The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1)(36)

It was all an unpleasant reminder that Tristan’s father, a witch capable of moderate levels of physical magic, had always considered Tristan a failure. From the start, Tristan had been slow to show any signs of magic, barely able to qualify for medeian status when he reached his teenage years. An unsurprising outcome, considering they had spent so many years before that concerned he wasn’t even a witch.

Was that why he’d chosen to do this? Atlas Blakely had told Tristan he was rare and special and therefore he’d thought yes, fine, time to drop everything I spent years tirelessly cultivating in order to prove to my estranged father that I, too, can do something wildly unsafe?

“Do you know any combat spells?” Libby panted, giving Tristan a look that suggested he was the most useless person she’d ever met. At the moment, he suspected he might have been.

“I’m… not good with physicalities,” he managed to say, ducking another shot. These men seemed to be different from the group Nico had taken on in the drawing room, but they were definitely also outfitted with automatic weapons. Tristan didn’t know prodigious amounts about the intersect of magic and tech in warfare, seeing as James Wessex had chosen to handle any matters of weapons technology himself, but he suspected these were mortals using magically enhanced scopes.

“Yes, fine,” Libby replied, clearly impatient, “but are you—”

She broke off before something he suspected to be the word useful.

Which, as Adrian Caine had always made an effort to point out, Tristan had never been.

“Just come on,” she said in frustration, pulling him after her. “Stay behind me.”

This, Tristan thought, was a mildly infuriating turn of events. For one thing, he didn’t have a lot of experience being shot at. This was supposed to be an academic fellowship, for fuck’s sake; he hadn’t expected his time in the Alexandrian archives to involve ducking behind the closest piece of gaudy furniture he could find.

He could have stayed at Wessex Corp and never been shot at in his entire life. He could have simply told Atlas Blakely to shove it and gone on holiday with his fiancée; he could be having vigorous, herculean sex right now, waking up to discuss the future of the company with his billionaire father-in-law over an expertly blended Bloody Mary. Did it matter that Eden was a tiresome adulteress or that James was a capitalist tyrant if it meant never having to break a sweat aside from a drunken family game of badminton?

At the moment, it was unclear.

Libby, at least, was starting to take some initiative with her defense, having discarded any further hesitation in favor of survival. Whoever had broken in, they were covered head to toe in black and moving acrobatically around the room, like a small pack of ninjas. That felt like a childish thing to say, but there it was: there were three or four ninja-things coming after them, and Tristan couldn’t think of the first thing to do. There was so much magic in the room it was difficult to see anything but hazy, translucent leaks.

Libby turned and aimed at something; an expulsion of power that was directed at nothing.

“You missed,” he said, a muttered I-told-you-so moment that he would have decorously avoided if not for how potentially life-threatening all this was, and she glared at him.

“I didn’t miss!”

“You absolutely did,” he said through his teeth, pointing. “You missed by about five feet.”

“But he’s down, he’s—”

Hell on earth, was she blind? He should have stayed with Nico. “What are you talking about? You might have broken a lamp, fine, but it’s only Edwardian—”

“I didn’t—” Libby broke off, blinking. “You’re saying there’s nothing there?”

“Of course there’s nothing there,” he growled in frustration, “it’s—”

Bloody Christ; was he stupid?

“It’s an illusion,” Tristan realized aloud, scowling at his own failure to see the obvious, and then, without any further wasted time, he took hold of Libby’s shoulders and aimed her, pointing.

“Right there, see it? Straight ahead.”

She fired again, this time setting off a round of bullets by stopping their progression mid-air and instigating mass combustion. The gunman was blown backwards, the air littered with shrapnel, and the force of the explosion set off a momentary fog of smoke. Libby was frightfully incendiary, which Tristan suspected was something to conserve as much as it was a timely relief. It was probably going to cost her the same amount of energy as whatever Nico had been doing downstairs, so best not to fire incautiously while they didn’t know how many others they would still face.

“What does the room look like to you?” he asked in her ear, trying to concentrate as the smoke cleared. All he could make out were flares, torrents of magic.

“I don’t know… dozens of them, at least,” she said, grimacing. He could see she was battling frustration; for someone with her obvious control problems, the presence of illusions must have been particularly nightmarish. “The room’s crawling with them.”

“There’s only three left,” Tristan told her, “but don’t waste energy. Let me see if I can find the medeian who’s casting the illusions.”

Libby gritted her teeth. “Hurry up!”

Fair enough. He lifted his head to glance around, trying to determine who, if anyone, was doing the casting. He couldn’t see any indication of magic being produced, though he did spot a bullet—a real one; Libby must have not been able to tell it from the illusioned ones—just in time to throw up a fairly primitive shield, which dissolved on impact as Libby jumped, alarmed.