Royals of Villain Academy 8: Vicious Arts

by Eva Chase

  I wasn’t sure it’d be all that easy even in the current scenario, but that didn’t help the Naries being mowed down by the figures who were supposed to protect them while we stood here talking about it. “It wasn’t enough—sending our own people out there to counteract the barons’ influence, arranging the terrorist alerts.”

  “They must have pulled out all the stops to speed things along this quickly,” Maggie said. “Barons Nightwood and Bloodstone might have gone out to Washington themselves to set this in motion.”

  Both my mother and Malcolm’s father did specialize in Persuasion. How many politicians and soldiers had they already managed to infect with their scheme?

  I hugged myself, rubbing my arms. We’d gathered all our supporters together, but I had no idea what to tell them now. The barons had managed to stay a step ahead of us from the beginning. What did any of our plans matter if we’d never get the chance to see them through?

  I couldn’t let that hopelessness overwhelm me, though. The Naries deserved better than that. I turned to Hector. “I think everyone’s here.”

  As the only semi-official baron in our midst, it made the most sense to let him lead the discussion. Many of our classmates would have responded to us as scions, but the older fearmancers would respect his authority more than ours. He nodded and leapt onto the raised platform at our end of the room.

  “I can’t believe Dad would go this far,” Agnes said to Malcolm with a shiver. “It’s like he’s gone crazy.”

  Malcolm grimaced. “He’s either desperate or deranged or maybe some of both. Once they’d committed to a certain point, there was no going back. Either they make this work, or they’re done for—with everyone, even the assholes who liked the plan.”

  If they’d just backed down sooner. If they’d just listened… But I couldn’t do any more to make that happen now than I’d been able to back when simply talking it out was still on the table.

  “All right,” the new Baron Killbrook said, raising his voice so it carried over the conversations around the room. “We’ve got a hell of a mess on our hands now. The most obvious way to put an end to this situation is to remove Barons Nightwood and Bloodstone from their positions and end their authority over the other mages they’ve employed in their machinations. Has anyone had contact with the families who’ve been standing with them to get a sense of how many will still defend them? I don’t want to send us into a battle we can’t win.”

  It really was coming down to that, wasn’t it? Figure out where the barons were, leave the safety of the wards, and do whatever we could to remove them from power. We’d hoped to do that only temporarily the last time we’d confronted them, and they’d sent us fleeing. Did we have enough people on our side now—and had they lost enough—that we stood a chance?

  Several of our allies spoke up, but only with vague observations. “There were quite a few unsettled murmurs going around before we left,” said a man from one of the handful of families that had joined us today. “Most people weren’t brave enough to share their doubts with the barons, though.”

  “We managed to convince the blacksuits to arrest Ambrosia Ashgrave,” someone else pointed out. “Can’t we turn them against the other barons?”

  A defected blacksuit at the edge of the crowd shook her head. “The acting Baron Ashgrave made a clearly unprovoked attack on a minor and in a setting where she lacked any significant defenders—and even to arrange that arrest, we had to choose who we reached out to carefully. They’re holding her in a separate facility away from the blacksuit headquarters, because they know some of their colleagues would let the barons overturn the charges and free her.”

  “The barons can’t constantly have an army around them,” said a guy from the Guard. “Is there a way we can find out when they’ll be traveling and, I don’t know, ambush them somehow?”

  “That could be a viable strategy—if we can get that information quickly enough to act on it,” Hector said.

  A few more ideas volleyed back and forth, but nothing that sounded concrete enough to settle my nerves. I shifted my weight on my feet. “What if we could draw the barons to someplace ourselves?” I said, only loud enough for the cluster of heirs around me to hear. “Like, I don’t know, if I put myself out somewhere as kind of bait—my mother would come, at least.”

  “Your mother and half an armada,” Jude said. “Do you really think she’d take the chance of coming unprepared after everything that’s already happened?”

  “No, I guess not.” I just wanted to do something that didn’t depend on watching the barons’ next moves. “Maybe if we distracted a bunch of the blacksuits who are with them, got them to charge off someplace else to split up their powerbase… But I’m not sure how exactly we’d do that.”

  “They’re going to be pretty skeptical of anything we put out there,” Malcolm said.

  “Well, let’s think on it.” As their children, we’d seen more of the barons than anyone else had. There must be something we could use.

  The meeting wound down with agreements of various people to ferret out what information they could from friends and colleagues on the other side of the wards. As we left the gym, people drifted apart into their separate clusters. Noah and Agnes headed back toward the junior dorms, Noah in emphatic conversation with a few of his classmates. I meandered toward the green with Jude and the other scions, not feeling ready to turn in for the night yet.

  The clouds still hung thick overhead, blotting out any moonlight and stars that might have brightened the evening. The only illumination came from the lights mounted on the campus buildings. Adding to the ominous vibe, a raven soared past us with a flap of its expansive black wings.

  “How long do you think the barons will let the Nary situation fall apart before they announce themselves?” I asked.

  Declan cocked his head as he considered. “They’ll want to make sure the Naries are completely unsettled and desperate for a solution—but I’m not sure how long they can keep directing a catastrophe on this scale. I think we’re looking at a matter of days, and few of them.”

  “Which doesn’t give us a whole lot of time,” Jude said with a kick at the grass. “Is there anything else that computer hacker of ours could contribute, do you figure?”

  I frowned. “If branding the barons’ most important allies as terrorists didn’t work… I don’t think the barons would have their travel plans or anything like that on a server he could get into.”

  We fell into silent contemplation as we strolled on. After a minute, Connar raised his head. “What about—”

  At the same moment, a dark shape swooped into view. Declan stiffened. “Stop that bird!” he said with a jerk of his hand toward it, immediately tossing out a casting word of his own.

  His spell either missed or bounced off some defense on the animal, but the one Connar flung at it stopped the creature in mid-flight. With another string of syllables, he brought it down to our level, its body still paralyzed.

  It was the raven I’d noticed earlier. Only there was more to it than I’d realized then. A thin black harness was fitted around its chest—and at the center of that harness was a dark gray object I immediately recognized as a conducting piece.

  Declan swore and spun around to scan the area the bird had been flying back from. Malcolm murmured a couple of words over the bird.

  “The piece is empty, but there’s magic in the bird,” the Nightwood scion reported. “It’s someone’s familiar.”

  “And it carried some kind of spell right into the middle of campus, we have to assume.” Declan continued his survey, but I couldn’t make out any sign of a hostile spell affecting anything in the area.

  “Maybe it was just spying on us for now?” I suggested without much hope.

  “We should report it to the blacksuits. They might have a technique for determining whose familiar it is or even what magic the conducting piece last contained. At the very least, they’ll want to be on high alert for similar intrusions.”


  Declan scooped the raven under his arm and started off toward the staff quarters. He pulled out his phone with his free hand. By the time we’d reached the building, a few of our blacksuits were already emerging from the building.

  Declan handed the bird over to them. One of them inspected it with a few spells while another turned to us. “What exactly did you see it do?”

  “We were coming up from the Stormhurst Building,” I said. “It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes ago it flew by us heading west. None of us noticed the conducting piece then. Just a minute ago it flew back to the east. Other than that, I’m not sure where it went.”

  “Me neither,” Malcolm said grimly. “It could have gone anywhere while it was on campus. We don’t even know if it kept heading east.”

  “It’s definitely a familiar,” said the man examining the bird. “If we had access to our database—”

  A shout rang out from farther off by the western forest, followed by a shriek. All of us jerked around toward the noise.

  Without any spoken decision, we took off to find out what had happened. The blacksuits barked orders into their radios. A few of the staff and some of the junior students spilled out of the building as we passed the farthest entrance, drawn by the commotion like we’d been.

  As we raced across the field, a girl stumbled out of the forest, clutching her arm. “They’re taking them,” she babbled. “All of them.”

  Declan caught her by the shoulder. His voice came out in its most soothingly even tone. “Who’s taking them? Just tell us what happened.”

  “One of my friends started walking off toward the forest.” The girl gulped back a sob. “She wouldn’t answer me when I asked what she was doing. I followed her—a bunch of other people were all going out there too. They went so far, I started to get nervous. I grabbed her arm and tried to make her come back, but she pushed me back with a spell that really hurt. And then I saw—there were other people in the forest, waiting for them—I think they must have been on the other side of the wards.”

  The second she got to that part, most of us listening started running again, on into the woods. I gasped out a few words to conjure a ball of light to help us find our way through the thicker darkness between the trees. The only sound was our rasping breaths and twigs crackling underfoot.

  “Take it slow,” one of the blacksuits said. “We have to take stock before we engage.”

  She’d only just finished speaking when my light caught on a few figures marching along some fifty feet ahead of us. One of them had a familiar fall of blond hair. Beside me, Malcolm swore.

  “Agnes!” he yelled, sprinting faster despite the blacksuit’s caution.

  She was too far away. I pushed myself harder too, but in the space of a few stuttered beats of my pulse, she stepped into a shroud of shadows so thick they completely swallowed her up.

  One of our classmates who’d run this way called out someone else’s name and leapt ahead of us. He barged between the trees—and was yanked away into the same curtain of shadow.

  It must have been magically conjured, I realized. Here and there, I spotted vague figures moving behind it.

  They must have set it up along the boundary of the wards. A woman who’d gotten a head start on us dashed toward it too, reaching for a boy who was just stepping into the haze. In an instant, they both lurched forward into its grip.

  “Stop!” one of the blacksuits shouted. For a second, I thought he was yelling at the mages beyond the shadows. Then he thrust out his arm, and a rush of wind knocked all of us on his side backward. I fell on my ass, the breath jolting out of my lungs.

  Malcolm grunted as he tripped over a tree root but managed to right himself. Before he could fling himself after Agnes again, more of our blacksuits rushed in to form a line between us at the wards’ boundary.

  “We can’t win like this,” said the man who’d warned us before. “They’ll just snatch us away one by one the second we cross the wards.”

  “My sister is over there,” Malcolm snapped. He moved to push past the blacksuits, and three of them spoke at once, casting a wall that halted him in his tracks.

  “We pull back,” the man said firmly. “We pull back and decide how to handle this. It isn’t going to help anyone if they draw you in too, and if we attack them without a clear view of them, we’re just as likely to hurt the people you want to save. They want us to rush in. Don’t you think that’s why they’re doing this?”

  Connar touched his friend’s arm. “Don’t play into your dad’s hands, Mal. He’s not going to hurt Agnes. He needs her.”

  Malcolm exhaled raggedly, his hands clenching at his sides. I ached to reach for him, but I wasn’t sure he’d accept that kind of comfort right now.

  “Fine,” he said. “But we are going to fucking fight.” He hurled his voice toward the unnatural shadows. “You’d better believe I’m going to crush every one of you bastards.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Connar

  It took an hour, pulling everyone on campus together in the huge foyer of Killbrook Hall, to fully count our losses. Our enemies had used what I had to admit was a smart tactic. It looked like they’d sent the raven familiar to target the junior dorm area with a contained persuasion spell that had activated in the students’ presence. The younger mages wouldn’t have been as practiced at keeping up their mental shields, making them more vulnerable.

  Along with Malcolm’s sister, six other juniors were missing, plus a few seniors and two parents who’d either been in the vicinity and unprepared or who’d chased after the younger students like Malcolm almost had. There hadn’t been a huge number of staff and students left at Blood U after we’d lost over a dozen allies in our last confrontation with the barons and said a temporary good-bye to those who’d left for the capital and elsewhere to try to interfere with their plans. Tonight, our enemies had taken nearly a quarter of those who’d remained, not counting the Nary students.

  Which didn’t make anyone all that optimistic about our chances of getting the victims of this assault back.

  “We can’t let the assholes get away with this,” Malcolm was saying, his normally cool voice gone hot with anger, though no less commanding than usual. “Who knows what the hell they’re going to do to those kids?”

  “There’s a significant chance that’s exactly the move they want us to make,” Jude’s uncle said. The new Baron Killbrook frowned as his gaze traveled over the assembly. “They want us to charge after them carelessly like some already did so they can pick us off easily, and then there’ll be no one left to oppose them.”

  “So we don’t do it ‘carelessly,’ then. But we don’t stand around waiting to check on their next moves either. What’s next could be even worse.”

  “We still have the same problems we did before,” Jude pointed out. “Except now we’ve got even less manpower on our side, and we know they’ll be expecting some kind of counterattack.”

  Holden had been watching the turmoil play out with a thoughtful expression. Now he said, in the warm, mostly steady voice I was still getting used to, “We can start with what we know and work from there. Do we have some idea where the barons are, or where they’ll have had the people they captured taken?”

  Hearing those reasonable questions sent an uncomfortable prickling through my chest despite myself. The more time I spent around my brother, the harder it was to picture me standing at the table of the pentacle next to him, no matter what Rory and the guys said. He saw the big picture. He approached it with care but determination. And here I was, a million times more familiar with the school and the people here than he was, with nothing I could think of to say.

  “If they’re hoping that we’ll come after them, they won’t have gone too far,” Rory said. “We could find out, couldn’t we?” She looked to a cluster of blacksuits standing nearby. “When you were searching for my mother before, you used me to help because my family connection made it easier to identify her—and that was acros
s the country. It shouldn’t be difficult to figure out where she is now or where Malcolm’s father or sister are when they’re at least in the same state as us.”

  A couple of the blacksuits nodded. “We could determine where they are within a fairly small range. That would certainly be a starting point for making any plans.”

  “Good. Let’s get on with it.” Malcolm made an authoritative gesture, but I knew him well enough to see how much his sister’s disappearance was eating at him. He was the one who’d brought her here, thinking she’d be safer—of course he felt responsible. If the barons had ripped Holden away from the school for whatever malicious purposes, I’d have been wracked with guilt too.

  “Now?” the one blacksuit asked.

  “We might as well get that confirmed,” Rory said, taking Malcolm’s arm. “We could use one of the staff offices so you can work the spells without distraction.” She glanced at the rest of us. “No matter where they are, we’ll have to take some of the same things into consideration. Keep hashing it out while we figure out this part.”

  “Can we use our familiars in any way?” Noah asked as the Bloodstone and Nightwood scions walked off with a few blacksuits. “Turn their own tactics around on them?”

  “If they’ve used a tactic, they’ll be prepared to guard against it,” Declan said. “We need to come up with an approach that neither the barons nor the blacksuits will have considered.”

  “What if we go straight into a full-out offensive?” I said. “Before, we’ve always taken the time to try to talk things out, which gave them time to, I don’t know, size us up.”

  Baron Killbrook rubbed his jaw. “I definitely think we should plan on bringing all the power we can to bear from the start. The question is how to use that power most effectively—effectively enough to overwhelm their own.”

  “We do still have quite a few people here.” Holden motioned to the crowd of mages in the foyer around us. “Some of them are professors who are experts at their subjects, and of course the scions. What special talents do we have among them that we could use?”