Magian High (18 page)

I had grabbed
Amity and reached the bottom step when a bright flash of light from below nearly blinded me.  Amity threw her arms around me just as we heard the explosion and saw the rolling wave of flames bloom towards us like thunder clouds in a storm.  She held up her hand as if to shield us, and the billowing slowed down.  Tugging at me frantically, she turned and ran, and this time, I ran with her, holding her hand, until a surge of energy went through me and I swept her up into my arms.  High in the air, I turned and looked back, confused.

“How—?”

“Time,” she said.  “It…fractured or something.”

I stared at her. “
You
changed it.”

Holding me tighter, she said, “You changed
me
.”

Amity had magic.  Time Magic!  Because I loved her!

A shadow flitted close to us.  “Get back!”  Sheldon motioned us towards the car.  “Get everyone clear.”  In his hand, I saw a hand-held camcorder.

“
Are you filming all of this?” I asked.

“We’ve got everything we need to shut down the whole—”

“
Whittle!
” screamed Amity.

A blur came out of the dark and smacked into Sheldon from the side.  The camcorder fell from his hand and the two men grappled in the air—like a bar room brawl from an old western movie. 

Amity let go of me and fell before I could stop her, and yet she showed no fear.  She sped past the camcorder and then slowed as she landed, just in time to position herself to catch it.  Almost as if she’d flown, and yet I got the impression she had used Time Magic again.

Silhouetted against the growing flame cloud, Sheldon and Whittle fought like wild animals.

I joined Amity on the ground and we bolted for the car where the others had gathered and were back to normal in movement and speech.  “Go!  Go!  Get us out of here!”  We jammed ourselves inside, hoping the car would provide some protection when the blast reached us.  Max had jumped into the driver’s seat and revved the engine, shouting at all of us to move faster and shut the doors.  We were sitting on each other’s’ laps, trying not to fall back out.  As we screeched away down the road, Amity called the fire department for help, and Elizabeth tried to get the various news stations.

“Get fire trucks here fast!”

“Get cameras here fast!”

Max
swore and swerved a little, watching the rear view mirror.  The rest of us craned our necks back to see the night sky become a wall of orange and then a massive mushroom cloud of smoke formed.

“Stop and let me out!” shouted Amity, banging on the window.  “I
have to film this!  Hurry!”

Max
skidded to a halt on the shoulder of the road—lucky for us it was deserted—and Amity yanked the door open.  “Hurry!  Someone pick me up!  I have to get up there!”

I felt helpless, knowing my magical energy was pretty much tapped out.  Before I could say anything, Curry pushed past me and picked her up under his arm like she was a football.  They were airborne fast, and I stumbled out to the gravel, watching them go.  Hitting the side of the
car with my palm, I shouted, “Go, Max!  We’ll follow!  Keep everyone safe!”

He hesitated for only a second, and then hit the accelerator hard, showering my legs with
gravel.  I ran towards the commotion in the air, feeling heat waves coming from the now flame-engulfed construction site.  Curry and Amity dropped to the ground, barely landing on their feet.

“Maybe we didn’t get Whittle trying to murder us
on film,” said Amity, breathless with excitement, “but we’ve sure got him for assaulting an officer.”  She held the camcorder up victoriously just as a bolt of fire hit the ground in front of her.  We all spun to face the inferno.  Another struck, and then something hard caught the side of my head.  With my ears ringing, I looked up at someone hovering above us.

“Jack!” yelled Curry.  “Don’t even try!”

“Stay out of this, traitor!” growled Jack.  “You know Mages should be ruling.”

“You live in the past,” said Curry.  “We all need each other.”

“You’re an idiot,” sneered Jack.  “The NMI was about to start a new school for us.”

“You mean your
mother
was about to get richer by stomping on Nomers,” said Curry.

“You better believe it,” said Jack.  “But you left us, and now you’ll—”

Curry roared and leapt for Jack’s feet, yanking him to the ground as if he were a body-sized sledgehammer.

Amity scrambled away like a crab, still holding up the camera, filming everything.  Was it light enough?  With the fire behind us, everything would be black.  I raised my hands above me and let them burst with sparks, acting like a flash for her filming. 

Just then, Sheldon and Whittle came free-falling until the last second when Sheldon did some kind of flip and got Whittle’s hands cuffed behind him.  With both Jack and Whittle downed, Amity and I each threw our bodies over them to help hold them.  Sirens and lights flashed—fire trucks—and behind them came the news vans and a police chopper overhead.

“Was this the sting?” asked Amity, her knee
s on Whittle’s feet and her hand on Sheldon’s shoulder.

He laughed through his exhaustion.  “Well, it wasn’t my idea of a Halloween party!”

***

A little after four o’clock in the morning, Sheldon let me in
through his front door.  We’d dropped Amity off, after all the report work with the police—good guys—the firefighters, and the news reporters.  We even gave
The Morning Edition
exclusive access to Sheldon’s camcorder recordings.  In a few more hours, the whole story would break, and everyone from the night’s adventures would be at the press conference.  We’d come back to clean up and to check on Mom and Kelsey, whom we found curled up on the couch with boxes of Snuffles stacked like a house on the coffee table.  Sheldon sent me off to shower while he woke Mom and told her what had happened.  She didn’t even get mad that Max had driven her car.  He didn’t have to parallel park, after all.

As I stood under the steaming water and watched the blood and soot trickle down the drain, I wondered when I’d gotten hurt.  I wondered why I hadn’t known Whittle was against us, too.  I wondered what would happen to Mrs. Bagler and her
Foundation.

But I didn’t wonder what would happen to Magian High anymore.  Somehow, enough of us had found courage to endure the
fight.  We were like those rocks in the stream my Dad had placed so many years ago, underwater at first, barely visible and making little difference.  But now we were greater in numbers.  We were bonded together, and we were strong enough to slow the currents of hatred and bigotry.  We had built something that would last.  Something that would keep getting bigger until it became a permanent part of life.

Tears of gratitude mixed with the water and shampoo suds.  I closed my eyes and
let them fall for a long time.

I’m pretty sure Miss Flinckey purposely scheduled the Unity Team retreat on the weekend after the verdict.  It gave us all a sense of closure to be together—those of us who had been part of the sting, those who had been injured or harassed in the various attacks, and the many who had joined us afterwards as the trial progressed and the levels of corruption were revealed.  Petercriss and Whittle had been part of Mrs. Bagler’s plans all along, but Petercriss had been sloppy and obvious, so he got caught earlier.  Whittle had played it straight until the very end, hoping he’d be appointed the new principal.  When Petercriss was appointed anyway, he’d been mad enough to get careless.  When Clorenzo had told him about the Gel Ball arena search, he’d grown suspicious and followed us until he saw that we were going to the NMI construction site.  Then Whittle waited to see what we were up to,
saw us head downstairs...

Local, state, and even a few national figures were charged with everything from fraud and embezzlement to assault and attempted
homicide.  Desegregation advocacy groups demanded purging of the police department, school board, city council and whole local NMI chapter. Personnel changes in each of those bodies flipped faster than a kid with a remote control and 400 channels on his TV. 

Of course, Jed was promoted within the police department to Chief of Police, and that same night he proposed to mom, who accepted.  The wedding will be after graduation.

As horrible as the whole trial was, it brought the community together.  Kids are always prone to fight for justice once they see it, and the students in all the schools had seen enough violence that they couldn’t ignore it any longer.  The youth led the adults into conversations across cultural lines.  The Mages figured out that being friends with Nomers wasn’t a death sentence to their power—especially after Amity’s Time Magic became public.  If I could have transferred that much power, and yet be a stronger Mage than ever before, obviously, the risk of love was worth it.

And of course, as the Mages figured that out, the number of Nomers dwindled.
  More and more people manifested magic in some way with every passing day.  The NMI’s original mission statement to help the education of Mages became something that truly stood for
national
values because there were so many of us.

So here we all gathered, almost
a hundred and fifty of us, at Miss Flinckey’s family farm.  A feast filled the front lawn on folding tables, and everyone roamed the flower gardens and rows of fruit trees.  Games would begin in about a half an hour, but for now, Amity and I walked hand-in-hand.  Well, we flew low.  As we passed the vegetable garden, she pointed to the left.

“Is that what I think it is?”

I smiled, realizing the time had come.  “Chicken coop.”

She
hovered with her hands on her hips.  “Okay, explain it to me.  It’s more than an idiom, but fairies aren’t real…
Are
they?”

I couldn’t help laughing.  “Well, it goes back to an old Mage prank.  Kids would Flash Jump into a chicken coop, steal or smash eggs, and then Flash Jump back out.  Because no one ever saw them, it was blamed on invisible fairies.”

Amity eyed me skeptically.  “Okaaay…Then why did that show up on an entrance exam?”

“It has to do with how to protect against Flash Jump
ing thieves.  It’s kind of a code for knowing what to do to catch the ‘fairy’ Mage.”

“Uh-huh.”  She said it like she thought I was crazy.  “So, if I decided to Flash Jump in there and raid the eggs—”

“There may or may not be a trap in place.”

Her eyes twinkled with mischief.  “Then let’s do it!”

“What?”

She grabbed
me and Flash Jumped, almost yanking my arm out of its socket.  A second later, we stood frozen, staring up.  I could tell she’d messed with Time again because above us, two buckets of something hovered in mid-topple.  I looked down to see the trip-wire, tall enough for the chickens to go under, but just right for catching dogs or pranksters.  Amity reached up casually and grabbed one of the buckets.  Inside it was some sticky, murky liquid.

“
Ew?”

I plucked the other bucket down
and found it full of chicken feathers.  Amity grinned.  “Ah, I get it,” she said putting her bucket back on its perch.  “You come in here to steal, and you leave looking like a chicken yourself.”

“I guess.”  I shrugged and started to place
the bucket back above the door on the beam, but before I did, she punched it out of my hands and feathers went flying.

And Time slowed again.  The feathers wafted down around us at a fraction of the right speed, and we stood in a swirl of white
, like a life-sized snow globe.  Laughing lightly with delight, Amity wrapped her arms up around my neck and pulled me into the most delicious kiss of my life.  And it lasted for a long, long time.