“I don’t like this,” I said, my limbs shaking. I should’ve been firing off the casings. I should’ve been doing battle, especially since I knew this was some sort of trick. Instead, it was taking everything I could muster not to unravel Reagan’s false reality. “What’s happening?”
I’d never liked it when the Muppet Babies disappeared into an imagined reality on their cartoon show, and I didn’t like this, either. Drugs weren’t for me, magical or otherwise.
At least I wasn’t alone. Emery was in here with me. He looked behind us and started.
Everyone else had disappeared. Including Reagan.
We seemed to be marooned by ourselves in this strange, altered reality.
Off to the left, in the sea of blackened water, rose a white-gray pole, shaded with black. It looked like a celebration of Emery’s and my smooshed survival magic. It grew taller and taller, filling out as it did so.
“A tree trunk,” I said, closing my eyes as vicious intent rang out from somewhere near me. Aimed at me. “Wait.” I peeled an eye open, looking in that direction.
Emery startled again. He was getting a premonition.
“This is an illusion,” I reminded myself. I cracked a casing right before Emery shoved me so hard that my neck cracked. He dove the other way and a jet of blazing purple roared past me.
“Oh, it’s on!” I hopped to my feet and started rapidly firing again, closing my eyes now, not trusting what they were telling me.
“Look!”
The scene had changed again. The tree trunk had grown into a large tree, its leaves white, black, and gray.
“I’m not doing that, right?” I asked in confusion. “Somehow?”
“No. Over here.” Emery turned me in the other direction.
Mages came into view now, standing shin-deep in the fake water. The water didn’t interact with their bodies, and no wetness soaked their clothes.
Stars blossomed in the sky. Little pricks at first, but they enlarged as we watched them.
“What is the point of all this?” I yelled over the rushing of power.
“It’s Reagan. She’s messing with their perspective…and ours. But we’re probably supposed to do more than stand around and watch it happen.” He plucked at my sleeve. “Let’s do our part.”
“We don’t even know what our part is!” I stuffed my casings anywhere they would fit before taking off running at his side.
Flatten.
“Watch out!” I cracked a casing on impulse, then jumped to the side, hitting debris and falling, turning it into a roll.
“We’re at the warehouse line where the wall used to be,” Emery yelled as more people came into view behind us, like a screen was being pulled away to reveal what had always been there.
I cracked another casing and the magic sped out before me, spreading as it went. It smacked into five mages, churning through them. A woman’s face screwed up in pain and she grabbed at her chest. A man clutched at his privates. It was clear to see what was the most important among the various mages, since the spell was uniform.
All five went down, their screams never reaching my ears.
Emery hit a line of eight mages with a simple yet brutal spell, just powerful enough to bring them to their knees. He tried to run forward, but tripped and fell at an angle, floating in the air.
“The warehouse wall. Or roof.” He tried to climb off, but a spell jetted toward him. He rolled over, barely dodging it in time, and sent off a retaliatory shot.
I cracked casing after casing, cutting huge holes in the line. Thankfully, they weren’t being replaced, but a quick look behind us revealed the mages were over the crazy spectacle. They were making their way toward us quickly, intent on trapping us.
Always with the trapping. But this time we didn’t have any shifters to help.
“She has to do something other than make illusions!” I yelled.
That was when I noticed what the stars were morphing into.
45
“Watch out!” Emery slammed into me as I looked up, trying to place that strange thrumming sound.
Large beasts, like elephants with wings, thundered down from the sky. They opened smallish mouths with large teeth.
“But it’s only an illusion. She won’t actually kill anyone with those,” I said, staggering back toward the corner of the invisible warehouse wall.
A female mage with a purple robe, a higher-tiered Guild member, staggered as she looked up, probably in awe. Or confusion, because those flying animals were whack. Reagan had a very strange imagination. Weirder, even, than mine.
I barreled into the mage, jabbing her in the eye before elbowing her in the face, and took her to the ground. I kicked out at someone else, my boot connecting with his jaw and knocking him backward. I called up a fast weave of moderate power to take a third mage before he could reach for his smaller pack of spells.
A huge roar quaked my heart and shook my bones.
I ducked instinctively and looked up. Amazingly, like with the lion incident, Emery didn’t. So I grabbed him and yanked him lower.
The winged elephant thing swooped down. From its little mouth belched a thick stream of fire. Blistering heat washed over me and I shrank back, throwing up my arms. Emery threw a shield of black survival magic over both of us, keeping some of the heat back before it dissolved.
“Maybe we weren’t supposed to run out here after all.” He struggled back toward the warehouse, dragging me with him.
“This is why we should have discussed the plan more!” I tripped over that blasted invisible warehouse wall or roof, falling to my hands and knees. Emery helped me up again and we scrambled forward.
A mage stood before us with an orange sash. I couldn’t remember what level that made him, but the last casing in my pocket assured me it didn’t matter. My spell spread across him and bent him backward.
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.