by Sadie Moss
“Raul didn’t succeed in getting whatever that weapon was, but it meant that the magical items were moved, so there went Hardwick’s collateral to keep the school open. The Trials were the watershed moment that turned people against us, when the anti-Unpredictable movement really started taking hold. The demon bird wreaked havoc and the towers nearly destroyed us. We had a fucking investigation team come in and check to make sure we weren’t making the towers ourselves!”
“So he did all of this to—to weaken Unpredictables?” Cam looks torn between anger and shock.
“Yes. You heard him. He doesn’t think it should be all Unpredictables in power, ruling over everyone else. He thinks it should be him. I’m pretty sure he thinks of himself as better than all of us, Unpredictable and regular magic user alike.”
“What a fucking cock.”
Dmitri paces across the destroyed space. If his limp is any indication, I’m pretty sure he’s just as beat up as the rest of us, but he’s still hopped up on the battle high.
I huff a humorless laugh, staring at the place where Agustin disappeared. “We have the best chance of stopping him—so of course he wants to take us all out. Now the public is against us, and we’re out of the school and vulnerable in a holding facility. People distrust us. They think we’re weapons. And the more isolated we are, the easier it will be for him to kill us for our powers.”
I can’t see Roman’s face since I’m helping him stand, and I can’t see Asher’s face since he’s turned away, but Dmitri and Cam look horrified.
Yeah. I feel about the same way.
This man has spent who knows how many years killing people and taking their magic—people with Unpredictable powers like him, people he should be able to understand and sympathize with. He’s just been murdering them for his own psychotic, egotistical goals.
It’s monstrous. He’s a monster.
“With all of our crazy powers, he couldn’t control us. He couldn’t predict us. And he wanted our power for himself. So he—he’s been killing us.” I swallow. “And now we have no idea where he is and only a couple of days left before the deadline the Circuit gave us, and you know he’s got some awful plan that he’s going to put into motion any second, and—”
“Hey, Sin, it’s okay,” Cam says, stepping closer as a small, hopeful, exhausted smile pulls at his lips. He pulls out his phone. “I mean, it’s not perfect. It’s not as good as stopping him or bringing him down. But I do have this.”
He holds up his phone and hits play.
Agustin’s voice fills the air, monologuing, and I realize what it is immediately. What Cam was doing with his phone earlier.
“I was inspired by the video you took when you were put in the holding facility,” he says. He stops the video and slips his phone back into his pocket. “Now we have proof. They can check this video out, run it through whatever tests they want—they’ll see we didn’t fabricate this. It’s genuine. It’s Agustin admitting to all of his crimes, his plans, his hatred of other magic users. If people can see this, they’ll have a hard time blaming all Unpredictables for the shit that’s gone down.”
I can’t help but grin at him, even though it hurts to do that. “Badass. I love it.”
“Yeah, but it won’t help unless we get it onto the networks, and fast,” Cam points out. “Who knows what he’s planning now? What his next move will be.”
“We need to fucking go after him,” Dmitri growls, finally stopping his pacing.
Cam’s face falls, the little burst of hope that lit up his features fading out. “How?”
And that’s the kicker, isn’t it?
We can’t go after him.
He’s gone.
Chapter 26
My stomach sinks like I’ve swallowed cement. We’ve lost him—we’ve lost him, and we can’t get to him. We have no lead, no hint as to his location.
We’ve failed.
I’ve failed.
At least we’re still in his… well… the only real word for it is lair, to be honest. I mean, it’s not cluttered with villainous laser machines or giant spiderwebs or what-have-you, but come on. It’s a pocket dimension that had a bunch of Indiana Jones style traps that tried to kill us along the way, and Agustin brought Roman here to try to kill him and steal his magic.
I think I’m justified in calling it a lair.
We’re all beat to shit—Roman worst of all. I help him to sit down, leaning his back against the wall before checking his body over. He’s got bruises, burns, and cuts. I don’t think any bones are broken, thank God, and I’m not seeing signs of internal bleeding—but then, who knows? I’m not a damn healer.
“I’m fine,” Roman rasps softly, and I realize that more of my concern must have shown on my face than I thought. He catches my hands, stopping them from continuing to inspect him. “This isn’t the first time I’ve had the shit kicked out of me.”
“At least your nose didn’t get broken this time,” I joke weakly.
Roman snorts in acknowledgment, then jerks his chin at the room. “There might be some healing potions around here somewhere. If you can find something, that’ll help.”
“Oh, right. Good idea.”
Healing potions basically rejuvenate your cells and can help you heal minor wounds like cuts, scrapes, burns, and bruises. More serious things like broken bones or a bad infection, you’d still need to see a healer for.
I know I should get up and help search the room, but I can’t quite make myself leave Roman’s side.
He could have died. He almost did die. I will never forget the moment I saw him with that lightning whip wrapped around him, Agustin standing over him, ready to take his magic, his very life.
And all it would have taken would have been for the guys and me to arrive a few seconds later. Just a few seconds. That’s all the difference it would have made between Roman being alive or dead.
“I’m going to be fine, Reckless,” he assures me, his voice tender even though it’s strained with pain. He reaches up and gently brushes some of my hair out of my face, tucking it behind my ear. “Go on, see what you can find. I just need to rest up.”
Hmm. I doubt he just needs rest. He needs some proper patching up. But I can’t accomplish that by sitting here holding his hand and worrying like an idiot.
I force myself to stand and glance around the space. I never really got a good look at it before the shit hit the fan—I was sort of distracted by everything else.
Asher’s got a hand against a wall, bent over, and I think he’s trying not to throw up again. He told me once that a lot of intense concentration like he uses when trying to get into someone’s mind, gives him a migraine, and I’m not surprised that it’s even worse when he tried to get through to Agustin.
Cam’s found a door and is stepping inside, hand curled into a fist and cocked like he’s got a punch ready to go.
I cross over, readying my sonic boom—only for the door to reveal what looks like a big office.
There was an office upstairs in the house itself, but that just had a laptop and some notebooks on it, what looked like some bills and letters. No taking-over-the-magical-world type stuff.
This office is a different story. It’s the kind of office that belongs in a lair.
“Dmitri?” I call out. “Can you help me look through all this?”
Dmitri’s doubles have disappeared. I would’ve thought he might summon his duplicates so we could search the area faster, but I suspect that would take more energy than he’s got right now.
He walks over to join us, his limp a bit more pronounced, and I wince. He’ll need to get that looked after. All of us need a healer. I’m glad there’s not a mirror around so I can’t look and see exactly how beat up I look. I sure as hell can feel it, though. My whole body aches like one big bruise.
The two of us split up, searching through the large office for a healing potion or anything that might give us a clue where Agustin went.
“I found a summoning circle,” Dmitri
says after a few moments, jerking his head over toward what looks like the dark entrance to a separate chamber—a tall, arched doorway with some runes carved around it, with nothing but blackness beyond. “I think that’s where he summoned demons.”
“The bird demon?” I ask.
“I’m guessing. I found what looked like some feathers on the floor. Could be from that. When you summon a demon, it can go on a rampage or try to eat you or something if you’re not mentally powerful enough to control it. So you summon it inside the circle to keep it imprisoned until you know it’s been bent to your will.”
I scrunch up my face. “Roman doesn’t do that.”
“Roman usually summons demons in battle, and he’s strong as fuck. I’m guessing Agustin decided to take precautions since he was giving the bird instructions and sending it far away. He probably needed time to keep it in the circle and strengthen his mental hold on it.”
Okay, that makes sense. And it gives me a tiny bit of hope to think that maybe Agustin isn’t completely all-powerful.
Cam pokes his head into the office, his blue eyes wide. “Hey, guys? I think I found his war room or something. His headquarters.”
Dmitri’s face darkens, and the two of us follow Cam quickly, stepping into the room with him.
The blond mage looks up at the doorway. “Runes here too. I think that’s why we didn’t see this door before.”
“I was too distracted to notice a door,” I confess. Too distracted worrying that my boyfriend was going to be murdered in front of me.
Cam shakes his head. “When I was filming, I was looking through the camera to make sure I got everything, and I definitely would’ve noticed a door. Now that Agustin’s gone—I think that he stopped trying to keep the runes up or something. Decided it wasn’t important.”
“Or maybe we injured him enough that he couldn’t keep them up?” I ask hopefully. I’m probably grasping at straws but, hey, worth a shot, right?
Dmitri frowns. “Or he knew it didn’t matter if we found this. Because it’s too late for us to stop him.”
He’s staring at the opposite wall, the wall facing us. I follow his gaze, and what I see makes my skin prickle with unease. I’ve seen shit like this in movies and TV shows, but I never thought I’d see it in real life. It’s like a collage that takes up almost the entire wall.
Red string connecting pictures of faces, locations, objects. Scribbled pages from notebooks. Newspaper clippings. Printouts from the internet. Post-it notes.
“Like we needed more proof this guy’s a total nutter,” Cam mutters, a note of fear in his voice.
“Can you film this?” I ask. I don’t really want to touch anything, and I feel like the whole villainous monologue was enough proof of Agustin’s evil intentions already—but just in case. We have to show our work, like solving a math equation.
Cam nods, pulling out his phone and filming. He shows the desk, and I flip through some of the maps and notebooks on there to show the camera.
One of them is just a list of powers. Things like demonic summoning, disintegration, and teleportation. Most of the powers on the list are crossed off.
A chill crawls up my spine. This is—holy shit. There are far more powers listed here than Agustin showed us in our fight against him. His arrogance is shitty, for sure, but he might actually have been right when he said he was the most powerful magic user out there. In the entire history of our people, I don’t think that anyone’s had this many powers, actually been this powerful.
Maybe, once, long ago. Maybe this is where myths about gods came from. Maybe Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan were this powerful. But not since then. Not in hundreds, thousands of years.
It fucking terrifies me.
“We need to let the Circuit know what’s going on,” I mutter, tearing off the pages and folding them up, shoving them into my pocket. “And we need to get medical help. All of us. Come on.”
Cam finishes filming, then follows me out. Dmitri lingers for a moment, glaring around the room, like he wishes he could just set it all on fire. Then he also follows.
Roman insists he can walk, that he’s fine, but Cam and Dmitri help him up and drape his arms over their shoulders anyway, and they’re proven right when Roman’s legs buckle the moment he tries to take his first step.
I help Asher. “You okay?” I ask.
Asher nods, his eyes squeezed shut. “I just need to stay away from bright lights and maybe sleep for a few hours. I wasn’t beat up too bad or anything, it’s just—a really, really bad migraine.”
“We’ll put you in the back of the car.”
We get back upstairs to the house, where Cam finds first aid supplies—both magical and non-magical—in the master bathroom. Roman drinks two healing potions, and I put bandages on the worst of his injuries, adding some magic ointment that’ll accelerate the healing process. Roman takes a look at Dmitri’s leg and uses the bandages to rig him up a makeshift cast. Nothing’s broken, luckily, but his ankle’s been wrenched, and it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Cam and I split the final healing potion. I’m mostly just aching and bruised, same as him, and what the healing potion doesn’t take care of, my body will heal naturally with time.
When we finally make our way outside, the neighborhood is dead quiet. No one called the cops, I guess, which kind of surprises me. Maybe they were all too scared.
It’s such a goddamn relief to see Roman walking on his own that I could cry. After the slow, laborious trek back to the car, he and Cam help Asher into the back seat, and the poor guy lays his head in my lap. Dmitri takes the front passenger seat so that he can stretch out his injured leg, and Roman sits in the back, Asher’s legs on his lap, so he doesn’t have to try and concentrate on driving while healing.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? You sure you’re up to this?” I ask Cam as he pulls away from the curb.
“Yeah, Sin. I promise. You focus on calling Aurora, I’ll focus on the road.”
Cam and I have a similar driving problem that Asher politely calls “treating speed limits as suggestions” and Dmitri calls “being suicidal maniacs”.
Then again, speed is kind of important right now.
I pull out my phone and punch in Aurora’s number while Roman tries to call some person in the Circuit that he knows. I gently run my fingers through Asher’s hair as the phone rings.
And rings.
…and rings.
“Dammit. I can’t get through,” Roman says, pulling the phone away from his ear. I watch him select a different number from his contact list and try again.
Aurora’s number is still ringing too.
“What the hell is going on?” Dmitri asks. He’s pulled out his phone too, although I have no idea who he’s trying to call. “It’s like something’s clogging up the networks.”
Technically, we can use whatever cell network we want. There is, however, a popular service provider that has things like enchanted emojis and such, and we all tend to use that because hey, what is magic for if not to make our lives a little more fun, right?
But right now, nothing’s getting through.
“I think…” Roman drops his phone into his lap, and I can practically feel him wishing that he had one of those old flip phones that he could snap closed, or even a landline where he could slam down the receiver. “I think the cell towers are down. Or overloaded.”
“Like Agustin took them down?” Cam asks, executing a right turn that’s fast enough to make me lurch and nearly slam into Roman.
“Or like people are clogging it all up with phone calls,” I reply.
Either option is disturbing.
Roman and I keep trying to call as Cam speeds us out of Portland and back to the holding facility, but there’s no luck. Nothing at all is getting through.
My stomach twists with dread. I try calling Maddy, just to tell her that shit might hit the fan, to find someplace safe and stay there, but I can’t get through to her either.
/> Fuck. I want to break something in anger, but instead I force myself to breathe and I keep stroking Asher’s hair as he naps in my lap, recovering.
We’re heading back to the holding facility because, well, where else are we going to go? And besides, that’s where the Circuit is expecting us to return so that we can report our findings.
But dread is settling into the pit of my stomach, and I can’t help but wonder if there will even be a holding facility for us to come back to.
“Do you think he wanted us to end up in a place like that?” I ask Roman. “Do you think—I mean, this idea of a holding facility for us didn’t come out of thin air. Do you think this was a possible… contingency plan? That he knew about it and thought if he could disgrace us enough—we’d all be fish in a barrel there.”
Roman scrubs a hand over his chin, looking troubled. “I don’t know. Possibly. Fuck.”
When we pull up to the holding facility, it’s still standing, thankfully. So at least there’s that.
I wake Asher up, gently shaking his shoulder and leaning down to whisper, “Hey, we’re here.”
He mumbles something unintelligible and opens his eyes, blinking groggily. “Hey, Cam didn’t get us killed.”
A soft chuckle falls from my lips. God, I love these men so much. “Nope. Not this time.”
Ash sits up, rubbing his eyes.
“How’re you feeling?” Roman asks, concern reflecting in his cobalt eyes as he glances over.
“A lot better. Give me a couple aspirin and I’ll be good to go.”
We get out of the car, and I can feel all the men tensing around me, ready for anything. I feel the same way. I’m bracing myself for this to be a trap. For the facility to be empty. For us to walk in and find the bodies of people we know and care about.
But as we walk up to the front doors, I realize that at least a few of my fears can’t be true. There are definitely still people here. And judging by the volume of the voices that are bleeding through the entry doors, they’re all trying to talk at once.
I grab one door, and Dmitri grabs another, and we yank them open.