Collision: The Alliance Series Book Three (7 page)

“She’s still hurt,” Jeth snapped. “They’re letting her go in this state?”

“There’s no cure,” I said quickly. “I told you.” Unlike Alber, my older brother hadn’t warmed up to Kay and me being friends. Kay himself glared back, while I rolled my eyes at the pair of them.

“I’m not on my deathbed,” I informed Jeth. “It’s magic burn, not the plague. What’s the plan for tomorrow?” I asked Kay. “Half the guards got taken out, by the look of things.”

Kay tapped his communicator screen again. “Ms Weston says you don’t have to come in tomorrow. I told her about the magic-creature. You can if you want, of course, but you’re exempted from patrols.”

Given that I flinched with pain every other minute, that was probably a good move. It still annoyed me.

“Great,” I said, suppressing another wince. “Ms Weston said my handwriting is illegible anyway, let alone when I’m being electrocuted.”

“Is there really nothing you people can do?” Jeth asked.

Kay shook his head, putting his communicator back in his pocket. “It’ll go away on its own.” He addressed me, not Jeth. “Distract yourself. You have my number, anyway.”

I stared. I
did,
but he’d never brought it up before.

“You should go. I’ll see you soon.”

He’d gone before I could so much as blink.
Okay…
Apparently my social skills had nose-dived since I’d started working here. Then again, it wasn’t like we’d exchanged numbers at a bar. My communicator stored all Alliance members’ codes automatically.

Jeth looked at me. “You have his number?”

“I have everyone’s numbers,” I said, a little too quickly. “Our communicators are linked up to all the staff, remember?”

He shook his head. “Sure. You be careful, Ada.”

“Bit late for that.” I tapped the marks on my neck. “It won’t scar, don’t worry,” I added hastily, and started to walk towards the exit before he started worrying over me again.

The front doors slid open. “I hope they do lock the Passage down,” said Jeth. “It’s not safe, is it?”

Ouch.
“Talk to me about something else,” I said, shivering as we walked outside into the pouring rain. “Distract me. What’re the tech team doing?”

“Now? Trying to track the magical disturbances,” he said. “It’s a bit annoying that we got interrupted, we were about to test out our new offworld communication apps. They’re based on the Chameleons.”

Ouch.
“How d’you mean?”

“Earpiece translators for offworld languages. We’ve a whole bunch of them, but we haven’t got clearance to use them yet because of all the craziness happening. They’re fine, though, most of our technology is. It’s just certain types of magi-tech that are playing up.”

“Weird,” I said, huddling in my jacket and wishing my coat had a hood. “I can’t believe no one knows what’s causing it.”

“Hope they get it sorted soon,” said Jeth.

“Me, too.”

***

Nell descended on us as soon as we got in the house. “What happened to you?” she demanded, instantly fixating on the marks on my neck and forehead.

“A magic-creature,” I said. “I don’t know what it was, but there’s something weird going on with the magic, everywhere. I guess you’ve probably seen it on the news?”

“Your brother almost set the house on fire,” said Nell.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Alber came out the kitchen into the hallway.

“What did you do?” I asked, eyebrows raised.

He shifted guiltily. “Tried to light the stove using magic.”

I rolled my eyes. “Idiot.”

“It used to work!” he protested. “I didn’t know magic had gone crazy.”

“The whole Multiverse knows now,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck as another sharp pain hit me. I shrugged out of my jacket. At least that hadn’t suffered any damage.

“What happened?” asked Alber, following me into the kitchen. I quickly explained while I ran cold water on a cloth and pressed it to my neck, hoping it might help.

“Magic burn,” said Jeth, switching on the light. “I can’t believe there’s no cure.”

“It doesn’t normally happen on Earth,” I said, moving the cloth to my forehead, which twinged again.

“Yeah, but the Alliance deal with offworld all the time.” Jeth pulled his communicator from his pocket. “I’ll look it up in the files.”

“There won’t be anything there,” I said. “Whatever that thing was, it sure wasn’t normal, even for the Alliance. And it might be worse for me because I have an internal magic source.”

“Damn,” said Alber. “That’s because you’re Royal, right?”

I winced. “Sort of. It’s not just me…” But he didn’t know Kay had experienced something similar. Nell had guessed, but I was pretty sure I was the only person who knew that now Skyla and the other victims were dead.
Ouch.
“Okay, this feels like being poked in the neck with a red-hot electric wire every minute. So I’m sorry in advance if I yell at anyone.”

“They ought to stop you from going into those Passages,” said Nell from the doorway, eyes narrowed. “Those magic-creatures are more dangerous than the usual monsters.”

“Someone has to deal with them.” But I shivered, thinking of the way it had looked so much like that creature on Aglaia. A deadly killer. We were lucky no one had died.

***

It was hard to feel lucky at one in the morning when the bloody magic burn
still
hadn’t gone away. I set up camp on the roof again, complete with a book and sleeping bag. The cold had never particularly bothered me. Maybe because I’d been going into the freezing-cold Passages for so many years. I set my communicator down next to me, but hesitated on using it. Did Kay want me complaining at him all night? I skimmed the newsfeed instead, which updated every minute or so from the various Alliance branches worldwide. An offworld update feed showed the news from nearby worlds, and like Earth’s, it was going haywire with reports of the magic level fluctuating in a way it shouldn’t be.

And zapping me. Ouch.

Sighing, I scrolled through to Kay’s number and sent a message
. “Are you awake?”

A couple of minutes later:
“Yeah. Want me to call you?”

So he’d meant it? Not that he’d suggested otherwise, but I didn’t think we were at the calling-one-another-in-the-middle-of-the-night stage of friendship. Then again, I wasn’t exactly an expert on the subject.

“Okay.”

The communicator buzzed in my hand, at the same time as the magic burn decided to blaze across my neck again, making me drop it.
Crap.
I caught the shiny piece of expensive tech before it fell over the edge of the roof. “Hey.”

“What was that?”

“I nearly dropped my communicator off the roof.”

“The roof?”

“I like sitting up here.” And now I sounded like an idiot.

“Just don’t fall off.”

“Fall off? I’ll have you know, I have an awesome sense of balance.”

“I know you do. I’ve seen you climb trees.”

I smiled. “Oh, yeah. You’re pretty good, too. Even invisible. Did you learn invisible stealth at the Academy?”

“Nah, I dropped out of ninja finishing school.”

“Very funny. Ow.” I rubbed my neck again. Even the cool air didn’t help, though the shocks occurred less often than before.

“It’s still happening?”

I couldn’t deny Kay’s concerned tone took some of the sting off.

“Yay me. How did you stand this for two weeks? Wait, you said it happened twice?”

There was such a long silence, I thought he’d hung up. “It wasn’t the first time.”

Ouch.
“What… what happened?”

“When I hit the wyvern with magic, I didn’t have any protective shield, so I got the full backlash.”

“Damn.” As I’d heard the story second hand, I didn’t know he’d been hit by magic as well as almost getting torn to pieces.

“I know, right?” His tone was light. Almost too much so.

“Ow,” I said, lamely. “Sorry.” Holy hell. Guess I’d been lucky the creature had only touched my neck.

“Don’t worry about it.”

I rubbed my forehead. “I was thinking…”

“Yeah?”

“I’m supposed to have adamantine inside my blood,” I said. “So the sparks shouldn’t have been able to hit me. But maybe it doesn’t apply to surface wounds. Those sparks just grazed me.”

“Good point. If you were magicproof on the outside, then you wouldn’t be able to use magic at all.”

“That’s what I’ve been wondering… but adamantine isn’t really magicproof, is it? It’s partly magic itself.”

“Adamantine in pure form is, yeah,” said Kay. “Same rules apply as bloodrock and other magic-based substances.”

“So I’m not a shield, not really. More of a conduit.”

“Like all magic-wielders,” he said. “Except the absorbent means there are fewer limits. It’s like a shield on the inside, because it stops higher levels from harming you. I think you’re right about the surface-wound thing, though. It explains why you can still feel magic, externally.”

“Guess so,” I said. “This shit’s crazy-complicated. What about your amplifier? Does it work on anything else, apart from the Chameleon?”
And me.
Because I could absorb magic, I could also absorb the effects of any other source just by touching it. That included Kay’s own abilities, because he was a human amplifier.

He paused. “Maybe. A lot of the Alliance’s equipment is partly made of adamantine, but I can’t affect that.”

“What, you thought you could make something twice as magicproof?”

“I figured it was worth a try.”

“It worked when you amplified
my
power,” I pointed out. “But that might be because it’s an internal source… that explains it.”

“Explains what?”

“Why it didn’t kill me to channel that much magic.” I fidgeted, swapping my communicator to the other ear. “You know when we sent that kimaros back into the Passages on Aglaia? That was easily as much power as I used when the Campbells…”

“Not exactly,” he said. “You were pushing on the magic already there, externally, not absorbing it. Same with the lustre source. It only amplifies what’s there.”

Like the Chameleon.
“Good point.” I frowned. “Okay. I’ll keep that in mind. I really need to find out more about this stuff. I know how it works for magebloods, because it’s all external. But it seems like magic gets more complicated by the day. Wish it was more help when we fought that creature.”

“It’s saved your life before.”

Of course it did. More than once. “I know, but I always wanted to fly.”

He laughed quietly. “Yeah, can’t do that. Sorry to disappoint you. You’ll have to stick to your hover boots.”

“I suppose it’d be
too
awesome,” I said. “You can’t have all the superpowers, that’s unfair.”

“Nobody said the Multiverse played fair.” He said this lightly, but I could detect an undercurrent to his voice. The Multiverse hadn’t played fair at all, considering neither of us should have had magic in the first place. Apparently, it was common enough offworld, but the Royals had done it to me when I was a baby, to turn me into a weapon. And as for what Kay’s father had done… he might be able to turn invisible, but the same amplifier made magic burn a hundred times more painful for him than anyone else. And if he got
hit
by magic at third level…

Ouch.
“I don’t get magic. Why does it affect some worlds and not others?”

“No one knows. It’s why they call it magic and not science. Doesn’t stop people
trying
to understand it. On some worlds, anyway.”

“Yeah… it’s weird how Earth didn’t know until thirty years ago,” I said. “I remember when we learned it at school. Everyone started talking about aliens and monsters. I kind of wanted to tell them I was an alien. God, that’s weird.”

And then I remembered I was talking to the grandson of the person who’d announced the Alliance’s existence to the world in the first place.

“Hmm. You can give someone a unicorn and they’ll call it a horse, but as soon as you mention aliens, people instantly believe you.”

I laughed. “That’s Earth for you. Guess we’re all in over our heads now.”

“Yeah. You should probably try to sleep.”

“Not bloody likely.” I groaned. “Why are
you
awake? Do you not sleep at all?”

“When the Multiverse plays fair.”

“Guess that’s not really happening right now.” I sighed, tilting my head to the night sky. Lights from the high-rise buildings obscured the stars.

“I could send you a link to some Valerian music if you like.”

Huh? I couldn’t tell if was being serious or not. “Depends if it’s relaxing.”

“It sounds like a train falling off a cliff.”

“Then, no.”

“I was joking.”