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 pulse with 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.
“We can’t kill one of them—not to my knowledge,” I say, before I realize how defeatist that sounds. “But we can disrupt the anchor point they’re using to project their power here without being present.”
“What anchor point?” the gargoyle growls, and I chuckle.
“Li, you need to do a reveal or something. We have to find whatever they’re using to control the storm.”
My best friend rubs his hands together and then closes his eyes, lifting his palms in the air as he chants.
The High Fae is deep and guttural, but after a few minutes, the magic crawls outward until it reaches a spot close to us.
Jerking my head at them, I head for the spot and wait until his magic makes a pedestal with an enormous stone on it appear out of nowhere.
I tap the glowing glass with a claw, and it flashes a new color, then resets to blue-green. “This is the lens; it’s focusing power from outside of the tornado.”
Morgana’s eyes glow yellow, then rake over the glass. “The anchor is inside here?”
“I think so,” I say as I scratch my chin. “It’s a projection of whoever this fucker is, so they could be anywhere and everywhere.”
Liam kneels beside it, scrubbing a hand through the dirt and coming up with a palmful of glass and insulation. “So what, a deity? An angry demi? Galactic-level nerd with a grudge? Some tricky legendary hoping to make a name in the digital age?”
“All of the above or none?” I offer, trying for levity, but it dies quickly.
“I don’t know, Li. Neither of us has dealt with many of those places much over the centuries.
You know some of them only deal with the heads of state, others rarely leave their realms, and others slip through the main realms like water only revealing where they were after they’ve fucked with things. ”
He stands, brushing himself off. “We have to find some way of tracking them when this is over. If they’re partnering with the demon rebellion and the Hand… this won’t be pretty.” The prince is looking at me with that goddamn ‘noble hero’ intensity, and I know what he wants me to say.
I sigh. “Okay. We can work with the Guardians out west and the demons on this.”
He nods. “We have to know more about those visitors and what they might be capable of. I get the feeling one or more of the people in those groups will have access somehow.”
Morgana’s face brightens as she hears me suggest we work with the other families. “I think that’s a great idea for later. But we’re still stuck in this whatever the fuck portal and need to figure out how to stop this stone before the tornado takes out the campus and the city.”
Something thumps against the barrier—hard. The sound echoes and makes my nerves crawl. I don’t like not being able to see what’s coming at us from all sides.
“Are you okay?” Morgana asks, voice low. She means physically, but her eyes keep flicking to my arms, my wings, the ragged edge of transition where my hands are half human, half dragon. I’m not a pretty sight when I’m stressed.
“Fine,” I lie, and she doesn’t call me on it. Instead, she steps up, just close enough that I can feel the chill off her stone skin, and stares outward.
“I hate feeling like a pawn,” she says. “I hate it even more when I can’t see who’s moving the pieces.”
“More accustomed to being the queen, eh?” I mumble. She gives me an arched brow and a sniff that says I’m right.
Morgana LeCiel prefers to be the most powerful piece on the board.
We stand there quietly for a long minute, the three of us. Prince, bodyguard, and Dean, all stuck in someone else’s experiment and trying to work out how to get out.
Then Liam claps his hands, as if he’s decided something.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s start with magic.
Whatever this thing requires to be destroyed, it has to be imbued with some kind of magic.
Worst case, it fucks everything up and we get stuck in a time loop and have to eat each other to survive.
Best case, we walk out in an hour and go home to get very drunk while eating copious amounts of cheese. ”
Morgana gives him a look. “I will eat you first if I get stuck in a time loop, Li. No questions asked.”
He grins. “Promises, promises.”
Some of the tension cracks when he jokes, and I force my body back toward a more human posture as I shift my wings.
It’s not easy to stay half-shifted when I’m so furious and my dragon wants out, but the pain is grounding.
I know who I am in the ache, and I can feel where he starts and I begin to prevent him from taking over.
I need to be sharp if we’re going to figure out this puzzle.
We take a full five minutes to pick through the debris looking for something important.
Morgana nearly eats dust twice, once on a slick of wiring that pulses like intestines, and again on a stack of frozen brush.
I’m not used to watching her struggle with footing—her center of gravity is usually unshakable—but this place is designed to mess with our instincts.
I can’t even blame her; I almost twist my ankle twice and I’m extremely coordinated.