Chapter Two #2
the heat before he hurled it, yet still she kept at that busted lighter. That match that wouldn’t strike. Right to the last
second, right to the point of him jeering as he went to throw.
And that was when she heard it. Above her, someone hissing through the dark and the quiet. “Hey, hey, hey,” she made out.
And she looked, and there the speaker was. The girl from the line, all liquid eyes and one reaching hand. “Grab it,” the girl
said the second Mina saw her. She even shook it frantically. Stretched down further, like she’d never been more desperate
for anything to happen in her life.
It made Mina get hold before she’d even had a chance to doubt.
Though she didn’t expect it to work. The girl hadn’t looked particularly strong. Thin and barely an inch taller than Mina’s
five foot three. Yet somehow the moment their hands connected, her feet left the floor. She scrambled, searching for purchase,
finding it and then not, finding it, then not. Then that light suddenly boiled bright, and she felt heat blooming against
her lower legs, and she yanked them up. She tucked them to her stomach and pulled with her arms.
And suddenly she was on top of a great bristle of twigs and leaves.
On her back, breathing hard, unable to believe what had just happened.
But there was proof it had. She could feel it on the backs of her legs.
And when she finally caught her breath enough to twist around and look, she could see it, too.
Two perfectly shaped ovals burned through her woolen tights.
Then in the center of each, a lot of suddenly too-pink skin. Like she’d been very weirdly sunburned.
Though she didn’t understand how she could make out that part in the darkness. Until she looked up at the girl crouching over
her, and saw what she had in her hand. A little ball of magic light, sputtering a little but never to the point of going out.
And it seemed to be getting stronger, too. More sure.
“Yeah,” the girl said, half a grin visible in the glow. “That’s because of you.”
But Mina didn’t have time to be happy about that. Or relieved. The asshole who had just almost burned her legs off was now
apparently trying to aim lightning up at them. And though he wasn’t succeeding, the crackle and spit of it wasn’t doing the
hedge beneath them any good. The acrid scent of burning leaves filled the air. Embers glowed too close to her hand.
She had to scuttle away over something that wasn’t meant to be scuttled over. Twigs bit into her palms, hard enough to hurt.
And when she went to get on her knees, her hand sunk into a gap between the branches, right up to the elbow. She almost face-planted—and
probably would have, if it were not for the girl.
The one who got a hand under her left arm and heaved.
The one whose name she didn’t even know.
“I’m Mina,” she gasped out, as they stumbled and fumbled their way down the top of the hedge to some dark and entirely deserted
corner. No one wants to linger where they might end up in last place, she thought, once they were huddled there, hugging themselves, burned and breathless, but still in one piece enough for the girl to answer her.
“Anaya,” she said, and Mina felt a hand clasp hers. For a shake, it seemed like. Though her new friend held on long past the
usual point for a greeting. Like she needed the comfort of it.
But who could have blamed her?
They had just almost been murdered. And now they stood with nothing but strange black behind them, like the world simply cut
off beyond the hedge. And in front, the view was even more disturbing. Pure carnage, of a kind that sent a jolt through Anaya
the moment she took it in.
Mina felt it through their still linked hands.
She squeezed that hand back, as the Brawl hit her, too. Someone somewhere was screaming that their eyes were on the wrong
way. In the distance, what looked like a set of horns were peeking just over the top of the hedge. Then this horned thing
moved, and when they did, the ground shook.
Like they belonged to some mammoth thing.
“A minotaur,” Anaya whispered, seemingly awed and terrified at the same time. And Mina understood that. It was one thing to
read in the guidebook that mythical and supernatural creatures could be encountered here. It was quite another to see them.
To know that they could possibly be summoned or maybe transformed into, and then kill you.
And there was more than that, so much more.
Tears in the sky above various places around the maze that disgorged hungry, searching tentacles.
Followed by multiple hapless students obviously trying to seal them back up.
They saw one jagged mouth zip closed, and the great gooey tendril that had emerged got cleanly snapped in two.
It tumbled down into one of the lanes where they couldn’t see.
But they could hear.
Screams followed.
As if it hadn’t quite died. As if it was still squirming away down there, squeezing people to death. Or sliding over them,
leaving a trail of burning acid. While they quite obviously tried to fight. Great gouts of rainbow-streaked flames flew up
from between those hedges. In fact, great gouts of rainbow-streaked flames flew up from just about everywhere.
One of them hit a shield someone made out of thin air, two lanes over from them, and then careened so close they both ducked.
They watched it paint the sky purple behind them, breaths held.
And all of it was only half visible to them.
Only something they could guess at.
Because everybody was on the ground.
“Why don’t they try to escape each other up here, too?” she found herself asking. Faintly, almost like she was talking to
herself.
But Anaya answered all the same. “I don’t really know. I think maybe . . . maybe it’s not that easy to. Honestly, I don’t
even know how I managed. It was like one second I was on the ground. And the next I was up here. With absolutely no explanation
as to how. Or how I managed to get you up, either.”
“Maybe you used some kind of teleportation magic.”
“But all these experts can’t? That seems really unlikely.”
“You could be a prodigy.”
“It was hard enough lighting this to see my way, once I was up.”
Anaya held it aloft as she spoke. That faint blue-tinged ball of light, incredible to Mina in more ways than she could count.
But she had to concede the point. “So maybe one of them hit you by accident. Like a blowback from something they only intended for themselves. I mean, look at this mess,” she said, pointing to something they could more clearly see.
Someone had turned themselves into a giant spider for some reason, and the person behind them now had a pincer where a hand should be.
“Well, whatever did it, we probably shouldn’t waste it,” Anaya said in the middle of trying to calm her frightened breathing.
“We could get pretty far, pretty safely like this. Enough to not get expelled, anyway. And seeing all of this, being not expelled
is pretty much all I’m going for.”
“Same. I mean, god, can you imagine what the third-year advance classes are like?” Her new friend shuddered, as if picturing
it.
And Mina had a good idea what it was she had in her head.
“You probably step into one and find Cthulhu waiting for you.”
“Or else some asshole just murders you immediately for daring to turn up.”
“You mean like the asshole who was staring at you in the entrance hall?” Anaya asked, and when she did, Mina felt those liquid
eyes on the side of her face. Staring through the darkness, waiting for an answer.
Though when she dared to look back, the expression she found was not unkind. It was something else, something softer, something
that made her want to confess what had happened in the hall of headmasters. That coldness, that feeling that he might do something
very bad indeed.
She had to force herself to keep it light. “That wasn’t anything,” she said, but Anaya didn’t back down.
“It was enough that other people noticed. I heard a bunch of students wondering if he found you so fascinating because you were secretly something other than human.”
“I don’t even know what something else I could be.”
“A succubus, they guessed. Come to suck out his soul.”
“That’s insane. That isn’t a thing. I’m as human as anybody.”
“You don’t have to convince me. Your hand is the hottest, sweatiest thing I’ve ever held. If anything, I’m worried you’re
too alive,” Anaya said, kindly enough that Mina couldn’t help laughing. Even with the thought of him in her head and all this
going on, she laughed.
And got a laugh back.
Half hysterical, like her own.
But it was there. It was enough.
“Feel calm and strong enough to go for a little bit farther?” she asked.
“I do now,” Anaya replied. Then they just went. Aisha in front, Mina behind, both still linked by that too-long handshake.
Each step more like wading than anything else, and wobbly as hell. But they managed. They got to the end of the first lane
still in one piece.
Then it was just a matter of jumping to the next.
A couple of feet.
Fairly doable, Mina thought. Though she wasn’t relishing a landing on the other side. Or particularly happy about what she could see when
she made the mistake of looking down. That was a severed arm, sprawled across the grass. And said severed arm was still moving. It crawled slowly but steadily toward a hunched dark shape, by a corner across the way.
So of course she could guess what the hunched dark shape was.
Her stomach turned at the thought. She had to look away, at Anaya, as she got ready to jump. A little clumsy run up, and then what looked like the easiest leap in the world, and she was over.
No big deal, Mina thought, as she took a few steps back and then ran, just like Anaya had. Exactly like that, it seemed like. Yet something
happened the moment her foot left the safety of the hedge. Shapes seemed to disappear into darkness. Darkness became suddenly
solid. And somehow there was way too much empty air in front of her. She passed right through the place she was supposed to