The Rise of Ren Crown (24 page)

For a moment, all sound was blocked—and all sense of taste and smell. I could only see the blue images and possibilities. If I bathed myself in paint—rubbed it into my skin... I could pull some of the power from my Awakening. Recoat myself in the protective image of blue. Let it fix all of my broken pathways...

I could become my Awakening. I could find Olivia. I could be
more
than Ren.

No. I swallowed. Just Ren was good.

I touched the door handle, then moved down the steps. Kneeling down, I made an arched line with a strangely steady finger in the dirt.
Protection
. Protect this tile from being stepped upon. The blue shimmered, then spread.

The building already had that command in place—it had taken me forever to get on the tile—and this was strengthening that command in the dirt at its base. Rapidly. The blue spread outward, circling the building, until the line rejoined itself. The magic flared, then disappeared from view.

I looked at the vine flailing in my hand, then acting on instinct. I swiped my finger along the top of the tube and wiped it on the vine's green head. It went still in my hand, like a puppet waiting for its direction.

Shuddering, I screwed the cap back on and sent the tube back to Okai. I wanted to keep the paint. I wanted the reassurance of having an ace in the hole. But it would be disastrous if it was found on me. It wouldn't even be the nail in the coffin. It would be the fully dug grave, complete with chiseled headstone.

I hated this. This hiding.

We stepped off the tile and Okai immediately spun out of view. It was replaced with another landscape, a quarter piece of a river—where the river flowed for fifteen feet before disappearing into the ground—like a fountain that was reusing its own water. Except that the river magically continued on in a tile somewhere thousands of tiles away. And it started its flow on another somewhere else.

I set the vine on the ground and pressed my finger to its painted head. I channeled my desire through the paint, and let the parts of my mind that collected information relay the sensory information on all the magic of the others—the others who each had some connection to me.

Find all of the trails.

In fact, any magic that looked tasty and mischievous?
Feast on, my green friend.

The vine weaved in the air, then dove into the ground.

The whole thing took but a few moments, but when I looked up, Dare was standing rigidly a foot away, whole body tense.

He was looking at something in the distance, his fingers clenching on the air, as if he wanted nothing more than to draw a staff out of his unlimited bucket of tricks. But that would be a dead giveaway to him. No one used a staff like Alexander Dare.

“Five seconds,” he said in a low, harsh voice.

I jolted, hands scrambling in the dirt to get myself upright as my feet were already moving in the direction he was pointing. We had fought together too many times in the Midlands for me not to obey unquestioningly.

He stood stock still, the deep hood obscuring his features, then he was all motion, hands lifting into the air and spinning. The greenery in front of him rose in a too-tight way, then spun with the motion of his hands in the air, and launched outward, toothed mouths open.

I lurched from my scramble into a full-out sprint.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadows shifting. Curses were heard as a few were caught.

Trolls appeared in front of us—why always trolls?—conjured by someone behind us and only a football maneuver kept me from being splattered all over the forest floor.

Shadows reached down and grabbed for my hood. Dare spun both of us and the ruined city tile we were running through shifted and broke, pillars and marbles rose then were thrust backward at our pursuers. The shadows screamed and two disappeared into mist.

A castle tile opened up. Then another. I angled left, heading straight for them. The other castle tiles would be more likely to attract, giving us better odds at shaking the tiles that the praetorians were moving on.

It was as if everything Dare had been training me for was coming down to this single minute.

A moor tile shifted into place in front of us, and there was nothing for it but to sprint across. The open, smoky moors were the worst places to be caught, if one was relying on subterfuge.

The fog lifted into shapes—forming into toothed clouds of smoke and lightning that were preparing to lunge at Dare.

No.

Dare’s paper dragon came out of the sky, reflected lightning glinting on its wings, and breathed fire in a long arc around us, blowing the shrieking fog into vapor. I pushed my very real shock down—I couldn't allow emotion to distract me as I sprinted and kept track of my surroundings as we burst through the flames and onto a forest tile, then the open desert. Root, branch, quicksand, scorpions.

Dare, hard at my heels, did something, pulling the forest branches together behind us. They formed a thickening thicket of enchanted thorns. A quick look over my shoulder saw a number of shadows slipping through the forming holes, but the vast majority ran headlong into the poisonous barbs.

Insane cursing and laughter echoed behind us.

Okay. If Dare hadn't already been slated for an imperial dungeon, he was definitely on that list now.

And then Kaine appeared.

Kaine swiped left, black shadow glinting silver as it sliced across Dare. An arc of blood shot from Dare's midsection.

His blood, we couldn't leave his—

The vine burst from the ground and swallowed the red trail from the air before a single drop hit the ground, then dove back into the ground in one clean arc. The dragon dove down again and swallowed the shadow that had split Dare's skin—making Kaine swear foully—then the paper burst into flame.

I stumbled, but regained my stride.

It was excruciating when one of my creations died, but I had to push it
down.

The phoenix swooped in suddenly and sucked in all of the flames of the dragon, twirled around one of the shadows trying to grab it, then swooped into the trees. The pain immediately numbed, as if the dragon was no longer dead, but in some strange state of limbo.

“Don't call them again.”
Dare's mental voice was breathing heavily.

I didn't... I hadn't called them, had I?

Dare's voice came through my mind, projected via the bands encircling our arms. “
They will get caught on a next pass. There is no way Kaine hasn't calculated the trajectories now. Only surprise let that work.”

I nodded, sharply and mentally, ducking a shadowy form.

The cloaks were doing some of the work at keeping us from being caught—and the garments were exquisite at it. They made it harder for us to be grabbed, as shadows tried to hitch onto shadows. I was pretty decent at duck, dodge, and evade, but hunting is what the mages following us had been trained for. On a level playing field...well, I would have been dead meat without Dare and the cloak.

The forming castle tiles had slipped away in a mass slide, but there was another tile—one that connected to part of the moat, and we sprinted for it together without exchanging a word.

Diving on at the last second, space tilted, then the ground jolted as our tile fastened onto two other moat tiles.

Dare was already on his feet, lifting me back to standing, then we were running into the outer bailey. He ran specifically toward a small guard outpost on the upper level of the inner wall.

He twirled me inside, slamming the door.

The air was eerily silent. The praetorians' shadows made a whistling noise that was noticeably, hauntingly absent.

Dare immediately pulled a black cloth from his cloak and pressed it against the wound in his midsection. I swallowed. I didn't know how he had kept running. It looked like he had almost been sliced in half.

“Can I do anything?”

“No.” He closed his eyes, then the black cloth melted into his wound, closing it in a black line. Another pass of his fingers knit the cloak back into shape. “Faults in the cloth lessen the illusion of the cloaks, but it should hold well enough for the next five minutes.”

I checked the time. Five minutes was all we had to get back to the Magiaduct. I tuned back into the armband chatter that I had muted before leaving the Magiaduct, then muted again in Okai. Distractions meant death in the Midlands, even on a normal day.

“Where are you, Princess?”
Patrick's voice was tight and overly controlled.

Holed up, with no way to make it back.
I kept tight rein on the thought, not allowing it to slip through the armband.

I closed my eyes and started to scroll through backup plans for how to keep everyone waiting for us safe and out of interrogation.

“The good news is that our magic trails are being eaten as we speak,” I sent. “On me making it back...that's...not looking as good.”

A flurry of voices responded, talking over each other. There was an enchantment that sorted voices out on multi-frequency or comm links, but I just let their voices wash over me in a wave.

“Activate Plan B
,” I said.

Plan B meant that Neph would accompany the double to Medical and leave. Leaving me to be discovered as “missing” later—likely reported by Bellacia. It also meant that they would wipe all traces of memory of the plan from their brains. Leaving me on my own if we
did
make it back.

“No.”
Neph's voice.

“Yes. It's the only way I can do this. Promise me.”

“No.”

They started arguing—at me—so I sent a
back in four
then shut them out. I closed my eyes, overwhelmingly exhausted with this whole day.

“You said I called the creations and vine,” I said tiredly, looking at Dare, who was fiercely and unflaggingly scanning the perimeter through the arrow slits in the castle wall, one hand pressed against his gut splitting injury. “I still do some magic effortlessly, while normal magic twists inside of me.”

Dare narrowed his eyes on a particular spot outside, then continued his sentry watch. “It's what people joke about as the retirement magic of a mage. Mages put a lot of things into place so they don't have to rely on dwindling magic or aptitude. A mage just needs to rely on the magic he already created.”

He looked at me. “And you... You create very powerful things.”

I leaned my head back against the stone. “I can connect to things I already have connections with. I did earlier with some of my paper. They didn't require active magic. Just the key of me.”

“Yes. You might irreparably damage yourself if you keep trying to channel new enchantments. But you can rely on what you already have. You will
need
to rely on what you already have. While you are like this, you need to craft what you already possess into new strategies, not magic.”

I nodded tiredly and looked at the hand pressed to his cloak, thinking about what else was beneath besides his nearly mortal injury.

“Kinsky's papers. We could use them. Suck up the entire lot following us. Praetorian sketches.” I mimicked whooshing my fingers into a sucking vortex. They were papers made by Kinsky, but they had accepted my touch and modification. I was pretty sure they would still answer to me.

“While there is some evidence that the suspended state inside the magic wipes a block of memory on either side of the entrance and exit to an Origin paper, you don't want Kaine inside something that contains a piece of your magic.” Dare's mouth pinched. “He lives in shadow. He thrives in otherworlds.”

I wasn't quite sure what that meant.

“The one thing I never anticipated was his presence on campus. We need to get rid of the papers,” he said shortly. “Hide them, especially from Kaine.”

I stared at Dare. He hadn't shared the 'how' of that plan. “Um—” I waved my hands to our surroundings. The castle had started shifting around us.

“We need something, in order to do that.” His expression was grim.

I grabbed onto one of the arrow slits as another third of the castle shifted away. I had never been in here, so I didn't know how the tile would slide. This was a trapped position I would never have entered into without Alexander Dare at my side.

“Hold on,” he yelled as the tile crumbled. He closed his eyes and threw down a ball of magic. It splattered on the stone floor as we were ripped into space.

When we reformed, we were staring into the smirking face of Kaine.

Chapter Seventeen: Negotiations with a Bad Hand

I let go of the arrow slit and scrambled backward. Kaine reached forward and gripped me by the neck, pushing me back against the reforming wall.

I could feel magic rising off of him. Horrible magic that was all focused on me. He smiled. “By the power invoked—”

Magic hit him. His voice cut off abruptly in a choke, but his fingers tightened. I scrabbled at the strangling grip of his fingers. Kaine shed a shadow, like a layer of skin, and the choking spell on
him
fell with it.

Dare, fully hooded and standing a few paces behind Kaine, gripped the air and pulled backward with his fingers. Kaine's expression went tight and I could see another shadow start to detach from him.

“Dear baby Dare,” he spit. “Do you really thi—”

A silver sheen unfurled over Kaine's face and was sucked backward with the shedding shadow, pulled into Dare's closing right palm. A blade protruded outward from Kaine's chest at the same time, an inch from impaling me with him. Kaine's grip on me loosened as he stared down at it. I shoved him backward. The ground shook beneath us, and Dare grabbed Kaine by his neck and thrust him out of the open window and into the next tile slide.

“Oh my God.” It was a litany from my lips as Dare kept his right hand in a tight grip, his other arm still pressed against his midsection. It looked like it had opened again.

Not only were we past our time limit—our five minutes completely gone, with no way to return to the Magiaduct—but we had been halfway caught by Kaine, Dare was mortally wounded again, and Dare had used
magic
on Kaine. Had skewered him on a blade.