The Protection of Ren Crown Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Chapter One: Welcome to the New World

  Chapter Two: Two Worlds Into One

  Chapter Three: Danger Re-engaged

  Chapter Four: Reconnection

  Chapter Five: The Enemy Within

  Chapter Six: Holy Innocents' Day

  Chapter Seven: Chaos

  Chapter Eight: Feral Enhancements

  Chapter Nine: Olivia

  Chapter Ten: Close Encounters of the Good and Worse Kind

  Chapter Eleven: Always Back to You

  Chapter Twelve: The Lightning Festival

  Chapter Thirteen: Friends and Foes

  Chapter Fourteen: We're Doing What?

  Chapter Fifteen: Training

  Chapter Sixteen: The Politics of Class

  Chapter Seventeen: Criminally Yours

  Chapter Eighteen: Hidden Sides

  Chapter Nineteen: Rumblings

  Chapter Twenty: Caterpillar Friendships

  Chapter Twenty-one: Reminders and Persuasions

  Chapter Twenty-two: New Designs

  Chapter Twenty-three: Combat Qualifications

  Chapter Twenty-four: Luncheon Companions

  Chapter Twenty-five: Deathly Charms

  Chapter Twenty-six: Revelatory Decisions

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Troop

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Speaking of Disaster

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Click Once for Luck

  Chapter Thirty: Midnight in the Garden

  Chapter Thirty-one: Plan Fifty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-two: Appetizer to Destruction

  Chapter Thirty-three: Red Alert

  Chapter Thirty-four: Demons from a Checkered Past

  Chapter Thirty-five: Reaping What You've Drawn

  Chapter Thirty-six: Never a Sacrifice

  Notes

  The Protection of Ren Crown

  Back Cover Copy:

  Barely surviving her first term at college, all Ren wants to do over break is relax and bond with her roommate—not get eaten by a sentient building or attacked on the street. But with increasingly open warfare brewing between the magical factions and Layers of the world, this time, Ren will not fail in making sure everyone she loves stays safe and protected.

  That includes doing things like filling her parents' house with personal art heavily embedded with wards, bubble-wrapping her increasingly imperiled roommate, and even making sure that a certain sexy thorn-in-her-side continues to breathe free air.

  Finding herself on duty protecting the entire university alongside campus god Alexander Dare...was not what she'd had in mind.

  But this time it's not only her life on the line. And Ren will do anything to protect those she loves.

  Please Note:

  The Protection of Ren Crown is Book Two in the Ren Crown series.

  If you'd like information on The Awakening of Ren Crown (Book One), please click here.

  Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2014 by Anne Zoelle

  Contents

  Chapter One: Welcome to the New World

  Chapter Two: Two Worlds Into One

  Chapter Three: Danger Re-engaged

  Chapter Four: Reconnection

  Chapter Five: The Enemy Within

  Chapter Six: Holy Innocents' Day

  Chapter Seven: Chaos

  Chapter Eight: Feral Enhancements

  Chapter Nine: Olivia

  Chapter Ten: Close Encounters of the Good and Worse Kind

  Chapter Eleven: Always Back to You

  Chapter Twelve: The Lightning Festival

  Chapter Thirteen: Friends and Foes

  Chapter Fourteen: We're Doing What?

  Chapter Fifteen: Training

  Chapter Sixteen: The Politics of Class

  Chapter Seventeen: Criminally Yours

  Chapter Eighteen: Hidden Sides

  Chapter Nineteen: Rumblings

  Chapter Twenty: Caterpillar Friendships

  Chapter Twenty-one: Reminders and Persuasions

  Chapter Twenty-two: New Designs

  Chapter Twenty-three: Combat Qualifications

  Chapter Twenty-four: Luncheon Companions

  Chapter Twenty-five: Deathly Charms

  Chapter Twenty-six: Revelatory Decisions

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Troop

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Speaking of Disaster

  Chapter Twenty-nine: Click Once for Luck

  Chapter Thirty: Midnight in the Garden

  Chapter Thirty-one: Plan Fifty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-two: Appetizer to Destruction

  Chapter Thirty-three: Red Alert

  Chapter Thirty-four: Demons from a Checkered Past

  Chapter Thirty-five: Reaping What You've Drawn

  Chapter Thirty-six: Never a Sacrifice

  Chapter One: Welcome to the New World

  A flying carpet whizzed down the hallway of the Second Layer Depot and two mages followed slowly in its path, engaged in a magical duel with fencing swords in one hand and tasers in the other. They danced past us, alternating between lunges and electrocuted spasms. Bubbles emerged with each clash of steel, then popped boldly in the air, producing an offbeat chorus of a battle hymn.

  This was my world now. My insane, exhilarating, dangerously upended world.

  “Olivia Price, requesting a refill,” my roommate said crisply into a wall speaker as she pressed her palm to the wall along with an empty glass container shaped like a genie's bottle.

  I leaned against the wall next to her and withdrew a pencil from my back pocket. In the air I drew a depiction of the taser-fencing fight. I hadn't quite gotten my air sketches to animate yet, but electrocuted hair was still pretty amusing in its stagnant state.

  I forced my hand not to redraw one of the combatants as Alexander Dare, combat-mage-extraordinaire. I would have to add far more blood, destruction, and dying screams to the scene, if I did. Along with more intense, earth-shaking hotness.

  “Identity confirmed,” the wall responded to Olivia in a soothing feminine voice. “Olivia Helena Price. Sanctioned for defensive magic use in the First Layer. Refill activating.”

  The magic of the device enveloped both Olivia and the container, pulling out a small portion of Olivia's magic and directing it into the container in her hand. A navy blue ribbon stamped with a gold dragon wrapped around the container, sealing itself and the magic within. The unbroken seal would allow Olivia to pass into the non-magic world with active magic in hand.

  It hadn't escaped my notice that out of the thousands of mages currently traversing the corridors of the largest transport hub in the world’s Second Layer, that we had been the sole occupants in this alcove each of the three times we had come here for Olivia to refill her container. I had neither a container nor a permit, and despite there being a station for filling containers, I had seen no evidence of anyone else possessing one either.

  “Refill complete,” the wall-voice said.

  Olivia tucked the container securely in a sling that crossed her torso, then tucked a single wayward brown hair back into her tight ponytail. “Finished.”

  I twirled my pencil into my back pocket, and threw the air drawing toward Olivia's bag. A stream of magic directed it to the first empty page of my sketchbook, where it should spread out and sink into the fibers. The possibility that, instead, the drawing would end up as pencil dust strewn inside Olivia's designer bag was too humorous and terrifying to contemplate.

  “
All magicked back up and ready to scare the daylights out of people in the non-magic world again, Liv?”

  “That is not amusing, Ren,” Olivia responded stiffly.

  We were staying with my non-magical parents in the non-magical First Layer of the world over winter break, and last night Olivia had reacted a little explosively to someone bumping their cart into ours at the grocery store. The ice cream aisle there would never be the same.

  “I should have been cited for that,” she said. “My permit doesn't allow me to just randomly blow things up. That I wasn't cited is a problem that you have yet to grasp. Especially with everything else we've been doing.”

  “That the magical cops haven't come for us is a terrible, terrible thing.”

  She gave me the look that meant my wit was not appreciated and that I was three seconds away from a magical zap. “It means that either the reporting process isn't working as it should in the First Layer, or...or that they saw the magic and didn't cite me. I should have been dealt with brutally and immediately.”

  “And yet, with a nice monetary donation to the store and a judicious use of the daydream enchantment that affects people without magic, you are free as a bird, and falling in line with my diabolical desire to corrupt you.”

  She sighed. It ran through her entire body. “Ren...”

  I smiled and hooked our arms together. “Library? Then home? It's my birthday. I am exempt from recrimination during daylight hours.”

  “Fine.” The word was heavy, but there was a smile tugging Olivia's lips.

  It was my new mission in life to make those smiles appear more often.

  My old mission... Well, such shadowy thoughts were for the darkness of night. Daytime was for causing mischief. Exactly what my twin brother Christian and I would be doing on our birthday today, if he were still here.

  I hip-bumped Olivia, which resulted in a haphazard series of snapped body crashes since our arms were still hooked. Olivia would have crushed me like a bug had I tried to shake her hand when we'd first met. But she had become increasingly tolerant of my physical contact and I was determined to desensitize her completely.

  She hip-bumped me awkwardly back, restarting the drunken jostle.

  I laughed, and my lingering melancholic thoughts departed, tucked away for later. I maneuvered us into a crowded hall leading to the northeast spoke of the Depot. Ducking flying objects—identified or unidentified—and skirting all manner of weird creatures and mechanical constructs, I made another appeal.

  “If the magical law enforcement system isn't correctly registering magic use in the non-magical world, then we are seriously squandering—”

  “No.”

  “But Will said that after my Awakening, if he hadn't called Marsgrove, we could have gone on a serious magical bender.”

  “William Tasky, while brilliant, is not who I would follow on a 'bender.'”

  “Hey, Will's awesome.”

  And Phillip Marsgrove, Dean of Special Projects at our school, was not awesome, despite being Olivia's powerful, older cousin. Marsgrove's hatred of me was a sentiment I returned wholeheartedly. Speaking of which...

  “We could use my new lockpicks.” I pointed at her bag, where I'd stashed them. “See what hilarious things magical picks will do to ordinary doors.” I had ordered a set of magical picks last week in case Marsgrove found a way to get around Olivia's contract magic in order to imprison me again. “Will would totally be in for helping.”

  She gave me a deadpan stare, unamused, as always, by lockpicks and delinquency. Last term, after being illegally enrolled, I had broken into her room each day for weeks pretending to be her newly assigned roommate. All term, I had convinced myself that I was getting away with it too, until the day Olivia had given me an actual room key and a scathing lecture about breaking and entering.

  We were forced to separate as we turned into the corridor that led to the Library of Alexandria's port. Mages were entering and exiting the Depot in multitudes of fantastic ways from across the Second Layer, but the most intense magical domains were still travel-restricted to specific ports within the main transportation hub.

  “You have skill in picking useful friends, Ren. But a moral compass, or perhaps more accurately, a legal compass, William is not.”

  “We have Neph for that,” I said.

  “As a moral compass?” Olivia scoffed. “Nephthys would follow you to Hell and say that it was lovely,” she said as we entered the gilded Hall of Knowledge. The soaring, domed hall contained two-dozen ports and smelled of parchment and magic.

  I pointed at Olivia. “And we would probably have a good adventure there. I'm just saying, we should—”

  “No.”

  I threw my hands forward. “You don't even know what I was going to suggest.”

  “That we engage in some wild and 'awesome' magical treasure hunt across the non-magical tri-state area using my container magic.”

  I paused. “Okay, you knew exactly what I was going to suggest.”

  We stepped through the thin, but elaborate port into the largest library in the Second Layer and the strange whirring noise of the magical sensors buzzed in my ear like a swarm of mosquitoes.

  “Think about it, though,” I said as we grabbed the slips that spit out from a box on the side of the portal. “It could be fantastic.”

  I grinned at her, but then immediately grimaced as I read my visitation slip. The magical scan had allocated me with a one hour and five minute period in the library today. Five minutes less than yesterday, and ten minutes less than the day before.

  If the sequence continued, I wasn't going to be able to enter at all. Or maybe I'd just be digested while stepping through the port one day.

  Because, while the library was awesomely magical and contained a bit of everything from the magic world, the Library of Alexandria was sentient.

  And carnivorous.

  Thus, the real-time scanner that examined each mage and issued a slip, precisely allocating the time that the mage had before the library started chewing. While Olivia's one hour and forty minute allocation had stayed steady, the library was looking to chomp me sooner with every visit.

  There was nothing I could do about that, at present, so I shoved the paper into my back pocket and continued needling my roommate.

  “Besides, Olivia,” I said, multitasking as I set a timer in my head, grabbed a cloak from a peg, and plotted the fastest way to the warding books and materials I needed. “You are the one who wants to take over the world. I imagine that includes all five layers of the Earth—the four magical ones and the non-magical one too.”

  Olivia glanced sharply at the guards stationed at the entrance to the library's soaring, sharply-curved, golden atrium. They were standing smartly at attention as if guarding Buckingham Palace, but their gazes looked even more vacant than usual.

  “A 'magical bender' is not a path to dictatorial splendor,” Olivia hissed.

  I cheekily waved at the guards and, as expected, received no response. Olivia grabbed my hand from the air and pushed me into the atrium.

  “Not a proven path,” I said, letting her manhandle me. “But on our journey, we could come across some magical trinket that will ensure you a long and terrifying rule—like a ring, or a medallion, or a fiercely magical toenail. Think about it, Liv.”

  Her shoulders relaxed at the nickname. She would have shot me for assigning one to her weeks ago. “Wards first, splendor and terror second,” Olivia said, dryly.

  I grinned.

  My grin slipped, though, as we walked through the portrait gallery just past the library's breathtaking entrance. Paintings covered every bit of wall space and were secured with thick spells. Deep alcoves contained individual observation benches and particularly special pieces. My gaze shifted to one alcove and one painting in particular, as it did every time I passed. The lovely woman draped in beautifully mixed oils was watching me. Again.

  The hair on my neck stood on end.

  Olivia deliberatel
y picked up our pace, hurrying me past. We hadn't spoken of the portrait, but there was no doubt in my mind that the artist who had created the extraordinary piece in Ganymede Circus had created this one as well—Sergei Kinsky, the last mage capable of wielding Origin Magic, both a god and bogeyman.

  Olivia didn't have to tell me that I didn't have the time to study the magnificent work of art. She also didn't have to explicitly state that I couldn't afford to be seen doing so.

  As it had for the last three days, my heart only stopped racing when we broke from the main corridor and entered the gallery tunnel webbed by thousands of complex and interconnected wards. My fingers brushed the access panel and quickly pulled up visuals of the wards that were on my day's to-do list. Colored lines and shapes zipped and zoomed across the indexed screen and I pressed the button for “educational activation,” which pulled my twelve selected wards from the web and into the area where I could study and internalize them individually.

  I took a deep breath, centering my magic. Replicating each magic and setting it to paper would require the entirety of my allotted library time.

  My parents had “acquired” twenty-seven new pieces of frameless art in the past two days. After today, a dozen more would be attached to their walls.

  Using one of the library spells, Olivia conjured a table and two chairs next to the staging area. We dropped our bags on the tabletop.

  “How much time do you have today?” she asked.

  “Fifty-five minutes after the cloak.” The cloak protected me from the library's 'taste sampling' inclinations so that I didn't have to expend the energy to protect myself. I had seen more than one screaming person run down the halls after being sampled. But everything had a cost, and time was one of the most precious bargaining chips here. By increasing the magic around me like it did, the cloak cost ten minutes of my allocated time.

  I touched the first ward I was interested in replicating and wrapped it around me, absorbing it into my senses—taste, sight, sound, texture, purpose. The sensations coalesced into a dimensional picture in the eye of my mind and I stamped the image into memory, then sealed the associated sensations into the skin and bone of my fingers.

  I released the ward and stepped back, shuddering at the discharge of the sensory overload. The real world snapped back around me. Not for the first time, I ached to discover what the other sections of the library could offer. Someday I would.