magical items start going off as they hit the ground, accidentally activated, and it’s pandemonium.

  Roman is the first to stand, and as artifacts continue to activate around us, he starts muttering in some language I don’t know, his voice deep and guttural. As his words grow louder and louder, the air around him seems to rip itself open and something—and I do mean thing—emerges.

  “What the fuck is that?” I yell, scrambling to my feet. Fuck, my whole body feels like one big bruise.

  “That…” Cam mutters faintly, staring with wide eyes, “is a demon.”

  I’ve never seen anything like it. The creature is made of lava and bare, skinless muscle. Of twisting sinew, of living black snakes, and eerie, unholy orange-black-purple light. I can’t look directly at its face. Every time I try, some deep, unspeakable terror seizes me, and I have to look away. As though if I stare directly into its eyes, I’ll die.

  “Did he—did Roman conjure that?”

  “Yeah,” Cam says, his voice still low. “Now let’s just hope he can control it.”

  Roman’s sweating, his dark cobalt gaze fixed on Raul, his hands out as if he’s using the demon like a puppet. Oh, God, this can’t end well. If he loses control of that thing…

  “Come on!” I grab Cam’s shoulder. Roman and Asher are using every ounce of their focus and concentration on controlling their magic right now, so they’re sitting ducks. “Protect Asher!”

  Cam’s teleportation will come in handy, and so will his magic absorbing. If he can just take on some of the blows aimed at Asher…

  He pulls back against my grip, panic flooding his features. “Wait! What about you?”

  I see Dmitri phasing in and out to dodge the magic that Raul is flinging at him. Our gazes meet for a split second, and in spite of the mortal danger he’s in, he shoots me a cocky grin. Figures this would be the kind of thing that cheers his grumpy ass up.

  Turning back to Cam, I give his shoulder a squeeze. Then I rock forward on the balls of my feet and press a hard kiss to his lips. Fuck it. If I’m about to die, I’m not going to waste the last few minutes of my life hiding from my feelings.

  “I think all that time getting beat up in fight class is about to pay off,” I say when I pull away. “Go help Asher!”

  I give him a shove toward his dark-haired friend then leap up onto the nearest crate—a nice tall one—and scramble to the top using my spider climb. Once I’m perched atop it, I pause and take a deep breath.

  Okay. Okay. I can do this.

  Standing up, I launch myself up into the air, praying I’ve gotten high enough.

  Dmitri sees me and freezes in place. “Elliot!” he yells, panic in his voice.

  One of Raul’s magical blasts hits him and he goes flying, landing out cold on the ground. Fuck, no!r />
  My body twists in the air automatically, trying to get a better view of him, and my hand brushes the ceiling.

  I grit my teeth, shoving down the panic, and grab hold.

  My hand sticks.

  “Yes!” Cam yells in triumph. He’s standing in front of Asher, and it looks like he’s taken at least one blast of magic already. His shirt is shredded, revealing his muscled chest and abs, and his skin is glowing slightly. “Go, Sin!”

  I bring my other hand and my feet up, sticking them to the ceiling, staring at the world upside-down.

  Gingerly, trying to keep myself from getting sick from the perspective reversal, I let go with my hands and stand up.

  I’m right above Raul. He definitely noticed my leap up here, but the guys have been keeping him plenty distracted.

  It’s not going great for our side though. Asher’s struggling, and Dmitri is still out. Cam’s working to cover both of them, but he can’t keep up with Raul’s attacks. Roman looks like he could lose his grip on the demon at any second, and the demon itself is rampaging around the room, doing as much damage as good as it tries to get at Raul. Magical items are going off all around us.

  My heart seems to slide up my throat, pulled by the same gravity that makes my hair stand up over my head. It’s only a matter of time before something horribly dangerous goes off in here and destroys the whole school. I know what I have to do, but what if I kill Raul? What if I hurt one of the others?

  I wasn’t lying when I told Raul I’m not that kind of person. I’m prickly and sarcastic and emotionally closed off, but I’m not a damn killer. I don’t want to hurt anybody.

  Cam gets hit with something he can’t absorb enough of and I hear him cry out in pain. Raul’s using the magical objects around us to his advantage—either he knows what they are and what they can do, or he doesn’t care and is just unleashing them all anyway.

  Fuck. Time to woman up, Elliot. I can’t let him hurt the guys. And I can’t let him get out of this room with a goddamn weapon of mass destruction like that orb thing, either. God only knows what he’s planning to do with it.

  And when have I ever backed down from a fight?

  You got this, I tell myself. I crouch down low, bracing my feet on the ceiling, then push off hard. My hands extend in front of me, aiming at Raul.

  Then I pour all the magic I can muster out through my fingertips, releasing a sonic boom.

  The blast hits the ground right beside him, and he’s thrown through the air. Cam grabs Asher and Roman and teleports them to the far side of the room, keeping them away from the worst of the blast. It looks like it takes the last of his energy, and I see him collapse out of the corner of my eye as the force of the boom knocks me back upward. My body slams into the ceiling, and I scrabble for a grip, trying to get my hands or feet to latch on, but I’m too weak, too disoriented.

  For a split second, I’m suspended in air, staring down at everyone—Raul, Dmitri, and Cam all out cold on the floor, a small crater in the stone where my sonic boom hit—and then I’m falling.

  My stomach flip-flops wildly as air rushes by me. Jumbled thoughts tear through my mind in a flash, there and gone so fast I can barely register them.

  This is how I die?

  I hope someone will take care of Maddy.

  Shit. I should’ve fucking kissed Roman.

  I should’ve kissed all of them.

  No. I’m not ready to die, goddamn it!

  Shoving aside the whirling, confused thoughts, I force myself to concentrate. The floor is rushing up to meet me, and I’m almost out of time, and I’m so fucking terrified…

  But I manage to send out one more sonic boom.

  It’s a baby one—I have to work hard to keep from unleashing too big of a blast—and as it bursts from my hands, the blowback slows my descent just enough.

  I land hard on the floor, feeling like I just got rammed by a truck. The demon is gone—banished, I think—and Roman and Asher limp toward me, both looking like they’ve been through hell.

  “Elliot?” Roman calls, and his deep voice soothes me. I’m glad I’m still around to hear it. I should probably tell him that one day.

  But right now, I can’t quite get my mouth to work. I feel so tired.

  My vision blurs as I see Asher run toward me. “Elliot!”

  “I’m… okay…” I manage to slur.

  Then the world fades to black.

  Chapter 28

  It takes about a week to clean everything up, all told.

  Well, clean everything up to the point where classes can resume again. The storage room is going to need a lot longer to recover, and in the meantime, I’ve got no idea where the remaining magical artifacts will be kept. A bunch of them were destroyed in the fight, and it’s only thanks to luck and a small miracle that nothing as dangerous as the Brimstone Orb was set off, or the whole school could’ve been taken out.

  The Circuit sends a team out to deal with the broken objects and the spells they’ve unleashed. One classroom has been completely overtaken by a black sludge that stinks of evil and is apparently sentient. There are several curses that need to be broken too, and a bunch of crates were knocked into a precarious jumble that needs to be sorted out without breaking any of them, like a giant game of Jenga.

  Roman gets a stern talking-to from the admins for summoning a demon. Apparently, effective or not, summoning creatures from the underworld is frowned upon, especially when it results in structural damage to the building. Classes have all been moved into the common areas of dorms or outside while the construction crew that’s brought in does repairs.

  Of course, I miss most of the excitement because I spend the week after the fight in the infirmary with the guys.

  Roman comes by often to give us updates. He only had to stay in the infirmary for a couple days, but since we’re younger and our magic is less trained, the medical staff wanted to keep us students under observation a bit longer in case of weird side effects.

  Asher later tells me that I was the one out for the longest.

  “You slept the entire first day here,” he says as the four of us impatiently wait to be discharged on our seventh day in the infirmary. I can see his fingers moving, like he’s itching to reach out and hold my hand, but he doesn’t. “We were starting to get worried.”

  “That’s what happens when you’re a badass,” I reply, grinning at him. “You gotta take a longer rest afterward.”

  “Excuse me?” Dmitri points at himself, where his scrapes and bruises still stand out against his skin. “I was the first one to wake up, Princess.”

  “Who are you calling a princess?” I sit up. “I will walk over there and kick your ass—”

  A nurse pokes her head in, gives us all a stern look, and then leaves again.

  “Sorry!” Asher calls after her, because of course he does, even if he wasn’t the one about to start a fight in the infirmary of all places.

  Still, the room takes on a more serious air as silence falls for a moment. We really did get our asses kicked, all five of us, and even though Dmitri’s fine and Cam doesn’t look worse for wear—in fact, we’re all okay—it still took a lot to bring Raul down.

  And that’s… that’s terrifying. The idea that just one person could be so powerful? I didn’t realize, until that fight, just how strong a person’s magic could get.

  Speaking of Raul…

  “Where is he?” I ask.

  The guys all know who I mean immediately. Dmitri gives a low growl while Asher looks over at Cam.

  The blond-haired mage sighs. “The Circuit arrested him. He’s not dead, although you really did a number on him.”

  Something tight and knotted inside my chest starts to loosen. I probably shouldn’t feel bad for Raul. He was trying to get his hands on a magical weapon of mass destruction. But he was so nice to me, and he really didn’t want to hurt me. I’m not excusing his behavior, but I think in his mind, however unbalanced that mind was… we were friends.

 
And as awful as a person might be, I don’t want to kill anyone. I don’t want to be a murderer.

  “Do you know what they’ll do with him?” I question.

  Cam shakes his head. “No clue. We did, uh, hear something—or actually, Roman heard it and told us while you were still out.”

  He looks over at Asher, who says quietly, “Raul wasn’t working alone.”

  Something cold slides into the pit of my stomach and settles there. “What?”

  “They’ve managed to figure out that he was in contact with someone outside the school, but he has some kind of binding spell on him. It prevents him from telling anyone about who was working with him. Or using him, more likely.”

  My nose wrinkles as I recall Raul’s words before the fight broke out. We need it. He wasn’t just after the Brimstone Orb for himself. Then I think of what Roman said—that someone must’ve taught Raul how to do the things he was doing, like the spell to keep a necromancer from raising the dead. So Roman was right; Raul did have a teacher. But not just someone who taught him magic and was none the wiser about what he’d do with it. An actual puppeteer, pulling Raul’s strings.

  Stupidly, I feel bad for Raul. I meant it when I said I could understand his anger. I know why he considered it a betrayal when I fought against him, when I stood on the side of the “institution”, so to speak. Ever since I found out I was an Unpredictable, I’ve felt it from nearly everyone—the perception that we’re the freaks of the magical world. Hell, Alyssa and her crew have spent months picking on me just to distract themselves from their fear of what the outside world thinks of us.

  I don’t know where Raul came from, or what his family’s like, or what his childhood was like, and I feel bad about that. Like I should’ve known. Like maybe my knowing would’ve stopped him from going so far, as if I could’ve talked him down from whatever ledge he was on.