Nikolai retrieved the knife, yanking it free. Cracks grew, spreading outwards from the point where the blade struck, and slowly spread along the walls like fracturing ice. Within the cracks were shadows, too dark to be natural.
The wall splintered and broke apart in a web, surrounding him. Nikolai raced for the exit, jumping over breaks along the floor. A deep chasm cut Nikolai off from the entrance, trapping him. He made a dash for the window, reaching it just as chinks fractured into the windowsill. When he touched the ledge to jump over, pain seared across his gloved hand.
He dove for the bike and peddled like mad, his hurt palm an afterthought. The crap bike was nearly impossible to control with one hand. Twice he scraped against a car door. It wasn’t until he was five blocks away that he checked his hand.
He tugged the glove a few times before it peeled off. His skin had blackened in jagged lines, matching the cracks he had touched in the window ledge. He had some movement in his fingers, but the black areas were unnaturally stiff, as if half of his hand was stopped in time. It took an enormous effort to twitch the blackened flesh. His grip was shot, too.
Nikolai gritted his teeth, pounding his good fist on the bike’s handlebar. What the hell was that thing? Obviously magic, but there was no magician in sight. Whatever it was, it had taken out his non-dominant hand. Leaving him crippled, but not defenseless.
He hurried on to the campus dorms, accompanied by the constant squeaking of the bike.
Halfway there and running on empty, Nikolai hit the curb, and the rusted front wheel popped off the bike. The whole thing tipped forward, and the momentum took Nikolai down. He hit the asphalt hard, the force jarring and unexpected.
Where his sleeves were rolled up, Nikolai’s skin was scraped raw. Except for one area. The black mark on his hand was pristine. Untouched. Nikolai brushed off the dirt and debris from the wound. He tore off his sleeve, ripping it into makeshift bandages to cover the worst of it. Could he get an infection? Or were the bacteria frozen in time too? At any rate, that was all he could do for now.
Nikolai returned to the road to jog the rest of the way.
By the time he found the right dorm building, Nikolai lost all sense of time. Exhausted, his body was worn out. Had he last slept twenty-four hours ago? He had no way to tell.
Nikolai picked at the dorm lock, but he couldn’t exert the right pressure in its frozen state. Instead he circled the dorms, peering into the windows to find a hint of the room numbers.
There. On the first floor. He saw the placard with the number 11 on the backside of the door and grinned. Nikolai’s gaze swept the ground around him. He stopped to pick up a rock but dropped it almost immediately, cursing. He’d automatically grabbed it with his non-dominant hand. His thumb and pointer were so unwieldy they might as well have been dead.
Subtlety be damned, Nikolai bashed through the once pristine bay windows of Jun’s dormitory. The glass cracked and hung upright in a broken web. Nikolai pressed with his full body weight to topple it to the ground.
Neither the redhead typing at her computer nor the sleeping pimply kid were Jun. Damn it. Nikolai peered closer at the placard on the far door. 17, not 11. A lamp had obscured the top of the number from his view outside.
He smashed apart the correct windows to find she wasn’t in her dorm room—not that he really expected her to be. The side that was covered in fluffy knitted shit was empty. The other sported some girl with her mouth frozen open, with a faint trickle of drool dampening the bedding by her mouth.
He went by Jun’s desk first. There were folders arranged by color, a closed laptop, and a picture of a fluffy rodent with a top hat. In the desk drawers were knitting crafts and spools of wool. He dug through yarn balls in every shade of the pastel rainbow. More than she needed if the knitting was a deliberate way to fade into the background as some innocent wallflower. No. Jun must actually like this shit. Underneath a set of gel pens were cards, letters, and photos. He went through the photos first. The only people in them were her and an old guy that had to be her father. The rest of the photos were of that rodent again. He checked the cards. The one on top was a birthday card from her father. The envelope was addressed, and Nikolai put that one in his pocket.
As he went through her closet, with its empty suitcase and stacks of old textbooks and folders, he heard it again—a guttural snarl. Deep. Slowed down, promising violence.
Nikolai unsheathed his knife. The sound was above, coming from shadows in the dark. He shifted to a hammer grip when the sound ceased. Nikolai paused for a half a breath. He turned and ran out the room, jumping through the broken window.
A blast surged behind him in an icy wave. His eardrums popped, filling his head with a sharp ringing. He collapsed onto the school lawn, surrounded by bits of yarn and wood fragments the same color as Jun’s desk.
Nikolai got up, ready to run, fully expecting something to be following him. But everything in Jun’s room was unmoving. Not a single sign to show something out of the ordinary, other than Jun’s broken things left scattered on the lawn.
Even so, Nikolai was sure it was still there, watching him. Whatever it was, it obviously wanted him dead.
12
Jun’s hands flicked between the almond croissant and the hard-boiled eggs. The croissants here were divine, but she had already had twelve of them, at least two for each meal since she had arrived. What was she going to do when she got sick of them? But then again, was it even possible to get sick of a pastry with such a delicate flaky crust? Jun grabbed the croissant, adding it to the pear and green apple already on her plate.
“Excuse me.” She stepped around the hotel attendant, who was frozen in the act of adding bacon to the platter. “The food here is absolutely fabulous. Keep up the good work.”
Jun crossed the hallway, marveling at the geometric print on the carpets, until she reached a row of doorways. “Thanks again for letting me borrow the place,” Jun said to a middle-aged woman in a business suit, frozen in the act of staring worriedly at her watch as she stepped out of the room. Jun slipped around her. She settled cross legged on the second queen-sized bed—the room had two, and this one was untouched. She had to come to this place again; the thread count on these sheets was higher than her annual salary at Feelin’ Saucy.
The croissant was perfect. Just the right blend of buttery pastry with a good hint of almond. She looked out the window at the dark outline of palm trees in a glorious pink and orange sunrise. The same sunrise she had admired… for how long? Had it been just a couple days? Had it been a week already? It made no difference. Same delicious croissant. Same comfortable bed. The hotel was the loveliest cage she had ever been in. Almost lovely enough to forget that she was trapped. She could walk home, and she would never be home. Her entire life was frozen, and she was stuck outside of it.
She would stay here for the rest of her life. Then someday that lovely hotel attendant restocking the bacon would come back to this room and find Jun’s old-aged, dried out corpse as she was trapped out of the rest of her life.
This was ridiculous. There was no such thing as stopped time. Jun tossed her plate in the air and caught it. The repetitive motion as she continued to throw it was soothing.
She had to be in a coma or something. She must have drowned in the lake and now she was in a coma waiting to wake up. Or maybe she’d had a mental breakdown from stress and made all of this up. Things like this didn’t just happen. Like magic.
Deny it all you want. You’re never getting out of here.
Jun sighed. Why did that sound suspiciously like Suzie? She shouldn’t be going crazy yet; it couldn’t have been more than a week. She wasn’t lonely or anything, especially not for Suzie’s company. By now she should be used to being by herself. But it was boring. There wasn’t much to do here besides eat and sleep, and Jun had already explored every accessible space in the hotel, which meant she had walked down the hall, front desk, and cafeteria fifty times now. Of course her brain would be making unpleas
ant conversation.
“It’s not like I’m going crazy,” she told the reflection of herself in the TV, not the TV itself. Or maybe it would be better to be crazy than the whole magic thing. It would make more logical sense. Jun shimmied further onto the bed so her legs weren’t dangling off the mattress. She continued to toss the plate and catch it.
What she really needed right now was her knitting set, then she could pretend this was an overdue vacation and not the endless nightmare that it was. There was always the option of finding a craft store, but even if she found one, it would be forever closed, and it didn’t sit right with her to break in when it had been her dream to own one since she was seven and first learned to cross stitch a scarf for her dad. He’d been so happy—she knew right away she’d continue making things and eventually help others do the same. But that was all over. Forget her dream. Forget seeing her dad again.
“This is all his fault.” If Nikolai hadn’t kidnapped her. If he hadn’t driven her to the middle of nowhere. If he hadn’t thrown her into the water, none of this would have happened. She would be back having sushi with her dad, then wrapping up her last semester of college.
Jun flung herself back onto the ridiculously comfortable bed, her grip on the plate tight enough to hurt.
No. A thought nagged at her. You know that it wasn’t him. You know that’s not true. It hadn’t been Nikolai who had stopped time.
She was about to fling the plate in the air when something in the design caught her attention. The engraved floral pattern that rimmed the plate had a rabbit nibbling a flower, and Jun was a hundred percent positive that rabbit wasn’t there before.
There was something familiar about it, even though there shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t like she had ever had a pet rabbit before. Something about the shape of it nagged at her.
She brought the plate closer to examine it and blinked. It was a little white rabbit, but it wasn’t eating a flower anymore. It was staring right back at her.
Jun shrieked and hurled the plate away, and it shattered against the wall. The broken shards fell to the lush carpet, where they lay in silent accusation. It took a full minute before her pulse settled and she told herself she was being dumb. It was only a plate. All this ‘magic’ nonsense was scaring her into thinking she was seeing things.
Still, she hesitated before heading over to clean the mess. It wasn’t like room service was going to come anytime soon and do it for her.
She knelt down, picking up the broken pieces one by one, frowning. Where was it? She checked under the bed, but she had gotten all of the plate shards. Muttering to herself that this was stupid, Jun began arranging the broken pieces on the carpet, looking for it. But it was clear that the rabbit was no longer there. It was gone. Poof. Like magic.
But there’s no such thing as magic.
Jun looked again at the woman in the business suit. Her eyes were slanted down, open. Jun knew from squeezing past her that her skin was warm, despite the stillness.
Why bother to deny it?
She had done this. Denying what she’d done wasn’t going to get her out of this mess, but maybe believing that there was magic would do something. Make time start up again. It would make more sense if magic was real.
“Magic is real,” she muttered to herself. She looked at the plate to see if it changed, but it had not. Jun squeezed her eyes shut, her hands equally tight. “Magic is real.” She said it three more times before stopping and chuckling at her antics. Nothing happened; not a single particle of dust suspended in air shifted. “Yeah, like that’s going to work.”
She went back to the bed and flopped down on the covers, suddenly exhausted with it all. Closing her eyes, she thought taking a nap would straighten her out. The blankets were still tucked under the mattress as they had been when Jun had arrived. The past couple of nights, the temperature had remained steady and she hadn’t needed them. But a sudden chill wracked her body now, and Jun made the effort to get under the blankets.
Her eyelids were heavy and her breathing was evening out when she first felt something was off. She was cold. The temperature around her was rapidly descending. When she tried to move, Jun found her limbs stiff. Her fingers trembled as she tried to force herself up, but she was frozen in place. The only motion in the room were her rapid breaths condensing into a fog.
This was a dream, right? She was sleeping and had to wake up. But how could she be sleeping when she had never fallen asleep in the first place? Even blinking became difficult. Her eyelids were weighted, hardening in place. Wide-eyed, Jun scanned the room—for what, she didn’t know.
This was worse than sleep paralysis. What if she became frozen like the objects in the room, forever stuck in time? If she didn’t move now, the magic would catch her. If she didn’t—wait, what was that?
She thought she had heard something, a scratching noise. Her breathing was shallow and fast, too loud in the silence, and Jun tried to suck in the frigid air quietly.
It came again, a faraway noise creaking along the plaster ceiling, thudding against the carpet floors above her hotel room in a rhythmic pattern like footsteps. But it couldn’t be. Nothing here moved, not since time stopped. Everything else was still and silent. But the noise of it was stark against the silence.
Jun was immobile and powerless. Her limbs twitched in her desperation to escape. The noise seemed to stop, a passing foreboding, before the scratching came again, hollow and heavy inside of the closet door. She was facing it directly, her vision watered from the force of trying to jerk her head away, trying to move any part of herself. It was the same closet that she tried to open once before and knew for a fact was stuck like everything else.
Jun couldn’t just lie there. Not with something right behind the closet door. Telling herself that she had to move did nothing against the cold that held her. Her nails dug into her flesh as she clenched down on every muscle and wrenched upwards, trying to force herself away. Her vision blurred with the strain. Her body jolted an inch to the left, still and stiff.
She gulped down the air in deep breaths. Worn out, she hadn’t even managed to turn away from her view of the closet. The doorknob creaked as it began to twist.
It was coming for her; it would kill her if it could. Even separated by the flimsy panel of wood, the desire to maim, to destroy, was a thick smog in the air. Her limbs were locked up, her strength nothing against the overwhelming pressure anchoring her down, but Jun didn’t want that thing anywhere near her. She had been kidnapped, drowned, thrown into this surreal world—she wasn’t going to die here, lying passively in a hotel room. Her father wouldn’t survive the shock if he turned on the TV and saw the news about her mysterious death. She had to move; she needed to move.
Beads of sweat began to form along her back from the exertion. A sudden heat flooded through her veins, growing hotter and hotter until it felt like it would burst from her skin. At last she could blink and look away.
The doorknob clicked, a sound like ice cracking.
With a heave, Jun toppled out of bed, the impact traveling through her stiff limbs and loosening her further. Her only exit was past the closet, and Jun did not hesitate as she crawled forward and dragged her heavy limbs.
When the door creaked open, dark, smoke-like tendrils writhed in the gap as more pushed through to force it open. Jun dragged herself to her feet, stumbling into a run. She collided into the business suit woman and uttered a hasty “sorry” as she ducked under the outstretched arm.
Warmth burned through her, churning through her muscles, urging her on. She ran, faster than she ever had, down the narrow corridor, followed by the sounds of wood creaking and snapping.
As she passed the hotel lobby, a small white rabbit was sitting in the free candy bowl before it scampered away, tipping the bowl of peppermints to the ground.
It wasn’t until she was back on the highway, doubled over, her hands clutching the stitch in her side, when she finally had a moment to think. All right. Apparently in the
stopped time there was some sort of evil presence that wanted to hunt her down. That should have been the strangest thing to happen to her, even with time stopping, the assassin, and the sort of date with Bailey. But that wasn’t the thought nagging at her. She kept thinking back to the hotel lobby. No, that wasn’t even the first time she had seen it.
Why was there a little white rabbit hopping around and following her?
13
The house was easily the smallest on the block, olive green with a purple door. It was overdue in repairs: paint chipping, loose roof tiles, and an overgrown lawn. Nikolai nearly kicked over a hidden gnome nestled between the roots of a peach tree as he crossed the yard, and there were more scattered along the tall grass, only their faded red hats visible.
So this was where Jun lived. It wasn’t quite the evil lair Nikolai imagined a magician’s home would look like, but then again Jun hadn’t quite matched any of his expectations. As he circled the house, there were no easy entry points, and more importantly no sign that Jun had been here. Good, he could rest, then. He’d been on the road for so long, he’d lost all track of time. It could have been a week or more.
Without his phone’s GPS, Nikolai had to hunt down a physical copy of a map—who had those anymore? Luckily, he’d spotted a map in the back of a classic Mercedes-Benz that now sported a broken window. It had taken so long that he’d pushed himself harder in case she beat him home.
His only rest had been the occasional park bench, though he slept with the threat of the creature stalking him. Any one place he stayed too long, he’d sense it. Feel the air charge. Hear the creaking of warping floors and walls. It was worse when he broke into stores or houses, as if it were waiting for him there. Nikolai stuck to the open roads as much as he could help it.
Now he’d found his destination—a house that was sure to draw her in. All he had to do was wait. He had all the time in the world to find her. That was, if she was still out there.
Magician Rising (Divination in Darkness Book 1) Page 9
