The Rise of Ren Crown (55 page)

“Of course.” Automatically reacting to her distress, I tried to pick the other spells free faster, fingers slipping. “Did you think you were talking to a figment?” I asked lightly—my voice only shaking a little despite my crushing relief mixing into a terrible cocktail of terror, panic, and liberation.

“What are you doing here? You can't
be
here,” she hissed. “You need to be at Excelsine.”

“
We
. We need to be at Excelsine.”

“
Who let you out
?” She demanded in a way that sounded like a death threat. Warmth and further relief rushed through me.

“Psh. Like anyone
let
me.”

I finally got the lock free and the box clicked open. I pressed the button inside, and the shield fell. It was almost too simple.

She looked at the box and the origination of the spell. Then she looked at me. I shifted on my knees, unable to read her for a moment.

She launched herself at me.

“You
idiot
,” Olivia said, as she sobbed into my neck, holding me tighter. “You absolute moron.”

I hugged her tighter, burying my face in her hair. “I missed you too.”

She sobbed.

“
Red Colonel?
” came a familiar voice through the emergency line.

“I've got the package,” I said, face in her hair. I had her. I had saved her. I had failed with Christian. But I had saved Olivia. “And we will initiate the return sequence in five.”

Kaine and Tarei were temporarily contained, and as far as I was concerned, we could
leave
them. Raphael and the rest of the praetorians were...gone. I had no idea where they were. And, we were in a
ghost
town, because, thankfully, Raphael worked
alone.
Things were looking
up.

“
Intercepted Legion communications. Troops moving your way
.
Three minutes
.
Hurry
.”

Or maybe not.

“We have to go,” I said, manhandling Olivia to her feet as I painfully rose. The Justice Magic was trying to work its way through my second leg. I hobbled over to Marsgrove and made quick work of his bonds. His were a lot less complicated than hers, oddly. Maybe Raphael had thought I wouldn't save him?

Marsgrove was up and out the door almost before I got the last spell free.

Olivia, however, was unmoving, looking out the broken window at the Legion pounding down the hill and toward the dome.

Three minutes? We had forty seconds. I pushed her into motion. “We have to go.”

Her skin was the color of chalk.

“I can't leave.” The skin around Olivia's eyes tightened in pain. “I
can't
.”

“What? No. Did you develop some magic psychosis?” I demanded, physically hauling her taller frame toward the door, shooting pains in my legs be damned. When she stuttered to a stop, I put my arm through hers and
dragged
her.

“You don't understand, Ren, there are things implan—”

“
Red Colonel,
” the voice was far more tense this time. “
Correction! Thirty seconds. And two terrorist cells coming in from the north, intercepting the same transmissions. You need to
move
.”

“We have to
hurry
, Liv,” I said, dragging her into the solarium where Constantine and Marsgrove were looking out windows with varying degrees of grimness. The vine was still fat and full in the middle of the floor.

“No! Ren—there are—”

“Seriously doesn't matter. Tell me at
home.
” I headed for the vine. I didn't know
what
we were going to do with it. I turned to Marsgrove to ask while trying to ignore Olivia frantically shaking her head.

“No, Ren, home is too lat—”

The entire building rocked, making all of us lurch.

Marsgrove had an intense look on his face, and his head was cocked as if he was waiting for something.

He turned to me. “What's the plan?”

Olivia looked at him, brows furrowed like she was wondering what he was doing here. I was killing Raphael myself if he had whammied her permanently.

Constantine answered him. “We need the Justice Magic extinguished and thirty seconds to get everything set, but we have to be closer to the earth. Any height between the disk and the earth gets multiplied by the vortex on the other end,” Constantine said grimly. Combat troops were streaming into the building at all access points four floors below.

We weren't getting to the ground floor without fighting the Legion. And the praetorians were likely still lurking
somewhere.
Marsgrove might be able to hold his own against a good number of them, but with all of them focused on the four of us in the halls or stairwells? Our odds were really bad.

The smell of ozone and wood permeated the space for a strange instant, almost seeming to come through the floor. It was a familiar smell, but one I couldn't immediately pinpoint.

“We have—”

Constantine's eyes went wide, and he threw himself at me, magic flashing.

He didn't make it to me before the floor dropped out from beneath our feet.

Chapter Forty-six: Chaos

When the dust cleared, we were four floors down, surrounded by rubble in the marble atrium and in the midst of a battle that had already begun without us. Olivia was lying on top of me, but I couldn't see the others.

Spells were impacting and being shielded, and impacting again. Colored lights and percussive blasts were ricocheting back-and-forth like a psychotic pinball game where the ball had become stuck between two obstacles. Only, there were a hundred balls.

I crawled behind a pile of debris, pulling Olivia with me. Magic whizzed everywhere and three bolts got me before I managed to activate my small chaos field and pull it over us, hunching beneath it and making sure Olivia was completely covered. Magic battered against it, ricocheting from the
ceiling,
like fireworks that had misfired on the launcher.

God, where was Constantine? Marsgrove?

I had no idea how we'd survived the fall. Someone had to have done magic to cushion us before we'd hit the floor. Very likely Constantine, as he'd been calling magic.

Olivia was alive next to me. I closed my eyes and hoped for the other two.

On the positive side of things, whatever had happened with the explosion had destroyed the Justice Magic, I could move freely again, and we were on the ground floor. On the negative side, we were separated, and in the midst of all-out warfare.

The field protected Olivia and me from stray blows, but didn't allow us to shoot off our own magic. We were bystanders, and if we remained as such, in this conflict we would be taken—or killed—by whoever was the last one standing.

We were in the atrium, and though debris was semi-hiding us, we needed to get out of here before anyone noticed us as anything other than cannon fodder troops.

But something was wrong with Olivia. Her eyes were closed tightly and she was whispering something to herself over and over. It sounded terrifyingly like, “I
won't
kill, I
won't
kill.”

I framed her cheeks in my hands. “Less
Shining
, more
Mary Poppins
. We have to get out of here.”

She nodded frenetically at me. In one of her hands, the butterfly I had given her was clutched tight.

I touched it, then looked back at her and cupped the back of her neck like Axer sometimes did to me when he wanted to stress a point or strengthen fellowship. “It's going to be fine. Remember? Breathe. There you go.”

I channeled everything I had learned through the panic attacks on Tuesday and sent the feelings into her—with one of my hands wrapped around her clutching the butterfly and the other against the skin of her neck.

Eventually she nodded. She even managed a shaky smile. “No blonde to resurrect.”

“I'm sure we can find one,” I said, only half joking. Bodies littered the debris around us.

I quickly withdrew the containers and ouroboros I had brought for her. She ran a finger along the metal of the infinite snake, then attached it around her neck. “You've been busy.”

“Trick has all the reports. It looks like all current business ventures are in the black. The
deep
black,” I said. “Lots of business for the suppliers of paranoia right now.”

She faintly smiled.

When I tried to hand her the containers, though, she shook her head. “Better not.”

“Ren,” a very familiar voice shouted.

Mouth dropping, I looked over a massive chunk of broken marble to see Axer motioning with his hand.

“In five,” he said.

Without waiting to second guess it, I shoved the containers into Olivia's hands on the count of five, grabbed her and ran. The field didn't fully cover us, and I took two shots to the leg.

But, in military precision, cover fire took down five targets shooting at us. Maybe it was Nicholas Dare, somewhere far away at the top of the hill.

Axer reached out and pulled us both around the wall as something exploded where we had just stood.

I stared at him, heart racing from adrenaline, and not quite believing my eyes. He was supposed to be at the competition. Right now. “You are missing Freespar.”

He raised a brow and shot off another bolt of charcoal, making it curve around the corner. “I wouldn't say I'm missing it.”

Constantine and Marsgrove, thank God, were further down the hall. We made eye contact. They both were sending their own spells into the atrium. Olivia and I quickly joined in.

But again, there was something wrong with Olivia. I could see it on her face whenever I could catch a glimpse. There was a strain there, and strangely, she was attacking the Legion with far more fervor and precision than the terrorists.

And it looked like she was trying to close her eyes whenever she didn't feel the three of us to be in immediate mortal peril.

Down the hall, Marsgrove seemed to be taking special delight in killing Legion troops as well. But whereas Olivia flinched each time she threw a spell, Marsgrove was fiercely invested.

It was...not right. Yes, the Legion was actively against us, but they were the security force for the Second Layer, and Marsgrove and Olivia, while they didn't wear a magicist hat, were
darn
close.

In the middle of the chaos, the praetorians appeared. Kaine and Tarei looked far worse for wear, but still functional. I wondered if in the fall, the vine had hit the ground and barfed them out.

All we needed was for Raphael to appear and we'd have the whole band back together.

The vine, looking far more raggedy, shot through the atrium, launching itself from the piles of debris and from the walls and flying like a deadly arrow through the air. I tried not to pay attention as it swallowed
people. Nope, nope, nope.

“What
happened
?” I asked Axer. “How did you get here?”

Axer flinched. “When we exited the port, one of the people with me targeted the Justice Magic immediately, to give us an advantage. It worked, but there was a failsafe in the Justice Magic and the port exploded with all of you
directly above it
.”

He said it like we had positioned ourselves that way on purpose.

But...porting explained a
lot
.

Port magic was singular, smelling like ozone and minerals and freshly cut wood, as magic split two places at the same time, then joined the two together.

“
How
did you port here,” I demanded.

“Constantine set it up. Illegal vortex.”

That explained the gem and his reply to the demon bargain.

Grimly, I looked around. “You shouldn't be here.”

“None of us should. But you aren't surprised that I am.”

I wasn't. Though we had left his attendance in the “dire circumstances only” category, I had figured he would pop up
if
we got into massive trouble.

I chanced another glance down the hall. Constantine was a bundle of emotion and rage. Normal.

“There's an opening. Go.” Axer pushed Olivia and me down the corridor of columns toward Constantine and Marsgrove.

We were all edging toward a broken window that was large enough to exit when someone, somewhere, decided to end it all.

An explosion rocked the world and a gaping hole appeared in the ground, then rapidly expanded outward. It was like a sinkhole that reached to
hell.

Marsgrove grabbed me by the back of my cloak, plucking me out of range, and magically sending us sliding back across the marble that was crumbling in front of our backsliding feet.

Constantine pitched himself forward and grabbed a long cord hanging from the ceiling, when the ground gave way beneath his feet. It was a long mass of braided wire that had probably extended up multiple levels, until the first explosion had occurred and ripped it from its moorings. He twirled wildly, gripping the cord about halfway up, dangling over a vast expanse of nothing

Axer pushed Olivia to the side with a thrust of magic that shot her twenty feet, past the rim of the gaping hole, saving her, but the rocks beneath his feet gave way, and he pitched forward toward the center.

I threw my hands forward to call up
the earth
, but Marsgrove yanked me back, some foreign magic clamping down on me.

Constantine released the cord, letting it slide in one palm as he reached out into space, fingertips hooking into Axer's at the last possible moment. I could see him using magic, attempting to get a better grip, but the slipping shriek of world-ending magic—the maelstrom someone had unleashed that had caused the sinkhole—had a grip on everything and was
pulling downward.
Bodies were falling, being
dragged
inside.

“Let go of me,” I said to Marsgrove, who was staring at them as they swung and slipped, with only a faintly strange smile on his lips. He was doing
nothing.

“Magic will kill them faster,” he said, like he was watching a semi-interesting sport.

“Are you that angry with Axer for the Midlands' visit and the vine?” I said furiously.

Marsgrove said nothing, but he was right about one thing—all magic in the room seemed to be sucking into the gaping hole, causing it to increase its pull.