Screams followed.
As if it hadn’t quite died. As if it was still squirming away down there, squeezing people to death. Or sliding over them, leaving a trail of burning acid. While they quite obviously tried to fight. Great gouts of rainbow-streaked flames flew up from between those hedges. In fact, great gouts of rainbow-streaked flames flew up from just about everywhere.
One of them hit a shield someone made out of thin air, two lanes over from them, and then careened so close they both ducked. They watched it paint the sky purple behind them, breaths held.
And all of it was only half visible to them.
Only something they could guess at.
Because everybody was on the ground.
“Why don’t they try to escape each other up here, too?” she found herself asking. Faintly, almost like she was talking to herself.
But Anaya answered all the same. “I don’t really know. I think maybe... maybe it’s not that easy to. Honestly, I don’t even know how I managed. It was like one second I was on the ground. And the next I was up here. With absolutely no explanation as to how. Or how I managed to get you up, either.”
“Maybe you used some kind of teleportation magic.”
“But all these experts can’t? That seems really unlikely.”
“You could be a prodigy.”
“It was hard enough lighting this to see my way, once I was up.”
Anaya held it aloft as she spoke. That faint blue-tinged ball oflight, incredible to Mina in more ways than she could count. But she had to concede the point. “So maybe one of them hit you by accident. Like a blowback from something they only intended for themselves. I mean, look at this mess,” she said, pointing to something they could more clearly see. Someone had turned themselves into a giant spider for some reason, and the person behind them now had a pincer where a hand should be.
“Well, whatever did it, we probably shouldn’t waste it,” Anaya said in the middle of trying to calm her frightened breathing. “We could get pretty far, pretty safely like this. Enough to not get expelled, anyway. And seeing all of this, being not expelled is pretty much all I’m going for.”
“Same. I mean, god, can you imagine what the third-year advance classes are like?” Her new friend shuddered, as if picturing it.
And Mina had a good idea what it was she had in her head.
“You probably step into one and find Cthulhu waiting for you.”
“Or else some asshole just murders you immediately for daring to turn up.”
“You mean like the asshole who was staring at you in the entrance hall?” Anaya asked, and when she did, Mina felt those liquid eyes on the side of her face. Staring through the darkness, waiting for an answer.
Though when she dared to look back, the expression she found was not unkind. It was something else, something softer, something that made her want to confess what had happened in the hall of headmasters. That coldness, that feeling that he might do something very bad indeed.
She had to force herself to keep it light. “That wasn’t anything,” she said, but Anaya didn’t back down.
“It was enough that other people noticed. I heard a bunch ofstudents wondering if he found you so fascinating because you were secretly something other than human.”
“I don’t even know what something else I could be.”
“A succubus, they guessed. Come to suck out his soul.”
“That’s insane. That isn’t a thing. I’m as human as anybody.”
“You don’t have to convince me. Your hand is the hottest, sweatiest thing I’ve ever held. If anything, I’m worried you’retooalive,” Anaya said, kindly enough that Mina couldn’t help laughing. Even with the thought of him in her head and all this going on, she laughed.
And got a laugh back.
Half hysterical, like her own.
But it was there. It was enough.
“Feel calm and strong enough to go for a little bit farther?” she asked.
