Page 34 of Wildfire

A knot uncoiled in his belly, his own shoulders releasing tension, and for a second, he was surprised. But then... Matthew, Rebekah, Marco. Wilder had failed to protect his students. He’d failed to teach them to protect themselves well enough.

But had he done anything wrong? He’d taught them what he was supposed to teach them. It was a school. Most of the Banneker students would go on to jobs in the civilian sector, not the military. Even those who joined the military would get that training after they joined up.

It was not Wilder’s job to teach people to fight ancient horrors from another plane of existence. He hadn’t failed them any more than a physical education teacher had failed a student who died in a mugging gone wrong.

But now, they knew. Now, they had to try. They climbed out of the car together, and Wilder figured it was now or never for the hard question he had to ask.

“This isn’t impossible, though, right?”

Hermes looked over at him, body still loose and face open, eyebrows lifted in question. “What’s not impossible?”

Wilder met his eye steadily. “Killing a creature that’s immortal.”

Hermes paled and swallowed hard, but after a frozen moment where Wilder wondered if he was considering running away, he nodded. Instead of speaking, he turned and headed toward the building, eyes darting back and forth as though reading or watching a scene unfold in front of him as they walked.

Wilder, while he was usually impatient, decided to hold his tongue and let the man think. After all, assuming a “monster” and a “god” were the same brand of immortal, telling Wilder how to kill one was quite possibly an enormous betrayal of his family.

How was Hermes supposed to know Wilder could be trusted with that kind of information? And even if Wilder could be trusted, he imagined there were members of Hermes’s family who would be less than thrilled by him sharing the information with anyone anyway.

“Not many humans could do it,” Hermes finally said as they stopped in front of the door to the range and Wilder pulled out his key. “But if any of them could, I think it might be you.”

Instead of being pleased at the idea, Wilder was enraged at the injustice. He’d spent a lot of years thinking that his particular abilities, both rare and strong, made him something special. Something better than other people.

Now, having watched his students’ lives being snuffed out, one after another, for no reason but their magic, it didn’t seem special. It seemed unjust. Why Wilder, and not them? Why were they less worthy of continuing to live? Or Ward?

Of course, the dean had implied that Ward wasn’t mortal, which was its own can of worms, if Wilder ever decided to think on it. For now, he did not.

No, he was focused on the cold facts of the matter. He, possibly alone, among his fellow mages, might be able to defeat the monster stalking them.

And damn every god that existed and their complacent immortality too. If he could kill it, Wilder would.

He propped the door to the range open and started turning the lights on. He usually only lit half the place, because it was huge, and the whole thing was rarely necessary.

For a moment, he considered turning on fewer than usual. After all, he’d only just sent out the email that morning, so it wasn’t too likely word had spread too far beyond his little class. For them, he’d told them they could go home and be safe, scattering to their distant homes while this monster stalked the halls of their school.

Why would they knowingly stay and risk their lives?

Marco and his wish to risk his life was a rarity among Banneker students. They didn’t have to go to college before joining the military, and the military paid mages very well regardless of education.

The students of Banneker were practically children, they had to be frightened, and they’d been given leave to, well, leave—at least from him. He couldn’t imagine any professor at the school being more hard-nosed than himself, telling them they had to be in the classroom or fail.

His hand hesitated a third of the way through the light switches and he turned to the door when Hermes cleared his throat. “Whatever you gotta do before they get here, fireball, you better do it. Because, uh,”—he lowered his voice to a deeper register—“you’re gonna need a bigger boat.” He waved his hand out the door. “Or, um, maybe more teachers. That seems like a lot of kids for just you.”

Wilder pulled out his phone and dialed Dean Woods. If the students were coming, if they wanted help, he was damn well going to see to it that they got it.

Big Man on Campus

Holy shit. Had every student left at Banneker College of Magic shown up for Wilder’s training session? This definitely seemed like more than just the students Wilder had in his advanced class—more than he’d seen Wilder teach when he’d followed him around.

The way they stood in groups outside of the range suggested some of them had brought friends. Maybe they weren’t only elementalists. There were three basic branches of magic: corpus, spiritus, and animus. Typically, spiritus mages weren’t much for fighting, but when it’d come time to save the day late last year, Theo Ward, a spiritus mage who, from the outside, didn’t seem all that impressive, had stepped up and risked himself to save the eastern seaboard.

Maybe they all had something to offer, and the mortals here had a better chance of standing up against titans and monsters than Hermes wanted to admit. It was definitely something to bring up with Prometheus—what were the limits of the magic he’d given them? If Prometheus thought they could handle being a part of this battle, which was hard to deny when Wilder went fucking nuclear on him, then... maybe they all stood a better chance than they had the last time they’d fought Cronus.

Cronus and his cronies. Gods, that sounded like a bad band name.

Wilder let them into the range and started splitting them into groups. The older students naturally started talking defensive maneuvers with the ones who hadn’t attended Wilder’s class before. Of course, Hermes got the impression that Wilder had always taught his students how to protect themselves from their own power, not from a murderous monster.

When Athena swept into the room, imperious as ever, Hermes stared. He wasn’t the only one, either. It was hard to imagine Athena directly leading classes, though she’d taught plenty of people back in the day.

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