Is That a Threat?

Chapter Ten: Under | Part 10

“Thirtyx!” Benn was shaking him again. “Oh, man. I can’t go without you. I can’t leave you like this.”

“Hmm?” Thirtyx was lying down again. He struggled to sit up. Why did his body still feel so wrong?

Benn pulled something heavy off Thirtyx’s head. “Your helmet had a leak. You fell back asleep. Come on, there’s got to be a way I can take you with me. Are you sure I can’t teleport us both?”

Thirtyx barely knew the rules of Lam magic, much less Pfah magic, but even in his groggy state, he clearly recalled the shock he’d gotten from touching Benn’s floating model. “You and Rhea said it could kill me.”

“There may be an exception for teleportation.”

“Really? Specifically for teleportation—”

A loud crash. The strobe lights stopped. The room began to dissolve. The trance! He was in a trance, but he hadn’t broken it himself.

“What in the twin hells are you doing to him?!”

Rhea?

His eyes snapped open. His chin jerked up. Azirenne and her cronies stared in wide-eyed shock at something behind him. Thirtyx let his head fall back to see the intrusion upside down.

Benn and Rhea stood in the doorway, chests heaving, eyes blazing with purple sparks. Their hands were held aloft, purple ringlets circling them in insistent orbits.

It had to be another layer of the trance, right? They couldn’t possibly be here. But they were. Everything was real this time—his pounding head, his bound wrists, the ache of the devil venom still pulsing through his body.

Tears of relief streamed across his forehead.

“Get out!” the headmistress roared. “You have no permission to be here!”

“And you have no permission to torture a student!” Benn cried.

Professor Bavarren bristled. “Mr. Grimmary, that’s not what this is.”

“Oh, and the Verith you tortured will tell us something different?” Benn snapped. “Rest assured, we’ll take his testimony all the way to Grimmary—”

“You have a lot of nerve accusing me after you violated a lockdown,” Azirenne said over the end of Benn’s sentence. “Where in the universe were you two?”

“Acting on Grimmary’s orders.” Rhea’s voice trembled with a mixture of fury and power befitting a future queen. “I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he tears you apart for what you’ve done to Thirtyx. Whatever you thought was happening was no excuse for this, and you know it.”

Rhea ducked into the room and managed to unbind one of Thirtyx’s wrists before Azirenne recovered from the sheer shock of being addressed that way. “Get away from him!” the headmistress cried. “You will leave immediately, or I’ll remove you by force.”

Benn shifted his still-glowing hands to point directly at Azirenne. “That doesn’t seem wise, Headmistress. I just reached eighth tier in Sigraexil.”

“IS THAT A THREAT, GRIMMARY?”

“Come on,” Rhea whispered in Thirtyx’s ear. He tried to stand, but between the exhaustion and the pain and the emotional turmoil, he collapsed back into the chair. Rhea eased him up and supported him to the door.

None of the professors moved to stop them.

Benn let them hobble past, then he backed out of the doorway, his eyes and hands still trained on the headmistress. “No!” she shouted. “You don’t get to speak to me that way! I don’t care who your father is, you’re still students at this school! I’LL EXPELL YOU ALL!”

They were several steps down the hallway when Azirenne tried to lunge out the door after them, still shouting about expulsion, but the other professors held her back. Benn waited until they’d pulled her back inside before he let his magic fall.

He slung Thirtyx’s other arm over his shoulder. Together, they made their way back to the dorms.