Anna took a bracing stance and squared her shoulders. Then she took a few deep even breaths summoning her magic. Something that had never been hard. It was always there, swirling under the surface of her consciousness, looking for an opportunity to break free of her control. Now was no exception. Her power surged like a wild animal trying to bolt from her body in any haphazard way.

No! She thought at her magic, talking to it in her head as if it were a separate entity. Not like that. Not all at once. Measured. Directed. Anna was willing to swear to any being in existence that her magic really did have a mind of its own. It was something she had to coax into cooperating with her sometimes.

The room chilled, the air temperature dropping swiftly. Then the frost came. It didn’t creep as it radiated out from her feet across the floor and up the walls. Crystals of ice forming and coalescing into icicles hanging from the chairs and desks. The American flag over the blackboard became too heavy for the mount attaching it to the wall. It cracked from where it was and crackled with the tinkling of ice when it hit the floor.

Everyone trying to fight monsters had noticed when the floor suddenly slicked. Though the monsters had rubber feet, their ungainly forms led them to lose their balances as they slipped on the new surface. One of the boys turned wildly to see what was happening, something he was only able to do because of the opening the change in the battle had given him.

“Anna?” Anna recognized the voice, but she couldn’t place it. Her dark brown eyes had closed as she concentrated on reigning in the seemingly endless well of elemental power within her before it could become a raging torrent. The sounds of receding screams and other desperate battles in the adjoining classrooms faded from her hearing.

Time slowed as she lifted her hands to direct the flow of her magic.

When she opened her eyes to aim, they were no longer their normal dark brown, nearly black. Her eyes glowed an icy bluish white. Magic-touched in the use of her element like her white hair showed the world her ice affinity.

“Move.” She commanded the group of boys she now recognized as being from the football team. “Help Miss Callahan and get behind me.” They scrambled carefully to help the petrified teacher. Only one of the monstrosities she had been fighting was still after her and it was having enough trouble maintaining its footing that she had managed to flee on top of her desk and was throwing staplers, erasers, and other office supplies at it.

Miss Callahan shrieked as the tall blonde boy grabbed her from behind and hauled her away from the creature trying to eat its way through the desk she sat upon. At first, she struggled, thinking she had been attacked by something that had snuck up on her. He spoke to her soothingly as he wrestled her behind Anna and toward the door.

“It’s Liam. Miss Callahan. It’s Liam Ecclestone. We’re leaving. Come on.” She’d sagged in relief for a second until he said that they were leaving.

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“But there’s still a student.” The petite math teacher protested. “I can’t leave a student.” One small hand pointed at Anna.

“Get out of here,” Anna shouted at the teacher even as she herself was backing carefully away from the monsters who were getting used to the mechanics of moving on the icy floor. They were scrabbling frantically towards her and she didn’t like how close they were getting. “I don’t have enough control to use my magic while you are still in the room. Not for the amount I need to use for this.”

Her eyes left the immediate danger to check the progress of the herd. There were much larger creatures coming now. Sports cars and sport utility vehicles were bad enough. Dangerous in and of themselves. But there was a limo-form monster that seemed to have crossed with a centipede or a millipede and become a Lovecraftian horror worthy of the Eldritch classics.

Nope. She was done. Anna was not going to fight that. She would yeet herself right the fuck out of there like a coward. It had rows of gnashing teeth in a maw half the length of its body. Those teeth were backed by a thready baleen looking kind of organ which as she watched shredded a smaller slow to waken moped-form monster. It cried piteous honking cries as it was sawed by the vibrating razers of the baleen until it gurgled black oil blood in death.

“Oh, the hell with this.” The young elementalist’s voice shivered with her emotions. She didn’t wait to see if the room had been evacuated like she’d instructed but released her hold on her magic. Just enough. Just enough to let it out and form the far-reaching effect she needed for the construct she was building.

It was simple. Just an ice wall. But it was fast and dirty and stretching not only the length of the windows in the classroom but along that entire side of the building. She was following the flow of her power as it greedily gobbled up territory. As an elementalist, forming the ice wall wasn’t a spell like it would be for other magic users. It was just the form of power she had. The school was large and the row of glass windows that provided literally no protection from the approaching monsters stretched…

For the first time Anna was grateful that she had more untapped magic than she had ever wanted or needed. Her magic power was something she had always been angry about. Who could possibly ever need this much ice magic? Ice. Element. Magic.

But she did. Anna needed it now. She needed to have the ability to sense the course of the ice as it traveled over unbroken windows. Her affinity for the ice told her when her wall construct needed create a bridge and cover gaps in broken architecture. It told her when she needed to leave a hole because a student two classes down was being pulled out the window by a retreating monster and his classmates helping him needed a few more moments to pull him back into the room after a spike of ice punch out from the wall to skewer the monster trying to eat him.

Then it was done. The breaches were sealed. For now. But it didn’t do anything about the monsters already in the building. There were…a few. Dozens.

“Holy shit, Anna.” Someone exclaimed behind her. Turning, Anna realized that it was the blonde boy. He looked familiar. What had he said his name was? Crap. Liam? Anna’s eyes narrowed unfriendlily at him.

This was the kid Sara had the hots for? The guy that just got me suspended? While it wasn’t technically his fault, Anna couldn’t help but be irritated at him for the mere fact that he had unintentionally made her the object of more of Sara’s ire. It may have affected the next words that ran through her mind. Come on girl. Could this guy be any more generic?

Which… Anna admitted was an unfair evaluation of the boy. He was clearly brave, stupidly so. And he was conscious enough to know her name even if they weren’t in the same class. Though, to be entirely honest, there weren’t a whole lot of people in the city who didn’t know her name. So….

Why was she standing around glaring when she should be running?

Right!