Steel for 5 (Mags & Nats Book 3)

by Stephanie Fazio

  “Super Mags,” Smith shouted in my ear. “The Super Mags are here. Get the hell out!”

  I saw one of the Super Mags point a finger in Valencia’s direction. Lightning shot from his fingertip.

  Valencia dove to the side. The jagged lightning bolt hit the ground, turning the grass black. The ground sizzled and smoked.

  Valencia’s people threw themselves at the Super Mags. Because they were idiots. No Nat could go up against a Super Mag and expect to win.

  “Get the Directors out of here,” I ordered my people, who were already surrounding Kaira and Graysen and herding them off the field.

  I stayed where I was, making sure no one tried to come after the Directors.

  “Stop saying magic is bad,” a Super Mag told the group of Nats. He was at that awkward age where his voice was just starting to change, and it squeaked. The Nats laughed.

  “I mean it!” The boy’s face reddened. He started to close the distance between himself and the Nats.

  I tensed but continued to use my body as a barrier between the Directors and anyone who might try to come after them.

  “D-don’t come any closer, freaks,” one of the Nats told the Super Mags. He raised his hand to reveal a hunting knife.

  “Are you insane?!” I shouted, but no one was listening to me.

  I started forward, but I was too late. The Nat flicked his wrist in a quick, practiced move that I wouldn’t have expected out of him. The Super Mag boy he was facing off with cried out.

  The boy had turned just in time for the knife to miss his heart. It looked like it had sunk between his ribs, instead.

  Relief that he was still alive quickly transformed to rage. That Nat had just attacked a kid. What the fuck?!

  One of the Super Mag kids, who was wearing a daisy-patterned sundress, made a sound that could only be described as a war cry. She charged at the Nat who had thrown the knife. Just before they collided, the little girl twisted her hand.

  The Nat’s head snapped back so fast and so far that his chin was pointing up at the sky. And then he crumpled to the ground. His open, unseeing eyes fixed on the grass.

  My mouth fell open in a silent scream.

  “Oh my God,” Yutika gasped.

  Everyone was shouting. The ground thundered as thousands of people fled the stadium.

  “Exits are all blocked by the crowd,” one of my people said in my earpiece. “We’ll have to get the Directors out a different way.”

  “Get them back here,” I said into my mike. “Now.”

  Damnit. I should have made Kaira and Graysen leave the second Valencia showed her face.

  “I’m on it,” A.J. replied.

  “Hey, what the—” Smith’s surprised voice filled my ear.

  Seconds later, our van was appearing…from the air. I squinted into the sunlight as the van drifted down like a metallic bird.

  “Easy does it,” Smith complained. “I’m getting sea sick in here.”

  “Complain, complain, complain.” A.J. wiggled one of his hands, and the van did a pirouette in mid-air.

  “A.J.!”

  “Whoopsie.” A.J. chortled in delight before bringing the van to a soft landing right onto the baseball field.

  “No,” Kaira said, fighting against Graysen, who was holding her in a bear hug to keep her from charging into the fight. From the looks of it, Graysen wanted nothing more than to do the very thing he was preventing Kaira from doing. “We have to help. We have to—”

  “You go home and start figuring out how to undo this damage,” I said, having to yell to be heard over the panicking crowd.

  Kaira’s gaze hardened, and I knew she was about to argue. The rest of her security detail knew it, too. They all closed around her and Graysen.

  “Get in that van right now, or I’ll toss you in,” I told my friends.

  Graysen put up his hands in surrender and got into the van, pulling Kaira in with him.

  “Don’t jostle my equipment,” Smith snapped before the van door slid closed.

  “Get them out of here,” I told A.J., just as Valencia disentangled herself from the brawl and stumbled toward us.

  The van lifted straight into the air. Muffled cries came from my friends inside the van. Within seconds, the vehicle was lost in the gray-blue clouds swirling overhead.

  “A and B teams,” I said into my mike. “Meet Kaira and Graysen back at the mansion. Make sure they stay put.”

  With my primary concern alleviated, I turned my attention on the disaster playing out in front of me.

  “I’m stuck in the crowd,” Michael said over my earpiece. “It’s going to take me a few minutes to get down there.”

  “By all means, take your time,” Smith said. “I’m sure nothing too disastrous will happen in the meantime.”

  “Be nice,” Yutika told Smith. “You’re just kicking back and relaxing in the van.”

  Smith’s affronted response was cut off by a Nat’s howl as she went hurtling through the air. I winced as she slammed against the Green Monster and fell back to the ground.

  The Teleporter Super Mag—who was the one who’d gotten all of them to the baseball field in the first place—was transporting him and his friends in and out of the fight. They kept winking out of existence and reappearing elsewhere to tangle with Valencia’s Nats. Just watching them was making me dizzy.

  Valencia was shrieking at the top of her lungs, but aside from the piercing sound of her voice, she didn’t have any defense against the Super Mags. There were already three dead Nats lying on the field.

  Double shit.

  I stopped gawking like an idiot and ran into the fight.

  The Super Mags’ power swirled around me in an intoxicating and terrible wave of heat. If I’d been in regular skin instead of titanium, I would have been drenched in sweat.

  Their magic roiled in the air. It felt unstable and alluring at the same time.

  “This isn’t your fight,” a ten-year-old girl with pigtails told me. Right before she held her palm against one of the Nats’ faces. Her hand became translucent blue. The Nat screamed as his skin turned to ice and cracked beneath the girl’s palm.

  I dove for them, knocking them apart.

  The little girl tried her skin-freezing trick on me, but I felt nothing. Her brow furrowed, like it had never occurred to her that she might meet her match. Before she could try her luck on someone else with actual skin, I thumped my fist on the side of her head. Not hard enough to smash her skull, but enough to give her a nice, long nap.

  I tackled another kid to the ground. This boy couldn’t have been older than ten, and he was drawing extra-long needles out of thin air and sticking a Nat full of them. The screaming, writhing Nat looked like a porcupine.

  There were a few dull clinks as stray needles shattered on impact with my skin. The Super Mag took offense at my imperviousness to his magic. He screeched in rage, and then all of his needles were coming at me.

  Clink. Clink clink clink clink.

  What was left of the kid’s needles shot straight into the air as A.J. joined the fight. While the Super Mag was distracted by the loss of his weapons, I tackled him. He fell to the ground like a sack of potatoes.

  I wasn’t a violent person by nature, but I also didn’t lose sleep over other people hurting themselves on my skin. I didn’t start fights if I could help it, but I did end them.

  “Knock it off!” I shouted at the enraged, deadly children.

  Predictably, they ignored me.

  The lightning bolt boy was next. Purple electricity shivered up and down his bare arms and even cut down the center of his pupils. I would have been more impressed if he wasn’t looking at me like he planned to fry me alive.

  “Bring it, little man.”

  A lion sprinted past me. It roared and bared its teeth at the other Super Mags.

  “Thanks,” I told the Animalist.

  The lion licked my arm with the biggest, stickiest tongue I’d ever encountered. It regarded me with bright
gold eyes. And then it bounded back into the fray.

  “Stop fighting.”

  I heard Michael’s soft command in my ear. It never should have carried over the melee surrounding us, and yet, the Super Mags and Nats went still.

  Eight dead Nats lay sprawled on the ground. Valencia wasn’t one of them.

  “You devils,” Valencia croaked, getting to her hands and knees. “Barbarians…heathens! Nats will wipe you off the face of the earth!”

  I strode up to Valencia.

  With her runny makeup and billowing mumu, she looked far more barbarian than anyone else on the field.

  “You piece of shit,” I told her.

  Today had been about Kaira and Graysen’s efforts to make Boston a better, more inclusive home for all of us. Valencia had turned it into a senseless brawl that left eight people dead.

  Not only would this whole disaster encourage the few lowlives who wanted war between Mags and Nats, it would spike fear in citizens who were just starting to trust their new leaders. The damage Valencia had done today might be irreparable.

  Furious tears pricked at my eyes.

  “I should kill you,” I told the Mag-turned-Nat.

  But if I did, it would reflect on Kaira and Graysen. As much as Valencia deserved to die, I didn’t have the right to play the role of executioner.

  “Go ahead,” Valencia snarled, bending to stick her overly-large nose in my face. “It’s just like you Mags to use your deviant powers to take advantage of us poor Nats.”

  It irked me beyond reason that she was taller than me.

  “You were a Mag until four months ago,” Yutika told Valencia, throwing up her hands in exasperation.

  “You Mags are all the same,” Valencia said, ignoring Yutika’s comment. “You think you’re better, stronger, and smarter than us. The truth is you’re unnatural. Wrong.”

  I gave Valencia my best impression of a crocodile smile. I blew on my fists so my skin lost its titanium sheen. And then, I punched her in the face.

  A.J. and Yutika didn’t bother stifling their laughter as Valencia dropped like a ton of bricks.

  “There you go,” I told Valencia as she wiped blood from her lip. “One-hundred-percent natural strength. Want me to do it again?”

  I cracked my knuckles for effect.

  While I had been born with the ability to make my body titanium, my reflexes and conditioning had come from training. My dad had helped me learn how to use my titanium skin to its full advantage. He was also the reason why I’d been the top Mag wrestler in the city during high school. I’d been the only female on my high school’s team, and I’d gotten no end of pleasure at seeing the smirks on my opponents’ faces when they first caught sight of me.

  They were never smirking after we fought.

  “Here’s what’s going to happen,” I told Valencia and the mud-spattered and broken Nats who were staggering to their feet. “You’re going to drive yourselves to the nearest Nat police station and turn yourselves in.”

  Technically, she was their jurisdiction now. I didn’t want to cause any problems between the Directors and the cops by stepping on toes.

  Valencia gave me a petulant look, flinching a little when I raised my arm to adjust my sleeve.

  “You heard her,” Michael said, narrowing his gaze on the Nats. “Except, instead of going to the nearest police station, you’re going to go to the farthest. And you’re going to walk.”

  Yutika nudged Michael in the ribs. “Let no one say Michael is completely humorless.”

  His mouth twitched in the approximation of a smile.

  Without a moment’s hesitation, Valencia and her remaining Nats began tromping across the field to do as Michael had said.

  “What do we do about them?” Yutika asked, nodding at the Super Mags.

  With the way they were placidly staring at Michael, I was almost fooled into thinking they were just a group of kids. Almost.

  “Kaira and Graysen are going to want to talk to them,” Michael said.

  “That’s a great idea.” Yutika rolled her eyes. “Bring home a bunch of murderous, hormonal Super Mags. Ma will make a casserole, and then they’ll kill us in our sleep.”

  I wasn’t any happier about the prospect than Yutika. We’d gotten the upper hand on them because they’d been focused on the Nats. And because there were only ten of them here right now instead of the grand total of forty-seven.

  The Super Mags were just too powerful.

  As hard as Kaira and Graysen had worked to convince Boston society to accept them, the Super Mags had no interest in becoming law-abiding citizens. They needed a leader—one of their own to look up to. The problem was that the oldest of them was fourteen, and the Super Mags already had a lifetime of learning not to trust adults.

  Kaira and Graysen were convinced that the Super Mags would come around. I wasn’t so sure.

  “I can Whisper to them,” Michael told me with his usual quiet confidence, “since none of their magic is mental like mine.”

  In the three years we’d lived and worked together, I’d only seen Michael lose control once…when one of Valencia’s people had held a gun to Yutika’s head.

  “I’ll make a bus to get them back,” Yutika offered, flipping to a blank page in her sketchbook.

  A minute later, the Super Mags were filing onto the bus.

  “Don’t worry,” Yutika assured me. “I can draw them some toys and snacks to butter them up before Kaira and Graysen read them the riot act.”

  The way she was talking, it was like we were about to chastise these kids for being naughty on the playground. The eight corpses on the baseball field told a different story.

  As relaxed as she sounded, Yutika’s hand visibly shook as she began to sketch. I noticed the way her gaze kept straying from her drawing to the bodies on the ground.

  I wasn’t particularly squeamish, but I still kept my gaze averted as I climbed onto the bus behind Michael. My clothes were splattered with mud, and I felt the kind of weariness that usually only came as I was dragging myself to bed.

  And if the flurry of emails marked Urgent! in my inbox was any indication, my day was just getting started.

  CHAPTER 7

  It was late. My eyes were bleary from how long I’d been awake and on my feet. My stomach was growling. And I was in such desperate need of a shower that even Sir Zachary didn’t want to come near me. I was just working up the energy to haul my butt up the two flights of stairs to my room, when Smith intercepted me.

  He sniffed the air and wrinkled his nose.

  “Oh, not you too,” I warned him.

  “We need to talk,” Smith replied, taking a step back.

  “I’m showering right now, okay?” I threw up my hands. “No need to stage an intervention.”

  Not that Smith was exactly the standard for hygiene, with his oily hair and three-day-old hoodie.

  “What? No.” Smith tapped the closed laptop he was cradling like a baby. “I have a lead.”

  “On the magic ripper?” I asked cautiously, not daring to hope that he might be referring to the other mystery far nearer to my heart.

  Smith shook his head. “On the missing slaves.”

  My breath caught. I grabbed Smith’s arm and practically dragged him back to the living room, where the rest of the Seven were gathered.

  “Bri Hammond,” A.J. whined. “You’re still covered in dirt.”

  “I found someone who might be able to help us track down the slaves,” Smith said, coming to my rescue.

  Everyone sat up from their slouched positions at that.

  “Talk,” Kaira told Smith.

  “Okay, so there’s this blog I follow. It isn’t exactly pro-Alliance.” His gaze slid to Kaira and Graysen before he continued. “It’s actually super anti-establishment, and you need to break a special code to even read it. It’s kind of fun—”

  “Smith!” Six exasperated voices said at once.

  “Right.” Smith cleared his throat. “Out of the blue,
the blogger messaged me and said she had information about the location I needed.”

  I started. “The location?”

  Could this blogger be referring to the location? If so, it was the piece of the puzzle the now-deceased interim Director, Dr. Pruwist, had taken to his grave. It was the last detail we needed to solve this stone-cold case. Anticipation shivered through me.

  “I mean, we’ll have to take whatever she says with a whole barrel full of salt.” Smith’s expression darkened. “She’s a Clairvoyant.”

  “What’s wrong with Clairvoyants?” Yutika asked.

  “Aside from the fact that they couldn’t give a straight answer if their lives depended on it?” Smith retorted.

  “We need to go talk to her,” I said. I didn’t care what her magic was, just as long as she could give us the information we needed.

  Except….

  “Don’t worry about the Super Mags,” Kaira told me, already knowing what I was thinking. “Gray and I will deal with them when they wake up. The rest of you need to go see this Clairvoyant.”

  I wanted to argue. As their Security Chief, it was my job to not leave the two most important people in the city alone with a bunch of Super Mags. The ten kids we’d brought back from the baseball game were in the mansion now. They were sleeping off the effects of Michael’s Whispering in various guest rooms in the mansion. But if they woke up before the rest of us got back and started tearing the place apart….

  “Becoming Directors hasn’t made us completely useless,” Graysen said, giving me an amused look. “We’ve got this.”

  “I’ll stay here,” Michael said. “Just in case.”

  “Fine,” Kaira conceded. “But the rest of you. Go.”

  Having lost the small amount of willpower I had to argue, I nodded.

  “Everyone meet at the van in ten,” A.J. said before narrowing his gaze on me. “We’ve waited four months for answers. We don’t want to scare this Clairvoyant away with the fierce and terrifying Mud Girl before she tells us what we need to know.”

  “That’s Mud Woman to you,” I retorted, already sprinting for the stairs.