But then, of course, he’d been blindsided by a pack of what appeared to be spies with guns, and he was now having to rely on said annoying girl much more heavily than he cared to admit.
“Get down,” Libby snapped as another gun fired, this time from somewhere behind them. It was, at least, a refreshing change of pace from her usual apprehensive mumbling. If there was one thing to be relieved about given all this, it was that Libby Rhodes was far more capable than she looked.
Tristan was beginning to regret not befriending any of the three physical specialties. Nico would have been ideal, given that he seemed to be a powerhouse of energy. The magic radiating from him was more refined than any Tristan had ever seen, and he’d seen quite a lot in his capacity as an investment analyst. He’d met with medeians claiming to power entire plants with the equivalent of nuclear energy who didn’t have the raw talent Nico had, and who certainly didn’t have his control. It occurred to Tristan, unhappily, that Libby and Nico may have come off as the least threatening for being the youngest and least experienced, but he suddenly doubted they were as juvenile as they seemed. He wished now that he hadn’t drawn a line between him and the others, because he doubted it would be easy to un-draw.
It was all an unpleasant reminder that Tristan’s father, a witch capable of moderate levels of physical magic, had always considered Tristan a failure. From the start, Tristan had been slow to show any signs of magic, barely able to qualify for medeian status when he reached his teenage years. An unsurprising outcome, considering they had spent so many years before that concerned he wasn’t even a witch.
Was that why he’d chosen to do this? Atlas Blakely had told Tristan he was rare and special and therefore he’d thought yes, fine, time to drop everything I spent years tirelessly cultivating in order to prove to my estranged father that I, too, can do something wildly unsafe?
“Do you know any combat spells?” Libby panted, giving Tristan a look that suggested he was the most useless person she’d ever met. At the moment, he suspected he might have been.
“I’m… not good with physicalities,” he managed to say, ducking another shot. These men seemed to be different from the group Nico had taken on in the drawing room, but they were definitely also outfitted with automatic weapons. Tristan didn’t know prodigious amounts about the intersect of magic and tech in warfare, seeing as James Wessex had chosen to handle any matters of weapons technology himself, but he suspected these were mortals using magically enhanced scopes.
“Yes, fine,” Libby replied, clearly impatient, “but are you—”
She broke off before something he suspected to be the word useful.
Which, as Adrian Caine had always made an effort to point out, Tristan had never been.
“Just come on,” she said in frustration, pulling him after her. “Stay behind me.”
This, Tristan thought, was a mildly infuriating turn of events. For one thing, he didn’t have a lot of experience being shot at. This was supposed to be an academic fellowship, for fuck’s sake; he hadn’t expected his time in the Alexandrian archives to involve ducking behind the closest piece of gaudy furniture he could find.
He could have stayed at Wessex Corp and never been shot at in his entire life. He could have simply told Atlas Blakely to shove it and gone on holiday with his fiancée; he could be having vigorous, herculean sex right now, waking up to discuss the future of the company with his billionaire father-in-law over an expertly blended Bloody Mary. Did it matter that Eden was a tiresome adulteress or that James was a capitalist tyrant if it meant never having to break a sweat aside from a drunken family game of badminton?
At the moment, it was unclear.
Libby, at least, was starting to take some initiative with her defense, having discarded any further hesitation in favor of survival. Whoever had broken in, they were covered head to toe in black and moving acrobatically around the room, like a small pack of ninjas. That felt like a childish thing to say, but there it was: there were three or four ninja-things coming after them, and Tristan couldn’t think of the first thing to do. There was so much magic in the room it was difficult to see anything but hazy, translucent leaks.
Libby turned and aimed at something; an expulsion of power that was directed at nothing.
“You missed,” he said, a muttered I-told-you-so moment that he would have decorously avoided if not for how potentially life-threatening all this was, and she glared at him.
“I didn’t miss!”