Guardian Academy 2: Prisoner Of Magic (The Mystery Of The Four Corners)

by Maria Amor

  As far as her parents were concerned, Julia knew, that was enough—at the moment. They seemed to be confident that while she couldn’t necessarily handle an abduction attempt on her own, with at least one other person she had a decent chance of getting away.

  “Why don’t we stop to get something to eat? All these hole-in-the-walls are making my mouth water every time we walk past,” Blake suggested. Julia considered it. She had to admit she was hungry—hungrier than she’d been in days, in fact.

  “I could eat,” she said. They both paused and looked around; of course the easiest options, right around them, were Chinese: Cantonese, Szechuan, a few tea shops, sweets shops. They decided on a restaurant called August Gatherings almost without discussion, and stepped inside; it wasn’t the busy time of day, but there were a few people there. Julia took the seat she was offered, and Blake sat across from her, perusing the menu for a few moments.

  The selections were much like those at many of the restaurants in the area—modern takes on classic dishes. Julia and Blake took turns choosing items, and before she knew it they had ordered a feast: soy sauce chicken and roast pork, General Tso’s chicken and duck lo mein. They got tea and sipped it as they waited. “Are you glad I came by?” Blake met her gaze over the tea cup and raised an eyebrow.

  “I am,” Julia admitted. “I’m glad I got to get out of the house for a bit.”

  “Just that?” Blake’s eyebrow rose a fraction of an inch higher. “Not because it was me?” Julia rolled her eyes.

  “If you’re going to try and be all romantic right now, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she told him. Blake snickered.

  “Fine, fine,” he said. “I was just hoping that you’d started to get used to having me around, that’s all.”

  “You are really desperate to be my friend,” Julia pointed out. “It’s kind of annoying.” She expected Blake to protest, to get irritable towards her. Instead he grinned.

  “Maybe I just think that you’re in need of a friend, and that you’re interesting,” Blake said. Julia rolled her eyes again.

  “Maybe I’m cursed,” she said. “All my friends disappear.”

  “Maybe your luck has changed,” Blake said.

  “Settle down,” Julia told him, laughing in spite of herself. Did she really think she could trust him? He was practically a stranger.

  The food arrived—the first course, at least—and Julia busied herself with her chopsticks, plucking pieces of soy sauce chicken and roast pork off of the plate, eating them in bites between sips of tea and water. It was shaping up to be a hot summer in the city—beyond hot. The spring weather was already a little warmer than Julia preferred, but she thought maybe this year she could convince her parents to let her take a trip to Long Beach Island, or one of the other coastal areas—somewhere she could get some sun, spend some time in the sea. Pretend the world’s an ocean.

  “So, you obviously are playing things close to the vest,” Blake said, bringing a bite of roast pork up to his mouth. He half-covered his lips as he continued while chewing. “How can I help you figure out what’s going on if I don’t know what you already know?”

  “I don’t know much,” Julia said. “All my usual sources are gone, and I don’t…” she set her chopsticks down for a moment. “I could compel people for answers but I don’t like how little control I have over that ability.”

  “The fact that you have it at all is pretty amazing,” Blake said. “Aren’t you ever curious about what it would be like? You could pretty much get whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted.”

  “It just feels like cheating,” she said. “It also seems like it would get lonely—not knowing if people are around me because they actually like me, or if it’s because I’m compelling them without knowing I am.”

  “I didn’t think that was something you could do accidentally.”

  Julia grinned wryly.

  “I told someone to get lost and they almost walked out into the woods to do just that,” Julia said. “Not something I want to experiment with too much.”

  “Why not? It could come in handy,” Blake pointed out. Their other items came out, and Julia focused on serving herself lo mein and more chicken.

  “I want to know that I’m using it for the right reasons,” she said. “The same as any of my abilities, really. I mean—don’t you ever worry about whether you’re doing the right thing?” she gestured carelessly with her chopsticks and earned a quick, nasty look from one of the patrons, leaving the restaurant. She gave the woman an apologetic look and lowered the ends of the chopsticks, turning her attention back onto Blake.

  “I mean, there’s rules,” Blake said. “I tend to follow them—but when they get in the way, why worry about it too much? I mean; it’s not against the rules for you to use that ability.”

  “No, but it can get me into trouble anyway,” Julia countered. “Also, if I keep compelling people—experimenting with it—I stop being trustworthy.” She thought for a moment. “You know—can we not talk about it anymore?”

  “Of course,” Blake said. “Let’s just enjoy this and get some shopping done, right?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Julia said with a more relaxed smile. They finished their meal, and Blake snatched up the check before Julia could even look at it.

  She argued with him over it briefly—but she wasn’t willing to die on the hill of that argument, and eventually let him pay for the actual food, while she chipped in the tip. They left and walked down Broadway for a while, going into stores, and Blake gamely waited for her to come out of the dressing rooms. “You know, I have to wonder if it wouldn’t make more sense for you to wait until summer to clothes shop,” Blake said, after they’d left TopShop.

  “Why?” Julia made a face, wrinkling her nose at him.

  “I mean, you don’t get a lot of chances to wear anything other than a uniform at Sandrine, and the weekends aren’t that long,” Blake said.

  “I donate clothes three times a year,” Julia told him. “I like the idea of people who are down on their luck having something reasonably nice to wear.”

  “But only ones who are your size,” Blake pointed out.

  “There are people who are down on their luck and also my size,” Julia countered. After she’d accumulated three or four bags’ worth of purchases, she was bored with shopping.

  “Maybe we should head down to the park,” Blake suggested. “Get an iced coffee or something and just sit in the shade.” Julia thought to herself idly that it sounded a lot more like a date than just hanging out, but she was also curious as to where it would go.

  “That sounds good,” she said. They got on the train again, and Julia stopped them at her favorite coffee shop, just a few blocks from Central Park. She paid for the coffees, and fifteen minutes later they’d entered at her favorite part: Strawberry Fields, the memorial to John Lennon.

  They looked at the Imagine mosaic for a few minutes as people came and went, leaving flowers, candles, and tokens that the park staff would eventually sweep away, only to be replaced by more. Julia felt peaceful in the little enclave, the park-within-a-park; she’d always love the feeling of that space, and even though it reminded her of previous visits with Dylan, she had to admit that she only felt a small shadow of regret that he wasn’t there, as opposed to the deep guilt she normally felt thinking of him.

  They moved on from there, and Julia sipped her coffee and talked to Blake about nothing at all; before she knew it, they were somewhere in a secluded area of the park—away from the picnickers, the joggers, frisbee players, and dog walkers. “How did you get me over here?”

  “You’ve been leading the way all along,” Blake said. “I’ve just been following you.”

  “I feel like you maneuvered me here,” Julia said, looking up at him a little distrustfully.

  “Nope. Just wandering.” Blake looked down at her and Julia felt her heart beating faster, her blood rushing through her head. She bit her bottom lip and swallowed against the sudden
dry feeling in her throat. She’d kissed boys before, but it had always been Julia who had initiated it—and there had always been an aspect to it of playfulness, of it not being serious.

  She knew, instinctively, that Blake was about to kiss her; she could almost hear him saying it in his mind. Everything in her was wide open, and she reeled a bit on her feet as Blake leaned in.

  At first, he barely brushed his lips against hers—just enough for Julia to know that there had been contact between them—and then, after just a moment, a heartbeat of waiting, Blake kissed her more firmly, sealing her lips, his hands drifting lightly to her waist, around to the small of her back. As their energies collided and combined, Julia heard a sharp crack of thunder overhead, but she ignored it.

  Blake’s tongue slid against her closed lips, and for a moment Julia stiffened, startled and uncertain; the next moment her mouth was opening almost instinctively, and her arms were moving up to drape around Blake’s shoulders. She lost herself for a moment in the kiss, but in the back of her mind, she couldn’t help but—just for an instant—compared it to the kiss she’d had with Dylan almost a full year before in the dean’s office. There’d been no tongue with that one, but it had felt more comfortable, even if it had been slightly less exciting.

  Just as she and Blake were finding their rhythm, Julia pulled back, breaking her contact with Blake’s lips. “What? What’s wrong?” Julia shook her head, trying to sort through the odd combination of impulses in her mind. There was something she’d heard—or almost heard, the pulse of a thought that wasn’t quite wordless. She slithered free of Blake’s arms and looked around, trying to focus on her latent ability to hear thoughts—at least, those thoughts based in language. “Julia, are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Julia said. “Just that someone’s watching us. Someone’s moving closer to us.”

  “Maybe it’s a park security guy,” Blake suggested. Julia shook her head again.

  “No—that wouldn’t make sense,” Julia said. The thought she’d “heard” had been a linguistic jumble, words like going over a plan rapid-fire. But she couldn’t quite make sense of it.

  “Then what is it?” Julia looked at Blake.

  “Some people are trying to surround us,” she told him quietly. “They’re going to try and grab us.” Her heart beat faster from reasons that had nothing to do with excitement at her first “real” kiss, and Julia licked her lips and took a deep breath, trying to figure out what to do about the situation.

  “Someone’s going to try and grab us?” Blake stared at her in shock.

  “There are five of them,” Julia told him, after consulting her impressions again. “They’re definitely thinking of us.” She caught her own name, caught Blake’s name, in the minds of the people closing in on them. She looked at Blake, sizing him up. They needed to defeat the people coming at them without calling attention to themselves, and they needed to get back to her parents’ apartment, blocks away, without getting caught. If it had been Dylan with her, she wouldn’t have even questioned at all his ability to make it happen; but she barely knew Blake. “Looks like you’re going to get the chance to prove you can be as effective as Dylan,” Julia said.

  “What do you need me to do?” Blake held her gaze and Julia thought quickly.

  “Wait for them to get close,” Julia told him. She pressed her lips together, dividing her focus between the people whose thoughts she could hear still focused on the two of them and the boy in front of her. “When I grab your hand, send your energy through me,” she said.

  “Okay,” Blake said, frowning in confusion. “What are you going to do?” Julia grinned, beginning to feel excited instead of scared.

  “You’ll see,” she told him. She’d remembered something in one of the theory classes she had to take as an upperclassman at Sandrine; the professor had explained how the different combinations of elemental energies worked, and what their results tended to be in a direct way. The kiss with Blake had reminded her—in the back of her mind—of one of those combinations.

  If they could time it right, Julia thought, they could disable the five people after them just long enough to get a good head start back to her parents’ apartment. After that, she would figure out with Blake what they each should do.

  It was agony, waiting for their would-be kidnappers to make their move; Julia counted out minutes in heartbeats, listening into the minds approaching them, trying to get an accurate feeling for how close the five assailants were. She was glad that she’d caught the glimmer of a thought, but disturbed at the fact that she and Blake had somehow been tracked. It wasn’t the average run-of-the-mill kidnappers who had come to snatch them out of the park; it was people who had been tailing them for a while, with a plan. That mere fact disturbed her.

  “Now,” Julia hissed, when she felt the minds growing so close that she could almost see the people who possessed them. She held out her hand and Blake’s fingers closed around it; the next moment, she felt the burning, fire-aligned energy flame into her from Blake, almost scalding her before she gave into the super-hot flash of it. She accepted it, funneling it through her air-aligned energy, closing her eyes and focusing on the point where the two energies mingled.

  She and Blake would be immune to the effects, but their assailants wouldn’t be—and Julia knew that she had to be careful to limit the scope of their mingled energies when she let them explode out of her.

  Right when the men would have made their grab, Julia released the energy, imagining it as a crackling, sparkling, white-hot ball. A flash of light likely startled more than a few people in Central Park that day, but it was only for a moment; not even long enough for anyone to be sure they’d actually seen it.

  The shock wave from the created lightning rocked the neighborhood around the park, but by the time it came to the attention of the council, Julia had already managed to get home, and explain to her parents about the abduction attempt; she wasn’t blamed for an “incident” that had come about as a result of her need to defend herself.

  She opened her eyes and saw the five men on the ground around her and Blake, unconscious. “Thank god that worked,” she said, exhaling with relief and tugging her hand free of Blake’s grip. She looked and saw that he was stunned. “We need to run. Now,” she told him, giving him a shove. “I don’t know how long they’ll be incapacitated, and we need to get back to my parents’ place.”

  They broke out of the secluded little copse of trees at a run, and Julia was both grateful and almost disappointed that Blake didn’t—once they could stop to breathe a bit—ask her anything about what they’d just done, or argue with her about it in any way.

  She had been so hoping that he would be a better leader than that. Then again, it’s nice to have someone who isn’t disputing every little thing I come up with, she thought. She was sure her parents would be less than pleased to come home to find their daughter alone with a boy they barely knew; but she wasn’t about to let Blake leave the apartment by himself after what had just happened.

  CHAPTER 15

  It had been a week since Dylan found out about the reason he’d been abducted, from a combination of what Bernadette and her co-conspirator Alistair had said, and what their servant Odan had told him. Finding out that the goal that Bernadette and Alistair’s group of kidnappers had in mind was to get Julia to bond with a potential mate of their choosing—presumably to use her as a political puppet—had only spurred his resolve even more to find a way out of the prison they were being kept in.

  Ever since the revelation, Dylan’s captors had become more careful about his time—and presumably the time the other students had—outside of his room, and especially the time they spent interacting with each other. He wasn’t sure if that was because they’d overheard Odan telling him about their real goal, or because they were concerned that they themselves might have said too much.

  He stared at the TV in his room, pretending to watch it while he actually sat th
inking about what his next steps would need to be. If Julia had been there, he knew they would be arguing—Julia proposing some rash, impulsive course of action, making leaps of logic and coming to conclusions he barely understood her path to, while he tried to point out the reasons why her ideas wouldn’t work, or tried to offer counter-solutions. She did have a point that I’m kind of a wet blanket, he thought.

  If he could talk to Tal for any real period of time without being overheard, or if he could discuss it with Suzanna or Azhar or Eliza or Keyne, Dylan thought he might be able to get that same dynamic. After all, all five of the air-aligned students were similar in temperament to Julia, and they’d shown signs of being impulsive, of having that level of glittering, intuitive intelligence that Julia possessed.

  I actually miss her—like miss her, miss her. It had been months since Dylan had seen Julia, and it hadn’t occurred to him until then—at least not really—that he missed her, not just the responsibility that he had towards her, or the way she interacted with him.

  As he had a few times in the past several months, Dylan called up his memory of what Julia looked like, what she sounded like; he closed his eyes and tried to focus on the details enough to almost make her real in his mind, to recreate her from just thought. There was a technique that Ruth had told him about—though she hadn’t yet taught it to him—for reaching out with his mind to “find” someone through an emotional connection.

  He didn’t have much hope of achieving that with Julia, no matter how close they had become; his abilities were stunted from the vibrations of the earth and fire-aligned materials in the walls, in the door, in the ceiling.

  Dylan thought about Julia until he could almost smell her: the lavender she kept in little sachets in her drawers at home and at the school both, aligned with her element, to soothe and bolster her abilities, and the cedar in her shampoo and conditioner.