It was steel. An old, battered chunk of debris on which someone had carved a name. Which name, Julius couldn’t tell. The letters had all been clawed out, and above them, squeezed in along the metal’s edge, Raven’s name had been written in shaky talon marks.
“You stole it,” the DFZ whispered.
“I can’t steal what was never yours to begin with,” Raven said as the silver light converged on his name. “Emily the Phoenix ismy creation. She belongs tome.Not to you, not to Myron, and never to Algonquin.”
The light flared as he finished, and all the silver ribbons began to flail like whips. They whistled through the air at Raven’s call, unraveling from the spiraling circles and folds they’d been so carefully arranged into, including the net of bindings that held Myron’s body down.
He was thrust from the circle like a dead fish, thrown facedown on the dirt beyond. The silver ribbons plucked Emily’s sleeping head from his hands as he fell, sucking it back into the coiled silver cocoon that was now forming at the center of the circle. Raven jumped in next, folding his wings and diving into the swirling spellwork with a loud caw. That was all Julius saw before the spinning ball of silver vanished with a flash, leaving nothing but the smell of ozone and burnt feathers.
“What just happened?”
“Raven took back his construct and left,” Marci said, holding up her arms so he could pull her to her feet. “We should, too. I’m not sure what happens to magical pressure cookers when you pull the plug, but it’s probably not—”
The ground split, opening a huge crack that ran across the floor of the Pit and all the way up one of the support beams to the skyway above.
“—good,” she finished, staring wide eyed at the destruction before turning to scramble back onto Julius’s back. “Time to bail.”
“Bail to where?” he asked frantically, helping her up. He grabbed Ghost next. The poor spirit cat was hobbling now, his glowing eyes dim as Julius placed him in Marci’s arms. “And how? I’m still not entirely sure how I got here.”
“We go out the same way we got in,” Amelia said, suddenly appearing beside them. “We burn through. First, though…”
She turned and scooped Myron’s body up under her arm like a sack of flour. “Can’t leave without our prize.”
“What about her?” Julius asked, looking over his shoulder at the DFZ, who was still sobbing on the ground.
“Nothing we can do,” Marci said. “This is her domain. We can’t take her out of it any more than we could take her out of herself. But she’s an immortal spirit. She’ll be pissed, but she’ll recover. We, on the other hand…”
“Right,” Julius said, looking around at the quaking Pit. “So do I need to find an edge or a wall or—”
“Just use your fire,” Amelia said, tossing Myron onto his back behind Marci. “I’ll do the rest.”
Julius’s throat was still raw from his fire earlier, but he did as she asked, breathing a gout of flame into the empty space in front of them. Amelia waited beside him, watching his fire go from red to orange to bright white. Then, just when Julius was starting to overheat, she reached out and grabbed his flame.
He nearly choked. She wasn’t just grabbing the fire in front of him. She’d grabbedhim, her fist clenching around the fire that burned at the heart of his magic.
Julius was still trying to wrap his brain around that when Amelia lashed out, slicing the flames through the dark like claws. It was just like what had happened when they’d cut their way in through the trash, only this time it wasn’t the air in front of them that ripped. It was everything else.
Like a spark to tinder, the false DFZ was consumed by flames. Everything burned, surrounding them in an inferno. It should have been terrifying, but Julius wasn’t afraid at all. The heat was actually comforting, because it was his. This washisfire, his magic amplified through Amelia, and when it faded, they were back in the real world, standing in the flooded Pit at the base of the DFZ’s column of trash.
Which was collapsing.
“Move!”
Amelia’s shout was still ringing in his ear when Julius rolled to the left, skidding through the shallow water just in time as the whole pillar came crashing down on top of itself.
It fell like a demolished building, the stacked cars and dumpsters and washing machines sliding apart like knocked-over wooden blocks before crashing into the water below. When everything finally clattered to a stop, all that was left was a pile of trash rising like an island from the floor of the flooded Pit, and kneeling on top of it with her head buried in her shaking hands was the DFZ.
“It’s over,” she sobbed, her voice raspy and pitiful. “You’ve broken everything. She’ll kill me now.”
“No, she won’t,” Marci said firmly, sliding off Julius’s back. “We won’t let her.”
“What can you do?” the DFZ said bitterly, lifting her head, which didn’t even look human anymore. “You can’t fight Algonquin. No one can. That’s why I did this. I had to protect myself.” She fisted her hands, which now looked more like rat claws. “Why did you stop me?”
The question was screamed at Marci, but it was Julius who answered.
“Because you were killing yourself.”
“This is none of your business,” the spirit snarled, glaring at him with beady eyes. He’d been watching her the entire time, but even Julius couldn’t say for sure when the human-looking DFZ had changed into a rat. That’s what she was now, though. A giant, angry, wounded rat, cowering in the trash.
