“Did the message from the Resistance say when this attack was supposed to take place?”
“No.” Iannis scowled. “They were not quite that helpful.” His gaze turned back toward the bridge. “I can tell that magic was used here recently – the protective wards that are normally active around the bridge have been deactivated. I’ll need to cast a spell to determine what was else was done.”
“No need,” I told him, lifting my nose to scent the air. I peeled back my upper lip so I could make full use of the scent gland hidden beneath there – my olfactory senses were ten times stronger as a panther. “I can already tell where the source is coming from.”
Without waiting for an answer, I raced up the walkway, following the strange scent that I’d caught from the moment I’d arrived at the bridge – a combination of magic and sulfur. The scent grew stronger as I approached the first of the two red towers from which the bridge was suspended, and my senses told me that whatever the spell was, it had been cast here.
“What is it?” the Chief Mage demanded, having followed me on his horse. “Did you find something?”
“I think it’s under the bridge.”
“Mac soith!” Iannis swore, and I blinked at the unfamiliar language, guessing it was his homeland tongue. From what I understood, Iannis was originally from Manuc, an island country on the opposite side of the sea from the East Coast. A faint whisper of a musical accent was always in his voice, but I’d never heard him speak anything other than English and Loranian before now.
“Don’t worry. I can get under there.” Nervous energy crackled through me at the idea of getting so close to the bomb, but I had no idea how much time was left before the thing went off. We couldn’t afford to wait for someone else to get here – I was going to have to take the risk.
I slid my body beneath the railing of the fence, then shimmied onto one of the beams that crisscrossed along the side of the bridge. Fear rippled through me at the sight of bundles of traxtoline fastened all across the underside of the bridge – enough to blow a huge hole that would collapse the structure, especially with the weight of cars and carriages atop it. Near the side of the bridge that I was on, a kind of device was wired to the sticks of traxtoline, and there was a timer fastened to that, ticking down, down, down. The device itself was mechanical – the magic was coming from some kind of glowing substance that fastened the traxtoline to the underside of the bridge, something that I instinctively knew would make it impossible for me to remove both the traxtoline and the device.
“Iannis,” I said, my mental voice trembling a little. “There’s a really big bomb down here. And I think it’s about to go off really soon.”
If the Chief Mage had any problem with me using his given name, he chose not to voice it now. “You need to freeze it,” he shouted from above. “That’s the only way to stop it.”
“In shifter form?” I demanded. I’d never tried to use magic in beast form before, and while I figured it should theoretically be possible, I wasn’t confident about it. I didn’t know the Words necessary to conjure enough ice to freeze both the device and the traxtoline. In this form the beast half of me tended to come more to the forefront, and it was afraid of magic. I was worried that I might lose control.
“I’ll help you,” Iannis called, and then he murmured something, something too quiet for me to hear. In the next second I gasped at a strange presence within me – the presence of another soul.
“Relax,” Iannis’s voice echoed in my mind, and I froze as I realized that somehow, he’d managed to get inside me. This was much more invasive than mind-speech, not only could I feel his concern and urgency, but I could actually feel Iannis’s essence inside me, a strange combination of icy-hot that made me shiver. “Let me guide you.”
Closing my eyes, I drew in a deep breath, then forced my muscles to relax. Iannis told me the Words of the spell, and then a hot, electric current began flowing through me – his own magic, melding with mine. The only time something similar had happened was when he’d unlocked my powers, and it was a sensation I doubted I would ever get used to.
I opened my eyes and focused in on the explosive, more confident now. Even though an onlooker would simply see a lone panther clinging to the side of the bridge, Iannis was with me, almost as if he stood right behind me, guiding me with his own hands. I unwrapped one of my limbs from the beam and stretched the pad of my front paw toward the device, and then I spoke the Words in my mind, directing my intent through them.
Frigid magic spilled out of my paw, sending ice crackling across the device. The timer jumped, and my heart stopped for a moment, paralyzed at the idea that I might have accidentally set off the device before the bundles of traxtoline had frozen. But the device didn’t go off, and the magic quickly spread, running across the length of explosives until they were completely encased in ice. The magic continued back and forth a couple of times, covering the bomb with layer upon layer of ice, and I didn’t stop until the timer had ceased to move from within the frozen block.
“Excellent job,” Iannis said. “Now we need to get rid of it.”
“Okay.” I eyed the explosives nervously. “How are we going to do that?”
There was silence for a moment. “I believe the easiest way would be to use an alchemical spell to turn the device itself into ice.”
“Wait, what? You can actually do that?”