28. The Pact #2
“Speak for yourself,” Norrick said, his eyes never leaving mine. “You’ve no more claim than I do, just because you were too stupid to take the opportunity when it came.”
Pants laughed again, slapping Orrin on the shoulder. “He’s got you there,” he said.
The tallest of the five, who I knew the least about, didn’t grin at me like the rest of them.
Vlad Mordopast had long, black, expensively-coiffed hair and dark, piercing eyes, with a prominent Adam’s apple but a handsome face.
He also wore the most expensive-looking clothes.
His wardrobe reminded me the most of Bones’s when he’d attended classes.
He hung back slightly, but didn’t take his eyes off me, either.
“Bones won’t like this much, will he?” Mordopast asked.
Out of all of them, he looked the most nervous.
I saw him glance over his shoulder at the back steps of the college, where Elysia had been standing. Relief washed over his face when he saw that she’d disappeared back inside that door. When he looked at me next, his stare was appraising, and a lot colder.
I remembered that he and Warrington had been dating, and I scoffed, unable to help it.
“And here I was, thinking you had a shred of decency,” I said to him mockingly. “You were just afraid of your girlfriend kicking you out of her bed.”
“Shut up, cunt,” Mordopast snapped. “Whores don’t get to play high and mighty here. Especially when they have no idea what they’re talking about.”
Christian Orrin grinned at him.
Then he turned towards me and began walking faster.
“Come on,” he said impatiently to the others. His eyes never leaving my hands where they poised to cast. “What are we messing about for? Grab her! We need to get her somewhere out of sight, before we’re seen––”
Something about him saying it aloud, exactly what they intended, snapped my mind completely awake.
I couldn’t just hold them off.
No one was coming.
I had to put them down.
“Andham kartum,” I hissed, making the first mudra and aiming it at Christian.
He wasn’t expecting it, and it hit him square in the face. I saw his eyes go completely white, and knew the spell worked. I didn’t wait, but threw a second spell at Pants, who’d followed eagerly right behind him.
“Nihil nisi aerem!” I twisted my hand into a new mudra.“Incinerous Luciferus!”
Pants stumbled from the anti-gravity spell, then got blown back from the wind spell. He crashed right into Scar, who’d just raised his hand to counter my second spell.
Christian, who put out his hands as soon as the blindness spell kicked in, stumbled forward into the grass, and I leapt back.
Pants fought to hold onto Mordopast’s arm, then his head, then his hair, and Mordopast grabbed for him, as well, but neither got a good grip and the wind was too strong as the anti-gravity spell pulled him up off the ground and floated him rapidly sideways as he rose.
In a matter of seconds, he was too high to reach.
I aimed my next spell at scar, twisting each hand in a separate mudra.
“Vermis agni!” I hissed, sending fiery snakes in his direction.
Unfortunately, Scar was significantly faster than Christian had been, or Pants.
He cast a rapid shield, and tried to boomerang the spell back at me. I managed to block him with the same, and sent the spell at Norrick, who snarled curses at me when the spell wrapped around his leg, and caught some of the nearby grasses on fire.
“BITCH!” he screamed.
I turned back towards Scar in time to see him casting at Pants.
“Gravior aeris!” he hissed, performing a quick mudra.
Pants began to plummet towards the ground.
Without missing a beat, Scar aimed his next spell and mudra at Christian. It already left his hand and lips by the time Pants crashed back down to the long grass with a thick grunt.
“Omnia dissolvere!” Scar hissed.
He didn’t take his eyes off me, reinforcing the shield he held between me and him as he called over his shoulder. “Pants! Get your ass back here! Now!” He glared briefly down at Christian. “You too. We can’t take her on one by one.”
I aimed my next few spells at Scar, but his shield was strong, and it held.
All of us had shields in front of us now.
I cursed myself silently for not going after Scar first.
Bones’s words echoed inside my head even as I thought it. Not Bones in the present, unfortunately, but a memory of us talking about this exact thing.
“You need to stop thinking like a gods-damned human,” he’d snapped, in the middle of a trained duel he’d arranged between me and two other Magicals. “Don’t bother with the biggest, or the one threatening you the loudest. You’re a witch. Act like it.”
He’d waited for me to take his advice.
When I hadn’t, at least not the way he’d wanted, he’d scowled.
“For fuck’s sake, look at their auras, Shadow!
Use your seeing arts… and your head. You need to overcompensate when you’re outnumbered..
If you’ve got more than one Magical after you, your goal is, first and foremost, to survive.
Hit them with whatever you have. Stop them.
Only once it’s safe, only once they’re really down, can you even think about running. ”
Still holding my shield between me and the five of them, I slid deeper into my magic, and their auras lit up all around me.
Immediately, the ranking of their magics became crystal clear.
Mordopast was the strongest, which I hadn’t known.
Scar came next, which I’d suspected.
Norrick Voltaire came in third.
Which meant I’d hit the weakest two Magicals of the bunch first.
Bones would be ranting at me, if he’d seen.
He’d also warned me that in the heat of battle, all thinking would go out the window. He’d wanted all of it to be rote, something I did automatically, without thinking at all.
Clearly I hadn’t reached that point in my training yet.
I began another set of mudras as I remained just enough in the Aether to see them move and ignite their magic. Scar’s was definitely the brightest right now, with him clearly gearing up to attack me again, building something he likely hoped would get past my shield.
Despite Mordopast being stronger, I decided to go after Scar first, since he was the immediate threat.
“Asantulanam,” I said, trying to knock him off balance as my fingers and hand dipped into the next elaborate mudra. “Ignire aerum,” I hissed next, louder, when he knocked my first spell sideways. His shield was tough.
I would need to find a way around that.
“Know your strengths.” Again, I heard Bones’s voice in my ear, an echo of our training sessions in his Experimental Magic Shed.
“Don’t fuck around with spells you unsure about, not when you’re in trouble.
Use what you’re good at. You’re good at fire, Leda.
If you’re ever in trouble, use that. Fire scares the shit out of most people. Press that advantage.”
Fire exploded out from my hand, streaking across the air, igniting every molecule of oxygen in its path. I aimed it right at Scar, focusing all of my attention on him. I saw him try to throw up a secondary shield.
I hit him with a second spell to throw him off-balance.
“Crus levare!” I hissed, gliding my fingers into another mudra. “Balah!”
Scar stumbled backwards before he could finish the mudra, and crashed into Pants, who’d only just managed to make it back to where we were.
Both of them landed on their backs. Christian and Norrick jumped back to get out of the path of the fire, until I saw a spell divert the stream of flames away from Scar and up into the air.
I followed the trail of black and red magic, and saw Mordopast standing there, his eyes glowing from the heat of his own magic.
Damn Bones for always being right.
“Agni ajagar!” I snapped, that time aiming fire at Mordopast with a hard clap.
A dragon made of fire exploded from between my fingers.
It was followed by another, and another.
They flew straight for the tall mage with the long black hair and prominent Adam’s apple. His eyes shone brighter with magic as he threw several complex shields in front of himself, and then boomeranged the dragons back at me.
I was able to divert them again, so that they shot past me along either side.
But I was panting now, out of breath, and I could feel myself panicking.
There were too many of them.
I reinforced my shield, but it didn’t feel strong enough.
Norrick, who’d stood back slightly, maneuvering himself into my blind spot while I fought with Orrin, Pants, Scar, and now Mordopast, now unleashed a series of copper-colored knives.
I managed to twist my shield around to block most of them, but not before one nicked my upper arm as it flashed past.
The pain made me gasp and jump forward, closer to the others.
I heard Norrick chuckle, right before I turned and threw a harder spell at him.
It was one I’d only ever used once before.
“Raktaagni lakshyam,” I snarled in Sanskrit.
Looking back on it, escalating into full-blown dark magic maybe wasn’t the best strategy, since none of them had gone that far yet. Even so, I couldn’t suppress the feeling of satisfaction when violet and green fire slammed into Norrick’s chest.
It brought a scream out of him unlike anything I’d ever heard from another Magical’s lips, especially not one roughly my age.
Before I could look away from what I’d done, I got hit, hard, from my other side.
I didn’t even hear the incantation, so at first I had no idea what it was.
A streak of blue and white lightning engulfed me, bringing so much pain my mind completely blanked out. I hadn’t managed to get my shield around, much less construct a new one after being attacked by the knives, so I got the full force of the spell.
It knocked me to my back so hard, all I could do for the first few seconds is lie there, gasping. My body seized, long enough for Mordopast to cast a second one.
That one felt stronger than the first.
He hit me with a third while I struggled to move my lips.
All three felt like lightning spells, stacked on top of one another until I couldn’t see anything but current flowing past my eyes and over my skin.