If she told Lara, the argument would get ugly. Better to handle the situation another way.
“There’s no time,” Cathrynne said urgently. “Levi needs to be contained before he hurts a student or staff member. I’ll stay here with Kal while you gather more witches to deal with him.”
Lara looked torn, but she gave a hard nod. She pulled off her rings and pressed them into Cathrynne’s palm. “Topaz, sunstone, and sugilite,” she said. “Set in copper and gold.”
Then she was gone, sprinting into the darkness. In the distance, Levi continued his search, his lumbering form blotting out the lamps along the pathways.
Cathrynne turned to Gavriel. “Can you fly with her to Suriel?”
He considered it, then shook his head. “I won’t leave you here alone. And two will be too much weight.”
“I can handle myself,” she assured him. “It’s the girl he wants.”
“I’m right here,” Kal said. Her chin lifted. “I am not getting toted around like a piece of luggage. In fact, I have a train ticket in my pocket and I intend to use it?—”
Cathrynne tensed as she spotted movement. Two figures approached at a jog—Lara and Hysto. She felt relief, followed on its heels by guilt at the way she’d treated her mother the last time they spoke. Hysto had saved her life. Risked the wrath of the High Council that said cyphers could never see their birth mothers again. She deserved civility at least.
Yet their arrival seemed way too quick. Something wasn’t right . . .
Their faces shimmered, wavering like a heat mirage. The illusion slipped. Cathrynne felt an electric jolt of terror. It was not her sister and mother, but Markus Viktorovich and Berti Baako.
Gavriel stepped into their path. He clearly knew who they were because he looked furious. “How dare you come here?” he demanded, hands fisting. “I suggest you turn around this instant before?—”
Markus hurled him aside with a contemptuous flick of one finger. Gavriel slammed into a thick oak and fell to the earth, groaning. Cathrynne ignited a chunk of brown agate, but Markus easily deflected the attack. He unleashed another battering assault, forcing Cathrynne to duck and roll.
Everything happened so fast. A knife glinted in the moonlight. Kal yelled. Cathrynne feared she’d been stabbed. Then she saw that Kal’s wool coat had been slashed open, the lining hanging in flaps. The cold shine of kaldurite stones glittered in the grass. Kal scrabbled for the stones on hands and knees, but Berti got there first. She kicked Kal hard in the side, then grabbed her hair and dragged her back, kicking her again.
Ash’s candy-red hair materialized out of the darkness. She wore thick leather gloves. She quickly swept the kaldurite stones into a pouch.
“Those are mine!” Kal bared her teeth. “Give them back!”
Berti slapped her across the face. “Shut up!”
Markus regarded Cathrynne. The bastard didn’t look smug, of course he didn’t. He was too refined for that. Too self-righteous. No, he looked regretful, like she was a bright student who had wasted her potential and was about to get expelled.
“You should have accepted my offer when you had the chance,” he said. “Now it’s too late. But we have the girl. She’ll give us what we need.”
In the rainy night, Cathrynne’s scalp prickled. Three symbols appeared, hovering in the air, just as they had weeks before at the Nilssons’ home.
A golden key, a sailing ship, and a coffin.
A witch was about to force—either Berti or Markus, it didn’t matter who—but this time the coffin wasn’t for Mercy, it was for Kal Machena.
Cathrynne felt the painful pressure shift in her ears. She knew firsthand what the White Foxes would do to Kal once they had her alone in that house of horrors. Her fingers closed around Lara’s rings. Topaz and sunstone, projective. Sugilite, receptive.
Cathrynne had never been taught to force, that dangerous art of bending reality to create a portal, but she’d seen the witch Ninnoc do it, hurling her and Mercy from Arioch to Kota Gelangi in an eyeblink.
And she’d just watched Lara make a box—although not all the way.
Passivity and surrender were the keys to working receptive magic. The problem was that Cathrynne wasn’t good at either of those things. Her training had focused on offensive magic, which was all outward-flowing. Directing one’s will to manifest a specific outcome.
She quickly jammed the topaz ring on her left ring finger, the sugilite on the other, and tried drawing on them both simultaneously. The projective magic flowed well. But the other was like trying to push water back into a faucet. It only ran one way.
Markus’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing, Cathrynne?”
Bloody hell! It wasn’t working. Why wasn’t it working?
She was an ambi, able to use both hands for projective magic . . .
