Soul of the Mage (Twyst Academy Book 4) by D.D. Chance

Author:D.D. Chance [Chance, D.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781943768639
Published: 2020-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

13

This time, we landed in the dark, on our feet, as gently as if we were tucked into bed by our moms—those of us whose moms had stuck around, anyway. We also weren’t in a town square for once, but in the forest. In the far distance, flickering through the trees, we could see the faint glow of a fire—but high. Not a campfire hunkered down close to the earth, but the rosy illumination of a fire over a fortified wall of some kind. Like we were fifty feet away from someone’s backyard barbecue.

“This is…weird,” Luke muttered as we all looked around.

“You think the advisory board figured out where the Red Team is and sent us to find them?”

“If they have, how is it they’ve gotten so much better at tracking those assholes? I mean…” Connor protested, then he broke off as he and Rafe looked at each other. “No,” Connor said. “They wouldn’t have.”

“They wouldn’t what?” I asked quickly.

Rafe tilted his head, his brows arching as he thought. “They might have. If they’d figured out what the Red Team was doing after our report, putting a protection ward on the remaining teams would have been relatively easy…and where the teams went, the Red Team went. If the Red Team had siphoned off any new magic…” He smiled. “It’s a neat plan. I’m impressed.”

I scowled, shaking my head to clear it. “Once more for the cheap seats?”

“The advisory panel has full control over the students who enter the Mage Trials,” Marcus explained. “They can do anything they want with us to prepare us for the Trials, up to and including placing spells or wards on us. If they’d tracked the teams before they entered the Trials this year—marked their magic, if you will, and the Red Team sucked that magic into themselves…”

A queasy chill passed through me. I’d also taken a deep draught of that magic. Did the advisory panel know that? Was I going to get in trouble for it, or at the very least need my stomach pumped?

I rested a hand on my belly as Marcus continued. “The ward wouldn’t even be that complex. Think of it as a radioactive dye. The Red Team draws some of the affected magic from the teams into their own consciousness, so their magic now has the same marker for a short time. If they weren’t warding themselves against it, they’re sitting ducks. A marker carried on siphoned magic wouldn’t be strong, and I’d doubt it would last long—maybe a day. But it would help the advisory panel triangulate the Red Team’s position within a very narrow window…”

“Which explains why it was so easy for the advisory panel to put us in such close proximity to the Red Team when they sicced their lizards on the teams, even if the agency hung us up for a while,” I said. Still, something didn’t feel right. “They put the teams at risk. There could have been damage.”

“Collateral damage, or so they assumed. They didn’t tell the other teams about the danger of the Red Team.

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