Page 62 of The Tree of Spirits
“Going back into the basement.”
“Back into the basement?” she repeated in disbelief. “Are you insane? You don’t have a helmet to filter the air. So if you go back there, that potion will knock you out in like two seconds.”
“I’ll be fine.”
Dante caught my arm as I tried to move toward the building. “She’s right, Savi. You can’t go.”
“There are still four Apprentices trapped in there with those fiends!” I struggled against his hold, but my brother was really strong. And really, really stubborn. He didn’t yield a single millimeter. “Let go, Dante.”
“No.” His eyes locked with mine. “If you want to get back there, you’ll have to teleport. I’ll get dragged along with you. And then the fiends will getbothof us.”
“You are so annoying,” I snarled at him.
“Love you too, sis.” He blew me a kiss.
I snarled some more.
“Are you done throwing a tantrum?” he asked me calmly. “Ready to be sensible?”
“Yes,” I cut out.
“Good.” He released his hold on my arm. “Because we have to get the wounded to safety.”
One look at all the wounded Apprentices around us was all it took to ice my anger. There were a lot of wounded. Most of their injuries were minor—cuts, bruises, a bloody nose, a twisted ankle—but a few of them were in pretty bad shape. One Apprentice must have been hit by the door when the fiends blasted it open because the gash on his head was not pretty. And three Apprentices had jagged shards of wood poking out of their skin, up and down their arms, their legs, their torso…
My stomach soured. That wasmyfault. If I hadn’t sent those wooden crates after the fiends, they never would have blown them up. And those Apprentices wouldn’t look like human porcupines.
“We need to get the wounded to the Knights,” I said.
“Maybe the Knights got the fiends already,” Nevada suggested with a cautious smile.
So we hurried—or, in some cases, hobbled—around to the front of the conference center.
CHAPTER 8
POLYMAGE PARADOX
That evening, the Apprentices had dinner together with the mentors in the Castle. Boxes of pizza covered all of the tables but one. That one was full of bandages, braces, and other first aid supplies.
“The mystery assailants in black are still out there,” Ainsley said as she tended to an Apprentice’s wounds. “And they’ve taken four Apprentices with them.”
“We have to go back there for them,” I insisted while Eris cleaned the wound on my forehead. “We have to rescue the Apprentices.”
“We will. But first we have to find them.”
Her words startled me so much that I wasn’t even bothered that her forehead-bandaging job had left me looking like a mummy. “Aren’t the fiends trapped in the conference center?”
“No,” said Altair as I moved to one of the dinner tables. “Somehow they escaped with the four Apprentices. We don’t know how. All of the building’s exits were guarded.”
“Obviously notallof the exits.” Nala frowned. “Twenty-seven Apprentices escaped their captors and got out.”
“Yeah, howdidyou do that?” Ainsley asked us.
“She got us out.” Dutch pointed at me. But it wasn’t an accusatory gesture. He mostly just looked stunned. “One moment we were in the basement, and the next we were outside.”
Orion rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You’re talking about teleportation.” His eyes widened as they looked at me. “You can teleport.”
“Surprise?” I said with a forced smile.
