Page 38 of All Out of Flux
His voice softer, weaker, Leon replied. “I know.”
I set him on the asphalt, not quite far enough outside the circle, but we’d given Brendan enough leeway. We still had to stop the ritual.
“Penetrate,” I muttered, producing twin slivers of crystal, already exhausted and bloodied. I had to make this count.
I might not have understood the specifics of Brendan Shum’s ritual, but even a novice in magic would sense the undeniable surge of power radiating from his ceremonial circle. There he stood at its center, the hourglass between his fingers brighter than the moon, a rotating jewel. We had one chance to stop this. We had to make it count.
Taking careful aim, I recalled afternoons of lazy target practice in back alleys with Guillotina, her refining her skill with her buzzsaws, me with my crystals. I called on my many rounds of darts with Johnny Slivers, seemingly trivial at the time, never knowing our games would one day serve some greater purpose. My daggers shrieked through the air, each directed at one of Brendan’s hands. He never saw them coming. It didn’t matter that they wouldn’t maim him. All we needed was a distraction, a way to disrupt his ritual.
And a way to make an opening for Leon and his dragons. Brendan’s chanting and arcane gestures came to a soaring head, the hourglass glowing brighter than ever. His final anomaly was upon us, this deliberate act of time distortion, a ripple in reality. Leon extended both his hands.
“Emanate.”
Clever boy. The Quartz Spider was finally doing us a favor. If there was one thing Leon so badly wanted to erase, it was his pact with the dragons. They came surging forth from his fingers, an overlapping twist of three dragons, one formed of fire, another of water, the last of earth.
Tiamat, Bakunawa, and Bahamut screeched and roared as they penetrated the ritual circle, flooding it with their draconic might. Leon stumbled as their tails emerged from his skin, one by one, each dragon finally ejected from his body, exorcised through pure force of will.
Hungering, the dragons swirled within the circle, eager to wreak havoc. Brendan kept his chant up even as his gaze followed the three dragons with wide-eyed terror. They scented the blood on his hands, sensed the power pouring from the hourglass.
The bright white of time magic merged with the Quartz Spider’s spirit, a growing orb of blinding power. The dragons descended, all three at once. Brendan Shum screamed. Glass shattered. Torrents of fire, water, and sand spiraled into the sky. A clap of thunder, a roar of dragons, and at last, silence. Even the rain had stopped.
“It’s over,” I breathed, holding Leon in my arms, letting him lean against my touch. “It’s over now.”
“They’re gone, Max,” he said, smiling. Leon coughed, then let out a peal of delirious laughter. “No more fucking dragons. I’m free. I’m finally free.”
I pressed a kiss on the crown of his head, tasting rainwater and sweat. I laughed into his curls, the damp tangles of his hair, the knot in my chest untangling at last. If no one in Dos Lunas noticed the extravagant display of light and sound, it would be a miracle. But this wasn’t our problem anymore.
The Masques would be here soon enough, and for once I was glad for the concept of paranormal police. Someone needed to clean up this mess. Someone needed to pick up the unconscious, snoring lump that was Justice, the Masque who loved his mirrors so much.
And someone needed to do something about the teenage boy who’d replaced Brendan Shum in the center of the circle.
17
LEON
“Are you working out again?” I rolled my eyes, pretending not to enjoy the sight of Max grunting, sweating, and flexing. “God, enough with that, already. Pay attention to me instead.”
Max swiped at his forehead, wiping away the sweat. “It’s cute how you think this body just happens. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication.”
I slapped my belly, relishing the resounding drum beat. “And this takes a lot of soft pretzels and ice cream.”
He rolled his eyes pointedly away from me, returning his focus to the empty spot on the wall. He wasn’t really pissed. In fact, I knew that part of Max deeply, deeply enjoyed our repartee, whether or not it was witty. He, in turn, just knew that I deeply enjoyed when he played hard to get, throwing me those hard glares, playing the tough guy. The man was just daring me to do my worst.
But the point was that we could do this again, volley pointless banter at each other, go back to normal lives, or the closest thing to normal that anyone could find in the arcane underground.
Max could go back to chucking sharp objects in back alleys with Guillotina Hernandez, get in some target practice by the dumpsters. I could go back to guzzling a Johnny Slivers special, whether it was a fancy coffee or a delicious cocktail. We could all gather around Roscoe’s tablet to admire the latest traps he’d devised for any unwitting Brillante thugs who still thought invading Unholy Grounds was a good idea.
It had been days since that fateful detonation at the Dos Lunas Dome, since the two of us had somehow managed to put an end to the Quartz Spider’s ritual. At the time, all I could think of was how badly I wanted to keep Brendan from executing his time distortion, what would have been a time anomaly on a grand scale.
Even his smaller anomalies had wreaked enough havoc on their own, back when we hadn’t yet identified him as the Dos Lunas anomalist. Flora and fauna accelerated through natural aging so they turned into dust, endless time loops that affected both inanimate objects and organic life — chronomancy truly did feel like the deadliest of all the magical disciplines.
Looking back later, talking things out with Max, I’d never even considered the possibility that the massive anomaly would have destroyed our memories of one another. If Brendan truly had succeeded at winding time back to a point when his brother had been alive, Max and I would have never even met. The very thought of the possibility stung like a poisoned thorn in my heart.
And yet how selfish it was to even think that. What about the consequences of Brendan’s time reversal for everyone else his magic would touch? Would the dead come back to life? Would babies return to the womb? The effects had been mind shattering enough with the ritual gone wrong through our intervention.
What if the ritual had gone right?
But speaking of selfish, I allowed myself to indulge in the greatest aftereffect of the ritual. The dragons were gone. Poof. Not a whiff of fire or seawater, no midnight visitations from dripping-wet dragon goddesses, and not a single whisper from the inside of my battered skull.
