They began to slip sinuously over the grass.
Okay, Aaron, Call thought. Dismiss them. De-summon them. Do something.
Aaron lifted his hand. Threads of darkness began to spiral out from his fingers. His brow was furrowed in concentration. He reached out —
Havoc began to bark wildly, startling Call and Aaron both. Call saw the moment that Aaron’s concentration got away from him, the shadows vanishing from his fingertips.
Whatever he’d been meaning to do didn’t happen. Instead, one of the chaos elementals sprang into the air, toward Tamara’s mother. Her eyes went wide, her mouth opening in astonished terror. Her hand flew out, fire igniting in the center of her palm.
Aaron fell to his knees, flinging out both hands. Darkness exploded outward, surrounding the elemental. The creature disappeared, along with its twin. The chaos elementals were gone, scattered into shadows that melted away into the sunshine. Call became conscious of the fact that it was a summer day again, a summer day at a fancy garden party. He wasn’t sure if there’d ever been any real danger.
Everyone began laughing and clapping. Even Mrs. Rajavi looked delighted.
Aaron was breathing hard. His face looked pale, with a hectic flush on his cheeks as though from illness. He didn’t look like someone who’d just done a trick. He looked like someone who’d almost gotten his friend’s mother eaten.
Call turned to Tamara. “What was that?”
Her eyes sparkled. “What do you mean? He did a great job!”
“He could have been killed!” Call hissed at her, stopping himself from adding that her mom could probably have been killed, too. Aaron was on his feet now, pushing his way through the crowd toward them. He wasn’t making very fast progress, since everyone seemed to want to move closer to touch him and congratulate him and pat him on the back.
Tamara scoffed. “It was just a party trick, Call. All the other mages were standing by. They would have interfered if anything had gone wrong.”
Call could taste coppery anger in the back of his throat. He knew, and Tamara knew, too, that mages weren’t infallible. They didn’t always interfere to stop things in time. No one had interfered to stop Constantine Madden when he’d pushed his chaos magic so far that it had killed his brother and nearly destroyed the Magisterium. He’d been so injured and scarred by what had happened that he’d always worn a silver mask afterward, to cover his face.
He must have hated how he looked.
Call put up his hand to touch the uninjured skin of his own face just as Aaron got to them, flushed and wild-eyed. “Can we go sit down somewhere?” he said, quietly enough for his words not to reach the crowd. “I need to catch my breath.”
“Sure.” Call scrambled to position himself a little in front of Aaron as he leaned down to Havoc. “Pull me over to the fountain,” he told the wolf in a whisper, and Havoc yanked him forward. The crowd parted hastily to let Havoc by, and Call, Tamara, and Aaron followed in his wake. Call was aware of Alex looking after them sympathetically, though Kimiya had already turned her attention to the next mage’s trick.
Colored sparks rose in the air behind them as they rounded a hedge shaped like a shield and discovered a fountain. This one was round, made of yellow stone, and had an aged look that made Call think it must have been brought from somewhere else. Aaron sat down on the lip of it, scrubbing his hands through his wavy blond hair. “I hate my haircut,” he said.
“It looks fine,” said Call.
“You don’t really think that,” said Aaron.
“Not really,” Call said, and gave Aaron what he hoped was a supportive smile. Aaron looked worried. Maybe it hadn’t been that supportive. “You okay?”
Aaron took a deep breath. “I just —”
“Have you heard?” An adult voice floated through the air, through the leaves. It was deep and bass; Call had heard it before. “Someone broke into the Collegium last week. They tried to steal the Alkahest.”
Call and Aaron stared at each other, and then at Tamara, who had gone very still. She put her finger to her lips, quieting them.
“Someone?” replied a light, female voice. “You mean the minions of the Enemy. Who else? He means to start up the war again.”
“No broken Alkahest is going to save him once our Makar is trained and ready” came the reply.
“But if he’s able to repair it, the tragedy of Verity Torres could repeat itself,” cautioned a third voice, this one a man’s, sharp with nervousness. “Our Makar is young, like she was. We need time. The Alkahest is too powerful for us to take an attempt to steal it lightly.”
“They’re moving it to a more defensible location.” The woman’s voice again. “They were fools to keep it on display in the first place.”
“Until we’re sure it’s secure, the safety of our Makar must be our highest priority,” the first speaker said.
Aaron had gone still where he sat, the burbling water of the fountain loud in Call’s ears.
“I thought having a Makar around was supposed to make us safer,” said the nervous voice. “If we’re busy guarding him, who’s guarding us?”
Call stood up, struck by the thought that they were about a second away from overhearing one of the mages say something bad about Aaron. Something even worse than just speculating about the Enemy’s plans for killing him.
Call wished he could tell Aaron that he was pretty sure the Enemy of Death hadn’t tried to steal the Alkahest — whatever that was — and also wasn’t currently planning anything worse than revenge on Jasper.
Of course, he had no idea what Master Joseph was up to. So maybe the minions of the Enemy of Death were behind the attempted theft, which was less reassuring. Master Joseph had plenty of power on his own. He’d been managing without Constantine Madden for thirteen years, however much he said he needed Call.
“Come on,” Tamara said loudly, grabbing Aaron’s arm and hauling him to his feet. She must have been thinking along the same lines as Call. “I’m starving. Let’s go get something to eat.”
“Sure,” Aaron said, although Call could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Nonetheless, he followed Call and Tamara to the buffet table and watched while Call piled three plates with towers of shrimp and scallops, sausages and cheese.
People kept coming up to Aaron, congratulating him on his control of the chaos elementals, wanting to invite him to things or tell him a story about their involvement in the last war. Aaron was polite, nodding along with even the dullest anecdotes.
Call made Tamara a cheese plate, mostly because he was sure that Evil Overlords didn’t make other people cheese plates. Evil Overlords didn’t care if their friends were hungry.
Tamara took the cheese plate, shrugged, and ate a dried apricot off it. “This is so boring,” she whispered. “I can’t believe Aaron isn’t dead from boredom.”
“We have to do something,” Call said, throwing a breaded shrimp up into the air and catching it in his mouth. “People like Aaron act all nice until suddenly they explode and banish some annoying geezer into the void.”
“That’s not true,” Tamara said, rolling her eyes. “You might do that, but Aaron wouldn’t.”