Page 134 of Serpent and Shadow

“Come on,” he said impatiently to the others. His eyes never leaving my hands where they poised to cast. “What are we messing about for? Grab her! We need to get her somewhere out of sight, before we’re seen––”

Something about him saying it aloud, exactly what they intended, snapped my mind completely awake.

I couldn’t just hold them off.

No one was coming.

I had to put them down.

“Andham kartum,” I hissed, making the first mudra and aiming it at Christian.

He wasn’t expecting it, and it hit him square in the face. I saw his eyes go completely white, and knew the spell worked. I didn’t wait, but threw a second spell at Pants, who’d followed eagerly right behind him.

“Nihil nisi aerem!” I twisted my hand into a new mudra.“Incinerous Luciferus!”

Pants stumbled from the anti-gravity spell, then got blown back from the wind spell. He crashed right into Scar, who’d just raised his hand to counter my second spell.

Christian, who put out his hands as soon as the blindness spell kicked in, stumbled forward into the grass, and I leapt back. Pants fought to hold onto Mordopast’s arm, then his head, then his hair, and Mordopast grabbed for him, as well, but neither got a good grip and the wind was too strong as the anti-gravity spell pulled him up off the ground and floated him rapidly sideways as he rose.

In a matter of seconds, he was too high to reach.

I aimed my next spell at scar, twisting each hand in a separate mudra.

“Vermis agni!” I hissed, sending fiery snakes in his direction.

Unfortunately, Scar was significantly faster than Christian had been, or Pants.

He cast a rapid shield, and tried to boomerang the spell back at me. I managed to block him with the same, and sent the spell at Norrick, who snarled curses at me when the spell wrapped around his leg, and caught some of the nearby grasses on fire.

“BITCH!” he screamed.

I turned back towards Scar in time to see him casting at Pants.

“Gravior aeris!” he hissed, performing a quick mudra.

Pants began to plummet towards the ground.

Without missing a beat, Scar aimed his next spell and mudra at Christian. It already left his hand and lips by the time Pants crashed back down to the long grass with a thick grunt.

“Omnia dissolvere!” Scar hissed.

He didn’t take his eyes off me, reinforcing the shield he held between me and him as he called over his shoulder. “Pants! Get your ass back here! Now!” He glared briefly down at Christian. “You too. We can’t take her on one by one.”

I aimed my next few spells at Scar, but his shield was strong, and it held.

All of us had shields in front of us now.

I cursed myself silently for not going after Scar first.

Bones’s words echoed inside my head even as I thought it. Not Bones in the present, unfortunately, but a memory of us talking about this exact thing.

“You need to stop thinking like a gods-damned human,” he’d snapped, in the middle of a trained duel he’d arranged between me and two other Magicals. “Don’t bother with the biggest, or the one threatening you the loudest. You’re a witch. Act like it.”

He’d waited for me to take his advice.

When I hadn’t, at least not the way he’d wanted, he’d scowled.

“For fuck’s sake, look at their auras, Shadow! Use your seeing arts… and your head. You need to overcompensate when you’re outnumbered.. If you’ve got more than one Magical after you, your goal is, first and foremost, to survive. Hit them with whatever you have. Stop them. Only once it’s safe, only once they’re really down, can you even think about running.”