Firecracker: A Young Adult Fantasy (Arcturus Academy Book 1)

by A. L. Knorr

  With a nod, I slipped down the hall on the left while Alfred disappeared to the right. Sneakers padding quietly on the runner, I went slowly, ears perked. Trying door handles, I found many of them locked, but near the middle of the long corridor, a door opened.

  Peering inside revealed a library and lounge. A long row of windows covered with that metal security sheeting stretched the length of the room. Books and sculptures filled the shelves against one wall while an ornate fireplace graced the other. Other than behind furniture, there was nowhere obvious to hide.

  The gloom of the dimly lit space closed around me as I entered to do a quick sweep behind the couches and the thick curtains. I ran my hands along the bulky drapes, pressing against them. When I hit the solid form of a human, I jumped back with a yell, my heart giving a high leap of fright.

  The intruder exploded from his fabric cocoon.

  Simultaneously, the lights came on, flooding the room with artificial light. I staggered back, half blind.

  He shot by me and I groped for him, clumsy and desperate. My fingers caught on the tail of his shirt. Hauling back on the fabric, there was a rip and series of popping sounds. Buttons sprayed across the room.

  He twisted like an angry croc, rounding with his hands raised, fingers like claws. His eyes flashed red as fire leapt from his palms. I ducked, losing my grip on the shirt. With a sound like a low, continuous and powerful wind, flames arced over my head and hit the drapes. The fabric smoldered and sizzled at the edges, trying to catch. He darted across the room to the door as I lost moments drawing the heat out of the drapes, remembering that not everything was fireproofed in the main building. As the fire sputtered out, the door slammed closed. Heart pounding, I ran to it and wrenched it open. Diving into the hall and looking both ways, I caught the tail end of him as he disappeared the way I’d come.

  “Professor,” I called as I took up the chase. “He’s headed toward the girl’s block!”

  There was a distant, unintelligible shout from far away…in the wrong direction. Alfred sounded like he was nearly halfway to the end of the manor already.

  I reached the landing to catch a flash of dark hair as the intruder disappeared down the stairs. Not bothering to go around the railing, I braced a hand on the wood and vaulted over the banister. Fire detonated in my hips, knees and ankles in an effort to cushion my landing, but I still landed badly on the steps and tumbled forward, right into the back of the thief.

  He made an ‘ooof’ sound as I hit the back of his legs. Flopping backward as I rolled under him, he hit the stairs behind me and the two of us tumbled the rest of the way down like ragdolls, thudding and thumping and gasping. The edge of a step across my back knocked the wind out of me as I landed in a heap on the ceramic tile floor at the bottom.

  He was up and on his feet before I even figured out which way was up, reacting with an inhuman speed. I rolled over as he bent down, put a hand against my shoulder and the other against my hip. Before I could react, he gave me a strong shove across the floor, eyes flashing and teeth bared.

  “Stay out of it,” he hissed as he fired my body across the tiles. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  My hands squeaked against the tile as I slid over the slick surface, flailing and gasping. I hit the wall hard with my back. My skull bounced off the baseboard as dull pain bloomed in my shoulders and hips where I’d struck. A painting rattled. Rolling onto my back, hands flying out and up. Breathlessly, I caught the art before it could crush my skull with its heavy, wooden frame.

  Calling for help as he vanished down another hallway, I scrambled to my feet and propped the painting against the baseboard before giving chase again. I rubbed the back of my head where it throbbed. That had been one hell of a shove.

  Grinding my teeth at the way he’d gotten the better of me, I paused on the carpeted hallway, listening. I’d lost sight of him again. So far, I’d been in contact with him twice, and both times I’d failed to detain him. Where was Alfred? This intruder didn’t just have fire, he had skills. He’d displayed them by how he could detonate in rapid sequence inside his joints to send me flying across that landing.

  The soft snick of another door closing brought my head snapping to. It hadn’t been far away. This corridor was full of lecture halls and classrooms. He’d likely slipped inside the nearest one.

  My mind raced as my heart picked up speed. I was even more invested in catching him now that I knew he had training. Heading in the direction of the sound, I tried the nearest door. The brass plate screwed to the wood marked this room as a computer lab. With a bracing inhale, I slipped inside.

  Five

  Cat & Mouse

  I found myself staring across a long, narrow room. It might have been a library once upon a time but was now filled with cubicles of frosted glass and steel. A computer terminal nested in each nook. Above the work stations a metal-cutout sign screamed: ABSOLUTELY NO FIRE IN THE COMPUTER LAB

  From the far end came a frustrated snarl and a flash of orange light. Going up on my toes, I stretched to look over the tops of the stations. The intruder was huddled below a window. He looked up just as I spotted him and we made eye contact. My stomach lurched as I went around to stand in the aisle between desks. He was directly across from me now; if I sprinted, I could be on him in seconds. Heat swelled under my ribcage as I readied to detonate. It was time to show this guy I was no regular first-year. No regular mage, even.

  “I don’t have time for you,” he snarled, throwing a hateful look as he straightened to face me.

  Then he launched into the air.

  I gaped at the blooms of light pulsing beneath his skin as he moved—a masterful series of detonations he either wasn’t bothering to hide, or hadn’t yet learned how to mask. Something told me it was the former. He was too competent not to know how to conceal his detonations. His body arced into a sequence of tumbles down the row between the desks. Straight at me. His pure athleticism and virtuosity—like an Olympic gymnast—shocked me so completely that my joints locked up and my brain fizzled.

  Red glows flashed beneath his skin as he bounced off his hands as though coming off a springboard, both feet aimed at my chest. I tried to twist away but shock and dismay slowed me down. Air exploded from my lungs and pain blossomed under my collarbones as I flew backward. My twist became a corkscrew before gravity brought me down at an awkward angle. Hard.

  A softer-than-usual, squishier detonation went off in my shoulder, hip, and at the base of my skull. An impact that might have snapped bones or dislocated something was diminished into a series blunt compressions. Maybe my body was learning from the last time I’d been thrown without my brain having to make a calculation. I’d never used the fire in that way before, and if I hadn’t felt so poleaxed, I might have celebrated my accidental find.

  Instead, stars danced in front of my eyes and I tasted metal in the back of my throat. Sucking in air, I forced myself to my feet, bracing a hand against the nearest desk. Between the photo-flashes of my still popping vision, I saw the mage headed for the exit in the opposite corner. My first step wobbled and so did the room.

  He’d caught me off guard, but I wasn’t out of this cat and mouse game yet. I felt a wry twist cross my face. I’d begun this pursuit thinking I was the cat, now I wasn’t so sure. My arrogance had earned me a fire-loaded, flying kick to the chest. Maybe I couldn’t handle him on my own, but I could track him, slow him down. Someone with authority and ability—Tyson, Basil, or Alfred—would surely find us soon and put a stop to this nonsense.

  Grinding my molars, I forced myself to keep going. If I lost him, it could be a long time before he was found again. In the meantime, I was getting awfully tired of those security shutters blocking out the rest of the world. It turned the charming villa into a prison.

  I burst into a narrow corridor that ended with another sealed window on the left and two branching passages to the right. Who built this place anyway? It reminded me of the streets and canals of Venice, the way they wandered a
round like a forgetful elderly person.

  Pausing to listen, I chewed my lip. I had no idea which passage the intruder had ducked down. Actively suppressing anxiety, I trotted down the first corridor, eyes peeled and ears straining for signs of life. Not just his life, I’d take any life at this point.

  Burned mage or not, I was in over my head.

  This narrow hall had many closed doors and plusher carpeting than most. I tried a few handles to find them locked. With careful scrutiny, I discerned slight but fresh depressions in the thick pile of the runner. Seizing on these and ignoring the possibility they could belong to anyone but my quarry, I followed them to a side passage.

  As I jogged down a hallway so narrow two people couldn’t walk shoulder to shoulder—one in which my tallest friend would have had to duck not to catch a light fixture in the temple—I saw that the rug on the floor had changed yet again. It was little more than a jute mat. I’d lost his trail but my head snapped up as I detected the faint smell of smoke. Where there’s smoke—

  I picked up the pace only to lurch to a stop as the corridor t-boned with another passage. The smell of ash was stronger now, but still I couldn’t figure out which direction he’d gone. Stalled and breathing harder than should have been necessary, I doubled over and braced my palms on my knees, fighting frustration. I struggled to ignore the bruises forming over my body, later I might be able to use my fire to encourage them to heal faster, but I didn’t have time for that right now. A fleeting vertigo slipped through me, probably thanks to that kick I still felt poleaxed by. I braced a hand against the wall.

  With a start, I stared at the vertical wooden paneling under my fingers; different from anywhere else in the manor, as far as I’d seen … and abnormally warm. Sweeping my hand along the wall, stomach churning, the warmth increased as I closed in on a decorative light fixture.

  A glance down the hall revealed half a dozen more of these fixtures: inverted cones of dimpled glass sitting neatly within a delicate brass-colored claw. The lamp dangled from a hook which extended from a metallic base detailed with leafy flourishes.

  Now that I was looking at them, they were a little too beautiful to be appropriate for what seemed like an old servant’s corridor. They would have been more suited to hanging on the walls of one of the lush lounges on the main floor.

  Fingers sweeping over the fixture I detected that same fading warmth. Even more startling than the heat which shouldn’t be there, was a random screw in the side of the fixture. A screw which served no visible purpose. It didn’t fasten the light to the wall—it was running the wrong way for that—and it wasn’t holding down the casing because the base of the fixture was one solid piece of metal.

  Giving the fixture a tug, I gasped as the bottom of the light’s mount lifted away and dropped back down again. Applying more pressure, I pushed the entire lamp upward like the world’s fanciest and largest light-switch. The hinge flexed and there was a faint click within the wall.

  A door swung open.

  The seams of the portal had been undetectable thanks to the vertical wooden paneling, but once the door creaked open, I could make out the hinges tucked behind the right side. The dim light of the hall illuminated the rounded metal rungs of a steep ladder just inside.

  A secret passage.

  My stomach tightened as a new thought flowered: the intruder didn’t just know this place, he knew this place.

  A strange hybrid of fear and elation pooled in my belly as I ducked into the passage and groped my way upward in the dark. Letting my vision adjust, I emerged into an attic of sorts. Dingy light filtered in through a small triangular window. There were plenty of shredded cobwebs and a few lumpy silhouettes in the crook of the crossbeams overhead that looked suspiciously like bat’s nests. The only sign of the intruder were scuff marks in the thick coating of dust on the floor.

  Cresting the ladder, I followed the intruder’s trail, ducking to keep from braining myself on the low overhead beams. Passing three, four, five trellises, I caught a dim slash of light on the floor to my right between the rough-hewn framework. The disturbed dust also veered this way.

  A square panel in the floor had been removed and replaced without much care. A sliver of artificial light came through.

  Approaching the panel on catlike steps, I crouched and pried it up with my fingers. The hole dropped straight down into a closet. Jugs and spray-bottles lined the shelves and several mops, buckets, dusters, and brooms hung from hooks or sat leaning in corners. They were visible only because the door had been left open a crack.

  It was a long drop, but was I a mage or not? With a quick inhale and blossoms of fire-power in my hips, knees and ankles, I dropped straight down through the hole. Dull detonations cushioned my landing as I tented the fingertips of my right hand against the floor.

  Feeling jacked up on adrenaline, I straightened and stepped out into the hallway where a small alcove opened on a mini chapel. Clearly, this little church was no longer in use, at least not for its original purpose. Backless pews with fleur-de-lis cutouts in the sides had been stacked in rows against the stone walls in the alcove opposite me. But it was the flash of a sneakered heel that grabbed my attention, not the moldering furniture.

  “Hey!” My voice bounced around in the eerie silence.

  The intruder’s pointed features and mussed brown hair popped out from behind a pillar. He rolled his eyes and disappeared through the low, arched front door.

  “Wait! Can’t we talk?” I kept my voice neutral but inside my fire rumbled as heat and power built, ready to release if he turned and attacked. This clown wouldn’t be getting the better of me again.

  Passing through the chapel’s front door, I tripped over something and nearly went sprawling face first into yet another corridor—this one stone and lined with narrow pillars and arches. The spine of a thick bible peeked from where he’d shoved it under the edge of a short carpet runner. That was humiliating, but the stumble spared me from catching a face full of emerald green fire as he vented his frustration with a snarling jet of flame.

  A smell like copper burned in my nostrils. The crackling green flashed over my head and would have singed my hair if my curly mop hadn’t belonged to a mage. Nearly blind from the startling color of the flames jetting so close to my face, my tightly coiled energy released. Orange fire exploded from my fingertips.

  My rush of fire struck a second stream of flickering emerald, the desperate quality of my blast a match for his tighter, more concentrated jet. The flames grappled with each other mid-air like living things, then—with hissing pops—went out. Blinded by the sudden absence of such brilliant light, the world became vague shadows for what seemed like eternity. By the time my eyes were working well enough to see, the intruder was almost at the end of the hall.

  Growling and blinking, I took off after him. Determination filled me with primal urgency and fire pulsed through my joints. The fact that we were on the third floor and heading back in the direction of the lobby and main lounges filled my chest with hope. If I could keep him running this way we were bound to run into other magi.

  He passed through a doorway, slamming it closed behind him. Lowering my shoulder, I launched into the door like a freight train and barreled into a fancy hall with a tiled floor. I imagined graduation celebrations were hosted in here, why else would the overhead beams be hung with banners, the stone walls enhanced with art of fiery themes? The intruder was halfway across the hall already, but he wouldn’t reach an exit if I had anything to do with it.

  Fire exploded in my joints as I took a powerful jump from both feet. My hair jerked away from my face as my body vaulted across the room with unchecked velocity. As the tiles came up to meet me, fear that I’d break an ankle had me tucking into a headfirst roll. Springing to my feet and trying to check my momentum, a sledgehammer of a blow I should have seen coming took me hard across my right side.

  My neck creaked as I was thrown off my feet before sliding with a squeak across the tiles. I fetche
d up against a decorative table which rocked precariously, spilling a trio of polished stone spheres and the painted ceramic bowl that had contained them onto the floor. The bowl shattered into a million shards and my hands flew to protect my eyes as projectiles peppered my body. The three orbs rolled across the floor before stalling in the seams between the tiles.

  The intruder was at the double doors. He looked back at me with a baleful glare.

  “Mind your own business, girl,” he hissed before disappearing through the doors. I still heard him mutter: “Or you’re going to get hurt.”

  I agreed with him. Green fire that stank of copper? Blows with enough power behind them to send me skipping like a pebble? If this went on much longer, I was going to get hurt. I was already aching.

  I might have had the good sense to lay there and catch my breath. I could convince myself that Basil would have wanted me to stop this crazy pursuit a long time ago. He’d been reluctant to let me help in the first place. Surely this trespasser would be caught and detained in short order, with or without my involvement. I could just lie here and wait for the throbbing of my body to pass, wait for my breathing to even out and my thoughts to return to some semblance of logic. And I might have, if my eye hadn’t fallen on the orbs.

  Six

  Sapphire Surprise

  The perfect size to be cupped in a palm, they looked solid, even if they were supposed to be decorative. Crawling on my hands and knees to the nearest glittery ball, I scooped it up. It was heavy, solid stone, with what looked like hand-painted veins of lavender in the crackling metallic coating. The other two varied in shade, but were the same size and heft. I settled one in the crook of my elbow and carried the other two.