Page 93 of Suspicions on the Stage
“What is Lucas doing?” I ask as I look at them. “You said you brought him along.”
Liam puts a hand on my shoulder reassuringly. “He’s distracting the caster by running about and ducking things at present. You know he’s built like a tank, and once he gets moving, he’s fast as hell.”
“Yes, I saw that thelasttime we had to battle on campus,” I retort drily. “Like the murders, this shit is getting old. I’m petitioning the Society for a protective ward upgrade if we survive.”
“We will survive, Morgana, and then we will deal with the fallout at every level.” Iggy looks at us seriously, then nods at his symbols. “Time to move—on the count of three, yes?”
Iggy counts down, and on ‘three’, Kaspar kicks out the busted wall, and we spill onto the grass, the storm clawing at us but slowed by the shimmering shield Liam forms. Once we can see our targets, the game is on, and we leap into the air. My wings aren’t meant for upward lift, so I’m not as fast, but I’m more determined than I’ve ever been.
The three of us charge the center of the storm, and the wind howls. It fights our progress, but after a few minutes of ourenemy having to split the magical focus in several directions, we are able to breach the eye, and everything is, for one heartbeat, still.
Time to find this motherfucker and teach him how gargoyles get their vengeance.
battle royale
KASPAR
I’m less than thirty feet from the ground when the tornado eye does its magic trick—one moment I’m flying, raw air clawing at my feathers and scales and skin, the next I’m dropped into total stillness so suddenly my inner ear wants to throw a riot. My wings snap wide, and it’s only that instinctive, animal flex that keeps me from eating the concrete.
Fucking magic users—other than Li, I hate their goddamn guts.
Speaking of the Prince, Liam lands with more grace than should be legal, all dark hair and mischievous smirks as his coat flaps open to show a streak of the firework-orange shirt underneath. Morgana isn’t so lucky: the winds snatched her, and her hair is a rat’s nest with a single snake poking out. She twists midair, using those powerful gargoyle wings to force herself to land catlike, then comes up cursing under her breath in French.
The silence at the center of the tornado is not really silence—it’s more of a sucking void, blanketed on all sides by a wall of wind. The ground is covered in a lacework of shattered insulation, rebar, and, weirdly, blue-green glass shards—chunks that pulsewith their own light. They weren’t here when I did my recon flight over the campus two hours ago.
My skin tingles—every hair and scale on my body is at full alert. The instincts of my dragon say to blow everything up, but the human part of me says ‘run’. Neither wins because I’m a bodyguard to the royal prince, and I can’t run unless he does. Since Liam is busy plucking glass out of his palm and eyeing Morgana, that will not happen.
“How much trouble are we in, Kas?” he finally says.
I ignore the glass, ignore the blood, and focus on the perimeter. There’s not much to see in the eye itself—just scattered detritus, warped foliage, and a couple of drones hung up in the wind like ornaments—but the boundaries of this place are wrong. The walls of wind are too smooth, like someone sanded an invisible room in the quad.
I don’t like this one fucking bit.
“Okay,” Morgana says, hoisting the chunk of roof and setting it down, “whoever did this wasn’t subtle.”
“Subtlety is passé this year, apparently,” Liam says. “This is more like an overt threat.” He slaps a glass splinter onto the ground, where it shatters in a tiny shower. “Kaspar? Share your thoughts, man?”
I crouch, balancing on the balls of my feet, and try to taste the magic. There’s fae in here, for sure—the signature is like ozone after a thunderstorm, but with a tang of something else. Not demon, not human, not even vampire—no, this being is older and rarer. I open my mouth to say so and get a lungful of sour, citrusy magic instead. It makes my teeth ache.
“I think…” I cough. “I think this is a pocket portal. You know, the Mary Poppins thing people talk about.” I gesture upward, where the tornado’s walls glimmer in a rainbow of distortion. “It’s a portal that extends and layers alongside our realm. It makes a smaller space larger and allows for protection of things since not everyone can access it.”
Morgana makes a face. “Someone’s watching us right now from somewhere else? Creepy and cowardly if you ask me.” She looks up and yells into the air, “Come out and fight, you fucking pansy!”
Sometimes, she does things like that, and I can see why the others are so taken with her.
“They built this as a remote-controlled trap,” I say as I look around again. My tail wants to lash the ground and smash something, but I force it still. “I don’t know if it was meant for now, or if it was waiting for one of us to fly over the quad in a specific route.”
Liam looks, his expression furious. “Could we have prevented this? Is it something we should have sensed or found as you patrolled?”
I shake my head. “No. I don’t know a lot about that stuff, only rumors, but… No one has figured out how to tell when they’ve been created unless they’re in the species who have the power.” I glance at Morgana, who frowns but doesn’t interrupt. “Whoever did this is operating at a higher tier; they’re from one of the less commonly visited realms. Galactic, Deity, Legendary, maybe even Astral… these are the only beings who can do this with any success.”
Liam whistles. “That’s bad news for us, folks.”
“Yeah,” I say, voice dry. “And since none of us know enough about those fucking places, we’re going to need to expand our horizons after we get this taken care of.”
Morgana puts both fists on her hips, and I know that means she’s pissed. “Fine. For now, though, how do we find and peel the skin off the motherfucker doing this?”
Again, with doing shit that’s attractive in a bad setting.
