An ear-splitting alarm erupted through the room.

“—Quentin’s,” I finished, the shrill blare drowning me out.

Something hit the interrogation room door so hard the bang was audible over the alarm. Lienna leaped out of her chair. I launched up too, but chained to the table, I had nowhere to go.

Another thump, more powerful this time. The door shook. Lienna reached inside the hemp satchel she carried over her shoulder.

The door exploded and a fireball hurled toward my face.

Chapter Two

You might think that when a fireball comes blazing toward your skull, your life would flash before your eyes. Mine didn’t. And I was super okay with that. Now wasn’t the time to relive my somber existence.

An instant before the fireball incinerated my face, Lienna’s voice rang out and a bright blue barrier radiated across the room. The fiery orb of death burst against it, spraying liquid flames in every direction.

Lienna clutched a wooden Rubik’s Cube, which glowed with the same blue light as the barrier that had saved my ass. And my face.

Through the mangled doorway lumbered a Dwayne-Johnson-sized Neanderthal. He had to turn sideways to fit his massive shoulders—shoulders crawling with fire—through the frame. He looked less like the Human Torch and more like fiery lava was snaking down his arms. Thick liquid dripped off his fingers and hit the floor, where it ate into the dusty linoleum.

Interesting. A fire mage? That was my best guess.

He stalked into the room, accompanied by a leaping inferno and ribbons of smoking lava. Mindless fury twisted his face.

Lienna lowered her cube, and the blue wall of safety disappeared. My first reaction was that this seemed like an inherently stupid thing to do, but before I could relay my feedback, she pulled a marble from her satchel, shouted an incantation I couldn’t hear over the screaming alarm, and flung it at the intruder.

The small sphere struck the man with a dull pulse. His fiery veins shrank and went out with a pitiful sizzle, then his entire body relaxed as though someone had shot him full of horse tranquilizer. He staggered back, bumped into the wall, and slid limply to the floor. Lienna retrieved a fresh pair of cuffs from her satchel and fastened them around his wrists.

The whole thing, from exploding door to unconscious mage, had taken ten seconds, adding more weight to the wilder rumors about Lienna’s mastery of abjuration. The lady was good.

Without a victory dance or even a fist pump, she picked up the marble, then pulled a set of keys from her satchel, which was beginning to seem like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. Did she have a coat rack in there too?

“I’ve never seen a pyromage do that before,” I remarked.

“Volcanomage,” Lienna corrected as she jammed a key into the lock that bound my cuffs to the table and popped it open. “Follow me.”

“Hold up a sec! We’re not going out there, are we?”

The prospect of rushing out into whatever acrimonious chaos was ravaging the precinct didn’t thrill me. If I was right about the involvement of my former pal and fellow inmate Quentin, he was flooding the entire precinct with contagious rage that would only keep building. That’s what empaths did: they made people feel all the feels. In this case, all the “incoherent fury” feels.

Meaning Vesuvius the Lava Wizard was the first of many, many magical dangers outside the interrogation room.

Lienna turned toward the door. “We are.”

I waved my handcuffed wrists at her back. “Can you at least unlock me first?”

“No.”

Angry heat rose from my chest and into my head, but I stuffed it back down. Quentin’s emotional manipulation magnified even the slightest irritation. If it was this bad here, how ragey were all the nasty criminals in lockup?

Lienna pinched one of her necklaces, a chain with a cat’s eye dangling at the end. Between bleats of the relentless alarm, she declared, “Ori menti defendo.”

That nonsense word was an incantation for a sorcery artifact, and in response to the trigger word, the cat’s eye pendant glowed. The tension in her shoulders loosened, and as the tight lines of anger around her full lips softened, she offered me the first smile I’d seen yet. It was small and brief, but hey, it was a smile.

“Stay behind me. You’ll be fine.” Then she stepped out into the hallway.

To follow or not to follow, that was the question. Cowering in an unlocked room without the protection of this sorceress was far less appealing than whatever chaos awaited us, so I accompanied her out the door.

A nightmarish barrage of sounds assaulted my ears. Over the alarm, there were people screaming, footsteps pounding, metal clanging, and stuff breaking. To my right, the wide corridor ended in a set of nice, normal double doors. To my left, the hall bent around a sharp corner, beyond which was the epicenter of hell—billowing smoke, the orange glow of flames, bright flashes of magic.

Lienna strode to the left, Rubik’s Cube in hand. Fighting every instinct I possessed, I crept quietly behind her. She crouched, peeked around the corner, then tucked back behind the protective wall.

“Are the soles of your shoes made of rubber?” she yelled over the alarm as she spun the Rubik’s Cube, rearranging the runes that marked each square.

I looked down at the prison-issued tennis shoes I’d been handed on my arrival. “I have no idea. Why?”

A sizzling bolt of lightning leaped out of the billowing smoke and struck the fluorescent light overhead. The plastic casing shattered, raining debris on us.

“Electramage,” Lienna revealed brusquely. She poked her head around the corner again. “Let’s go.”

“Whoa there!” I yelled like the worst cowboy of all time, desperately grabbing for her jacket. I caught the hem and yanked her back.

She shrugged me off. “What?”

“I can’t go running out there like this!”

“What do you want me to do?”

My anger flared again, and I used my cuffed hands to point at her Rubik’s Cube. “Share the wealth. Load me up. Magicify me!”

Another arc of lightning lit up the hallway and left a smoking hole in the wall across from us.

“At least give me something that’ll protect me from Zeus!” I pointed at the cube again. “You can make different spells with that, right? It’s got like forty quintillion possible combinations, so there must be one that’ll make me immune to all this shit.”

“Easier said than done,” she snapped.

“Come on, Agent Shen. I’m defenseless here.”

Jaw tight, she looked at the Rubik’s Cube. “Give me a minute.”

“I’m not sure we have a minute.”

But she wasn’t listening. She twisted and spun the cube, muttering words I could barely make out over the alarm.

“Water—where’s water?” Blrrring! “Psychica …” Blrrring! “No, not elemental shiel—” Blrrring! “Where’s … right!”

The deep whooshing sound of a flamethrower, accompanied by a painfully bright orange glow, cascaded down the hall. A Wilhelm scream pierced the cacophony.

Lienna spun the cube once more, then thunked it against my chest. The alarm drowned out half her shouted incantation, and a pale glow washed over the cube.