The Protection of Ren Crown Read Free Page B

tight focus.
    Running the main corridor had just, very plainly, entered my “don't do it!” category. There were shortcuts throughout the library—hidden doors and windows and quicksand floors, books that sucked you in and spit you out of other books, hanging lights that switched you out of existence then switched you back on in a faraway wing, doors that folded and unfolded you from space.
    The building was full of small portals that transported people from one spot in the library to another, but the paths were dangerous, unpredictable, and unknown to me. Olivia was always reminding me not to touch anything other than the parts of the warding gallery we'd painstakingly vetted. I didn't know any shortcuts.
    But I did know there was only one exit to the building. And we were tantalizingly close to it, while being horribly far away as I watched mage after mage go down.
    Guards were fighting mages cloaked from head to toe in black, while others were being swallowed by doorways and floors, and crushed by ceiling beams left and right. Rock, clay, marble, and wood exploded from each crash. Wall trim bent down to crush and rend, and picture frames snapped their jaws. The library had clearly switched to offense and it was winning.
    Olivia and I, standing stock still and peering around the corner, had just enough defensive protection with her bracelet and my cloak, to remain out of the library's immediate notice.
    We had seven minutes to figure this out—probably six, now. And maybe the library wouldn't remember me when my time ticked out. We could try to wait out the attack...spend my remaining six minutes devising a plan. Between us, Olivia and I would think of something in six minutes.
    A cloaked mage threw something small and silver at a statue in the middle of the large atrium. Even a hundred yards from the atrium, the explosion knocked us off our feet.
    And the library... screamed .
    “Holy— Run!” Olivia shrieked, scrambling up.
    Marbled hands thrust out from every wall, one punching straight for Olivia. I launched myself at her. Stone fingers tore my cloak straight off my frame as Olivia and I fell hard to the floor. We grappled with each other, elbows flailing everywhere, as we stumbled to our feet and lurched forward.
    My last look at the atrium was of everyone— guards, terrorists, patrons—being swallowed by toothed arches and marble tiles.
    We skidded down the main hall—away from the atrium, away from the exit —surfing the rumbling floors and dodging falling objects. Olivia slammed me into a wall, saving me from a chandelier hammering into the floor. I wiped the blood from my mouth, then tackled her just as draperies snapped out to behead her.
    We scrambled to our feet again, sliding sideways as the marble buckled. A mage in black, racing toward us, shattered into a thousand clay-like pieces as he was violently crushed by hammering ceiling tiles.
    We had to get out of here.
    “We have to hide!” Olivia yelled amid the nightmare as we avoided the next crushing blow aimed our way. As if we could hide from something that we were already within.
    Another tile crushed downward in a hammered fist and we threw ourselves against the wall, narrowly missing death. But the walls were no safer than anyplace else in the locked belly of the beast.
    Locked? Wild thoughts bloomed. I grabbed the pencil in my back pocket.
    “Shield!” I screeched as the library attacked. “Last stand! Last stand!”
    Olivia threw a shield over us with everything she had left. The reverberation from the library's strike was deafening. We'd withstand two, maybe three more strikes, and that would be it.
    “Door,” I said, already drawing on the wall with one hand as I frantically reached over to fish my lock picks out of Olivia's bag with the other.
    If only I had paint. But I didn't and I had zero time to cry about it. I had only the time to enact my burst of a plan.
    I got the picks free and ducked instinctively as rocks burst against