“I wonder why she hasn’t woken up,” my father said, politely ignoring the near-panic attack I was having beside him. “It was like this when I was here before. She’s breathing, but her eyes aren’t open.”
I’d been too busy staring at her teeth and claws to notice her eyes, but I took his word for it. “It’s probably the ward,” I said, pointing at the glowing lattice of spellwork that covered her cage. “If I was crazy enough to imprison a dragon, I sure as hell wouldn’t leave her awake.”
My father nodded in agreement, eyeing the ward with malice. “Can you break it?”
I was sure as hell going to try. I’d actually been looking forward to using this as my practice run. There were tons of safe ways to break a ward, but none of those let me practice blowing up one of Kauffman’s circles. Dr. Kowalski thought I was ready, but if I couldn’t overload this thing without hurting myself, then blowing the arena was a pipe dream. It was time to see if all my practice had paid off, so before I could lose my nerve, I strode into the room, walking straight to the edge of the glowing spellwork surrounding the still, seemingly sleeping dragon.
It was one of the scariest things I’d ever done in my life. Objectively, I knew I was perfectly safe, or at least as safe as I could be down here in the belly of our enemy. We’d already taken out the camera, and if the Gameskeeper or White Snake could have attacked us, they would have done so already. This was actually the least dangerous part of our entire plan, but there was just something about walking toward the thing every survival instinct I had was begging me to run away from that turned my muscles to water. By the time I actually reached the cage, I was shaking so badly my teeth were chattering.
Don’t be afraid, the DFZ ordered, her voice reverberating in my rattled mind. You are my priest, and I smacked her out of the sky like a fly. We beat her once. We can take her again if it comes to that.
I yearned to remind her that we were not in the DFZ this time, which meant no punching with buildings, but there was no point. Freeing White Snake was the most critical element of our plan. If she decided to eat us on the way out, there wasn’t much we could do to stop her. We just had to hope she wouldn’t bite the hand that freed her, because it was waaaaay too late to turn back. Her fight with Nik was starting in less than an hour. We actually only had about ten minutes left before the guards would arrive to take her upstairs to the arena. It was now or never, so I took a huge breath and knelt on the ground, pulling off my rubber safety gloves to place my bare palms down on the glowing spellworked bars that contained her.
The moment I touched the ward, I knew it was Kauffman’s. Just like every other bit of his work I’d touched, the spell holding White Snake down was perfectly tuned and neat as a pin. This time, though, instead of despairing at how much better he was, I focused on my own talents. I’d never be a good Thaumaturge with perfect spellwork, but I’d become a pretty decent Shaman, and we rocked at stuff like this.
“Okay,” I whispered to the DFZ. “Let’s blow it.”
Magic bubbled up inside me in answer. Even after days of training, the sudden surge of power I hadn’t put there caught me by surprise. I compensated by focusing on the parts I was used to: namely throwing all of that magic into Kauffman’s perfect circle as hard and fast as I could. Just like the one I’d destroyed in the Gnarls, I knew it was going to take a lot. Kauffman’s circles always had multiple fail-safes. Unsurprising for a dragon prison, this one was even sturdier than usual, but I had something he’d never thought to plan for: a direct magical link to a god. I didn’t even bother trying to get around his spellwork. I just bulldozed straight through it, shoving magic into the circle as fast as the DFZ could feed it to me until, with a blinding pop, the whole ward exploded.
It’d been so long since I’d been backlashed, the sudden wall of force caught me completely by surprise. For a terrifying moment, the power of the overloaded spell raced through me like lightning, burning and breaking everything it touched. Then my training kicked back in.
All at once, I stopped fighting the lightning and grabbed it instead. I didn’t have to hold it, didn’t have to endure. All I had to do was pass it on, sending the roaring magic through me into the DFZ like electricity down a wire.
As fast as it had started, the explosion vanished. I didn’t even get knocked over. When I opened my eyes again, I was still crouching right where I’d been with my dad right beside me, watching nervously.
“Did it work?” he whispered.
“Hell yeah, it worked,” I breathed, looking at the bars, which were no longer glowing, but charred and brittle as old fire logs. “It worked great.”
The words weren’t even out before I collapsed onto the ground. I’d done it! This was what I’d practiced for, but after so many years of eating backlashes to the face, being able to pass all that horrible, out-of-control magic to someone who could actually handle it felt like a miracle. I still wasn’t certain I could manage a circle the size of an entire arena, but we’d just proved the
