With that, I squeezed my eyes even tighter and reached out with my mental hand, the one Dr. Kowalski was always claiming was huge compared to normal people’s. I got embarrassed every time she said that because it sounded so weird, but I’d never been happier to have a freakishly huge draw than I was now, because that big reach allowed me to grab a giant handful of magic.
It was a classic Opal handful too. None of that pumpkin-sized safety stuff Dr. Kowalski had taught me. This search was all about volume, so I scooped up as much as I possibly could. Enough to blow myself up if I’d actually tried to use it, but I didn’t have to worry about that here. Just like every other time I’d grabbed magic in the arena, Kauffman’s spell snatched it right back, but instead of reaching frantically for the next handful as I usually did, I kept my seemingly empty grasp tight, probing with my mind to find what his spell hadn’t yanked away.
It was a bit like panning for gold. Unlike the DFZ’s syrupy magic or the arena’s screaming bloodlust, ambient magic was mild and sedate. Picking it out from all that chaos was like trying to pluck a gentle breeze out of a hurricane. Even when I did manage to find some, it was exceedingly thin. I had to grab three more giant fistfuls of magic before I’d scraped together enough to cast even a tiny spell. Fortunately, tiny was all I needed.
I popped my eyes back open and checked the screen. My magical barrel-scraping had taken longer than I’d liked, but for once the Gameskeeper’s need for drama was on my side. They couldn’t just pop Nik’s cage and let them go at it. Oh no. They had to play the full ten-minute highlight reel of Mad Dog’s previous fights spliced together with news footage of my dad as a bloody dragon over the Detroit river. I didn’t know what they thought they were going to get out of it. If this crowd got any more hyped, people were going to start having heart attacks. But the dramatic delay gave me the space I needed.
The tiny bit of magic I’d scavenged wouldn’t do crap against a mage like Kauffman, but there were other ways to hurt a man. You just had to get creative, so creative was what I got, scooting as quietly as I could across the carpet to press my forehead against Kauffman’s ridiculous glass coffee table.
Fun fact about decorative glass: it is very sensitive to heat changes. Especially uneven heat, which can cause one part to expand so rapidly that the rest can’t keep up and the whole thing shatters. I’d seen the aftermath of such explosions twice: once in a fancy furniture showroom where some idiot had left a twenty-thousand-dollar glass sculpture touching a heater, and once in an apartment I was Cleaning after there’d been a fire. It was rare, but the physics involved were relatively simple, especially for someone who’d been turning magic into dragon fire all week.
I didn’t even need my hands. I just stared at the bit of the table Kauffman was resting his feet on and focused on fire, squeezing the tiny wisp of natural magic I’d gathered smaller and smaller, denser and denser. When I had it down to a focused dot of white-hot flame, I touched it to the glass directly under Kauffman’s left heel.
He didn’t even have time to feel the heat before the temperature differential grew too great and the whole table exploded. Much bigger than I’d anticipated, actually. All the glass furniture I had experience with was made from safety glass, stuff that shattered into millions of little beads rather than jagged shards so you didn’t accidentally trip on your table and die.
But safety was clearly not a concern for whomever Kauffman had purchased his monstrosities from. His table exploded into glass daggers, one of which got me across the cheek. The pain was enough to make me yelp, but I got off easy compared to Kauffman. He had glass stuck through every limb. One shard had actually pierced his leg and come out the other side. It was horrible, way worse than I’d intended, but at least he was too busy screaming and bleeding to chase me when I jumped to my feet and grabbed a shard to cut myself free.
It took some finagling and a lot of sliced fingers, but I eventually got the length of broken glass under the plastic tie trapping my wrists behind my back. The moment my hands were free, I jumped for my bag, using the marble TV stand as a ladder as I climbed up and grabbed it. I ran for the door next, kicking Kauffman’s grabbing hands out of the way as I charged into the hall…
…and right into the chest of an armed guard.
“Hey!” the man cried, grabbing my shoulders. “Who are you?”
“Never mind that,” I said, thinking fast. “Kauffman needs help! Someone attacked him and he’s bleeding everywhere. If we don’t get him to medical stat, he’s going to die!” I jerked my head back toward Kauffman’s room. “You go in there and stop the bleeding. I’m going to get a doctor!”
“Right!” the guard said, too caught up in the emergency to realize I didn’t belong here. Kauffman gave me a surprising boost as well by choosing that moment to pull himself out of his room, screaming something unintelligible as he flung his bloody hands toward me. It looked like something out of a horror movie, and it worked like a charm. The moment the guard saw him, he forgot all about me and rushed to his superior’s side, grabbing Kauffman and pinning him to the ground in an effort to stop the bleeding while I darted in the other direction.
I charged down the hall, feet and arms pumping in time
