Cass's fingers curled slightly against the brickwork beside him. His nails slid over the dried moss between the bricks without leaving a mark.
Cass struggled to focus. He could feel a persistent, faint prickling at the base of his left ear, a sign that the magic inside him had begun circulating faster toward the ends of his limbs.
"Have you ever seen snakes?" he asked. His voice was quiet, just loud enough for those in the front row to hear clearly.
The leader's gaze sharpened slightly. Snakes? Why had the kid suddenly brought that up? Was it some secret code for a spell? But no attack had hit him. Was it delayed?
Even as his mind raced, his body had already acted: first, he signaled the teammates on either side to surround Cass and attack; then he adjusted his grip on his wand, lowering its tip two inches from Cass's chest to aim at a spot in front of his feet.
Cass made his own choice before the man could finish. He pressed the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, where a contraction of the muscles produced a brief, low-frequency vibration. Air escaped between his teeth in a piercing hiss, its frequency enough to make their hair stand on end.
Before the witch hunters could react, uninvited guests appeared.
A dense mass of snakes, one after another, of different species and wildly varying sizes.
They emerged from gaps between the walls and the ground, moving toward the mouth of the alley and covering the bases of the walls and the corners of the pavement. Within seconds, there were too many to distinguish, like a broad barrier stretching between Cass and the witch hunters. They were also like shallow water rising through a narrow river valley, swiftly