Chloe joined me on the line a moment later, with a beleaguered expression that annoyed me by reminding me of the similar look Mum occasionally gets when she’s been trying to make peace between me and the most recently irritated commune-dweller. At least Chloe didn’t try to persuade me that I ought to try and see things from Magnus’s side, and call forth his understanding by offering my own, et cetera. She was still trying to think of what she did want to say—I don’t know why Americans won’t just talk about the weather like reasonable people—when Mistoffeles suddenly put his head out of the little cup on her chest and emitted a few alarmed squeaks, at which point I noticed that eight kids from Shanghai enclave had casually been drifting off the lines on either side of ours and were now very-not-casually closing in around us. And one of them was already muttering away at an incantation for something unpleasant that he was about to throw in our faces.
Chloe darted a scared look over towards Aadhya and Liu—deep in the relay race and not even glancing our way—and then looked around for anyone else from New York, except Orion wasn’t anywhere to be seen, I presume too busy hunting the mals in the stairways and corridors, and of course Magnus the Magnificent had flounced off with the rest of his pals to huddle on the other side of the gym and discuss what to do about my refusal to accept their wide-armed welcome.
“A filthy soggy dishcloth,” I said, trying to vent enough of my fury to think through the situation. It wasn’t the numbers: I can handle a thousand enemies as easily as seven, as long as by handle you mean “kill in a grisly fashion.” I hadn’t any idea what to do about them otherwise. I do have a top-notch spell to seize total control over the minds of a group of people, only there isn’t a constraint on the size of the crowd: you have to cast it on a defined physical space isolated by things like walls, and then it grabs everyone in it. In this case, we were inside the gym that was holding literally every kid in the school. Also, the spell was quite vague on the aftereffects on the minds in question.
I could just have waited until the other kid threw his spell, and then caught it and thrown it back at him. It’s hard to describe how that works, and in fact it doesn’t work for most people; the first-year incantations textbook informed us firmly that you’re much better off either doing a defensive spell or trying to get your own offensive spell out before the other wizard fires off theirs. But I’m brilliant at reflecting as long as the spell being thrown at me is malicious or destructive enough, and I had a strong presentiment that wasn’t going to be a problem in this case.
And then I would have the pleasure of watching up-close while his skin flew off his body, or his intestines exploded out of his mouth or his brains dribbled out his ears or whatever horrible thing he meant to do to us, and it would just be the purest self-defense; no one would even criticize me for it. Not to my face, at any rate.
I would really have liked to be angry at them right then. I often haven’t any difficulty in contemplating extreme violence and even murder when I’m angry, and I can get angry at an enclaver at the drop of a hat. But I couldn’t be angry at them, not that way, not with that helpful burning righteous rage, because I’m really very good at knowing the right thing to do, the smart thing to do, and picking a fight to the death with a wizard who’s capable of killing with a wave of her hand isn’t it. If I was dangerous enough to warrant killing, the smart selfish enclaver thing for them to do was to keep the bloody hell away from me, as far as possible. They ought to have kept their heads down, got out safely as they were all sure to do, and then gone home to tell their parents about me. They were teenagers; they had every right to let me be the grown-ups’ problem.
Instead here they were, all of them gambling with their safe, sheltered lives—they had to assume I’d take out at least one of them, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t even have loser allies along with them to take that mortal blow. The boy in front getting ready to cast was an enclaver: his face was vaguely familiar from the language lab, round and spotty with a mustache he’d valiantly been trying to grow for the last two years. We’d never studied any of the same languages; I didn’t know his name. But Liu might: her mum and dad had worked for the enclave a few times. Their parents might know each other.
And I did know the girl backing him up, Wang Yuyan, because everyone in languages track knew her: she was doing twelve languages, which no enclave kid needed to do. Either she was ambitious or she loved languages madly or maybe she was just a tremendous masochist, I had no idea. I didn’t really know her, we’d never had a conversation or anything. But we’d been in the same Sanskrit section sophomore year, and one time I’d had a dictionary she needed—when you’re trying to get the meaning of a more obscure word, you often need to chase it down through three or four dictionaries until you end up in a language you’re fluent in—and she’d asked me to look the word up for her in a perfectly civil way, and offered to look one up for me in return.