Page 122 of Magical Academy for Delinquents
The heat on my calves went from tickling, to biting, to melting. “Smeckle, I need a little relief.”
“One sec,” Malcolm said.
But a second later, Evan was floating in front of me and I was handing him the amulet. There was no way his ass would fit in the fridge with us. “You need to just blast it with ice, what’s the problem?” I growled.
Malcolm retorted, “I can’t just ice it, that’s the problem. There are thermometers in here. I’ve used them before. Practicing. If the temp changes too quickly, then it’s just like the lasers. Alarm.”
“Shit.” I tried to wriggle so there was some room for Evan. He shoved himself into the fridge, which pushed Malcolm into me. I felt like my ribs might crack. Evan was too big, half his torso hung out of the fridge. “Can you go any faster?” I wheezed.
“Trying.”
I couldn’t reach my earpiece to tell Gray to stop sending people. I just had to shout with my eyes as he floated Z toward us.
“I can’t see,” Evan spoke, “but point my hands and tell me what I need to do.”
Malcolm elbowed me in the face, making my nose smart, as he rearranged Evan’s hands. The heat in the fridge, from all three of our bodies and the fire a few feet below felt unbearable. I felt like a melting wax figure.
“We aren’t blasting with ice; we’re just lowering the amount of flame.”
“Don’t forget our body heat compensates,” Evan said.
“On three,” Malcolm said. “One, two, three…” They both shot lukewarm water toward the fire, which turned the kitchen from an oven into a sauna as the water hissed and steamed.
Condensation settled on my face.
“Again.”
They blasted again, and suddenly, Malcolm started to wriggle past me. “Got it.”
Thank goodness, because Z was right in front of us.
Malcolm climbed down, using his hands to maintain the flames around us at barely there levels with one hand, while keeping a sauna-like heat in the air going with the other. I followed, taking up a position on his back as he fed his hands through the rungs of the ladder and blasted the next ring of fire below us.
Dazed, I touched the ladder rungs with my forearms, using my fire-retardant suit to test them. They were surprisingly cold.Thank magic!Then I held onto the rungs so Malcolm could focus on the fire. Evan crawled down above us, until his feet were right in front of my face.
The way down the tube was crowded, and three times as hot as when we’d practiced. By the time we reached the pitch-black subterranean level, we were all sweating, miserable, angry.
I lit a small space around us, and we all sat for a second. Evan conjured up ice cubes for us to suck on and Malcolm cooled the air around us slowly. Both of them looked ready to keel over when all was said and done. But we weren’t even to the vault yet.
I closed my eyes, shoving back my sweat-plastered bangs and felt around the room for any devices Dad might have missed. Five cameras pointed at the vault door.
“Fucking ghosts,” I muttered around my ice cube as I extended my hands and slowly covered their feeds with black shadows.
“What’s up?”
I shook my head and gestured for another ice cube from Evan. “Just had to take out some cameras, that’s all.”
We marched together to the vault door, which was steel, and round, and as impressive as any bank vault I’d ever seen.
I knelt in front of the door, on the rough concrete floor and pulled a tiny roll of parchment from my pants pocket, then a tiny vial of ink. “Wand?” I held my hand out to Andros. He gave me Stone’s silver wand.
I wrote out the spell I’d learned from Malcolm, when he helped me unravel Gray’s Shakespeare prank. The spell for the vault glittered in the air and Evan used a pen and paper to write it down as quickly as he could while Zavier stood, pulsing magic into the air so that the Latin words wouldn’t dissolve too quickly.
“Got it,” Evan said.
Just then, Andros, who was watching his watch, standing out of the range of Z’s spell, called out, “1.5 minutes. Z’s got about thirty seconds left in him.”
Evan nodded.
