The Protection of Ren Crown (3 page)

“No. This is an attack.” She was already at the end of the gallery and peering around the corner before the sentence had fully left her lips. She frantically dug two small devices out of her bag and activated a small silver bracelet. A tangerine shield sprung around her.

“On the library?” I said incredulously.

“Artifacts, Ren.” The devices she had grabbed from her bag whirled in her palms lighting her hazel eyes with the emerald halo of one device and the topaz of the other. “The library is full of priceless pieces that people want. But also full of magical protection—active, inactive, and sentient. Stupid thieves.”

The marble beneath our feet started swirling, as if responding to her words about its sentience. Olivia looked at the marble with distaste and a little fear. “Ugh, I
hate
it here,” she hissed.

Another boom shook the space around us. I waited for Olivia to take off running, but she kept her position.

“Does this happen often?” I whispered, watching the active marble swirl closer. But Olivia didn't move, even as other mages sprinted past us, down the main corridor, running toward the atrium and the single exit at the far end.

“No.” Olivia gripped the emerald device. “The library exterminates all threats.”

And just like that, the swirls in the marble gathered into a solid fist and shot out into the main corridor, like a predator chasing fleeing prey, and rammed one of the fleeing mages down into the stone floor.

My heart stopped beating, and sound grew confusing.

“...is
very bad,
” I heard Olivia say, once my panic sharpened to tight focus.

Running the main corridor had just, very plainly, entered my “don't do it!” category. There were shortcuts throughout the library—hidden doors and windows and quicksand floors, books that sucked you in and spit you out of other books, hanging lights that switched you out of existence then switched you back on in a faraway wing, doors that folded and unfolded you from space.

The building was full of small portals that transported people from one spot in the library to another, but the paths were dangerous, unpredictable, and
unknown
to me. Olivia was always reminding me not to touch anything other than the parts of the warding gallery we'd painstakingly vetted. I didn't know any shortcuts.

But I did know there was only
one
exit to the building. And we were tantalizingly close to it,
while being horribly far away
as I watched mage after mage go down.

Guards were fighting mages cloaked from head to toe in black, while others were being swallowed by doorways and floors, and crushed by ceiling beams left and right. Rock, clay, marble, and wood exploded from each crash. Wall trim bent down to crush and rend, and picture frames snapped their jaws. The library had clearly switched to offense and it was winning.

Olivia and I, standing stock still and peering around the corner, had just enough defensive protection with her bracelet and my cloak, to remain out of the library's immediate notice.

We had seven minutes to figure this out—probably six, now. And maybe the library wouldn't remember me when my time ticked out. We could try to wait out the attack...spend my remaining six minutes devising a plan. Between us, Olivia and I would think of something in six minutes.

A cloaked mage threw something small and silver at a statue in the middle of the large atrium. Even a hundred yards from the atrium, the explosion knocked us off our feet.

And the library...
screamed
.

“Holy— Run!” Olivia shrieked, scrambling up.

Marbled hands thrust out from every wall, one punching straight for Olivia. I launched myself at her. Stone fingers tore my cloak straight off my frame as Olivia and I fell hard to the floor. We grappled with each other, elbows flailing everywhere, as we stumbled to our feet and lurched forward.

My last look at the atrium was of
everyone—
guards, terrorists, patrons—being swallowed by toothed arches and marble tiles.

We skidded down the main hall—away from the atrium, away from the
exit
—surfing the rumbling floors and dodging falling objects. Olivia slammed me into a wall, saving me from a chandelier hammering into the floor. I wiped the blood from my mouth, then tackled her just as draperies snapped out to behead her.

We scrambled to our feet again, sliding sideways as the marble buckled. A mage in black, racing toward us, shattered into a thousand clay-like pieces as he was violently crushed by hammering ceiling tiles.

We had to get out of here.

“We have to hide!” Olivia yelled amid the nightmare as we avoided the next crushing blow aimed our way. As if we could hide from something that we were already
within.

Another tile crushed downward in a hammered fist and we threw ourselves against the wall, narrowly missing death. But the walls were no safer than anyplace else in the locked belly of the beast.

Locked? Wild thoughts bloomed. I grabbed the pencil in my back pocket.

“Shield!” I screeched as the library attacked. “Last stand! Last stand!”

Olivia threw a shield over us with everything she had left. The reverberation from the library's strike was deafening. We'd withstand two, maybe three more strikes, and that would be it.

“Door,” I said, already drawing on the wall with one hand as I frantically reached over to fish my lock picks out of Olivia's bag with the other.

If only I had paint. But I didn't and I had zero time to cry about it. I had only the time to enact my burst of a plan.

I got the picks free and ducked instinctively as rocks burst against the shield Olivia was clutching around the two of us. Two more strikes.

My pencil tip flew over the corridor wall as I visualized and created what I wanted in a multi-dimensional landscape, schematics flipping through my mind too fast for conscious thought. I didn't even try to make it conscious, as I thrust the expanding mental balloon into the creation.

Magical travel was Will's passion, and port technology was one of his favorite discussion topics. Spending fifty-plus hours last term helping him on projects, and doing whatever he needed, had to have left a mark. That, and sheer insanity. I had no other option but to believe that this would work. Somewhere, my subconscious had to remember how to recreate the portal pad Raphael had ripped from my magic when I had Awakened.

There was, however, a chance this would kill us. Or suck us into some dimensional void.

“Faster,” Olivia gritted out, holding the shield against the marble floor to also protect us from being swallowed from underneath. Another column of stone exploded.

I drew the last line while letting conversations with Will, equations, and internal images of magical locks focus the magic sliding along the rays of the mental pyramid construct I used to correctly bring together and balance the cornerstones of magic. I pressed the torque wrench and pick against the newly sketched door, pictured the rotating tumblers of a triple-grade magic lock, thought the word
exit
, and pushed.

The door swung inward, shocking me, just as the opposite side of the corridor erupted into a swirling magical vortex.

My fingers wrapped around the edge of the new doorframe reflexively as the vortex on the opposite wall spun faster and the suction increased. I reached out my hand for Olivia.

A black clad mage appeared and grasped Olivia before I could. Using the leverage of her body, he flung her backward—toward the vortex—and plunged himself through my door. I released the frame and dove toward Olivia, frantically grabbing her outstretched hand in both of mine.

Her torso jerked and her legs flew out behind her. Magic erupted from her toes—defensive spells cast at the vortex, and offensive ones flashing in every other direction. The vortex reacted, swirling faster and swallowing everything into its cyclonic throat. Olivia’s magically thrown ropes, hooks, and fastenings snapped before they could attach—sweeping stone jaws eating all magic before it could connect.

The eyes of the library were directly upon us. My feet dragged along the floor toward the swirling hole of doom that was sucking us in, inch by inch. I tried to supplement Olivia's defensive magic with my own. My pencil and picks dug into our clasped palms.

Jagged teeth rent the mangled shield around us, chipping and gouging more holes in the magic with each chomp.

I pulled Olivia for all I was worth, digging my heels into the slippery marble, and arching back.

Olivia's legs swayed hypnotically behind her, like a snake in a death trance—the sucking vortex pulling us in while the library's corridor dove toward us for an early kill.
No!

“Let go,” Olivia said, her voice and gaze far too cynical and resigned.

“No
way
.” My feet lost six more inches. Gaping jaws tore through the remaining pieces of the shield's top in one giant rip.

“We will both die,” she said in a voice far too calm and cold. “I would let go of you.”

Another inch of ground slipped beneath my feet. I looked back to see my door shutting—the library pushing it closed around my magic. Five more seconds and it would be gone.

Tick...

Six sets of jaws swept up the walls, converging on the ceiling, then together, dove toward us. There would be nothing to hamper their descent.

There was just one last thing to do. One action that I wouldn't survive, but Olivia might.

Tick, tick.

I thought of the Kinsky painting, of my Awakening paint. A drop of ultramarine dripped in my mind and magic exploded against the door behind me. The momentum flung me forward and I used the initial jerk of propulsion along with a burst of magic to fling Olivia over my head and through the closing door.

I flew toward the vortex instead.

“
Ren!”
The door shut on Olivia's scream.

Motion slowed, and the feel of the drop of paint in my mind lit the magic around me. I could see the magic, layering one thread, one line, one sheet, one slab...one upon another in an infinite sequence. I could see the possibilities of the world. And in that last moment…a possibility for myself. I flung my right hand around a glittering turquoise ward striping the air and pulled it to my chest, tangling it together with the pencil and picks in my left hand. Thrusting them in front of me, I hit the vortex as hard as if it was a brick wall and told it to
let me through
.

The library screamed as I was sucked harshly inside.

Stygian blackness, then a flash of light illuminated the gloriously mechanical and magical Hall of Locks—which I had desperately, and absurdly, wanted to visit—then darkness and another flash.

I was painfully spit onto a textured, multi-colored floor.

Olivia was crouched behind a padded bench on the floor—a floor that was strangely far below me. She was holding her midsection. Art glittered everywhere. We were in what appeared to be one of the deep alcoves near the atrium.

“Liv, up here,” I wheezed.

Her head whipped up and she stared at me in horror. The skin around her eyes bunched, her lips painfully compressed. “You
idiot
.”

“I know.” I pushed roughly to my feet, coughing and spraying a mist of crimson toward the floor. Instead of splatting on the floor, though, the blood
swirled
around my ankles like real mist. Unease gripped me. But Olivia was alive. That was such the important part of this equation. And, hey, me too, bonus! “Where—?”

Detonations echoed weirdly in the distance. The alcove was strangely inactive, but clay and rock littered the floor in front of Olivia's bench. Whatever the library was doing to people—
turning them to stone before crushing them?
—there was no blood to be seen other than that upon our skin. Unless the library was drinking down whatever fluids it spilled. And...it was better to think about other things.

“Don't touch her!” Olivia's voice was harsh as she reached toward me, then snatched her hand back. “Stop!”

I whipped around to see a woman walking toward me—a woman draped in beautifully mixed oils, with excitement vibrating her painted features. Ripples of her excitement flowed around us.

Flowed around us...on canvas.

Absolute terror crawled up my throat.
I was inside the Kinsky painting.
I had thought of it. I had thought of the painting before I'd thrown Olivia through the door. I'd been awash in thoughts of paint when I'd hit the vortex.

The woman's painted hand dipped inside the folds of her dress and she pulled out a piece of paper, similar to the paper that had been held by the painted woman in Ganymede Circus. She motioned me closer, her movements elegant, but edged by anticipation. The paper pushed against the texture of the air, riffling out the colors of the piece.

I stepped toward the woman without conscious thought, enthrallment swallowing my terror.

“
Ren, don't!”

I turned as an explosion rocked the hall behind Olivia, cutting off any further words. Stone teeth descended from the alcove's arch. Olivia's yells had alerted the library to her presence. My heart leaped to my throat. I was not doing this again. No.

The paint turned liquid beneath my touch and rolled up my fingers, as I grabbed for my roommate. Library air pulsed around my freed fingers in waves echoing the beat of my heart. The cuff around my wrist—the one meant to keep my magic from acting on uncontrollable urges—sizzled as the surface coating of the paint touched the edge of the flexible metal. The paint streamed upward, like rivulets of lava slicing through the final pieces of something supposed to be unbreakable. My magic burst completely free.

I grabbed Olivia's wrist and before she could say anything, before the terror could completely form on her face, I pulled her inside, wrapping thoughts of safety around her as I did. The noises from the library turned distant.

I could feel Olivia's terror... I could feel...everything around me. I tucked her against my back, holding onto her wrist, as I turned to the painted woman.

The woman said nothing—she just smiled and extended her hand—but I could hear the echo of speech and nonverbal communication in the painted textures flowing and swirling around us. I carefully accepted the paper from her fingers.