“NOW,” Tristan said, more desperately than he had hoped to sound, and Libby, thank bloody fuck, threw up a hand in time to stop whatever was coming towards them. The medeian’s eyes widened, obviously startled at the prospect of being overpowered, while Libby advanced towards him, shoving the force of the medeian’s own expulsion backwards.
The medeian wasn’t going down without a fight; he tried again, and this time Libby’s response was like a bolt of lightning, snapping the medeian’s control with a lash of something around his wrists. Tristan heard a cry of pain, and then a mutter of something under his breath; some basic obscenity, Tristan suspected, though his Mandarin was rusty.
“Who sent you?” Libby demanded, but the medeian had scrambled to his feet. Tristan, concerned the medeian might conjure more illusions as a defense, leapt forward, taking hold of Libby’s arm again and raising it.
“Which one?” Libby gasped. “He split.”
“That one, there, by the window—”
“He’s multiplying!”
“Just hold steady, I have him—”
This time, as Tristan locked Libby’s palm on the trajectory of the medeian’s escape, he caught a glimpse of something; evidence of magic that hadn’t been clear from afar. It was a little glittering chain, delicate like jewelry, that abruptly snapped.
In that precise moment the medeian turned his head, eyes widening in anguish. It had been a linking charm, but it was gone now.
“He had a partner but he doesn’t anymore,” Tristan translated in Libby’s ear.
She tensed. “Does that mean—”
“It means kill him before he gets away!”
He felt the impact leave her body from where his fingers had curled around her wrists. He could feel the entire force of it pumping through her veins and marveled, silently, at being so close to what felt like live ammunition. She was a human bomb; she could split the room, the air itself, into tiny, indistinguishable （except to Tristan） atoms. If Adrian Caine had ever met Libby Rhodes, he wouldn’t have hesitated to buy her somehow; he’d have offered her the biggest cut, given her the highest privilege of his little witchy cult. He was like that, Tristan’s father; male, female, race, class, it didn’t matter. Optics were nothing. Usefulness was paramount. Destruction was Adrian Caine’s god.
Tristan turned his head away from the explosion, though the heat of the blast was enough to sting his cheek. Libby faltered, struggling for a moment from the effort, and he locked an arm around her waist, half-dragging, half-carrying her from the room.
He kept moving until he saw Parisa, who emerged from one of the lower floors onto the landing of the stairwell, white-faced. Callum was at her side.
“There you are,” said Parisa dully, sounding like she’d seen a ghost.
“What happened?” Tristan asked them, setting Libby back on her feet. She looked a little woozy, but nodded to him for release, disentangling herself from his grip.
“I’m fine,” she said, though she remained braced for another attack, shoulders still tense.
“Just ran into another medeian downstairs,” Callum said. “Some spy organization from Beijing. A combat specialist.”
Tristan blinked with recognition. “Did the medeian have a partner?”
“Yes, an ill-”
“An illusionist,” Tristan confirmed, exchanging a knowing glance with Libby. “We got him. How did you know they were spies?”
“Aside from the obvious? She told me,” said Callum. “It was just her and the partner who were magical, everyone else was mortal.”
A distraction, probably, while only one of the medeians broke in.
Libby was testing her joints, still glancing around in paranoia. “She told you there was no one else? She could have easily been lying.”
“She wasn’t,” Callum said.
“How do you know?” Libby pressed, suspicious. “She could’ve just—”
“Because I asked nicely,” Callum said.
Parisa would have known—or could have, assuming the medeian hadn’t been using any mental defensive shields—but she, Tristan noticed, hadn’t said a word on the subject.
“You okay?” Tristan asked her, and she shuddered to cognizance, glancing up at him with a look of temporary displacement.
“Yeah. Fine.” She cleared her throat. “As far as I can tell, the house is empty now.”
“Was it just one group?”
Parisa shook her head. “Whoever Nico and Reina took out, they were a group, then the partners we took out, and someone else who was working alone.”