I threw myself towards Audrey while slamming up a force wall. All throughout the corridor, people dove for cover as shattered stone foundations and broken floorboards and screaming mages fell from the high ceiling. A huff tore from Audrey’s throat as she hit the ground with me on top of her, covering her body. My force wall vibrated above us.
But the majority of the damage hadn’t been near our section of the corridor. It had come from the two rooms on the left side. The explosions had cracked the floor of the upper rooms, making everyone who had been fighting up there plummet down to our floor.
Limp arms and legs poked out from underneath the broken blocks of stone and shattered pieces of wood. Sand from the crumbled stone foundation swirled down and glittered in the sunlight, which meant that the roof above those rooms had also partially collapsed.
The bodies appeared to belong mostly to the people from upstairs, since the members of Johnson’s gang, who had been hiding close to the doorways of those rooms, had dived out into the corridor.
While shifting together into a united front on the opposite side of the now much wider space, Johnson’s gang stared at the piles of debris that had been the floor and ceiling above, along with the wooden walls that the rubble had torn down on this floor when it came crashing down. Strips of massive carpets, now shredded to pieces, slowly sailed through the air to land on top of the mess of stone and wood.
I scrambled to my feet and grabbed Audrey’s arm, yanking her up with me. My hand came back red. I snapped my gaze down to her forearm to find blood dripping down from a cut on the side of it. But before I could say anything, stone groaned and rumbled from one of the piles. Touching my hands together, I called up another force wall while whirling towards the sound.
The large block of stone at the top rose up into the air and then shot to the side, slamming into the pile next to it. A moment later, the flat bit of stone before it crumbled as well.
It revealed two people.
A young woman with dark hair, who I recognized as the wind mage who usually fought next to Johnson, blinked at the area around her in stunned shock.
Next to her was Trevor Gale.
Because of his stone magic, he had managed to protect himself relatively well both from the explosion and from the fall. She must have been standing right next to him, probably while trying to kill him, and had been saved by his magic by accident.
The stone mage stared out at the scene before him.
Groans came from underneath parts of the debris, but it was safe to assume that practically everyone who had fallen through the high ceiling was dead. On this floor, the surviving members of Johnson’s gang had gathered together on the side opposite ours. Out of the twenty or so who had attacked us, twelve still lived. Most of them had magic pointed in our direction, but they all glanced between us and Gale.
On our side of the corridor, Audrey and I, along with David and three of his guards, remained standing. All of us also had magic summoned and aimed towards Johnson’s people. But no one moved.
For a while, the battle was at a complete standstill. As if everyone was trying to figure out what the hell had just happened and what they were supposed to be doing now.
My chest heaved from the fight, and worry knotted my insides at the way blood smeared Audrey’s left hand and arm.
Trevor Gale looked from us to Johnson and his gang and then to the fifty or so of his guards that were currently dead or dying underneath broken bits of the floor and ceiling. His gray suit was covered in stone dust, and his previously so smooth brown hair was disheveled, but cold fury burned in his blue eyes as he dragged them back to Johnson’s group.
The dark-haired wind mage next to him was still staring at the room, her mouth open and her eyes wide with shock.
Gale lifted a hand towards her, almost as if he was going to pat her on the shoulder.
Then, without even turning to look, he shot a stiletto blade from his suit sleeve and straight into the side of her neck.
Blood spurted from her punctured carotid artery and splattered the right side of Gale’s face.
“NO!”
The word tore from Johnson’s throat with animalistic agony.
It shattered the strange standstill like a smashed mirror.
I threw up a force wall as a mix of lightning and water magic crashed towards us. Flames roared through the air as Johnson hurled a crackling fireball towards Trevor Gale. The stone mage raised a thick slab before it could hit him.
While the dark-haired woman crashed to her knees, blood still spurting from her neck, Gale shoved the block of stone towards the others. It shattered into tiny pieces from a combined strike of lightning and wind.
I threw a force arc towards them while Audrey sent a cloud of poison straight on its tail. The still breathing wind mage, a young man with red hair, shoved my attack up into the gaping hole in the ceiling next to them while Johnson burned Audrey’s poison out of the air.
Rapid fireballs from David covered Gale as he made his way over to us, but I could barely spare them any attention.
Johnson’s gang still outnumbered us two to one. Not to mention that out of the forty-one people that he had brought here, twenty-nine of them were already dead. Along with whoever that dark-haired wind mage had been to him. And combined with the fact that they outnumbered us, they were now also fighting with the fury of hell itself.
It was taking all of my concentration just to block their attacks while also trying not to hinder Audrey’s or any of the guards’ shots. Even though the collapse had torn down some walls and widened the space, the piles of rubble and the undamaged rooms and the wall on the right side of the hallway still boxed us in enough that the seven of us could just barely manage to stand shoulder to shoulder. It forced us to alternate our larger attacks to avoid cancelling each other out.
Whips of glittering green poison snapped between my force walls and the blasts of wind that came from one of the guards.
“They’re not Levi’s people,” Trevor Gale ground out as he joined the edge of our row.
Since David and two of the guards were standing between me and Gale, I couldn’t see more than his arms as he yanked them up to shoot stones towards Johnson’s side. But even with three people between us, I could feel his sharp eyes burning holes in the side of my head.
“So,” he continued. “Why are they attacking us?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” David answered in between fireballs.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
I couldn’t very well tell him that all of these people had come here with the sole purpose of killing me, and that he and all of his guards had gotten caught in a battle that had absolutely nothing to do with him.
A boom echoed through the crumbling building as my force wall slammed straight into a massive blast of wind. Audrey shot a cloud of poison after it, but David also attacked, and his fire burned away part of her cloud. Both of them growled in irritation.
“I don’t know for sure,” I began while throwing a shield to block a lightning bolt from Kane. “But I’ve had a feeling that people have been tracking our moves since the day we first met with David. I think these people are making a move for power.”
Heat washed over us as orange flames slammed into a defending block of stone.
“Is that why Levi’s wife wasn’t up there?” Gale said, his voice tight with anger. “Because they’ve already taken her? And then they waited for us to show up so that they could ambush us?”
The good thing about paranoid people was that all you needed to do was to give them a few bits of information, and then they would start putting together worst-case scenarios all on their own.
“Probably,” I answered while shielding Audrey from a torrent of water that would have sent her flying through the nearest wall.
Swirling green mist made it almost all the way to Kane’s mouth before the redheaded wind mage shoved the cloud aside. Johnson let out a furious scream that echoed through the whole building.
Slapping his palms together, he shoved his hands forward and sent a gigantic wave of fire crashing down the hall.
Alarm shot up my spine.
I hurled a wide force wall straight for it while Gale yanked up a thick block of stone. Flames spilled over the top like a red flood, and the water mage on Audrey’s other side had to shift his shield up at the last second.
Steam hissed through the corridor.
Damn. I had forgotten how dangerous people could be when they were fueled by rage and raw grief.
“We need to move to a better position, sir,” David said. “This space is too narrow. We’re hitting each other’s attacks.”
It was true. If we’d been able to spread out, Johnson and his people would probably already be dead. While they weren’t connected to the Great Current, and therefore all technically had the power level of a dark mage, they weren’t really dark mages. Not in the sense that we were. But the cramped space along with the sheer power that they still possessed gave them an advantage in this fight.
“Yes,” Gale replied.
Lightning crackled through the air the moment our defensive walls were down. It exploded into a force shield that I barely managed to raise right in front of my chest. Wind and fire rushed down the corridor again as Johnson and the redhead launched a synchronized attack.
A boom shook the building as the attacks collided with Gale’s thick slab of stone.
“We need to—” the stone mage began, but another voice cut him off.
“Winston!”
Glittering green mist shot across our side of the hallway.
I sucked in a gasp, and my consciousness slipped through my fingers like slick ice.
Darkness pulled me under, and I could barely feel my body beginning to topple backwards as Audrey’s smooth poison shoved its way down my throat.
