He looked at me like I was being particularly slow. “To stay away from saving others. This is you saving yourself.”
“Con, that's not—”
He leaned toward me. “Are you trapped here?”
My brows drew sharply together. “No.”
“Then why do you act like you are, but only when it suits you?”
I ripped my gloves free and threw them on the table, then slammed my palms down. Lightning sparked across the surface. “I blew up three Magi Marts last week—four hundred miles away and a layer down. I just burned a hole into the Fourth Layer that I patched with a prayer and some tape. There were giraffes with canines and hooked nails. Not to mention the closet pinprick into the insanity of the Fifth. And you want me to start slinging paint around you?”
“Perhaps not slinging. A nice set of waterlilies would look lovely on my—”
“I can't paint waterlilies.” Lightning sparked the surface again.
“Not with that attitude.”
“Not with any attitude. I'd destroy the whole compound probably, if I tried!”
“I would have you pave Tus Onus instead,” he mused, barely sparing a glance at the lightning. “Nasty town. And to build a castle upon its banks. I've been playing with a building material for you. Veins of gold and ivory, but not like one of the tacky things you sometimes create when left to your own devices.”
He nudged Guard Rock with one of my pencils. Guard Rock stabbed back.
“Constantine, I swear—”
“Please do.”
“I'm going to push you back to Excelsine.”
He smirked and poked a little harder at Guard Rock, who drew blood with his return strike, his pencil tip razor sharp. “No, you won't,” he said, sticking the sliced end of his finger in his mouth. “You like being surrounded by vicious things.”
“You are going to drive me to insanity before my magic does.”
“Likely. That's what friends are for, isn't it?” The words were blasé, but the feeling from him was not.
All anger drained from me. “I don’t want you in the crossfire when I go.”
Axer was fighting on the table between us again, but I could see the pinch of his eyes—he was still listening in.
Constantine reached out and touched my cheek. “You forget that you’ve already imbued me with your paint. And I won’t let you go.”
He turned abruptly on his heel. “Come, Ren. Stop trying to pretend I don’t know what I’m doing. Get that blasted book and pick a place. I hate being the reasonable one.”
Discombobulated without knowing why, I rose. “I've picked nine places,” I stressed, as I followed him to a rack where he started flipping through papers I'd collected and been given in folders stamped with National Security, Confidential, and Myths. “Nine uninhabited sections of land. They are all craters now. Every one of them.”
“Your picking sucks, then. I'll pick.”
Our connection threads pulsed as he pushed comfort and determination across them.
Something in me loosened abruptly, because I had touched Constantine with paint before. We’d created paint together countless times, and contact was inevitable. I wasn’t the most sterile lab assistant.
But more than that, I had wiped paint across his forehead to heal him. And that had been Awakening paint. Ultramarine Awakening paint, at that. Powerful, protective paint.
“Let me guess.” Heavy, painful relief made my voice shake—because I wouldn’t hurt him, and I didn’t want to be alone. “Tus Onus. Because you think the shops there have terrible merchandise.”
He paused, internally assessing my heady, abrupt, out-of-character relief for a moment, before resuming his search. “I'm willing to list it as a detour. But no, I, too, was listening, when the madman proclaimed an 'Origin Circuit.'”
He said the last part reluctantly. He didn't want me to go near any Origin Magic zone—the feelings were all over him. He was just afraid I was going to damage myself if I didn't.
“I landed in one of the buildings on the Circuit. That's where the book took me after we disappeared from campus.”
“And?”
“It's a crater now, too.”
“Well, this layer would hardly notice another.”
“It's a crater bracketed by spires of death, and it's in the Second Layer which is excessively full of healthy magic.”
He paused again. “Endovar?”
“Yes.”
I could see him putting the pieces together—the news reports, timelines, and my flight here, which I'd glossed over heavily in mortification
He pursed his full lips. “Of course. that was you. The after pictures were quite...stunning in a certain way. I'm certain they are beautiful death steeples, in the right light. But come, darling, where are we going now?” He looked down at me through his lashes and a strange knot of emotion coiled in me. “Don't make me the voice of reason.”
Magic, stoppered up and shoved down, started to seep upward and swirl under my skin. I wiped the corners of my eyes and knew my fingertips would be stained with turquoise.
The book sensed the change—the excitement and dread I couldn't contain—and its tight circles became tighter in anticipation. It narrowed its view on Constantine as it waited to swoop, and I sensed its dark approval.
“So,” I said, swallowing the paint down. “Just to make this clear—you want to find an Origin Magic safe house with me so that I can create something dripping with death and destruction? A house probably loaded with booby traps and world-ending magic that will want to devour you?”
He didn't answer for a moment. “Yes,” he said with a sigh, flipping open another folder.
“And if I refuse to take you.”
“You won't,” he said lightly—dark, forbidding promises underlying each word.
I looked at the book circling tightly, felt the edges of my magic, thought of consequences and outcomes and responsibility to those surrounding me. I looked at Constantine—the face of my entire community, brimming with the combined magic of it all.
“You aren't alone, Ren,” he murmured, and his absolute trust filtered through me.
I swallowed and raised my arm.
The book immediately dove downward and landed like a hawk on a glove—only I didn't have a glove and the book's taloned corners made its delayed displeasure known.
“The other Origin Mage hideouts—”
The book didn't wait for me to finish, its covers opened, and a complicated construction of color and dimension ejected into the air, like a squid releasing its ink.
“A map?” Constantine asked.
I could tell from his tone that he couldn't read it, but the longer I stared at it, the more the moving picture made sense. The outer edges peeled back to reveal the inner petals of direction—a map of space that wasn't limited to a single layer of the world. This one included space in a way that wasn't of the normal human mind.