Wicked As You Wish (A Hundred Names for Magic #1) - Rin Chupeco Page 0,35
kick and landed a boot right to his face.
“Fight!” someone yelled, and shouts and hoots erupted as more people headed closer, attracted to the noise.
Someone lunged forward, grabbing at her. Tala ducked low, escaping their grasp.
“Bitch,” Landaker snarled again.
“Don’t call her that!” Alex snapped.
“We’ll call that whore any goddamn name we want.” Hughes moved to punch Alex. Lynn planted herself in between them at the last minute, but her brother’s fist was already on a collision course. Alex yanked her close to him, raising his arm as a shield.
There was a delighted cackle and a sudden blur of feathers.
The firebird reappeared, popping out from nowhere to fly right into Hughes’s face, knocking him backward. It then dove down to grab both Landaker and Dryden by their shoulders, each talon sinking into the cloth of their jerseys. It rose, lifting the boys high enough in the air that the tips of their running shoes barely scraped against the ground. They clawed wildly at their shoulders, at something they could not see.
The bird dove forward, with a speed and strength that was surprising for something so small. The boys struggled and yelled out obscenities as the unseen force propelled them forward despite their best efforts.
And just as suddenly, the strange bird stopped, releasing them at the same moment. Unable to stop their momentum, Landaker and Dryden plunged headfirst into a nearby rock, hitting it face-first with a heavy thump. They both remained glued to the surface for a few more seconds, as if to defy the laws of physics on top of everything else, before toppling backward when gravity once again reasserted control.
The feathered creature crowed.
Bill Moretti took off after his friends, but hit something solid halfway. He crumpled, and the bird lifted its beak from where it had made contact with his head. Then it swooped down and flexed its left wing, tripping him so hard, he somersaulted from the impact, landing on his face.
People in the crowd were already shrieking, watching as one by one, the boys succumbed to some invisible force none of them could see. Hughes staggered back up, gaping open-mouthed at his fallen comrades. “What the hell did you do?” he roared at Alex, raising his fist again.
The bird glowed, and a lazy waft of smoke drifted from it to settle on Hughes’s hair, which promptly caught fire.
Tala barely remembered him, hopping about, screaming for water before dropping to the ground to perform several barrel rolls. She barely remembered people running and shouting while Hughes’s girlfriend frantically tried to smother her boyfriend’s head in a sea of sweaters. The only thing she could recall in stark, vivid detail was the strange bird performing loops in the air, crowing in victory—exultant, glowing brighter than any light he had ever seen—and Alex, smiling grimly.
The fire was soon doused. Alex pushed at Hughes’s sprawled form with a foot, turning him over, and bent down. Lynn sank down on the ground beside him, trembling.
“Where did you hide my phone, Hughes?”
Hughes stared up at him, face sooty and frightened. “Boys’ locker room,” he gasped out.
Alex straightened up and turned to walk away without another word.
“Alex!” Tala yelled at him. “What the hell?”
He paused for a couple of seconds but resumed walking. “Don’t come after me, Tala.”
“I deserve to know what’s going—”
At that point, more screaming began.
The burning bonfire had been the first target. The mist had passed so stealthily and soundlessly over it, consuming the very air so quickly that there was almost no time to process the aftermath. One moment the bonfire stood, brightly blazing the way bonfires ought to. In the next, it was a sculpture of ice, a fully formed fortress of icicles, and the breeze that swept through it to spread across the crowd was cold with the touch of winter.
Astonished, Tala only had time to gape before the ground underneath her iced over, a permafrost sheen spreading out from the newly frozen bonfire and rippling toward the celebrants. Stumbling over each other, alternating between curses and shrieks, the partygoers fled as the rising fog turned the air bitter and cold. The night stilled; something, however briefly, seemed to take shape against the moonlight—some strange figure of a shrouded woman, almost—before the image dissolved completely, and panic took its place.
“Tala!” Ryker sounded frantic, but Tala ignored him, leaping to her feet to scan the now-disorderly crowd, trying in vain to search for Alex, or her parents, or Zoe, anyone who surely knew what was happening and could tell