I trailed off, fighting not to grin like an idiot. Yong had been standing next to me when the Gameskeeper had grabbed him. But when he’d manifested his smoky self, he’d done so behind his own tied-up body. It wasn’t that the Gameskeeper couldn’t see him because he was invisible. The Gameskeeper couldn’t see him because my dad was using himself as cover, literally hiding in his own shadow. Clever dragon.
“I’m going to make a distraction,” my father whispered. “While he’s busy, you free my body, and we’ll run for it.”
Easier said than done. The bloody cocoon the Gameskeeper had wrapped around my father was the thickest version of his magic I’d seen yet. I couldn’t grab and move the normal stuff. How the hell was I going to shift bloody coils the size of my arm? And on that note, what did my dad think he was going to do for a distraction? So far as I’d seen, his smoky body went straight through everything. How could you cause a distraction when you couldn’t touch anything?
I was still worrying my way through all the reasons this wouldn’t work when my dad blew through me. His shape changed as he moved, the smoke wavering until he no longer resembled a human, but a dragon. A huge dragon made of billowing ash-colored clouds that slid through me to fly straight at the Gameskeeper, ghostly fangs open wide.
It’s not every day you get to watch a god freak out. From the Gameskeeper’s perspective, it must have looked as if I’d just launched a huge smoke-dragon spell that did who-knew-what out of nowhere. Divine or not, that’s not the sort of thing you want flying at your face, and he leaped back with a yelp. It sounded hilarious. I just wished I could have watched more, but I was already wrestling with the magic trapping my father’s body.
As I’d feared, it was pretty much impossible to grab. But while I couldn’t actually get a hold on anything, I could slam the coils around. So that was what I did, punching the magic this way and that until, at last, I’d loosened the wraps enough for him to slide free.
Yong was back inside his body before it hit the ground. “Go!” he yelled, grabbing me around the waist and throwing us both at the exit. Before I could catch the breath he’d knocked out of me, he’d smashed through the metal security door with his shoulder, carrying me under his arm like a sack as he leaped over the crumpled metal to charge down the spellwork-covered hall back the way we’d come.
Chapter 11
Since running straight down a hallway away from your enemy was a universally terrible idea, my dad took the first turn he came to, then the next, then the next. This process got us rapidly lost in the depths of the arena, but at least it got us out of the Gameskeeper’s line of sight. For all the good that did.
“Put me down,” I ordered when I’d gotten enough breath back to speak again.
My father shook his head. “You can’t run in that dress.”
I rolled my eyes. “Dad, we’re lost in the back tunnels of a huge arena crammed full of cameras, security guards, and professional murderers. We’re not getting out of here by running.”
“Then how are we getting out?” he snapped, gripping me tighter as he charged ahead, turning a corner just in time to avoid a group of armed men coming down the hall we’d been following from the opposite direction. “Your god can’t do anything here. We’re on our own, but this place is still a giant public arena. There has to be more than one way out.”
There undoubtedly was, but our chances of reaching it before the Gameskeeper’s people found us were getting smaller by the minute. The cement hall was already echoing with the shouts of guards working together to corner us. My father’s supernatural speed had kept us ahead of the trap so far, but the longer this went on, the worse our options got.
“Put me down,” I said again. “I have an idea.”
My father didn’t look happy about it, but he did as I asked this time, setting me back on my feet. The moment I was safe on the ground, I kicked off my stupid heels and grabbed my phone out of the little bag hidden in the ridiculous ruffles of my skirt.
“Sibyl,” I ordered, pointing her at the wall beside us, which was covered in spellwork just like everywhere else in these tunnels. “Highlight the variables.”
“Right-o, boss!” my AI said cheerfully, whirring the cameras on the front and back screens of my AR smartphone as she tried to scan both walls at once.
“What are you doing?” my dad asked.
“Looking for a lucky break,” I replied. “With all this spellwork, there has to be something.”
My father frowned. “Aren’t you terrible at spellwork?”
“Absolutely awful,” I assured him, smiling as Sibyl’s photo recognition filled my phone’s screen with red circles, showing me where all the variables were located in the carefully balanced spellwork equations. “But that’s the idea. A good Thaumaturge would never do this.”
I grabbed my dad’s hand and lifted it up, using his claw-like nails to scratch a big fat zero over the elegant notation carved into the concrete. Kauffman’s spellwork was so complicated, I wouldn’t have known that particular set of quasi-Greek symbols was a variable if Sibyl’s spellwork helper hadn’t identified it for me. I still didn’t know what it was a variable for, but that didn’t matter. The moment I wrote over it, I moved on to the next one then the next and the next, replacing the meticulously written magical notation with zeroes as fast as I could.
“Opal,” my father said nervously.
I heard it. We’d stopped in the middle of a long tunnel, and the straight walls provided excellent acoustics for the shouting men I could hear closing in
