NO?” FORT SAID, NOW EVEN more confused. “You don’t want our help? Then what—”
“If I share the full plan with you, Damian will pluck it from your mind like a flower from a garden,” William said. “In order to keep it safe, none of us know the full plan. It is the only way.”
Rachel sighed loudly, but at least her annoyance seemed to be bringing her out of the funk she’d been in. “First, you really need to talk normally, or I’m going to explode. Second, if you can’t tell us the full plan, we still need to know how to stop Damian.”
“And why Damian is acting like this,” Jia said quietly. “He must be possessed. He’d never do this.”
“Oh, he’s not possessed,” William said. “But I can’t fully explain his actions, not without taking a peril-filled journey into his mind—”
“What did I say about the language?” Rachel said, taking a step closer to him.
William sighed, rolling his eyes. “Great art is never appreciated in its time. I can use simpler words if that helps you. Is that better?”
“Yes,” Fort, Jia, Rachel, and Ellora all said at once.
“Philistines,” William said, then held up his hands in surrender at a look from Rachel. “Okay, okay, I’m sorry. This all started yesterday, when Sierra brought us back to the present. From where, you ask?” His face lit up a bit. “Ah, that’s a story worth telling—”
“Another time,” Ellora said.
“Fine,” William said. “Sierra brought us back from somewhere. And that’s when things get interesting. Because before we came back, I’d foreseen what was to come. Originally, we’d have returned, and Damian would use his Mind magic to try to find out where the book of Time magic was. Only, we didn’t know, because the teachers had taken it. But instead, he found something much more interesting.”
Ellora waved her hand for him to hurry it up, and he shook his head in disgust. “Damian found that one of us knew where the book of Spirit magic was, okay? Long story way too short.”
Fort winced at the mention of Spirit magic and saw Rachel shudder out of the corner of his eye. So they’d been right about the type of magic they’d seen back in the vision of London’s destruction. He really wished they hadn’t been.
“So then Damian goes and gets the book,” William continued. “Probably planning on using it on our teachers, to find the book of Time magic too. Only what he doesn’t know is that Spirit magic can affect the weak of mind, tempt you with its power. And Damian, who’d just found out that everything he ever knew about himself was a lie, had quite a bit of anger boiling around inside him.” Here he paused, giving Fort a long look. “Though you three probably know just as much about that as I do, eh?”
Fort turned bright red in response. But that wasn’t even fair. Gabriel had been the one who’d betrayed Damian to the Old Ones, not Fort. And that had been how Damian had found out about his dragon heritage.
Yes, Gabriel would never have been in that position if Fort hadn’t gone looking for his father, lying to his friends about it, but …
He sighed. Maybe it was time to stop making excuses.
“I don’t get how Damian finding out he’s a dragon makes him destroy everything,” Rachel said. “What exactly did the magic do to him?”
William leaned in close, an excited glow in his eye. “You think of magic as a power, a tool you can use like electricity or gravity.”
“Gravity’s not exactly a tool … ,” Ellora said, but William ignored her.
“Magic doesn’t care about your physics or laws of nature,” William said, getting closer to Fort, Rachel, and Jia to the point they all stepped backward. “Magic has a mind of its own, one not too happy with humanity, from what I’ve felt.”
Felt? Fort frowned. How had he “felt” that? What was he even talking about, magic having a mind of its own? That couldn’t be possible. Magic couldn’t have its own opinions on things and just not like human beings.
… Could it?
“He’s making this up,” Ellora said. “None of the rest of us felt anything like this.”
“None of the rest of you were sent where I was,” William said, his face going pale. “And from what I’ve seen, magic has it in for us. It wants us to fail, to fall before its masters. And it’ll help them in any way it can. Especially Spirit magic. No other type has as strong a will as Spirit, and when someone as conflicted about things as Damian messes around with it—BOOM.” He shouted this last bit, making them all jump.
Could that be true? Damian hadn’t exactly seemed calm and together when burning down Buckingham Palace. And stealing all the people in London to form a giant Spirit monster didn’t help either. But how could magic itself have such an impact on someone’s mind?
“I don’t know about the rest, but Damian definitely thinks everyone’s out to get him, even his former friends,” Ellora said, nodding at Jia. “You must have seen yourselves there in the future, trying to stop him.”
And failing, from the look of it. Fort frowned. That didn’t bode well.
“There’s no reasoning with him,” Ellora continued. “Whatever Spirit magic is, he uses it to absorb the power of every citizen of London and destroy the city. After seeing the TDA powerless to stop Damian, all the other countries decide they need to protect themselves any way they can. And that means they want their books of magic back, now.”
“To which your government says ‘no thank you,’ ” William continued. “And in the department of unfortunate timing, this is when the discovery is made about how to give magic to adults. Word gets out, books of magic are stolen, and the world goes to war, resulting in scenes like the ones you all saw.”
For a moment, everyone was quiet, each lost in their own memories. Visions of the tsunami and of Damian destroying London flooded into Fort’s head, no matter how hard he tried to push them out. Was this going to be how the world ended, in a war because Damian couldn’t control his magic?
No. It’d be a war because Fort couldn’t let his father go. Everything else had come from that, and there was no one else to blame but himself.
But if he hadn’t gone to the Dracsi dimension, he’d never have known if his father was still alive. His dad would have been left there, living out his life as a monster. That couldn’t be the better choice, no matter what came of it!
But maybe there was a better way to do it. One where he worked with his friends instead of lying to them. Where, together, they found out what Gabriel was up to before he almost gave the Old Ones the whole world.
“You know, of course, about the war,” William finally said, breaking the silence. “You’ve seen parts of it. And I know Simon was going to share how adult soldiers could use magic—”
“He told them it was Dr. Ambrose who made the discovery, that’s it,” Ellora said, giving Fort a quick look.
“Really,” William said, turning his gaze on Fort as well. “So not the whole story?”
“They know all they need to know, for now,” Ellora said quickly, staring at William. “I told you what would happen if we tell them too early.”
“Oh, right!” he said, winking entirely unsubtly at her. “To everything its proper time, of course.”
What was going on? Ellora and William were definitely hiding something from them, from Fort especially, but what was it? Something to do with Dr. Ambrose? “I think we need to hear the rest right now—” he said.
“Not yet,” Ellora told him, looking away. “Sorry. We can get into that later. Tell them about the dome, William.”
He nodded. “Because I had foreseen all of this happening, I came up with the idea for the dome and put it up the moment we returned. Almost fainted from the effort, but there was no way to tell everyone what was going on without alerting Damian to what I was doing, so I didn’t have a choice. Once they heard it all, the others pitched in and took the weight off my shoulders.”
“We don’t care about what you went through,” Rachel said. “What was the reason for the dome?”
“It was meant to freeze everyone, including Damian, so that we could figure out what to do,” William told her, then paused, looking uncomfortable. “But somehow, he was able to resist the magic. I’m not really sure how. He escaped, and we don’t know where he is now.”
“Maybe he’s with Cyrus,” Fort said, more bitterly than he’d intended. “Maybe they’re all hanging out together.”
“You better hope Cyrus isn’t helping him,” William said, narrowing his eyes. “We’ll all be in for it if they’re working together. But no, he probably just managed to sneak a Mind spell or something into my head and made me leave him out of the dome’s effect.”
“So basically it’s useless,” Rachel said. “And you’re just freezing half the country for nothing?”
“Not exactly,” Ellora said. “You saw the soldiers below. They were coming for us the moment they figured out Sierra could bring us back. Our teachers weren’t going to let that happen.”
She shuddered, and Fort again wondered where exactly they’d all been this whole time and why they couldn’t come back. Had the school’s teachers kept them away somehow, like some kind of detention or something? But how? Their teachers wouldn’t have been able to use magic any more than the Oppenheimer School’s teachers could.
“The dome’s good for something else, too,” William said. “Getting to the book of Spirit magic without any outside interference.”
What? “Are you joking?” Fort said.
“He better be,” Rachel said. “Or we’re going home right now.”
“Oh, I’m not joking,” William said. “Why do you think we needed you three here? The only way to stop Damian from destroying London is to get the book of Spirit magic before he does. And to do that, I’m told you three each will play a part.”
“And who told you that?” Fort asked.
“I did,” Ellora said, looking him in the eye. “Because I’m the only one who knows where it is.”