He circled the block, picking a vantage point with a clear view of Jun’s house. It was a few houses down and across the street. The porch was well lit and had a comfortable hammock.
It must have been a few hours before he was unable to keep his eyes open. He settled into an uneasy pattern of sleeping, occasionally jerking awake, certain the thing was going to be after him. Or that he would miss something.
Each time he awoke, he would stare at the motionless scene of the stalled car backing out of the driveway, a man in a bathrobe walking his poodle, the bird flying to a nest close enough to touch if he reached out his hand. He’d watch the scenery, look down the road, and keep watch until either sleep or hunger took him.
The easiest available food was the unripe fruits from a neighbor’s peach tree. As long as he stayed trapped like this, they would always be a few days away from ripening. He chewed the hard flesh of tart fruits, with nothing but the growing pile of discarded pits to mark the passing of time.
He had no idea how long he waited, but it was long enough to doubt if she was even going to come. What was worse than the wait, the growing uncertainty, and the sour taste of unripe peaches perpetually itching the back of his throat was the complete silence. It plagued his dreams. After the utter silence of being awake, his dreams were painfully loud. Often he was startled awake, jarred into a fight-or-flight response, from growls, screams and screeches ringing in his head.
The silence was oppressive—a tangible absence weighing down on him. Nikolai was used to being alone. On the hunt, researching, he’d spend hours and days alone. But there had always been others around, even if he chose not to speak to them. He hadn’t realized how lonely it would be when that choice was taken away.
Getting here kept him distracted. Now, there was nothing to stand in the way of his isolation.
He was alone. Completely alone. Nothing but the sound of his own breaths kept him company.
Never to hear another human voice.
Never to see another smile.
Never to feel the warmth of soft skin.
Time went by—just for him. The rest of the world was locked away.
This is how you die. Heart's still beating. Lungs still breathing. Never escaping. You're already dead, you just don't know it. Nikolai shook his head, clearing the thoughts.
He stared down the same stretch of unmoving road as the stillness grated away at him, little by little. He didn't know how much more of it he could take.
When he first spotted movement, Nikolai was sure he was hallucinating. How could someone even tell if they were sane or not? But the movement—the first he’d seen in forever—was coming closer. That purple hat was unmistakable, vibrant when his memories of it had all but faded. Something his brain couldn’t make up. He held his breath, reigning in the brimming euphoria at seeing another live person.
Adrenaline and a vibrant sense of weightlessness pumped through his veins. He’d found her. He wasn’t left behind, trapped. He fought to control the feeling before he started grinning like an idiot.
Jun ambled down the road, swinging her arms, carefree. Her sleek, dark hair swayed behind her with each step. She was small and lithe. Closer, her doe-like eyes came into view—dark and lovely in a heart-shaped face.
Beautiful.
Nikolai’s eyes widened as he tensed. He had to force himself to relax, to calm the rapid beating of his heart.
What the hell was that?
Jun was dangerous. Earthquakes. Stopping time. God only knew what else. She had no idea of what she could do, and no control of her magic. She could kill him or kill thousands of innocents. Easily.
This was a whole new level of idiotic. He really must have been losing his damn mind.
Jun tried the front door of her house, then went around to the side. When he could no longer see her, Nikolai moved.
Jun was struggling with the window, pushing against the unyielding wood panel in her attempt to break into her own house. It was ajar, but that window may as well have been nailed shut.
“I wouldn’t.” His voice was raw, strange to his own ears from how long it had been since he’d last used it. The rest of his sentence died in his throat.
Jun gasped and banged her elbow with how fast she turned around. “You—” she started to say, freezing with panic, before taking a step to run.
“Don’t.” Nikolai stepped in her path, blocking her off, then held his hands up and took a step back. “It’s all right,” he finished lamely.
“What are you doing here?” She narrowed her eyes, but something else occurred to her, and fear drained the color from her face. “What have you done to him?” Jun turned to look through the window anxiously. It dawned on him a moment later.
“I’m not here for him.” Which was the wrong thing to say, as Jun visibly tensed. Shit. Calming down frightened women was definitely not part of his skill set. “Look, I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to get out of here.”
“You want me to help you?” Jun laughed in a way that had Nikolai imagining eating unripe peaches for the rest of his miserable life, at least until that thing caught up with him. “After everything you did? Why should I?”
“Because we could help each other.” After searching for weeks, how had he managed to screw things up already? He’d thought about what he’d say to Jun, rehearsed this conversation dozens of times. Nothing was working out like it had in his head.
She gave him a pointed look over, from the top of his unwashed hair to the sweat-stained clothes he’d been wearing for at least a week’s time. “I don’t need your help. Besides, why should I help you? You tried to kill me.”
“If I wanted to kill you, you’d be dead.”
“Is that supposed to make me trust you? And yes, you did try to kill me. You dragged me out into the middle of nowhere and almost drowned me.” Jun shuffled back, drawing away as she glared at him.
“I didn’t just drag you out in the middle of nowhere.” His voice was sore and felt raw, though anger fueled his words. “I took you away from others to stop you from hurting innocent bystanders. And I wasn’t trying to drown you. I assumed that you were playing dumb. I thought that the water would trigger the magic out of you and then you’d go kick my ass.”
“You’re crazy if you think I’m going to be able to kick anyone’s ass, especially yours. And throwing me in a lake because I’m so dangerous is an overreaction if I’ve ever seen one.”
Nikolai’s whole body tensed. Overreaction? “The magician I tracked down before you was especially creative in the way that he killed people. Turned parts of them inside out. Lit their organs on fire. Made people disappear into the floor.”
Nikolai stared down at his hands. None of those people deserved to die. If anything, moving and reacting faster could have saved some of them. “The seventh magician I tracked liked to age people rapidly. He took whole decades away from his victims. The third magician I tracked started a tsunami that killed fifty thousand people.”
Nikolai closed the space between them as his voice deepened. “And the first magician I saw killed my brother. Incinerated him into ashes right in front of me. So no, I don’t think that I’m overreacting.”
But Jun shook her head. “That can’t be true. I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”
“People will rationalize away anything to make it fit with what makes sense to them. Missing persons. Unnatural phenomenon. Magic. Just because you don’t want to believe it doesn’t make it untrue.”
“If you really think I’m that dangerous, it doesn’t make sense for me to free you up to kill me later.” Jun crossed her arms. “I’ll take my chances. Alone.”
“Look, I don’t hurt innocent people. As long as you aren’t going on some killing rampage, I promise that I won’t do anything to hurt you.”
She didn’t look convinced.
“You came here because you wanted things to feel normal. You wanted to be someplace safe. If you want things to go back to normal, take my h
elp.”
Jun stared resolutely at the window, refusing to look at him. She didn’t have a plan; otherwise she wouldn’t be here, aimlessly wandering back home.
Nikolai sighed. Hell, what did he have to lose? He wrenched the window open, wide enough for her to go through.
Jun opened her mouth and closed it again, burying whatever question or comment she had for him. She eased up and into the window, hanging on the sill precariously, before disappearing into the dark depths of the house.
It wasn’t a good idea. They didn’t have that much time left before it came. What if it attacked Jun and he got stuck here forever? But he couldn’t keep her around if he didn’t gain her trust. It wasn’t like he could stay awake forever, watching her. No, she would slip away in his sleep.
Nikolai backed away, crushing weeds and overgrown flowerbeds in his haste. He went as far as hopping over a neighbor’s fence in case that thing really was after him only. There he waited, watching. Eyes trained on the frozen house, waiting for Jun to do what she needed to do. For her to get back out of there.
Once again, he stared at the house and waited.
It was distant and muffled, but in the silence, it might as well have been the retort of a pistol. The house was creaking. Was it too much to hope that Jun was fumbling around inside? There it was again, the groan of wood, as if the very floorboards were aching, pain reverberated down into the foundation, the structure of it. It was a noise that Nikolai had become too familiar with. Too angry to be natural. The thing was here.
Would going in make it worse?
Maybe. Maybe it would go easier on her. His heartbeat rang in his ears as the creaking became louder. He couldn’t take that chance. If something happened to her, Nikolai would be left behind.
Nikolai flung himself over the fence and to the window. The tight fit of the wooden frame scraped his skin raw and ripped jagged lines down his shirt as he shoved himself through.
For a moment, Nikolai stopped to adjust to the dim light, finding he was in a sparse kitchen. On a scratched up square table was a bowl of oatmeal with steam spiraling up, and what looked like a ripe peach chopped up on a small cutting board. Standing in front of the sink was a wrinkled man, only a few inches over five feet, washing off a pot. He wore an apron with cartoon fish and rubber gloves.
If he was here, then where the hell was Jun?
The hallways were empty, and Nikolai didn’t trust the blackness that bordered the shadows. The house was too small; there wasn’t exactly space for her to hide. He passed by doors that were ajar, listening intently to the occasional creaking that couldn’t be her. Scratches that didn’t even sound human. Nikolai rushed past.
There was a door at the end of the hallway painted lilac, and the shadows at the wall’s edge reached into it.
“Jun,” he called out as loud as he dared.
She didn’t reply.
Damn it. Right. Better to just go for it, then. Like a Band-Aid. Rip this shit right out and into the open.
Nikolai burst into the room, hands on the cool metal of his blade.
Jun was sitting in front of a cage that contained her fluffy pet rodent. She appeared to be trying to pry the wire door open with a set of knitting needles.
In the upper ceiling, tendrils of shadow reached for her like a many-armed spider.
Nikolai grabbed her and yanked her out of the way, just as clawed hands crashed down.
14
Something hard around Jun’s stomach wrenched her back. There came a crunch of twisting metal as black tendrils tore into the cage, missing her. Jun craned her neck to see Nikolai behind her, his gaze locked toward the ceiling.
Above them, shadows moved, in the twitchy rhythm of a spider. It twisted toward them from where it hung. Darker indents for eyes and a mouth in what could have been a face seemed to appear and disappear, bubbling in and out all over. A low rumble vibrated through the air, and dread prickled her skin. The thing from the hotel room had found her.
The poor cage creaked as the shadow freed itself. Jun couldn’t see where her chinchilla was behind the bent bars.
“Pickles!” Her yell was caught off as she was lifted in the air and thrown over Nikolai’s shoulder. The set of knitting needles that she had just packed jabbed into her back with each step he took.
Where she had been crouching moments before, smoldering tendrils lashed out, piercing through the floorboards. The ceiling fractured as shadows pushed through. Her last view of her room was the ceiling collapsing. Thick black cracks followed them down the hall and into the kitchen.
Her dad was only a blur as they ran past him. He was stuck in his task of washing the dishes, completely unaware even as the walls broke apart and pieces of tiles and plaster exploded around him.
Jun screamed as she was practically thrown out the window. She skidded along grass that did not bend under her weight, but instead snagged across her skin. She barely felt it and shot up at once. Nikolai eased out the window a moment later and blocked her from trying to get back inside.
“I have to go back.” Jun could barely hear herself; her ears were ringing in the sudden silence. “My dad!”
Nikolai took one look at her before grabbing her arm, forcing her into a run away from the house. “Stop, it’s going to get him!” She dragged her feet and tried to pry her arm from his grip. “Let go of me! The house will fall down on him.”
Nikolai didn’t let go. It was like being dragged by a rhinoceros as they crossed the yard to the sidewalk.
“We could carry him out of there, please!” She must have finally gotten through to him because Nikolai abruptly stopped.
Nikolai sighed and ran his hand through short hair. “I don’t see a way to get him out without breaking both of his arms. Did you see the way they were bent? The longer we spend in there is more time for the monster to have another shot at him.”
Her blood ran cold.
“No.” Jun shook her head, as if it would clear the words away. “I have to at least check on him. I’ll be fast.”
“That's what you said going in there in the first place. And then I found you trying to break open a cage with that thing hovering over you.”
“I won’t go in. I just need to look.”
Nikolai gritted his teeth, and Jun’s mind raced. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind. Time restarting. Her house collapsing, and her dad laying in a jumbled mess. Broken, just like Cartwright and the earthquake. It would be all her fault.
“Please.” She wouldn’t be able to save her dad alone. She needed his help.
“Fine,” Nikolai snapped abruptly. He turned, making his way back to her house, and Jun scrambled to keep up with her short legs.
He stopped, giving the window a breadth of six feet, examining it critically.
The inside of her house looked fine. It seemed dark. Perhaps more than usual. At the sink was her father, just as he had appeared before, still washing his oatmeal pot. There were no cracks in the ceiling that hadn’t been there before. No monster in sight.
It was calm. “I think it’s gone,” Jun said, right as Nikolai picked up some rock and threw it through the window and into her kitchen. The rock skidded and thudded against the table’s leg. Nothing happened. The rock just sat there, dirtying the floor that Jun swept on her weekend visits. Then the shadows converged and struck the rock, splitting it. It was as black as if it had been burned.
Nikolai turned to look at her with an eyebrow raised. “The best thing we can do for him is to leave him alone.”
Her father seemed all right. Frozen in his breakfast ritual, and nothing for Jun to do.
Though turned away from them, Jun remembered the look frozen on her father’s face as he scrubbed away oatmeal from the same dented pot he had used since she was in third grade. His eyes were bleary from long hours at the office. He worked too hard.
It had made her cry, seeing him like that. Tired and still. So close and so out of reach, even though she was standing right next to him. She
couldn’t even pick up the stack of napkins off the kitchen table, as they were all wedged together like a brick. Jun had wiped her snot off on her sleeve. It was while staring at him—willing him to snap out of it, give her a hug, and tell her that everything was all right—that she heard it. The scrit scirt of tiny paws.
“What about Pickles?” Jun whispered in case the thing could hear. “What if it got him?”
Nikolai’s expression was blank. “The squirrel?”
“Chinchilla,” she said, affronted.
“Something tells me that thing was more interested in us than your pet. Speaking of which, do I even want to know what you were doing that was so important that you would risk your life?”
“It’s not like I knew a psychotic shadow was going to be there,” Jun muttered. She stepped away from the windowsill, her fingers so shaky that she had to keep them in fists. “I heard Pickles. Well, I thought it was Pickles. So I was going to get a closer look.”
“What did it sound like?”
“I heard the little footsteps. You know, the kind made from a small animal scurrying around.”
“What did you see when you followed the footsteps?”
“Pickles was frozen, but I thought maybe he wasn’t? Like if I could get a closer look, I could get him to move?”
Nikolai scratched his chin in thought. “Maybe it was trying to lure you in.”
“Yeah, but how would it even know to do that?” Unless it could read her mind and somehow know that every time she passed a pet shop she would without fail stop to look at all the animals, it didn’t seem plausible. “Is it even sentient? Have you encountered one before?”
Nikolai shrugged. “Beats me. I’ve only seen it after time stopped, but it does have a similar presence as magic. What I don’t understand is why it would be after you, too?”
“I don’t know, maybe because apparently I disrupted time and space and the entire universe?” Jun snorted. Not that any of this made sense. The only logical thing about this creepy monster was that it was after her. With her luck, that seemed about right.
Magician Rising (Divination in Darkness Book 1) Page 10
