Page 44 of The Tree of Spirits (Paragons #2)

The Templar that Conner had incapacitated, the one with the smoky voice, was on his feet again too. He hit the boys with a wave of vertigo. They fell to their knees, their movements jagged with dizziness.

The third Templar grabbed the Knights. First, she slammed Conner into a picnic table, so hard that the wood split down the middle.

Then she heaved Kato over her head and hurled him at the barbecue pit.

Kato’s hard armor bounced off the roof over the pit, and he slid down one side of the angled metal shingles.

I pushed off the bench where I was sitting, staggering to my feet.

Thankfully, I’d already regained some of my strength, so I didn’t topple over.

I started humming as I ran. Branches rose from the ground, weaving themselves together to form a shield—with me and the Knights and the Apprentices on one side, and the three Templars on the other.

“Everyone still in one piece?” I asked them.

Behind us, Kylie and Asher were tied up in a bunch of vines close to the Spirit Tree, but I couldn’t do anything about that right now. I was barely holding my shield together.

“Fine,” Conner said, standing.

“Mostly.” Kato’s armor made an excruciating screech of protest when he rose from the ground.

“That doesn’t sound good.” Conner examined the armor. “It’s damaged.”

Kato stretched out his arms. “Don’t worry. My armor will survive the battle.”

The three Templars hit my shield with a combined magic blast that totally shredded it.

“I’m too weak,” I sighed as broken branches rained down on us.

“You’re not weak, Seven. They are too strong in those suits,” said Kato. “We need to even the odds.” He clapped his hands, and three mystical-looking handheld mirrors appeared.

“The Mirror of Woe,” I said as he handed one to each of us.

“Mirror of Woe?” Conner’s tone sounded amused.

“One of Altair’s creations,” Kato told him. “I asked him to make more of them after the original proved so effective at knocking the armor off the Techno Knight at the Tournament.”

I gripped the silver handle in my hand. The cozy scene in the stained glass mirror rippled, the artwork changing to display a pretty accurate depiction of the shorter of the two male Templars. I thrust the mirror forward, toward him.

There was a loud, crunching sound, then a chunk of his leg armor dropped to the ground, splashing into a puddle. More pieces of armor fell from his body, each one dented and twisted, like a giant had ripped them off and then stomped on them.

Beside me, Kato and Conner were using their mirrors to pluck the armor off the other Templars, piece by piece.

“Well, that’s one way to do it,” Conner said as he watched what remained of the techno suits spark and sizzle—before all the lights finally went out. “Though I have to say, defeating them like this is pretty unsatisfying.”

“I am not defeated,” the female Templar said as she shed her battered armor like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.

The other two Templars still lay on the ground.

Beneath her armor, the female Templar wore a black fabric suit from head to toe, with tiny slits for her eyes, like a ninja. “I don’t need a fancy suit to defeat you.”

Then she planted her feet wide, shifted into an enormous bear, and threw back her head, roaring. She pounded her furry fists together, and flames burst up on them.

“She’s a Polymage,” Conner gasped as we all ducked the fireball. “Even without the armor.”

“Didn’t you say we were the only Polymages in the Many Realms?” I asked the boys.

“I thought so.” Kato sounded pretty shocked.

The Templar waved her arms, using telekinesis to create a tornado of broken branches in front of us.

“Well, this isn’t good,” I commented.

The tornado was headed right for us. Conner grabbed our hands just in time, taking us just far enough out of this dimension that the branches went right through us. Then Kato’s spell dissolved them to dust.

The other two Templars were on their feet again, staggering under the weight of their warped, lopsided armor. They tossed aside their broken helmets, and they weren’t wearing ninja hoods underneath. I could see their faces.

“Do you recognize them?” I asked the boys.

“Yes,” said Kato. “They’re both notorious mercenaries. That one is a Dreamweaver named Starling.” He pointed at the man with a scar that bisected his face. “And he’s Harlyn, a Metamorph.”

“So they’re not Polymages like the other Templar?”

“No,” Conner said, putting up an energy shield to block the picnic bench Harlyn had tossed at us.

Meanwhile, the female Templar was chanting. A burst of bright purple energy exploded out of her.

“A psychic blast,” Conner said.

Kato tackled us to the ground, out of the spell’s path. The purple wave shot past us, toward the Spirit Tree, where the Apprentices had just managed to wrestle free of their restraints.

“Asher!” Kylie screamed as the psychic blast flashed toward him. She jumped into its path.

The blast hit Kylie with a boom! , slamming her to the ground. The spell was so powerful, however, that even that didn’t stop it. It kept going, though it was a duller purple now. Kylie must have taken most of the damage.

“Kylie!” Asher shouted back to her as the spell knocked him into the Spirit Tree’s open trunk. He disappeared in an instant, transported to some other realm.

The tree stopped glowing, and darkness returned to the picnic area.

“The gateway is closed,” Kato said.

I hardly heard him. I was running toward Kylie. She lay on the ground, motionless.

“Kylie?” I shook her gently, and then, when she didn’t wake up, harder. “Kylie!”

I felt for her pulse, but I didn’t find one.

“She has no pulse!” I shouted to the boys. “And she’s not breathing!”

Conner hurried over to us.

“You can save her, right?” I asked as his glowing hands waved over her. “You healed Marlow! You can heal Kylie too!”

“Red…” His hands stopped glowing.

“What are you doing?” I demanded, grabbing his hands, shaking them, trying to make them start glowing again. “Save her! Please!”

“It’s too late.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t bring people back from the dead.”

Dead .

The word grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.

Dead.

Kylie was dead.

And that Polymage Templar had killed her.

I rose from the ground, my hot anger hardening into cold fury as I faced the fiend who’d killed my friend. I was going to make her pay for this.

“Guys, we have a problem.”

I hardly heard Kato through my rage.

“What are they doing here?”

Conner’s voice was just as distant, just as unreal. The only real thing was the evil Templar in front of me.

“Snap out of it, Seven!”

I pivoted toward Kato, annoyed and angry, but the growl died on my lips when I saw them. Someone in a long, brown robe marched into the picnic area, closely followed by four Techno Knights. It had stopped raining. Moonlight shone down on their black armor, lighting them up with a silver halo.

“The Brotherhood of Earth?” I frowned, my anger fading to confusion.

“Stand aside,” the cloaked figure told us. “We are not here for you. We are here for them.” She pointed at the Templars.

“How did you know they were here?” I asked.

“We followed you, knowing you would lead us to them .”

I squinted at her. “Who are you?”

“The leader of the Brotherhood,” she replied.

I knew that voice. Somehow, I knew it.

“Good to see you again, Savannah.” She pushed the hood off of her head.

“Elandra?”

The leader of the Brotherhood, the biggest magic-hating organization on the planet, was Kylie’s mother?