Natural Mage (Magical Mayhem #2)(108)

The crack made me gag.

A roar preceded a blast of heat and pressure, knocking us forward. Wings beat at us overhead, the flapping elephant things sailing by before swooping low on the other side of the warehouse and belching fire.

My foot hit a lip of something and I tripped forward. Emery did the same a second later, splaying out right next to me on the smooth warehouse floor.

Sear.

“Move!” I rolled to my back, pulled down magic, and threw it into a hasty weave right as the incoming spell reached me. I raked the spell, countering it before scrambling backward so it didn’t reach me before it dissipated.

Emery flung a spell ahead of him from his belly, opening slashes across three mages approaching the lip of the warehouse.

“I think we were supposed to keep mages from reaching the warehouse,” I said, flipping over and pushing to my feet.

“My bad,” he said with a grunt. Standing now, he flung spells in rapid-fire toward mages standing in a cluster, looking upward.

Above the hubbub, floating in the air like a goddess, with hair whipping in the wind, hovered Reagan. Power ripped from her like lightning as the flapping elephant things swooped and rolled, spewing fire on those not fast enough to get out of their paths.

“We were definitely supposed to cover her back.” Emery took off running, and I paused only long enough for an I told you so about our failure at interpersonal communication.

I mean, how much more proof did a person need?

A weave in progress but not quite ready, I ran with my hands in front of me and rammed my shoulder into the back of a mage who’d been seconds away from firing a spell at Reagan. He fell forward and I finished the weave, turning and firing it out. It opened up across the warehouse floor turned weird, swampy pond, rolling and tumbling toward a line of mages who’d made it past the Dumbos-from-another-mother.

My spell caught them at the knees and legs, crushing through bone and tissue.

“Oh, gross. Emery, switch.” I spun away, my stomach rolling, seeing a few mages tripping over the far corner of the warehouse. I took a few steps forward, feeling Reagan’s pulsing magic, diminishing in power. She was expending more than she needed to with this weird false reality, and it wasn’t long from running out.

“We need to speed this up,” I yelled.

I rodent-zapped those mages, punching holes in parts of their bodies. The ball of heat I’d sent out continued to roll, capturing two more would-be escapees before running out of power. Emery fired off one spell while building another, fired off a third, and kept building the second.

“He’s always a step ahead.” I dug in my pockets for more casings, but came up empty. Just me and my imagination.

A mage staggered up, half burned. Another was basically crawling. Emery took out one and I sent a simple spell of magical spikes to deal with the other. Elephant things flickered above us. Then the whole false reality flickered, bright sunlight blasting down, blinding me. Darkness resumed, and now I couldn’t see a thing. Blinding sunlight again.

“This is the worst,” I yelled at Reagan, who was lowering from the sky.

The day resumed, bright and full of color. The green of the grasses and trees rushed back in.

Bodies lay strewn in the fields, blackened and burned. A wildfire was smoldering near our protective walls. A smattering of mages had survived the onslaught by hanging toward the back. They’d obviously done so to protect themselves from the elephant things and our flying capsules.

“It’s the last stand,” I heard Reagan say. She was on her knees to my right.

Emery looked from her to me, and I knew we were thinking the same thing.

She was done. We had to end this.

Without a word, we were running in opposite directions, charging toward the remaining mages and mercenaries.

Pulling at everything I had left, I yanked energy up from my toes, still feeling the balanced bubble connecting my magic to Emery’s despite the fact that we were getting farther and farther apart. I mixed two vicious spells together and stopped short, remembering the balloon searching spell that attached to us last night.

I started to back up, which caught the attention of the three mages left in my vicinity.

They paused their weaving for a second, staring at me. It was that pause which sealed their fate.

I closed my eyes for a moment, pulling the wildness and rage of Emery’s magic and the complex mixture of fire and ice of Reagan’s powers into my spell. I sent that up into the air. Instead of ballooning, it merely opened up like a parachute before drifting down.

The three mages went back to work, but I had already turned away and was running toward an injured mage attempting to escape. A quick spell to his middle ended that right quick, and I lost some of my breakfast.

Screams reached my ears now that the false reality had completely faded. I turned back in time to see the three mages’ throats exploding, and realized I’d confused the weaves. I hadn’t intended it to be so violent.

I lost the rest of my breakfast.

Someone on the periphery ran for it.

And maybe that was the reason for the false reality. Since Reagan had helped us create the spells for the protective walls—she had actually trapped them in instead of just keeping outside eyes and ears from seeing what went on inside. She’d forced them to remain. Forced them to keep her secret.

With her magic gone, that was no longer the case.