by Sadie Moss
“All right, Sin!” Cam crows. “That’s how you fuckin’ do it!”
Agustin rights himself and turns, snarling at me. “You loathsome little…”
“Takes one to know one, asshat,” I shoot back.
In a flash, all the water suspended in the air around us falls like torrential rain, and I’m disoriented as it crashes down, splashing my face, blinding me, soaking all of us.
I splutter, blinking my eyes open as I spit out water—and then almost choke as I inhale a sharp breath.
With an electric sizzling sound, a strange whip made of lightning materializes in Agustin’s hand. He’s gripping it, no handle or anything, like he’s summoned an actual goddamn lightning bolt and is holding it captive. It snakes in the air, crackling, and I smell ozone.
Holy shit.
My gaze scans his fingers, searching for a ring or some other enchanted object that might be generating the whip. But he’s not wearing anything.
Now, I don’t know a fuckton about ordinary magic users. But I do know they’re pretty restricted in what they can do with their power, and that they need to use enchantments, potions, and charms in order to access different kinds of magic—although there are always limitations. It’s why so many people are, apparently, wary of Unpredictables. We don’t need those kinds of add-ons in order to boost our power. We’re not limited by conventional magical rules. It’s where we got our name.
And one thing I’m ninety percent certain most ordinary magic users can’t do?
Summon a fucking lightning whip.
All of us instinctively dive out of the way as Agustin raises the whip. I’ve never seen anything like that. It can’t be some kind of spell or enchantment, can it? He’d have to be wearing some kind of charm object, and even then, I don’t think an enchantment would allow him to hold lightning with his bare hands.
I don’t have a lot of time to analyze the situation though, because my only thought is to get out of the damn way and pray the others do the same. Asher’s mostly clear, standing back and focusing on either keeping innocent people away or trying to break into Agustin’s mind—I’m not sure which at this point. But Cam, Dmitri, and Roman are all in the line of fire, same as I am.
And of course Dmitri, my sparring partner, decides that diving toward the maniac with the lightning whip to try to tackle him is a better option than diving out of the way of the weapon.
“Don’t!” I yell, even as I tuck and roll on the grass, my body moving without thought—all those fight classes paying off. I’ll have to remember to thank Tamlin later.
Dmitri catches Agustin around the waist, driving him back several steps with a shoulder to his solar plexus.
Then everything happens so quickly that I almost can’t see it, can’t tell what’s going on until it’s too late.
Agustin and Dmitri are scuffling, grappling in a clinch. Agustin raises the whip, and I cry out—because Dmitri’s a tough son of a bitch, nobody’s denying that, especially me as the girl he’s literally knocked into the dirt plenty of times, but this is actual lightning. There’s no way he can survive a direct hit from that thing.
And then Roman shouts words I can’t understand, and something that looks almost like a demon ghost pops into existence behind the two brawling men. Suddenly, Dmitri’s being yanked backward by demon ghost, pulled away from Agustin’s whip just as it flicks toward his back.
The whip misses.
But Agustin cracks it again, and this time, the bright white whip wraps around Roman’s waist. Roman cries out in pain.
And then both he and Agustin vanish.
For a brief moment, I wonder who’s screaming—they sound so angry, so helpless, so terrified—and then I realize it’s me.
I’m the one screaming.
Dmitri staggers to his feet as Asher collapses and Cam teleports to catch him.
“I… I tried. His mind’s a fucking fortress,” Asher manages to gasp out.
Asher rarely swears, so when he does, I know he’s at the end of his rope.
“That asshole… is definitely not… just a water elementalist,” Cam says, his voice hoarse.
I don’t care. I don’t care what he is, I don’t care if his mind is Fort Knox, where the fuck did he take my boyfriend?
Roman’s strong. I know he is. He was taking down necromancers when he was a teenager, far younger than I am, far younger than he is now. He can kill someone with a single touch, control demons for crying out loud—but he’s also human. He’s got fragile, breakable bones, same as the rest of us, and he’s got a good heart, and he works so hard to be a good person and to take care of his students, and if I don’t get him back in one piece, I am going to seize the world in both hands and rip it apart.
“Breathe.” Dmitri’s hand is on my back and his voice is in my ear. I don’t even know when he moved over to me. “Breathe. It’s going to be okay, Princess. Hey. Breathe.”
My eyes are stinging and my lungs are burning. I know now how Roman must’ve felt when I was up in that tower last spring, my life in danger as that mage advanced on me with murder in his eyes. Roman didn’t even hesitate. He used his death touch, even though he knew what it might cost. I know how he felt when he saw me get attacked by my fellow students in my second year, when they thought I was the one stealing their magic and they surrounded me, mobbed me—and Roman stepped in and stood between us, snarling like an animal, magic crackling between his fingers.
If—when—we get him back, I am never complaining about his protectiveness ever again.
Not that I really complained about it in the first place. It’s part of why I love him so much.
My chest seizes at that thought, and it takes all my willpower to keep my legs under me. I can’t give in to my fear. Fear won’t help us get Roman back.
“We have to get to him.” I stagger to my feet, shaking Dmitri off. “We have to stop Agustin. He can’t—if he hurts Roman, I’m going to—I will rip him to pieces.”
“We will, okay, we will.” Somehow I’m not surprised that with Asher apparently down for the count, Dmitri’s the one staying calm in the midst of crisis. “But…”
“The police will be here soon,” Cam notes in a tight voice as he helps Asher to his feet. Whether he means the regular, non-magical police or the Circuit or both, I don’t know.
“I don’t care about the police!” I yell, and I know I sound a bit hysterical, but I can’t stop it, I can’t help myself. “The only thing that matters is Roman!”
“Where the fuck did they go?” Dmitri snaps, grabbing my shoulders and forcing me to look into his eyes.
I know he’s not angry at me—he’s just trying to get me to actually hear him and listen. Trying to keep me from spiraling. I can feel myself slipping into panic, and I grab onto his forearms with a death grip, shaking my head back and forth.
I don’t know where they went. I don’t know.
“I can try… to sense them,” Asher says, but he looks pale, like curdled milk.
That’s when I feel it. Something in my chest, almost like an echo of my heartbeat.
No, not an echo.
A tug.
Something’s tugging at my heart.
It feels like—like what I was supposed to feel back in the Trials, during the ring challenge. For our second challenge, we were each attuned to a small silver ring before it was taken away and hidden from us, and then we had to find our ring before the timer ran out.
Surprise, surprise, I fucked that one up. I’m pretty sure by now that Johnson and the couple of other administrators who were helping him did something to make it even harder for me—maybe severed my connection with the ring or something—but I was also struggling with my magic at the time and had no clue where to even start with finding the damn ring.
But now I can feel it, a tug, like there’s a string connecting my heart to someone else’s—and I just know it’s Roman, it has to be.
“This is going to sound very stupid and cliché,” I say out loud, figh
ting to keep my voice steady, “but I can sense him.”
The others all turn to stare at me.
“You… what?” Cam asks.
“I can… I can feel him. Roman. It’s like my heart is reaching out to his. I don’t know if it’s my mirroring magic or something else, but—I can feel him. I’m sure of it.”
The three men all wear expressions that convey varying levels of alarm and concern, making me sure they’ve never heard of anything like this happening before either. But I don’t care. Maybe it’s stupid, and maybe I’m wrong, but it’s all we have. That bastard could have teleported anywhere with Roman, and I’m not wasting a second. Not when that’s all that could stand between saving one of the men I love and losing him.
Trying to settle my racing heartbeat, I close my eyes for a moment, focusing only on the pull I feel.
The tug seems to be coming from inside the house.
I take off, ignoring the way my body aches from the fight. The front door’s unlocked, since Agustin wasn’t expecting to get jumped on his short walk from his porch to his mailbox, and I yank it open.
Whatever doubts or concerns the guys might have about my ability to sense Roman’s location, it doesn’t stop them from having my back. All three of them are hot on my heels, Asher in the rear, Cam in the middle, Dmitri right behind me.
“Romaaan!” I scream. I know it’s probably not the best or smartest idea—that it could let Agustin know we’re coming. But I can’t help myself. I have to get to him, and it’s like alarm bells are ringing in my head, in my chest, making me want to claw at the goddamn walls. “Roman!”
All the furniture and other objects in the house seems ordinary, just like everything else about Agustin. I tear through the rooms, barely noticing the décor, trying to find something, anything, that seems like it’ll show me what to do, where to go.
There’s a lot of blue everywhere. Clearly this guy likes that color. Whoop-de-fucking-doo for him. There are also a few pictures of places it looks like he’s traveled. But just like in Roman’s house when I first stayed there, I don’t see any pictures of family or friends, no group shots.
It’s just Agustin, alone.
Nothing around here screams I’m a villain who hates an entire sub-group of magic users either. Not that I thought there’d be a big notebook on the dining room table entitled “My Evil Master Plan”, or some kind of James Bond interrogation room with a giant laser. But there has to be something. Anything! This guy has been summoning demons, for fuck’s sake. That doesn’t just happen in your Martha Stewart-inspired French country style kitchen!
I want to scream, to rip the walls apart, to smash his precious little house to absolute bits and then set it all on fire—and then Cam yells from the foyer, “Hey, Sin!”
I barrel back toward the front of the house to find the blond man kneeling in front of what looks like the door to the basement, his hands splayed across the dark wood.
He glances up as I crash into the room. “I think I found it. This thing’s radiating magic like nobody’s business. If it was a nuclear power plant, it’d be Chernobyl.”
Sure enough, as I take a few steps closer, I can sense it.
This is exactly why all those ancient magical artifacts were stored underneath our school. Powerful magic lets off an aura, an energy that you can sense, a bit like how you smell ozone in the air right before lightning strikes. Or the way your skin crawls right before the temperature rises or drops dramatically. The magical artifacts let off that kind of aura, but so do Unpredictables, so our aura was able to mix with that of the objects and hide exactly what was causing it.
Now, this door? It reminds me of the hidden door we found that led to the storage room where all those magical items were being kept. When I brush my fingertips over the wood, goose bumps prickle up my arm. Whatever’s behind here, it’s powerful.
The tug in my chest gets stronger, like the string around my heart is tightening.
“This is it,” I whisper. “It has to be.”
I know it in my heart, like I know the sun’s going to set in the west.
This is where we have to go.
Chapter 22
“How the hell are we going to break through?” Cam asks.
Dmitri reaches out, and his fingertips pass through the solid wood of the door.
“I thought so,” he says, as if to himself, and then he phases the rest of himself out and steps through.
That worked on the secret door guarding the magical items too. Dmitri’s other power besides duplication is the ability to make himself insubstantial, and it’s pretty damn rare. It must be, otherwise Agustin would’ve been prepared for it, made it so that the door couldn’t be opened that way or phased through.
But Dmitri passes through just fine.
My heart leaps into my throat and nearly strangles me in the few minutes it takes for Dmitri to unlock the door from the other side. What if there’s a trap? What if Agustin did plan for this, and now Dmitri’s dying on the other side, but we can’t hear him, we can’t see him, we don’t know…
The door opens silently on well-oiled hinges, and Dmitri grimaces. “Sorry. There are four fucking locks on this door.”
Jesus. Whatever Agustin is hiding back here, he certainly doesn’t want anyone finding it. I’m sure there are protective wards as well, which we only bypassed because he didn’t plan for Dmitri’s phasing ability.
I peer behind the dark-haired mage and see a steep stairscase leading down into darkness. Right away, I know it’s not an ordinary basement, with a simple set of steps that leads into a big room. Nope. These stairs seem to go on forever.
“I think… this is sort of a portal,” Asher whispers, as if someone might be eavesdropping. Who knows, Agustin might well have some kind of surveillance system in place. “He couldn’t have done all of this construction without the neighbors noticing. I think his basement must be in some kind of pocket dimension.”
“Holy fuck. Can someone do that?” I hiss.
“Sure. It’s what we use all the time for our buildings so we can hide in plain sight from non-magical people. It takes a lot of complicated wards and magic, and a long time to set up. You attach the pocket dimension to the building and it’s like adding a hidden pocket to a coat.”
“And he could put anything in this pocket dimension?”
Asher grimaces. “Ah. Yeah. He could.”
Well, we’re up shit’s creek then, aren’t we? Because the last things he sent our way were a magic-stealing bird-demon, a bunch of powerful mages and other supernatural creatures, and three supercharged magical towers that almost destroyed our school.
I think I’m justified in saying that I’m just a tiny bit concerned here.
It’s dark in the long stairway, and we have to feel our way once we make it a few yards down.
“Anyone got a light?” I whisper.
Dmitri pulls out his phone and puts the flashlight on, illuminating the space.
The bright beam of his flashlight bounces off the bare walls and worn steps, and when we finally reach the bottom step, we find ourselves in a dark, slightly cramped hallway—the kind you’d expect to find covered in dust and cobwebs in a horror film, except this one is nice and clean with hardwood floors. Figures, if Agustin comes down here all the time, he doesn’t want to deal with dirt and all that shit.
Just like the stairs, the hallway seems to go on forever. I glance around at the ceiling and the floors, which seem to grow wider apart as the hallway goes on.
“No trap doors or anything that I can see,” I whisper.
“Be on alert.” Dmitri’s voice is low and strained.
We start moving forward as a group, gingerly. Not as quickly as I’d like to. I want to rush down the hallway, to charge into Agustin’s lair with guns blazing, but the asshole has to know by now that we’re coming after him. He must have activated some kind of failsafe.
I’m proven right when we walk up a slight incline and the hallway in front of us v
anishes, disappearing into pure blackness as if light doesn’t even exist anymore. We all freeze in place, nothing but darkness all around us. A slight breeze drifts past my lower legs, making my shiver.
“Uh…” Cam’s voice filters through the blackness just behind me to my left. “Any chance one of you has night vision and has been holding out on us this whole time?”
“Dmitri.” I grope around beside me. “Turn your flashlight back on.”
“It’s still on,” he grunts. “Whatever kind of enchantment this is, the light can’t seem to penetrate it.”
I walk forward, squinting, trying to see if I’m getting any closer to the next part of the hallway.
Nothing.
I run, ignoring the yelled warning of the guys as they start to jog to catch up with me.
It feels like I’m not even going anywhere, like I’m just lost in this darkness, stuck like a hamster on a wheel. The walls have widened out so far that I can’t feel them on either side of me. I feel completely lost in space, adrift and untethered.
I stop running. Dammit.
“Maybe we should go back and see if the light comes back on? Try to get our bearings and try again?” Asher suggests, panting slightly as his voice grows nearer.
“Yeah, if we can figure out which way ‘back’ even is,” Dmitri grunts. “I’ve got no clue anymore.”
“Hang on. Let me see if I can teleport to where there’s more light,” Cam says, and I feel a whoosh of air beside me as he teleports.
A moment later, he appears right in front of us—but he looks a couple of feet shorter, his head only about the height of my chest. His phone flashlight is on, and it illuminates his excited features.
“What the fuck?” Dmitri scowls in confusion.
“Remember that incline we walked up a while back?” Cam points to our feet, which I realize now aren’t actually on the floor—they’re suspended in space, on a filmy surface that stretches out a couple of feet above the actual floor. “I’m guessing he’s put some kind of darkness conjuring runes on the walls here. But the floor’s only a couple feet below the walkway. From down here, the walkway doesn’t feel solid at all.”