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“I might as well. I don’t seem to be doing much otherwise. I’ve warned Merlin and Rod about a couple of things, but they’re way ahead of me. Hey, do you think anyone will write stories and songs one day about this epic fight of good against evil?”
“Not unless you feel like doing it. And it’s more like good against annoying, which is less epic.”
I hung out beside Granny while he stepped into the melee, and I soon saw how I must have looked.
He didn’t have quite the experience with magical immunity that I did, so it took him a while to stop flinching when it looked like something might hit him. Soon, though, he caught on to how protected he was, and then he started showing off with theatrical motions to supposedly deflect the magic. All those years as dungeon master had finally paid off for him. I would have bet he wished Dean hadn’t swiped his old Jedi cloak.
Rod and Granny continued to guard the exit. The terrified reactions of student wizards running back to the battle gave me the impression that Rod had cooked up some impressive illusions. Granny mostly swung her cane and shouted, and I was rather glad I couldn’t hear exactly what she was saying. I was sure they were curses of some kind, but whether they were the magical variety wasn’t quite clear in the chaos.
As absolute proof that Idris had left out a few crucial facts about magic, some of the students swarmed around Merlin. Compared to Owen’s spectacular showboating, Merlin didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. If you didn’t know he was the Merlin, you might have mistaken him for an ordinary old man and very likely our side’s weakest link. It would have been one of the dumbest mistakes you ever made.
Four of the student wizards closed in on us. “Hey, Grandpa,” one of them said. “Aren’t you going to join the fight, or are you just gonna stay here with Grandma and watch?”
“You really don’t want him to join in,” I muttered, too low for them to hear.
“I’m quite enjoying it as a spectator,” Merlin said cheerfully. “This is some of the best entertainment I’ve had in months, even better than the last movie I saw about that young Harry Potter.”
“I guess magic is one of those things that you lose with age, huh, Pops?” another one of the guys said.
I shook my head sadly. Stupid, stupid, stupid, I thought. They were such jerks that they didn’t deserve a proper warning. Merlin waved a careless hand and the whole group immediately turned into little white rabbits. Their noses twitched furiously in what had to be a panic. Granny didn’t help matters by saying, “My gran had an excellent recipe for rabbit stew. I haven’t had it in years.” She hefted her cane as if to club a couple of rabbits. The rabbits hopped away from the scary woman with the big stick, only to run into Owen’s wards, which sent them hopping back to cower and shiver in a circle.
Merlin then turned them back into humans, but they stayed right where they were, nearly catatonic with fright. After that, the rest of the student wizards stayed well away from Merlin, which allowed him to resume watching Owen.
I made my way back across the battlefield to Owen’s side. This time I had to pay more attention to where I stepped than to what was flying through the air. A number of the student wizards were on the ground, either utterly exhausted and magically spent or so bombarded by pixies that they couldn’t move. The attrition in their forces meant Owen wasn’t quite so beleaguered. Now he only had to fight off three guys at a time.
That appeared to be enough, though. It wasn’t my imagination; he really was moving more slowly now. It was completely dark, with only moon and starlight illuminating the park, along with the occasional burst of magical light, but I was sure he looked pale. Even his vast resources had to run out after a half hour or so of this kind of activity.
He sent the three attackers flying away from him with an impatient wave of his hand and paused to wipe his forehead with his sleeve as the pixies pounced. Moments later, a few more students joined the fight. These were the more determined ones who hadn’t yet been scared off or defeated. I hated that Owen had to face them now, when he was tired. Then again, I supposed they were tired, too.
I took his hand as the students surrounded us. He gave me a nod of thanks, and then our palms grew warm where they met. The extra power allowed him to dispatch those guys easily. He was no longer trying to put on a show. He was merely getting them out of his way as quickly as possible. These guys slumped to the ground, sound asleep. They didn’t even stir when the pixies picked through their pockets.
Owen released my hand. “Thanks. That helped.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m tired, but I don’t feel like I’m in any danger.”
There was a burst of light and sound from the other side of the park, where Merlin, Rod, and Granny were. It looked like the fighting had intensified over there, but I couldn’t see any of the students.
Almost all of them were out of the fight by now. Next to me, Owen tensed and took a step back toward the trees. “What is it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I don’t like it.” He threw a fireball in the air, and it exploded like a firework, lighting the whole park. “What do you see?” he asked.
A figure was walking through the park. Merlin, Granny, and Rod didn’t seem to see it at all. I could, though. It looked like Idris had finally finished his banana split and shown up. “It’s Idris,” I said.
He walked straight toward us, a smug grin on his face. “You either need to find better students, or they need better teachers,” Owen said when I nudged him to let him know that Idris was near.
“Still leaning on the girlfriend, huh, Owen?” Idris said.
“Better than tricking flunkies into doing what I can’t,” Owen replied. I took his response to mean that Idris had unveiled himself to Owen. “Give it up, why don’t you? Your army is out of it, and the power lines here aren’t strong enough for you to do much against me.”
“Under normal circumstances, maybe. But who said these are normal circumstances?” Idris tugged on a leather thong around his neck and pulled out the necklace Nita had noticed in her photograph. At our look of surprise, he said, “What? You thought I hadn’t already made one for myself?”
I should have anticipated he’d do something like that. Of course Idris would have made one for himself first and kept it on, but I wasn’t sure what we could have done about it, short of having Teddy strip him of anything that looked suspicious while Ramesh covered him with his shotgun and Nita held her baseball bat over his head. I hadn’t even known that there were magical magnifiers back when I first saw that photo of Idris, though that did explain how he’d been able to teleport. I supposed we could have had a contingency plan in place, but that was all twenty-twenty hindsight when a fresh Idris faced us, wearing that necklace, and Owen was so visibly exhausted.
I grabbed Owen’s hand and nodded to him. It was just in time as Idris sent a wave of power at us that gave me goose bumps. Our joined hands went white-hot as Owen deflected it, and while Idris had to react to his own spell coming back to him, Owen took a step back, even closer to the trees around the creek bed. I had a feeling he was either getting closer to our allies, or he was getting closer to one of those necklaces.
A wall of magical fire rushed at us, and Owen doused it. Having him draw power from me had been pleasant—even kind of sexy—before, but this bordered on painful, the difference between a nice, hot bath and a tub of scalding water. I also felt the drain of energy. I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.
