The Rise of Ren Crown (33 page)

I pinged the connection threads, subtly checking him for spells. Dare liked Stuart Leandred about as well as Constantine did—which had not filled me with confidence.

Magic zipped clumsily into my fingers as I reached for him. I stopped and looked at them. I had
magic
. Taking a good internal look, I felt
so much
better. My magic was making it through paths that had partially opened and fixed at some point while I slept.

I grimaced. Whatever magic enhancement Bellacia had swapped her soul for
worked.

Testing, I waved my hand in a circle and a butterfly made of fiery light appeared on my palm. I swirled my fingers around my palm and a silvered dragon appeared next to it, sparking rays of light. I tossed my palm up and they lifted into the air, flying in opposing arcs, then dove into Constantine's chest.

He lifted a brow at me, expression clenching, but said nothing while I investigated his state.

The paint that I had wiped across his brow gave me insight into his physical state, as well as allowing me...other things that I never planned to use. His state registered increased stability—large leaps from both times I had seen him.

Relief swept me, and I let the magic go, leaving it to swirl around him at his control.

I inflated Olivia's balloon. The thin magic still swirled inside. She was still alive.

Staggering
relief.

Constantine pulled my magic from his chest and put it into a small pouch, then carefully pulled the strings closed. He tucked it into a pocket while looking at the paper balloon, then raised his gaze to me.

“You screwed up,” he said bluntly.

I closed my eyes. “You have no idea.”

“I have a pretty good one, actually.” He held up a hand and headlines swirled around his fingers and drifted into the air.

I snatched a few of them, reading about the dozen attacks that had taken place all over the Third Layer. The reports had Raphael, Marsgrove, and Kaine stamped all over them.

“Yeah.” I released them to the recycling grate and slumped back, rubbing my eyes as the bed reformed into an upright couch.

I filled Constantine in on the pertinent parts of what had happened with Kaine and Raphael.

He leaned back—looking like he was knocking on death's door again. “I don't know whether to strangle you or embrace you,” he finally said, eyes closing. The strange thing was that I felt a humming satisfaction ringing through our connection. He was pleased about something.

He had been furious with me in Medical.

“Where is Dare?”

Constantine waved a blind hand toward Dare's workroom. It was devoid of the thousands of wards that were usually upon it. Dare had stopped blocking his presence from the room, or at least from me. I wondered what he was doing in there.

“Can he hear us?”

“He's
busy.
His precious mother opened a line to the room. Or else he would have been out here interrogating me already.”

“How do you know what he's doing?”

He waved again without opening his eyes. “What is the plan?”

I didn't respond.

He cracked open an eye. “Oh, darling. Are you deluding yourself now?”

I shifted. “You don't think Marsgrove will succeed now?”

Constantine hummed. “Do you?”

I picked at the blanket, and gave a mirthless laugh. “I'm magically unstable. I'm being continually tracked. And I'm going to have a harder time getting out of my
room
than I will getting off campus.”

He opened both eyes, examining me, looking for...I didn't know what. “Yes, I heard about your new roommate. I have been thinking of all sorts of lovely ways to remove you from that situation.” He smiled.

“Without hurting her,” I said hurriedly. I pictured him pitching Bellacia's body off the Magiaduct, safety spells in place or not.

Bellacia was one of the people in the very small fraction of the population Dare had referenced who Constantine cared about. And not in the good way.

“Of course, darling. You made me promise when you destroyed my lovely toy. I was thinking more of mental pain,” he said with a smile.

“Without
hurting
her. Emotionally counts.”

His smile grew. “Not a problem.”

“She's not a cyborg.”

He waved a hand. “She doesn't have enough emotion to be one.”

“Con.”

“I think your line is, 'It's lovely to have you back.'” His eyes glinted, amused, and there was something genuine in his devilish smile for a moment.

I reached out and touched his hand. “It is.”

Dare chose that moment to exit his workroom. He looked between us, then at the wards, expression going grim. “Ren.”

“Yes?”

“Your tablet is beeping,” Dare said.

“Crap.” I fished it out. The first thing I saw was that it was
noon
. The next was that I had thirty messages of increasing panic from my friends, and last, but definitely not least was that a mandatory Justice Squad meeting had been scheduled by Isaiah Gellis.

I stared at the blinking magic, then swiped a finger through it. A message from Isaiah popped up and swirled into my brain. Comfort and friendship and a clear directive of, “We are waiting. Get to this room, Crown, or the contract magic is going to penalize you.”

An image of a room in Dorm Eight flashed.

I stared blankly at my tablet. “I have... I have to report to the Justice Squad. Everyone was put on the roster for duty today,” I said out loud.

I still had Justice Magic responsibilities. Unbelievable.

Marsgrove was out there somewhere—rescuing Olivia or dead. Raphael and Kaine were waging war across the Third Layer. Stavros and Helen Price were somewhere, plotting my doom. And I was stuck here, in the Magiaduct, captive with everyone else, and responsible for campus
lawfulness.

“Only you, Crown,” Constantine said, his tone pretty uninterested again, and his eyes still closed. “Would be surprised by this.”

“But—”

Dare dropped a sandwich and a piece of fruit into my free hand and pulled me upright. He magicked my day bag crosswise over my body and pushed me out the door.

In the hall, Justice Toad beeped for an entire minute while I stared in stupefaction at the tablet in one hand and the food in my other.

I gained myself an additional hour of service time in not answering the beep promptly enough.

Chapter Twenty-three: Justice Squad

Every gaze followed me as I swallowed the last bite of my sandwich and slipped into the only seat left—front and center, unfortunately—of the dormitory common room we were using as a temporary meeting spot.

On the way here, I had tried to eat, catch up on what had happened while I'd been out cold, answer the questions of the people who were brave enough to accost me in the hall, and reassure all of my panicking friends that I was alive. But I had too little time to process any of it, especially while apologizing profusely to the entire armband alliance for turning off my comm again. I was going to have to catch up on everything on the fly. Hopefully I didn't get caught wrong footed right from the get go.

Isaiah clapped his hands together, bringing audience attention back to him. “Okay, people. We had quite a day yesterday. A brutal one. The media is, unfortunately, labeling it Bloody Tuesday—I think we have one of our regular offenders to thank for that moniker, so make sure to give O'Leary an extra fun punishment next time you answer his call. But
Bloody
Tuesday, or not, we weathered the events and we
succeeded
.”

A fierce surge of Community Magic pride swept through the room. It was not unlike what I'd experienced inside of Patrick and Asafa's room, and it was a powerful reminder that my community
was
larger than I sometimes realized.

“I'd like to single out a few outstanding efforts,” Isaiah continued. “Prime support personnel took care of everything that came through the system during curfew hours last night with the help of Professor Wellingham, and with Provost Johnson granting exceptions.”

Exceptions could be made to curfew magic? Interesting...

“And as most of you already know, last night and this morning we had
thousands
of calls,” Isaiah said. “Thank you, to everyone on prime support who went above and beyond the call of justice duty.”

I shuddered. I could only imagine the type of calls that had been fielded.

“Rewinding back to the events of yesterday,” he said, “Travers,
excellent
work on the Justice Magic Negative Field. For all of you who are unaware, when the Administration Magic came back online yesterday, Travers managed to switch the flow of Justice Magic to attack anyone who was not a resident of campus proper. The praetorians were able to overcome the magic, but most of the rest, even members of the Legion, were put out of commission for a full minute, allowing us to identify those who didn't belong on campus. I heard some of the officials who journeyed in at the tail end of things got a right shock.”

That startled an unwitting laugh out of a few people.

“Poor Travers suffered three thousand hours of community service for implementing the spell, but I've been assured those hours will be cleared before lockdown ends.”

There was a large round of applause. I joined in, and visually identified Travers, a gangly brunette with large ears and pink cheeks who was ducking his head. I was very interested in what he had done to achieve that spell.

The list of mages who had performed outstanding actions in the service of the day was lengthy, but Isaiah wielded each recognition with aplomb.

Until the end.

“And lastly, Ren Crown.”

Silence.

“Without whom,” Isaiah said, without breaking stride. “We would have been blind to what was happening within the Troop.”

More silence. All gazes on me.

“Furthermore, her actions allowed us to work together with all possible hands and resources to break free of the Magiaduct's dome and to protect campus.”

I swallowed and looked at my hands, unwilling to meet all of the gazes staring at me. I was kind of hoping Isaiah would stop speaking. But no such luck.

“Actions that are directly prompting an immediate debate on how we can coordinate efforts further, and better, in response to large-scale attacks. All thanks to one of ours.” He brandished a hand at me.

I cleared my throat in the face of the dead silence.

“There were a number of mages involved in keeping communications open,” I said, shaking hands gripping Justice Toad tightly against my chest. “Mages who are, ironically, routinely punished for such actions. You might want to go easy on Patrick O'Leary for a few calls, even though, Bloody Tuesday? Yeah, I can't believe he named it that either. But if you want to thank anyone, Olivia Price was integral in every facet of yesterday, not least of which was making sure that we all remained connected to each other.”

I took a breath and looked around. “Do not credit me. We were all, as a community, involved.”

Silence.

Isaiah gave me an amused glance. “I know said community has many questions—” Hands and magic shot into the air. “Which will be answered during the strict fact based question and answer session at the end of this meeting.”

The hands reluctantly lowered. Thank Magic, for Isaiah.

“First things first. We need to discuss, going forward, what we can do to aid the new forces on campus—”
More
new forces, was somewhat heavily implied, but not said. “And Justice Magic itself.”

I settled in for a long meeting. Usually I had fourteen projects flying through my brain, and untangled magic slotting everything into neat mental piles to work on. Today I had one mission, and magic still too burnt to freely flow past all the knots.

That meant I was stuck...listening.

“We will need to account for mages acting out from stress and grief,” Isaiah said. “Those on prime support have already been dealing with it, and there will be increased counts of vandalism, fighting, and provocation over the next few days. The mental health and well-being mages are working with the Administration to tailor the next two weeks of Justice Magic to include a trigger in the magic to identify magic tinged with a rota of emotional occurrences.

“If someone acts out of grief directly, they will receive particular sentencing. Sentences designed to help them, while at the same time not rewarding their initial outbursts. We are trying to help students get back in the pool and off the diving board.”

I stared straight forward, unable to stop the thought spiral of how I had acted my first eight weeks on campus. Of how many charges I had racked up searching for a way to bring Christian back.

“We will coordinate grief counseling with large picture trauma. This is more than just our monster of the day, or out-of-control beast of the week.”

“The combat mages will still be
gone
tonight when the top levels of campus reopen,” someone in the audience said.

“But part of the Legion will remain here,” Isaiah responded. “I think we can all concur that they can handle any surprises that occur.”

Surprisingly, that seemed to bring no ease to the people in the room. They had been gung-ho at the Peacekeepers' Troop coming in to help. Either the idea of outside help had lost its shine or the Legion was outside their point of acceptance
.

When Isaiah finally reached the end of what we'd be doing during the next week, it was question and answer time.

Unsurprisingly, I got the first one.

“Miss Crown, what
happened
?”

It was a question I had been asked at least six times on my way to the meeting. I gave a rote recitation of the events. The same litany I had given every stranger so far. Stripped down and to the point.

But at least here, everyone knew what working with Alexander Dare entailed. No one questioned my statement that I'd felt like I needed to save campus when he left for the competition.

It was a nice change.

Unfortunately, there were more difficult questions to answer.

“Why didn't you use us? Why weren't we privy to this plan of yours?” an upper year girl asked, expression pinched.