“I am terrible at this,” I said as Nico took the pistol from my hands.
“You hit that one,” he said, pointing at the can lying in the grass.
All around us, thepop pop popof gunfire was going off, muffled by the earplugs I wore. I was about to tell him to be honest and tell me how bad I actually looked, but from the corner of my eye, I saw Sinthy strolling through the grass toward us.
Nico held his arm up and shouted for the shooting to stop. Sinthy was grinning and looking very proud of herself.
“Okay, what’s this surprise you’ve got for us?” Nico asked.
Sinthy clasped her hands together and bounced on her toes. “Oh, you’re gonna love it. First, I need you all to put the guns back in the cases—can’t be too careful.”
Nico sighed and frowned. “Sinthy, this is the whole point of the exercise. How are we gonna teach people to use the weapons if we aren’t holding them?”
She pulled a piece of paper out and waved it around. “I’m telling you that I’ve got it. This took me, like, a week to create. You’ll see in a second.”
For the next fifteen minutes, Sinthy went about whatever strange ritual she’d written. She spent time with everyone in attendance, placing a hand on them and muttering strange words she read off the paper. After touching each of us, she went around the entire field, stopping every few feet to either draw a weird symbol in the air or mutter some more. The language was like nothing I’d ever heard before. Even though it looked like she hadn’t done much, when Sinthy walked back to us, she lookedutterly depleted. Her face was pale, and sweat ran down her cheeks.
“Okay,” she said with a heavy breath. “All done.”
“Are you okay? You look like hell,” Felipe muttered to her.
She waved him off. “This was some intense stuff. Weaving a spell as complex as this takes a lot out of me. It’s hard to explain. Are you guys ready?”
The twenty or so people, including me, shrugged. We weren’t sure what was about to happen. Nico looked more impatient with each passing second.
Sinthy sat down cross-legged and said, “In a second, you guys are gonna have a battle to fight. You’ll be safe, nothing can hurt you, and the weapons you hold will feel real, but they are also totally safe. You’ll probably have about forty minutes, maybe thirty if I get really tired.”
“What weapons?” Nico asked. “You made us put the weapons away.”
Sinthy rolled her eyes. “Men. No imagination at all. You’ll see soon. I won’t be able to talk. I’ll be concentrating on keeping the mirage together. Otherwise, it’ll flutter away like dandelion seeds. Ready?”
“Uh…” Nico looked at me for some kind of help, but all I could do was shrug.
“I guess so, sure,” Nico finally said.
Sinthy closed her eyes and began muttering in her strange language again. A few seconds later, she went quiet and opened her eyes again. I gasped. Instead of the pretty blue, I was used to, her eyes were totally white. No iris, no cornea, not even any thin red blood vessels. Pure white.
A weird crackle, similar to static electricity, filled the entire field. The feeling tickled down my arms. Some of the others cried out in surprise as they felt it. There was a half second where I worried that Sinthy had done something wrong. That feelingvanished when a heavy weight appeared in my hand. Blinking in surprise, I looked down and saw my fingers curled around the butt of a pistol.
“What the hell?” Nico said. He was holding an assault rifle.
I looked behind me at the gun cases and was shocked to see that all the weapons were still safely tucked away. Everyone had a weapon. Luis even pointed his shotgun to the sky and pulled his trigger experimentally. The earth-shatteringboommade me jump. It sounded exactly like a real gun. When he turned the gun toward the grass and fired, the sound exploded again, but the ground and grass were untouched.
“This is insane,” Luis said, his eyes so wide they might have fallen out of his skull.
“She wasn’t lying about realism,” Nico muttered as he inspected the rifle in his hands.
From the forest at the edge of the clearing, a shout echoed across the field.
“Filthy fucking shifters.”
As one, twenty heads turned toward the sound. Fear jolted through me. Had the anti-shifters somehow gotten through the defenses? Had Sinthy used too much of her power to create the guns, and that had decreased the efficacy of the wards? Could that be it?
As if in answer, three gun-toting men stepped out of the trees and sprinted toward us. There were some shouts of surprise and shock from the pack. One man stopped running and raised his gun, aiming directly at us. Without hesitation, Nico lifted his rifle and fired. Two bullets slammed into the guy’s chest. His arms and head went flying backward as his body tumbled away. An instant before the intruder hit the ground, he vanished in a small puff of what looked like smoke or steam.
“Holy shit,” Nico muttered, then turned and shouted. “They aren’t real. It’s part of the spell. This is what Sinthy created. Everyone defend yourselves.”
As though spurred on by his words, another ten people came running from the forest toward us. I watched them begin to get taken down, each one getting shot and then vanishing. Even though I understood that they weren’t real people, the effect was so uncanny that I was unable to push away my fear. The intruders were all screaming out how much they hated us and wanted us to die. I couldn’t tell myself I wasn’treallyin danger.
