I barely brought Valkyrie up in time to block a mace plunging toward my face. Sparks from the magic blade stung my skin. I smelled singed hair. My hair.
Oh, no you didn’t…
I kicked the man right in his tender spot and heaved him onto one of his buddies. The Society acolytes were conveniently wearing matching dark uniforms, making it easy to pick them out among the smattering of Academy students they were fighting. I ducked another blow and clobbered my attacker with a swift roundhouse. A shout of alarm echoed from down the street, soon joined by others, all headed this way. It seemed our presence had been noted.
“Draw them away from each other!” Asher said. He evaded a woman’s whipping chain and kicked her into a hedge. “We split them up and take them down piece by piece.”
“Excellent idea, General!” I said, right as two more acolytes came around the corner, spotted us, and decided to join the fun. “Why don’t you start asking them to separate into nice, orderly groups based on favorite kind of flower, and we’ll take them on one at a time…”
Asher redirected a stun spell headed toward Mia into one of the acolytes. They went rigid and slumped over. I’ll admit I was slightly impressed. “If you can think of a better plan, Skylar, then I’m all ears!”
“I’m just trying to figure out how you two managed to complete any assignments with all this arguing!” Mia said.
I smirked at Asher. “It’s tough, but I somehow manage.”
He could only smirk back.
Right before another spell blew us up.
I saw it as it descended, a blistering red eruption spell that’d been perfectly lobbed from one of the cowardly acolytes who didn’t feel like engaging us hand-to-hand.
“Defendi—” My half-formed barrier caught the worst of the blow, but I still found myself lifted off my feet, tumbling, unsure of which way was up before hitting the ground a moment later and tasting blood as it coated the inside of my mouth. A high-pitched squeal rang in my ears, then slowly faded. I pushed myself up. My arms felt brittle, like stale bread, my legs like pretzels.
“Mia! Asher! Colson!”
“Here,” Colson grunted beside me. Half of the sign from an organic cream puff factory had broken from the roof of the shop and fallen atop him. I rushed over and helped him push it off.
“Thanks. The others…”
I looked back and stifled a gasp. Where we’d stood was nothing but a ten-foot crater, bits of charred brick creating a crumbling radius. The air belched thick with smoke. I didn’t see Asher or Mia. I felt my senses numbing as a horrifying possibility crept over me. They couldn’t be gone. I must have protected us in time…
“There.” Colson pointed with his hammer. I spotted the familiar figures of Asher and Mia running away from the other side of the crater, half a dozen acolytes in hot pursuit. Despite their clear danger, I could feel my body again. My heart no longer clenched with fear.
“We’ll meet up with them later,” Colson said. He also sounded like he was almost too relieved to form the words. “Right now we’ve got other problems—”
He didn’t get to finish. More acolytes—those that hadn’t been blown away by their own spell—were converging on us. They hefted weapons, spells primed on their fingers. Seemed like somebody was looking to rumble.
I raised Valkyrie. “I’ll take left, you take right?”
“Neither. We lead them away. Split them up.”
Before I could protest, Colson wheeled me around and took off running. I cast a look at the acolytes—come on, there were only ten of them—and followed after Colson. I heard gruff orders shouted between them as they pursued us. Spells careened over our heads.
“I don’t think this is the best way to fight!” I yelled to Colson. A spell caught some of the dormant trees on fire. Another singed the side of the Japanese pagoda we ran around.
“It’s called a strategic retreat,” Colson yelled back.
“Why do I get the feeling that’s what we call it when we’re losing?”
He merely smiled.
The acolyte’s shouts were still behind us, but we’d run deeper into the park, letting the numerous attractions cover our escape. I finished circling the pagoda and hesitated, my mind racing for where to go next. At this rate they’d catch up to us within minutes. There had to be another way to lose them.
Then I spotted it.
“Follow me!”
Colson saw what my plan was. His face went white. “Those won’t hold me!”
“It’ll only be for a second.” I leapt into the first of the dragon boats. “Sectspra!” With a flick of my wrist, I severed the rope tying them to the shore of the miniature lake. “Ventabis!”
My spell pushed the remaining dragon boats forward, scattering them into the center of the lake and creating a somewhat stable bridge. I started leaping across.
“This is a terrible idea, Skylar!” Colson called after me. He flinched as a spell melted the lamppost beside him.
I double-checked the lake’s surroundings. At our current pace, it’d take the Society at least three minutes to circle around, versus going straight across.
“Just jump on,” I said, steadying myself on the next boat. I cast another push spell and the last of the dragon boats lined up directly to the opposite shore. With a few more unsteady jumps I was there, turning in time to see Colson nearly capsize on the third one. He was gripping his hammer like a child would a teddy bear during a thunderstorm. I’ll admit, it wasn’t my best plan to pull off with a guy who could take up an entire boat himself, but he was surprisingly graceful.
Until the Society arrived.
“Skylar, I really hate you right now!” Colson growled as one of their spells caught the boat he’d just leapt from on fire. I cast a shimmerscreen at his back to deflect any attacks I could. I saw one of the acolytes pointing, commanding the others to start circling around either side. I really, really hoped I’d been right about how long it’d take them to reach us.
“Catch.”
Whoof! The wind was knocked out of me as I caught Colson’s hammer. He lined up and made a final leap, clearing the last two boats and performing a gymnastics-worthy tuck and roll as he landed. Without missing a beat, he cast his hand behind him, scattering the nice line of boats I’d made and dumping a few brave acolytes who’d tried to follow into the water.
Colson took his hammer. “Now I lead.”
“Hey, it worked, didn’t it?”
“I lead.”
Well, fine then.
The sounds of the rest of the battle were muted the further we drew away. Sporadic flashes of light strobed between the iron spokes of the Ferris Wheel. A woman’s pained cry rose over the barren tops of the trees, and I saw Colson wince.
“Mia can take care of herself,” I assured him.
He nodded. The grip on his hammer lessened slightly. “Asher too.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d meant that to be reassuring to him or to me, but my tense shoulders relaxed all the same.
We carefully crept our way deeper into the gardens, weaving around a stone tower and through a web of small hanging pots that I assumed would normally be full of flowers. Colson had to duck as we made our way through to the other side.
Despite our brief reprieve, my senses were on high alert. During our fight, I hadn’t felt the pressure of Kasia’s magic bearing down on me. I hadn’t really expected to run into her here. It was a feeling, a sense that she’d be elsewhere, possibly closing in on the Cursed One. The thought almost made me wish she were here.
Part of me was terrified to face her again, even though I knew, some small part of me knew, it was inevitable. We were linked. More than just the Dark Prince, more than her shared history with my mom. Kasia had something—I hated to say—I saw in myself. She was the complete antithesis of everything I stood for, everything I wanted. She was the biggest threat to my friends, my family, my home I had ever, and I was sure would ever, face.
Which meant I’d have to stop her eventually.
We stopped to take stock of where we were. The gardens were absolutely massive. I could understand why the Denmark Academy had decided to make it home base.
“Where do you think the main part of the school is?” I said.
Colson looked right, then left. Then he pointed over the top of a merry-go-round to a building rising like a phantom from the rest of the park. It had a middle eastern flair to it. A single dome at the top lorded over smaller spires flanking either side. It seemed grand enough to house the epicenter of a magical school.
“Maybe we should head there,” Colson said. “Perhaps the other Academy students have rallied. They might have some defenses we can use.”
“Or we could be leading some of the Society right back there.”
He acknowledged this with a shrug of a single shoulder. “We can be careful.”
Voices came from behind us, still a little way off, but growing closer.
I pointed right. The bricked walkway split in three different directions in front of a sign reading, “The Gardens.”
“Let’s cut through there.”
Colson raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure? You don’t want to try a more elaborate way to throw them off? Perhaps we could scale a roller coaster. I’m sure we’d gain a few minutes doing that.”
I punched him lightly in the arm. “Don’t you start getting sarcastic with me, too. I get enough of that from Asher.”
“For good reason, I think.”
Everyone’s a critic.
We hurried into the garden and were soon swallowed by swaths of leafless trees and what few plants still hung around after the winter chill set in. Slabs of rock making up curving paths took us around shallow ponds interconnected like Olympic rings, their fountains off and silent. We paused when we were sure we were obscured enough from the rest of the park. I crouched beside a tōtō lantern to catch my breath. Thankfully the rain had stopped, leaving a damp coat over everything.
“Think that will lose them?” Colson said, kneeling beside me.
“As much as we’re going to for now.”
Colson checked again. “We can’t stay for long.”
It was only then, when the chaos of the last half hour had briefly quelled, that I felt rising panic at the thought of Asher and Mia still out there. I knew they were perfectly capable of holding their own, but still I worried. And the way Colson played with the dead grass at his feet, tearing the blades into smaller and smaller bits between his enormous fingers, told me he was worrying, too.
I put my hand on his. “We’ll wait until they pass, then we’ll come from behind and kick butt. Per usual.”
Colson grunted in a tone I knew to mean agreement. I pulled my hand away with a smile. “Well, if there’s one good thing about this, it’s that we’ll get full marks for practical hours.”
Colson chuckled. “I think we got those a long time ago. We might as well be Masters by now.”
I felt the faint push of the Prince’s darkness pressing against the back of my mind. Typical. He always felt the need to worm his way into my thoughts when there was even the barest hint of danger. Usually I was easily able to ignore it, but something about him continuing to press, to try to bend me to what he wanted, still irked me. Probably because a small part of me—a very small part—knew that no matter how much I resisted, there’d be situations where I needed his power again. Times where my own life or the lives of my friends were in danger and I’d be forced to choose between letting them die and asking for his help.
And I already knew my choice.
“Do you think we—”
“Shh.” Colson peeked between the line of trees. We waited, holding our breaths. “Thought I heard something,” Colson said. He stood and offered me a hand. “We should keep moving.”
I gratefully took it and we continued creeping across the garden to a bridge that took us back into the rest of the park. It occurred to me that this was the first time that Colson and I had been alone together in a long time. Usually it was either in a group or alongside Asher and Mia. The guy had become one of my best friends, someone I trusted more than almost anyone, and yet he was usually so dang silent it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. Now wasn’t the time to bring up what had happened back in the Village, but I so wanted to. Mia’d told me that there was nothing the matter, and as much as I hated to leave it at that, I had to trust that it’d all work out for the best.
“Wait.”
I tugged on Colson’s sleeve to stop him. I couldn’t see anything, but a small buzz on my skin warned me of magic in the immediate area. It was possible the Academy had simply set some outer perimeter charms that we were finally coming into contact with. Or…
A portal opened in the ground before us. I heard a scuttle of insect-like movement, saw the cluster of too many legs force their way past the edges of the portal as four creatures, each the size of a Doberman, crawled out. The nearest one focused its dozen eyes on us and hissed.
“Arakens!” Colson cursed, shoving me aside as the arakens launched spikes out of their abdomens. I rolled the moment I hit the ground, staying crouched behind a hedge as Colson and I tried to figure out a way around them. Arachnophobes, meet your new worst nightmare: the arakens were pretty much spider hybrids, complete with eight squirming, hairy legs, twelve eyes that glittered like shards of glass, topped off with mouths jutting from the rest of their body, snouted like a wolf. Just looking at them gave me the heebie-jeebies, but I bit back my panic and made sure my sword was well between me and them.
“Down!” I yanked on Colson as the arakens fired more spikes. They whizzed over our heads and thudded into the tree behind us.
“They’re over here!” someone yelled. Shapes were moving in the garden. One of the arakens scuttled around the other side of the hedge and I pounced, not giving it time to attack, driving Valkyrie into the point where its eyes intersected. It let out a screeching hiss as it died. Black blood leaked from its body, but I had already yanked my sword out and deflected another’s spikes.
“Fiero!” I shaded my eyes as a torrent of flames erupted from Colson’s hand and swallowed up the last three arakens.
“Nice!” I said. “That was a piece of—”
Another portal opened up and five more arakens crawled out.
“Way to jinx it,” Colson said, pushing me to start running. I shot a final spell behind us. The few plants that were still alive sprang to life. The saplings’ bare branches reached down and wrapped around a couple of the arakens, lifting them, squealing, high into the air. Knots of grass gnarled their way around the legs of the remaining ones, immobilizing them long enough for us to put some distance between us.
A summoner. That was the source of these portals. The Society had a flippin’ summoner. And unless we could find them, they’d just keep sending these big nasties after us—
We’d just crossed the bridge when another portal opened directly in front of us. A swarm of blue-skinned pixies shot out, gleefully chattering their needle-like teeth together. There had to be fifty of them, cutting off any way forward.
“Seriously? Pixies?” I said.
“Hammer!” Colson said, raising it.
“You don’t seriously think you can hit—”
Oh, but he could.
We charged forward, and with a single, massive swing the hammer clobbered the nearest bunch, sending them ricocheting away like ping-pong balls. I cast stun spells at the remaining ones until we broke through and were sprinting toward the dome-topped building I really, really hoped was the main part of the school. Or would at least have someone who could help us out.
I risked looking back, but Colson’s hammer had done its job. The pixies had scattered, and I couldn’t see what few arakens the plants hadn’t managed to ensnare.
“Good aim back there,” I panted.
Colson nodded. “Like hitting a baseball. Only, times a dozen.”
We ran until we reached the front of the dome-topped building. Another shallow pool covered a chunk of the front lawn, a sign behind it reading Nimb Hotel.
“Nobody’s here,” I said. I did a full circle. We were alone. Which meant either the Society hadn’t reached this far, or this was the Academy and the battle was already over.
“Let’s head up there.” Colson pointed to the top of the hotel steps. The moment we passed the pond, I felt a strong buzz across my skin. Concealment magic.
“Seems like we’re in the right place after all,” I said. “Then where is—”
Pain splashed across my shoulder blades. I recognized the familiar sting of a stunning spell as I collapsed. I heard Colson grunt as another one must have hit him. Fortunately, his half-giantness made it extra hard to bring the guy down.
“Go around the other side,” someone yelled. Out of the corner of my eye, a few figures materialized from the shadows of the building. Another half dozen came up from behind us. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the spell. Guess my fancy plant magic hadn’t slowed them as much as I’d thought.
Colson easily swept me up and hunkered us behind the Nimb Hotel sign as the figures closed in. “You okay?”
“Can’t feel my face,” I mumbled. But feeling was returning to my arms and legs. Another half minute and I’d be back to normal. Good thing these Society goons couldn’t cast a proper spell.
A portal opened up in the center of the courtyard and a few more arakens scurried out.
“Skylar…” Colson said as the acolytes drew closer. I could almost stand. But if I couldn’t fight, we were screwed.
“Put down your weapons and step into the open,” a man said. I could hear the smugness dripping in his voice. Definitely haughty enough to be a summoner. Probably the leader of the group. He had us trapped and he knew it.
Colson started to scoop me up again. “I’m going to make a run for it when there’s a break—”
“I’m almost out of patience!” the summoner said.
I clumsily pushed Colson’s hands off. “Don’t be stupid. Even you wouldn’t get that far.”
I peered around our cover. The summoner and a couple of his lackeys stood in the dead center of the Academy’s front courtyard, not even bothering to hide. They knew they’d already won.
“Enough games, Skylar Rivest.”
“Aw, crap,” I muttered. No wonder they were speaking English. They knew exactly who I was.
Five more portals opened in the ground. I heard the scurry of a dozen legs clambering out. “Time’s up. Now we’re going to drag you out.”
“Now!” I shouted.
My first stun spell went wide thanks to my partly numb arm. More spells exploded around us as Colson and I alternated sticking our heads out of cover and returning with attacks of our own before we were forced back. Wood chips stung my skin as the Nimb Hotel sign was blasted away, bit by bit. In less than a minute we’d be exposed.
I’m here…
I internally growled as the Dark Prince’s voice slithered through my consciousness. The temptation of his power filled me. Something I really didn’t have time to deal with right now.
“Fiero!” My fireball sent two of the acolytes tumbling. But there were still half a dozen left, plus the arakens. Like I could forget about those.
Colson grunted as one of the arakens scrambled over the sign and tried to sink its fangs into his shoulder. He swung his hammer and successfully splattered it against the wood. Droplets of bug blood sprayed my face.
“Sorry,” Colson said. “I really hate those things.”
“No, no, by all means keep squashing,” I said, trying to keep myself from vomiting.
I charmed some of the nearby stones to clobber one of the acolytes who thought she’d be tricky and flank us. I almost celebrated until a chunk of my side of the sign was shredded away. I cried out, throwing my arms over my head.
“Don’t kill them!” the summoner shouted. “The girl especially. Kasia wants to ensure she stays aliv—”
He cut off. Stunned silence followed. I peeked out in time to see him stumble, then collapse.
“Angreb!”
In seconds, the courtyard was filled with a dozen more figures. For a moment I could only watch, my exhausted mind trying to discern whether these were friends or somebody else we’d have to hex to kingdom come.
“They’re students,” Colson said with a sigh of relief. “The robes.”
He was right. The new fighters wore red robes, some almost as obnoxiously colorful as Lucien’s, that swirled elegantly with every move they made. No wonder they were having trouble fighting off the acolytes. The things were so billowy I was sure half the students had caught a bad draft and been swept into the atmosphere.
One boy in particular seemed to be directing them. “Gå rundt på den anden side.” He pointed to some of the fleeing acolytes. “Lad dem ikke flygte.”
“Looks like the cavalry arrived just in time,” I said.
We stepped out of cover. The remaining acolytes were gone, being chased further into the park by half of the students who’d come to save us. A couple more students were poking the unconscious summoner. I was happy to see the arakens were nothing but gelatinous piles of goop.
“You guys sure saved our butts,” I said, temporarily forgetting that they probably couldn’t understand us.
Everyone turned our way. The boy leading them stiffened. He raised a trembling finger at Colson “En kæmpe…”
Then he and the rest of the students attacked.