She backed away in case the shadow creature was near. The subtle tension in Nikolai's jaw relaxed as she stepped away from the window.
Every few steps, Jun looked back until they rounded the corner. She hesitated on the driveway and then sat on the curb. She was tired. Physically, after walking for what felt like weeks. Mentally, she just didn’t know what to do next.
Jun was not thrilled at the idea that Nikolai was most likely going to follow her. She could leave him again. It hadn’t yet gotten to the point that she needed human interaction. Besides, it was better for her to be crazy rather than dead if Nikolai decided to change his mind.
“That man wasn’t there before,” Nikolai said as he pointed at her neighbor a few feet away from her on the sidewalk. It was Mr. Dawson, wearing a bathrobe over his pajamas, on a walk with his poodle, Barkley. Jun had known him her whole life, though she’d only say hello when they crossed paths.
“What do you mean?”
Nikolai frowned. “This entire time I was here, he was behind his dog. Now he’s in front of it.”
Jun shivered, thoroughly creeped out. “We’ve been stuck here too long and now you’re seeing things.”
Jun didn’t know what that meant if Nikolai was right. Would time soon go back to normal? She got up and took a few hesitant steps closer. There was something wrong about his eyes. She couldn’t remember what color they had been before, but she was almost positive they weren’t black. She could barely tell where his pupils ended, just that there was only a sliver of blue left. The tiny veins in the whites of his eyes were the color of wine, so dark they almost looked black.
Though frozen, it felt as though those eyes were staring straight back at her.
Jun stepped back involuntarily. “Okay, I think that’s our cue to leave.” She found herself walking without thinking to the park around the block that had been a source of comfort to her growing up.
It was sunshiney, with willow trees bordering the playground, their leaves frozen in the gentle sway of the wind. Jun sat on an immobile swing. She braced her legs into the woodchips to push the swing into motion, but it didn’t. She tried a few more times without success and then slumped against the chain with a loud sigh. “I wanna go home. Oh, wait, I just spent a week doing that and it was all for nothing. I just want things to go back to normal.”
Nikolai looked unimpressed.
“But it’s never going to be normal again.” Jun held her pointer finger to her temples. Maybe if she pressed hard enough, she could force the answer out from wherever it was hiding in her mind.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Nikolai muttered.
“What do I have to do? Say a magic word?” Jun straightened up and cleared her throat. “Hocus-pocus time-refocus. Abracadabra. Expelli-free-us. Bibbidi-bobbidi-let-us-go-idi.” She frowned as she tried to think of more words. “Presto chango? Damn, I really was hoping that last one would work. Oh, man, please don’t tell me I have to draw pentagrams on the ground.”
Nikolai raised an eyebrow. “You weren’t saying anything when you stopped time in the first place. Not in class either when you almost started another earthquake. What were you thinking when you stopped time?”
What had she been thinking about when she stopped time? “I don’t know. I thought that you were going to kill me.”
“All right, that might be important. What did that change when you thought that I was going to kill you?”
“I don’t know. It made me nervous.”
“And what happens to you when you feel nervous?”
Jun opened her bag, grabbing the knitting needles she had just packed. “Usually when I’m feeling nervous or upset or something, I just start knitting.” A crease developed between her eyebrows. “But when I stopped time, I didn’t have any of my yarn projects. I didn’t even have my lucky rabbit’s foot.” She paused when she mentioned rabbit’s feet and looked at the grassy lawn. She could no longer ignore the scampering, little flashes of white color that flit about the otherwise empty field.
It was obvious, now that she was staring right at it. It was right in front of her. Hopping before her as if demanding to know why she hadn’t noticed it. Why hadn’t she thought of it when she was at her house? The scampering of little feet. Obviously, it wasn’t her chinchilla that she had been hearing. It was the rabbit.
Sleek, pristine white fur. Little whiskers. It wasn’t one of those really fat, fluffy ones that Jun might look up on Pinterest when she was having a bad day. No, this one had a wilder look about it. Its body was leaner and already poised to flit away, to move, to act. But more than any of that, it was the look in its eyes. Playful and mischievous.
Jun recognized that look. Felt it reverberate within her like a wave. Her mouth fell open in shock. Stopped time wasn’t the first time that she had seen this rabbit.
She suddenly remembered going to the grocery store and being stressed out about some guy bullying her. He was trying to take the last box of snickerdoodles that Jun had rightfully gotten first. Wasn’t there a rabbit on the cereal boxes that tumbled down on his head? Or one of the many times at school that there was an electrical issue, or the plaster fell down. How many times had Jun simply forgotten seeing a little rabbit scampering around outside? Or improbably sitting somewhere in the room—standing on its hind legs on the classroom globe, or from the top of the fish tank, or scampering around the walls watching her.
The rabbit wasn’t new. No.
The rabbit had been with her for her entire life.
How had she somehow missed that?
Nikolai looked over at the field and frowned. “What are you looking at?”
15
Nikolai waited as Jun drifted off into thought. Finally, they seemed to be getting somewhere. At least Jun wasn’t wasting their time denying that she was even capable of magic anymore. She seemed distracted, except that her mouth fell open in shock.
Her eyes flicked back and forth across the frozen field, tracking nothing.
“What are you looking at?” Nikolai frowned.
Jun shook her head and pointed. Nikolai carefully followed the direction of her gaze, but he saw nothing in particular. More empty field. Just grass and a couple of dandelions.
“You don’t see it?” Her voice rang with disbelief, and Jun looked back across the grass as if to check something, long enough to seem like some stupid game. “Huh. Actually, that makes sense.”
“How does that make sense?” Nikolai hid the annoyance in his voice. He had just spent what he could have only guessed was weeks tracking this girl down. He did not need her to run off on him again.
“It’s like that time back at the library, when you were on the phone, saying that you had eyes on Evan, and you were wondering if he had anything to do with the earthquake.”
“How did you know about that? I made sure that I was alone before taking that phone call. I would have noticed if you were there.” Nikolai recalled the phone call; it was still fresh in his mind. The guilt, too. There had only been Evan and a few people sitting at the tables near him, the lady at the desk and one other student at the front.
“That’s just it. I was sitting down on the other side of the bookcase. But you didn’t see. Like I wasn’t even there.”
All of a sudden, he could see a shadow in his mind’s eye that morphed into her as she sat at a table by the wall only a few feet from him.
Then he remembered that when they were in class, he would suddenly be aware of her and then dismiss her immediately. He assumed that she came in late and he didn’t notice. He hadn’t even noticed that he wasn’t paying attention to her. Since when was someone in a knitted hat in neon bright colors not noticeable?
She delivered pizzas to his door and he hadn’t noticed a thing. Hadn’t connected her to the business class he spent hours analyzing. Or seen the obvious clue on her essay. He had to directly feel a magical spark before he became aware of her.
“So you’re saying that part of your magic is about hiding out
in the open?”
“What? No. There is a rabbit out there in the field. Just did a somersault. You don’t even see it.”
He followed to where she was pointing. There was a rabbit. Not a brown rabbit that was camouflaged into the grass, but a pristine white rabbit. Not frozen. It was tumbling through the grass, plain as day. “The hell is that?”
“Yeah, I've been seeing the rabbit the whole time. Actually, my whole life. But I never really noticed it before.”
The rabbit that was now cheerily doing cartwheels. Casually. As if cartwheels were natural rabbit behavior.
He wanted to demand why she hadn’t noticed something so obvious. But he knew better. This was clearly magic. “Okay,” he said. “So there is a rabbit. What does that mean?”
“I'm not sure. But I think that every time before, when I made things happen, I think that the rabbit was always there. The rabbit had something to do with the magic. I just don’t know why. I don’t see the connection.”
Nikolai never heard this mentioned or seen something of the like with other magicians. He couldn’t be sure if this was unique to Jun. “You think if we catch it, it could help us figure out how it’s connected to your magic?”
Just as he said it, the rabbit stood on its hind legs and looked right at Nikolai. The rabbit turned and bolted across the field, disappearing from sight.
“Damn, little guy doesn’t like me. Should we chase after it?”
As Jun turned in his direction, the horrified look on her face gave him his only warning. Nikolai spun, reaching for the knives on either side of him. Only his undamaged hand could grip the handle. He hesitated for a second at the sight of a balding middle-aged man. That moment cost him as Mr. Dawson lunged from a foot away.
Nikolai jumped back, but not fast enough.
Mr. Dawson had him. Hands clenched around him with all the force of time. Nikolai’s hand was forced open, and his knife clattered to the ground below. His arm felt as though it was going to get ripped apart under the pressure. The grip cut into him like knife blades. Tensing his muscles against the force of the grasp was useless, and he could feel his muscles give out under the strain.
Lines of black crept up his arm from Mr. Dawson’s touch, like veins filled with shadows. There was a cold numbness under the spread.
A flash of purple broke his concentration as Jun, in her ridiculous hat, squared up against her neighbor.
“Stop! I don’t want to have to do this.” Her voice wavered as she held her arms outstretched in front of her.
Nikolai blinked. Was she really going to use magic? Had Jun been holding out on him? What sort of trick did she have up her sleeve?
The canister in her hand clicked, echoing across the silence.
Nikolai recognized the cylinder Jun held and jerked his head away in time to avoid the spray. Mace erupted out of the can in a wet hiss.
Mr. Dawson was hit full in the face and let go, scratching away at the liquid residue. Released, Nikolai fell to his knees, blinking away mace that hit him indirectly. He saw the outline of a handprint black as a burn where Dawson grabbed him.
Dawson stepped back, scrabbling at his eyes and shrieking.
She had that mace lying around that whole time? Nikolai refused to think about all the times she could have used it. Like on him, when he had first taken her. Why not use it on him?
Nikolai’s arm stiffened, and the areas surrounding the blackened marks felt raw. He had to get up. He had to move. Nikolai clasped the burn mark, cradling it in his other hand. He’d been burned before, and it wasn’t like this. He had never felt burned this deep, straight into the part that made him… him.
Dawson scratched at his face. It should have been torn up and reddened, but instead his features contorted and drooped like they were made of wet clay. Beneath hands that curled like talons, his face looked as if it had been melted off. Like skin stretched over the vague suggestion of a face. The hollow of his mouth stretched wide in a silent shriek.
Then he turned that empty face toward Jun.
Oh, hell no. That thing wasn’t going to touch her.
Nikolai forced himself up and stepped into Dawson’s path. “Hey, what do you think you’re looking at?”
Dawson leapt at him, unnaturally fast.
There was nowhere for him to back into. With Jun right behind him, Nikolai couldn't launch out of the way. All he could do was raise his good arm and block him.
It wasn’t enough. Dawson leapt forward. Nikolai saw that hand, blurred into claws. It was moving oddly slowly, as if time was once again disjointed, all of the laws broken here, until it grasped his face, blocking his vision.
The thing reached into his face and tugged.
Nikolai heard a delicate pop, and felt a sinking pit in his stomach that something was horribly wrong.
He heard the thing step away from him.
Nikolai couldn’t see. His eyes were open, and he couldn’t see.
No, there was something. Eyes stared back at him in the middle of all that emptiness. Eyes that he knew. They hung in the air at about five feet and ten inches. Dawson’s approximate height. Shadows flicked around those eyes. They flickered into the shape of a person, and then they twitched and morphed into the mass of tendrils and limbs that had chased them.
He knew precisely the shape and color of those eyes. They were his own.
They blinked. Smokey tendrils curved under his eyes into a mocking smile.
Then they turned and blinked again, out of sight. Then nothing.
The world was a hazy gray.
16
Jun clenched the mace can in her shaking palm. It all happened so fast. Mr. Dawson, from around the block, who swapped fishing stories with her dad, had ripped into Nikolai's arm.
Dawson somehow could move. He’d be completely still and then appear elsewhere. He seemed to walk in the corners and in the shadows, even when there weren’t any around—at the edge of her awareness. Motionless, then blurred fast.
Now, Dawson had disappeared, and Nikolai was still.
Dawson did something to him. It was fast, but Jun saw him grab Nikolai’s face. What if he had done something to Nikolai to make him like everyone else? What if he made Nikolai frozen as well?
What if she was left here all alone?
Jun edged over to Nikolai cautiously. Like a skittish wild animal.
“Jun?” Nikolai cocked his head back toward her.
Oh. So he didn’t get frozen in time. That was good. “Are you all right?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Nikolai?”
“I think I’m blind.” Nikolai turned to face her.
Jun squeaked and then clapped a hand over her mouth. The skin on his face had turned coal black where he was grabbed. The darkness spread over his features in the shape of a handprint. His eyes were solid black across the cornea and pupils. That had to have hurt.
“How’s my face?” Though his eyes were black, they stared right at her.
“It’s marked where Dawson got you,” Jun said, then bit her lip. This was her fault. Dawson was charging after her when Nikolai stopped it. Then she had to go and make everything worse with the mace. Was mace classified as a deadly weapon in California? Was she a criminal now?
“I’m not totally blind. I can sort of see you.”
“How does that work?”
Nikolai stepped closer to her. “From far away, you look gray like everything else. But close up, you’re a mix of white and black in thin lines. I can see your outline.”
Nikolai placed his hand in front of his face and then lowered it. “I can’t see my hand or anything else, though. Just you.”
“Oh.” That wasn’t blindness. His injury had to do with the magic, somehow.
“Jun, we need to figure out how to get out of here before that thing comes back.” He touched the shadowy skin on his face as he spoke. Was that mark still painful? Or was Nikolai worried about facing the creature again if he couldn’t see?
Ju
n rubbed the back of her neck. “Got any bright ideas?”
“When you stopped time, you were anxious, and without your normal coping mechanism, you triggered magic. I think it’s something you can access mentally, at least as a defense mechanism.”
Access mentally? “You’re saying I can think my way out of this?”
“Try it.”
Stupid assassin, with stupid advice.
She was trapped here. There were literal monsters and the advice they were going with was to think about it.
What she needed, what she really needed, was someone who knew what was going on. She didn’t need jerky McKiller ordering her to think. She needed someone who could actually give her good advice.
The annoyance burned into a bright point in her mind, and just as suddenly, it was released.
Something felt different. Jun frowned and listened intently. She felt a pulse of awareness, as if something behind her was watching her.
“You called?” a voice purred.
Jun spun and gaped.
Sprawled across the field was a creature that didn’t exist. Her head was normal enough—she had full lips and curly black ringlets. Her breasts were uncovered and definitely human. The rest of her form was the body of a lion, with massive wings of long downy feathers that spread across her back. Sleek, feline muscle tensed and coiled under tawny fur. Claws that were thick and lethal scraped against the grass.
“What is that?” Nikolai asked in a tense voice as he stepped in front of Jun, placing himself in the path of the beast. “It’s like you. I can see it.”
“I think I asked for it to come,” Jun murmured. She walked to Nikolai’s side. “It’s a sphinx.”
“A what?”
“You know, a flying lion woman,” Jun explained.
“You summoned a monster? Instead of getting us out of here?” His all dark eyes glared at her.
He was blaming her now? If it was up to her, she would have had a rainbow roll and the spicy salmon while she gossiped with her dad.
Magician Rising (Divination in Darkness Book 1) Page 11
