My heart pounded against my ribs and worry twisted through my insides like snakes. The whole fucking city had been crawling with constables, so I’d had to hide out in an abandoned building until they had all finished filing in through the main gates. That meant that I still didn’t know if Audrey and Henry were okay. The constables might not recognize Henry on sight, but Audrey was another matter.
Trying to block out the terrible fear that threatened to drown me, I leaped over a low hedge and then jogged onto our street. From a distance, our house looked deserted. I tried to persuade myself that that didn’t mean anything. It was still only afternoon, so there was no need to light any candles or oil lamps. They could all be in there. Safe. Waiting. They had to be.
I opened the small gate in the fence and then ran the final distance to the door before yanking it open.
Three people whipped around to face me.
Relief, so intense that I almost sagged to the floor, crashed over me.
Henry and Audrey were standing in the middle of the hall with Levi a few steps away. My own relief was mirrored in both Audrey and Henry’s faces as they hurried over to me. Glancing over their shoulders, I found Levi giving me a small nod. I nodded back.
“You okay, boss?” Henry asked as he clapped me on the shoulder.
Reaching up, I squeezed his muscled arm. “Yeah.”
“Thank hell,” Audrey said before giving my bicep a hard slap. “Don’t you dare make me worry like that again.”
A smile pulled at my lips as I raised my eyebrows at her. “I thought you didn’t worry about me.”
She just shot me a withering glare in reply. Then a serious expression washed over her features, and she leaned sideways to peer around me. “Paige isn’t with you?”
“No.” Frowning, I glanced around the hall. “She’s not back yet?”
Worry flickered in both Audrey and Henry’s eyes.
“No,” she replied.
I looked between the two of them. “She knows this city better than any of us, and she has lots of contacts in secret places. I’m sure she’s fine. Just waiting out the constables like I was.”
Neither of them looked fully convinced, but they nodded.
For the next half hour, the two of them anxiously paced back and forth across the hallway floor while Levi and I took up position by the wall. There was so much tension in the room that the very air seemed to vibrate with it.
“We should go out after her,” Audrey said eventually.
Henry nodded. “Yeah, if she—”
The door was yanked open.
All of us whirled towards it in time to see a blond woman stroll across the threshold. Both Audrey and Henry let out deep sighs. Paige just flashed them a brilliant smile.
“Look who I ran into,” she said, and hiked a thumb over her shoulder.
My eyebrows rose as I watched Malcolm Griffith, Sienna Hall, Harvey Grant, and Sam Foster walk through the door and into our hallway.
“They were hiding by the smugglers tunnel,” Paige explained while Sam closed the door behind them.
Malcolm drew his dark brows down in an affronted scowl. “We were not hiding.”
She chuckled and shot him a knowing look. “Uh-huh.”
“We were waiting until we were sure that all the constables had passed.”
“Potato, potahto.” Waving a hand in the air, she sauntered farther into the room. “Anyway, I found them not hiding by the smugglers tunnel, so I brought them all here.”
“Which is very much appreciated,” Sam interjected before Malcolm could say anything else.
Paige stabbed a hand towards him while throwing a pointed look at Malcolm. “See? At least someone has manners.”
Malcolm closed his eyes and massaged his temples while blowing out an exasperated sigh.
“She also explained what happened at your meeting with Quill,” Grant picked up.
Opening his eyes again, the shadow mage drew his eyebrows down and looked from face to face. “Yes, that it didn’t work.”
“He truly used the students as soldiers… and shields?” Grant asked. When we nodded, he clicked his tongue and shook his head. “I disapprove of that very much.”
“Yeah, he—”
“Can we go and sit down or something?” Sienna interrupted. Raising her eyebrows, she stared at us all and flicked her wrist. “Or are we seriously going to have this conversation right here in the hallway? I just rode two days from Grant’s mansion on the heels of an army and then crawled through a dirt tunnel to get inside the city. I want to sit down and I want a glass of wine.”
“I thought you didn’t care for sitting down,” Malcolm said, a smug look on his face.
“Yes, let’s go and sit down,” Audrey thankfully managed to say before Sienna could burn down our new house.
After bringing in some wine and whiskey along with a bunch of glasses from the kitchen, we all claimed the couches and armchairs in the second living room across the hall. It had a larger arrangement of sofas and armchairs than the other one since the dining room table took up half of that room.
Leaning back against the dark red cushions, I blew out a long sigh and then drank deeply from my glass of whiskey.
“So, the hostages didn’t work,” Sienna said as she crossed her ankles and rested her feet on the low wooden table in the middle. “Which means that we need a new plan.”
“And now we have lost the element of surprise,” Malcolm added in a disapproving tone.
“What were we supposed to do?” I snapped. “Slaughter a bunch of thirteen-year-olds?”
“I’m not saying that I disagree with your actions. I’m just stating a fact.”
“Well, here’s a fact for—”
“By all hell,” Levi interrupted. Lounging on the couch opposite me, he shook his head at all of us. “Enough bickering. How do you people get anything done?”
“I don’t bicker,” Malcolm and I said in unison.
Surprise flitted through my chest. It was mirrored in Malcolm’s eyes too as he blinked at me. For another second, no one said anything.
Then we both let out a low chuckle.
It dispelled the tension in the room immediately. Furniture groaned as we all settled more comfortably in our seats and drank a bit more from our preferred choice of alcohol.
“So, to summarize,” Grant said eventually while tracing the rim of his glass with his finger. “We have two objectives. Get a hold of the Blade of Equilibrium so that you,” he nodded towards Levi, “can destroy it. And we need to kill Chancellor Quill.”
“Speaking of,” Levi began while shifting his penetrating gaze to Malcolm. “Where are my people?”
“Hiding in the hills right outside the city,” the shadow mage replied without hesitation. “Waiting for us to find a way to sneak all one hundred of them inside.”
“All one hundred?”
“Yes. There have been no casualties.”
A satisfied smile spread across Levi’s lips, and he raised his glass in a salute.
“If we’re going to launch another attack, his people won’t be enough,” Henry said. “We need more.”
Everyone fell silent for a while. A cloud passed over the sun, temporarily blocking out the light that had previously been filling the room with a golden glow.
“There are a lot of resentful mages in the city’s underworld.” Paige swept her gaze over the rest of us and then shrugged. “We could probably persuade a lot of them to join us in taking down Quill. They hate the current parliament for forcing them to give up their magic.”
“Alright, that would give us the numbers,” I said, giving her an appreciative nod.
Sienna blew out a sigh and swigged from her glass of wine. “It still doesn’t solve our problem with the blade. Getting into the academy to steal it is next to impossible. Trust me, I barely managed to escape the graduation ceremony myself. I had surprise on my side and I was trying to get out, not in. And I still had to burn down two whole city blocks to do it.”
“What if we get them to move the blade?” Malcolm said.
Several pairs of eyebrows rose as we all turned to look at him.
He shrugged. “Let’s say we discreetly let slip that we’re going to attack the academy with a massive force. Quill will try to outmaneuver us by moving the dagger before we can hit it.”
“Move it where?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know. But anywhere is better than the academy.”
“And how do we let our plans slip without him knowing that it’s us?”
“I can take care of that,” Paige said. “A few words to the right people in the underworld, and the news will get back to Quill without him knowing that it came from us. He’ll think that his sources have managed to uncover a great secret.”
“Sneaky.” Grant gave her a nod. “I approve.”
“So, we need to split into teams then,” I said, already running through options in my head. “Some of us need to get Levi’s people into the city and get them, and you, set up in temporary safe houses since we can’t fit a hundred and nine people in this house. And some of us need to start convincing the resentful mages to join our fight.” I glanced towards the blond forger. “We’ll leave the discreet sharing of our plans to you.”
She waved a hand in front of her face. “Oh, that’s an easy one. I can help with convincing people once I’m done.”
“Alright.” I gave her a nod. “As for the rest of us…”
The clouds blew clear again while we began dividing up the work between us.
Our first plan might have gone to hell because Quill had pulled a stunt we hadn’t seen coming. But that wouldn’t happen again.
We didn’t have to play by the same rules as they did.
And it was time that we started using that to our advantage.
