Clash (Academy of Unpredictable Magic Book 6) Page 5

  He can’t control all of them, obviously—and it’s even harder to gain control because he’s not the one who summoned them. But he manages to influence one or two of them and uses them to wreak havoc, turning them on their compatriots, who roar in anger. That’s all it takes to start the dominos falling.

  Our attackers are wary of my sonic boom now and stay out of my blast radius, so I can’t use that, but I can use my mirroring powers.

  The mages around me are all regular magic users, elementalists and potion makers and that kind of thing. And as I reach out with my feelings, trying to latch onto their powers, it strikes me that mirroring has never been this easy.

  I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but I’ve been mirroring Unpredictables this whole time. Unpredictables, with their crazy, random abilities and their super magical strength. Now that I’m up against regular mages, it’s so much easier to latch onto their powers.

  Holy shit!

  I almost want to laugh hysterically in relief. This must be how it feels for Agustin, I realize. And I start to understand a little better why people are scared of us. Doesn’t make it okay, doesn’t make it right, but holy shit, I’m powerful.

  It’s still a hard battle. There are a lot more of them than there are of us. But for the first time I feel—vindictive. We’re going to beat these assholes. We’re going to kick their asses, and then I’m going to kick Agustin’s ass and show the world that just because Unpredictables are powerful, it doesn’t mean we’re all evil. That some of us want to use our power for good.

  By the end of it, my legs and arms feel like noodles. I’ve had magic flowing through me for the better part of an hour, and everything aches. Asher slumps to the ground with a groan, and Dmitri draws his duplicates back into himself, shaking his head to get rid of the disorientation.

  “Good job.” Roman straightens, breathing heavily.

  I nod, limping over to him. “I didn’t realize… how much more powerful we actually are.”

  He wipes the back of his arm across his forehead, smearing the small line of blood trickling down his temple from his hairline. “That’s why people are so frightened of us. They assume that power like this automatically equates to a thirst for control, a lack of empathy. Maybe because that’s what they’d do if they had our power. But being Unpredictable has just as many downsides as it does advantages.”

  “Feels like it’s nothing but downsides lately,” I admit. “I’m glad I’m finally seeing a benefit to this.”

  He gives me a tired smile, his intense cobalt eyes warming a little. “I’m glad to hear it. At least something good’s come out of this goddamn mess.”

  Which reminds me—is everyone else okay?

  Just as that thought settles into my mind, Tom, a friend of mine from Griffin, rounds the corner from the north side of the holding. He’s sporting a black eye, and his shirt has huge rips in it that appear to be claw marks. “Elliot! You guys okay?” He’s limping slightly.

  “I should be asking you that.” I scan him up and down as I walk up to him. “You look like hell.”

  “Yeah, you should see the other guys,” he shoots back with a tired but elated grin. “Everyone’s okay, no casualties on our side, but a shitload of injuries. Broken bones, burns, that kind of thing. The healers are doing what they can, and I think everybody’s going to be okay—but, man, that was terrifying.”

  “I’m glad you’re all right.” I glance at the dead demons and mages strewn across the ground around us. It’s… sickening. Now that the elation of battle is over, I kind of want to barf up everything I’ve ever eaten. “Um. We need to get a cleanup crew together. Can you gather those who aren’t injured to help? We should probably burn the bodies.”

  That thought makes me feel even sicker, but we can’t just leave them out here. Dead bodies, even demonic ones, stink like a motherfucker and carry a shit ton of diseases

  “I need to do some interrogating first,” Roman says quietly, coming up behind me.

  Oh. Right.

  My darkly handsome professor has three powers: demon summoning and control, death touch, and necromancy. Raising people from the dead to question them is pretty damn helpful in situations like a murder investigation, and who knows, he might glean something useful from one of the dead.

  I steer Tom away. I’ve never actually seen Roman resurrect a dead body, but he’s described it to me and said that most people find it disconcerting.

  Dmitri walks up as Tom goes to tell the others about organizing a pyre for the bodies.

  “We got lucky with no casualties,” he mutters, his eyes hard as he scans the compound. “It’s not safe here anymore.”

  Dammit. I agree.

  “We have to tend to the wounded and these bodies, clean up.” I rub my forehead. “And then we’ll call a meeting.”

  No rest for the wicked.

  Chapter 7

  Everyone is exhausted, and I know that I for one would like to just pass out and sleep for ages, but that’s not an option until we figure out what we’re going to do next.

  It’s not safe here for us anymore. Not that it was all that safe to begin with, but now the danger is more obvious than ever. We can’t hold this place. I haven’t exactly been poring over The Art of War here, but even I know that this building and area is shit for defending, especially now that it’s been breached once. It’s meant to be a place to hold people inside when you have a whole bunch of guards to keep them in line. It’s not meant to be defended against outside forces.

  As I look around, I see a lot of people sporting heavy bandages. Outside, Erin and a few other volunteers are tending to the fire and making sure it doesn’t get out of hand. The rest of us are inside the main common room, professors and students mixing in small groups as they talk in low voices.

  The line between those two groups feels like it’s blurring. Most of the professors are in their mid-thirties and up, older than I am by at least a decade, but all of us students are adults too. The majority of us started at Griffin when we were in our early twenties, rather than at a younger age like most regular magic users, so we’re young but not exactly children.

  Now, with all of us scared and exhausted, with the governmental authorities gone… all those societal structures are falling away. We’re all in the same boat.

  Student. Teacher. It doesn’t really matter anymore.

  I sit down at a long bench between Ash and Cam and text Maddy, who’s sent me—holy shit—fifty-three text messages.

  I send her a text in reply, my fingers flying over the screen in my haste to give her some reassurance after leaving her hanging like I did.

  Me: We’re okay. Agustin sent some demons and mages to attack us, but we fought them off. Discussing our next move. xoxo

  Her response is immediate.

  Maddy: Keep me posted. Please!!

  Seeing as how when I glance at Asher’s phone, one of his brothers has just sent a text that reads, I thought you were dead, asshat, I’m thinking I got off easy as far as concerned-sibling lectures go.

  A few minutes later, we all gather in a group around one of the large, long tables. I half expect everyone to start talking at once, spouting off their opinions, throwing in their two cents about what we should do next. But instead, everyone’s just silent. Looking at each other. Daring one of the others to be the first to say something.

  Finally, Hardwick clears his throat. “It seems to me that… despite our fears about being picked off one by one, safety in numbers is no longer really an option. Not as we are. If there was a place we could defend properly, then maybe that would be different. But we don’t. Even getting back to Griffin would leave us too vulnerable. Open to attack.”

  A shiver runs down my spine. He sounds completely different than he does when he delivers our start-of-semester convocation address. His voice is harder, more blunt. He might’ve sugarcoated things a little bit when he spoke to us in our assemblies at school, but he’s not sugarcoating anything here.

&n
bsp; “I think that our best bet now, as much as I hate to say it, is to split up in some way,” he continues. “We’re simply too tempting of a target all gathered together like this. If we strategically separate into factions, then perhaps we’ll have a better chance.”

  Roman stands up. He’s wiped away the blood on his face from the fight, but he still looks like a goddamn warrior. “We can also do more to fight back if we’re not all together. This isn’t a war where we’re all on a battlefield and whoever has the biggest army wins. If we’re in smaller groups, we can still work together, coordinate, and find ways to strike back at him while presenting less of a target.”

  “But where do we go from here?” Kendal asks, raising her hand as she speaks because, well, she’s Kendal. “Do we just go into hiding?”

  “Living until tomorrow is the most important thing,” says one person. I can’t tell who it is in the crowd.

  “No, we have to fight back!” someone else argues.

  That’s when the arguing finally breaks out. The stress and tension that’ve been hovering in the air, thickening the atmosphere for the past several days, snap like rubber bands pulled too taut. Everyone’s yelling and bickering. Half of the people here just want to live to see another day, and the other half want to do something about this, with a few people in the middle like Hardwick who are trying to mediate and restore order.

  Ugh. I drop my head into my hands, scrubbing at my face. This is so ridiculous I can’t even stand it.

  I stand up and let off a sonic boom, directing it up at the ceiling—just a small one, enough to make that distinctive noise that has everyone jumping and shutting up in surprise.

  “For fuck’s sake!” I yell. “Don’t you see? There’s no point in fleeing or going into hiding to live if the future’s just going to get worse and worse. Of course we have to fight! If we don’t fight, then there won’t be anything to live for. I don’t know about all of you, but I don’t want to spend the last few days or weeks or months of my life cowering in fear. That’s not living! That’s barely surviving! This guy’s been going after us for longer than any of us even knew, and it’s about time we strike back. This is what he wants! He wants us to hide in fear!”

  I gesture to Brodie, who’s standing off to one side, his shoulder brushing Tamlin’s as they both turn to face me.

  “Tell them,” I blurt. “Tell them what you told me. About what happens to Unpredictables. How the big, fancy future that was promised to us if we graduated and got our licenses was all an illusion.”

  Brodie’s face goes red, and he rubs the back of his neck. “Okay. Um, so I started doing a bit of research after my boss asked me to look into Unpredictable activity to see if we really posed a threat to society. The Circuit—you might not believe it, but the Circuit didn’t really want to go against you guys. There were some people who wanted to, but not most of them, not overall. Still, they had to do their due diligence—”

  “The point, Brodie, please,” I prompt, trying to hide my exasperation.

  “Right. Sorry. Apparently, over three quarters of the Unpredictables who’ve graduated over the years have disappeared. They’ve ended up missing or dead.”

  That sends a shockwave through the crowd, sharper than my sonic boom. There’s frantic whispering and nudging. I clear my throat meaningfully, glancing at Brodie.

  He takes the hint and continues, raising his voice slightly to speak over the murmurs. “It’s a really high number. I won’t get into the details, but basically someone—or a group of someones, I didn’t know at the time—took advantage of how Unpredictables are already sort of outcasts, and they used our isolation to systematically target us.”

  “Now I think we all know who that is,” I add. “Agustin.”

  Everyone’s still murmuring. They sound outraged, and I can’t blame them.

  “Agustin’s Unpredictable power sparked when he was a young child, which in itself is really rare.”

  I keep my gaze from flicking to Roman as I speak. He’s the only other person I know whose magic manifested that early, and it had devastating consequences. But unlike Agustin, Roman turned into one of the best people I know.

  “As I’m sure you all know from the video, he has the ability to steal the powers of others, but it kills them in the process. He’s had this power since he was young. That’s at least a decade to hunt down Unpredictables and kill them, taking their powers.”

  I see the faces around me go pale as everyone does the math. If so many Unpredictables have been killed, a staggering number of them had to be by Agustin’s own hand. Maybe not all of them, not with those high numbers, but a lot of them.

  How many powers does he have? Two dozen? A hundred? There aren’t a ton of Unpredictables, we’re a subset of a small culture—magic users in general aren’t a dime a dozen.

  But there are enough of us.

  “If we stay together, we’re sitting ducks.” I speak into the silence that’s fallen in the room as all eyes focus on me, everyone almost seeming to hold their breath. “But if we separate completely with no plan, he’ll pick us off the way he always has. There are still Unpredictables out there. We’re not the only ones. So I suggest we split up into small groups, find those Unpredictables, and gather reinforcements. If we can get them to help us, we can launch a proper attack against Agustin—all of us.”

  I stand a little straighter, clinging to the last shred of hope and confidence I have.

  “He’s scared of us. You saw that in the video. He knows we can defeat him. And as many powers as he might have, he’s just one person. We can take him. We just have to be organized and prepared. If we’re going to all be together, then we have to be launching an attack—and if we’re going to be separate, then it has to be for a purpose, not because we’re all hiding and fleeing. So can we please do this with purpose? Be proactive, not reactive. He’s been proactive this whole time, and it’s the reason he’s gotten this far while we’re still scrambling. We need to actually do something.”

  I swallow, wrapping my hand around the bracelet Cam gave me, running my thumb over the polished silver.

  “We might go down. Agustin might win. I’m not going to tell you it’s impossible for us to lose. But at least this way if we do go down, if we do lose, it’ll be because we fought. We’ll go down fighting, we’ll lose having actually done something instead of waiting around for the end. And I don’t know about you, but that’s how I want to do it. That sounds like a pretty damn good way to go to me.”

  If life were a movie, this would be the part where there’d be a moment of silence, then someone would stand up and do a slow clap, and then everyone else would stand up and join in, and there’d be thunderous applause and swelling music and all that.

  Nothing like that happens here, and honestly, I’d be a little embarrassed if it did.

  Instead, there’s a ripple through the group as people nod and murmur to each other. After a few moments of people quietly debating, some start standing up and agreeing. Hardwick says that he thinks this is the best course of action, and that we should divide the groups up the way we did for the battle, with an experienced professor placed with some of the younger people. People start splitting up into teams, organizing themselves based on powers and experience.

  I sit back down, relieved—and feeling like we all might be a little less screwed in the long run.

  We’ll need to try to get people as battle-ready as possible along the way. The professors can hopefully help with that, and maybe some of the older Unpredictables that we recruit can assist as well, teaching the younger people how to use their powers specifically to fight.

  “What about you guys?” Brodie asks, looking at me and gesturing to the men. “I mean, no offense but you’ve kind of got a massive target painted on your backs. Agustin clearly hates you five specifically. And he wants your powers.”

  It’s true. The evil megalomaniac wants Asher’s mind control, for one thing—some of the mages we fought in the battle earlier se
emed to have their minds being manipulated, but only one or two. Agustin’s power allows him to literally get inside someone’s brain and use them as a puppet, but Ash’s power is broader—he can use it on a single individual, but he can also mass influence people. Right now, Agustin’s power is concentrated, but if he stole Ash’s ability, he could control entire groups.

  Then there’s the issue of Roman and myself. Roman’s got demon summoning powers, which Agustin clearly already has, but my handsome, stoic professor also has necromancy and death touch. And me? Well, with my mirroring powers, I don’t even want to imagine how strong Agustin could become. Coupled with his own magic, he could become literally all-powerful.

  He made it clear when we faced him before—he wants the three of us. And I’m sure he wouldn’t object to the ability to teleport and absorb magic or phase through walls and make copies of himself either.

  And, well…. he hates us. Me, specifically.

  “We’ll have to separate from the others,” I tell Brodie. “I’m not sure what we’ll do beyond that. But we have to stay away from you all.” I shoot him a lopsided smile, even as my stomach flips around inside me like a fish on dry land. “Maybe we’ll draw Agustin’s fire, keep him occupied with us while you all get to work.”

  Brodie nods. “Well, in that case,” he tells me, “good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  We’re going to need it.

  Chapter 8

  We head out the next day, first thing in the morning. All the groups have been decided, and everyone’s got an assigned area they’re going to cover. Brodie’s given everyone a list of Unpredictables to look for based on his research.

  A lot of people are going back to their families first to try to recruit them to our side. Tamlin’s apparently got some well-connected relatives near Seattle that she’s going to try to shake down for help. Brodie volunteers to go with her.

  “It only makes sense,” she says when Roman gives her a look. “I’ve got the best fight training, Brodie’s useless at defending himself, and he’s got the list of all the Unpredictables who are still alive. He needs a proper bodyguard.”