Prison of Supernatural Magic

by Laynie Bynum

  Mica remained quiet, but I knew she was listening intently to my every word by the way she only breathed after I had finished my sentence.

  “I’m not a child of Ares either, but Dryas offered me a spot on their team, and I’m inclined to take it.”

  Mica stayed silent, a sharp intake of air the only sign she had heard me.

  “I want to be on your side, always,” I said. “But you made it pretty clear that Keres doesn’t want me on your team. If I was one of the children of Apollo, then maybe things would be different, but I’m not. I am who I am, and I can’t change that.”

  “So, you prefer to join them? I rather you be in cohorts with the spawn of Poseidon, or those hellish broods than with them!” Mica shouted. “You do realize Keres used to date Dryas, right? There’s no one she hates more on this entire planet than she hates him. During the next Trials, if she finds out you joined them… Even worse, joined them although you’re not actually one of them, she’ll skin you alive.”

  “She can try,” I said, faking bravado. A furious Keres sounded about as dangerous as a dozen anacondas. “But they’re the first group who offered me a place, and I said yes.”

  The lights turned off, and Mica scoffed, lying down. “Why do you have to betray me like this?”

  “I’m not betraying you. You were the one who told me that if I wasn’t a child of Apollo or one of the muses, I wouldn’t be able to join your team.” I grabbed the covers—a light, flimsy blanket that failed to make me feel any warmer—and pulled them to my neck. My heart broke at Mica’s accusations, but my body was too tired to fight sleep anymore.

  “You’re still my best friend,” I said while I turned to face Mica. She was an unmoving shape in the dark, a shadow. “I love you.”

  Mica grumbled something in return. “I love you too, but you’re not making this easy for me. If Keres finds out, she’ll drink your blood. She’s crazy jealous.”

  “I can take care of myself.” Which might be a lie, but I didn’t want Mica to worry. “Besides, the only reason why Dryas wants me in his team is because I kicked his butt.”

  Which could be another lie. I remembered what Dryas told me, about how life came down to fighting or losing, how he had opened up to me. Had he revealed those parts about himself to Keres too, back when they were dating? Did Keres know that behind the tough-guy persona, was a vulnerable individual?

  “He’s never asked anyone to join his team who wasn’t a child of Ares. He only agreed to an alliance with Amphion and Eris because they give him an advantage, and because it was a slap to the face for Lycus.” Mica shook her head, her dreadlocks bouncing from left to right in the darkness. “I don’t know if Keres will believe you got accepted into the A-team for your fighting abilities. Especially since she doesn’t know what your powers are.”

  “You won’t tell her, will you?” I asked.

  “I’ll try not to, but she can be very persuasive.” Mica didn’t sound convinced. “I wished… I wished things were normal between us. That I… That I wouldn’t have to choose between my new and my old family.”

  I resisted the urge to say all of this could’ve been avoided if she had just asked me to join her team from the start. Regardless of what god was my mother or father, I would’ve gladly fought by Mica’s side.

  “Let’s get some sleep,” I suggested, already unable to keep my eyes open. “I’m exhausted.”

  “Okay,” Mica agreed. “I…” She hesitated to find the right words, and then I heard her shift in her bed and realized she didn’t intend to finish her sentence.

  I closed my eyes and drifted off into a dreamless slumber.

  Chapter Ten

  The cell door beeped open, and two MMCA jailors came bursting in. One of them I recognized as the talkative guard who had been posted outside the door to the Arena, and the other was an unfamiliar face, a girl with her dirty-blonde hair tied up in a bun, wearing oversized glasses. She looked more like a librarian than a guard.

  “Wake up,” the first guard said while he roughly shook my shoulder. “We need your assistance.”

  I blinked, barely able to see as sleep clung to the corners of my eyes. “What… what’s wrong?”

  “Just come with us and shut up.” The girl pulled me up by the shoulder.

  “Be careful, this one got beat up pretty bad earlier today,” the other guard said while he steadied me as I wobbled on my feet.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  The female guard sighed exasperatedly, but the other guard said, “Something happened and we need your help. Now, come with us.”

  Mica snored and turned around in her bed, still sound asleep. Should I shout, ask for her help? What were the guards planning to do with me?

  Still, the bracers didn’t succeed in blocking our powers, so in the worst-case scenario, I could turn back time, and scare the guards half to death. Besides, the MMCA had just dropped me at this prison this morning: if they wanted me death, they could’ve done so the first time around.

  I followed the two jailors as they escorted me outside the cell. The clock on the wall on the opposite of the common room told me it was a little past two, in the dead of night. All the other cells were cloaked in darkness, and as far as I could tell, everyone else was still lingering in the land of dreams.

  The guards hadn’t even let me put my boots back on, so I shuffled on my socks after them. We turned into a hallway closer to the courtyard outside, where light was streaming from one of the cells in the back. Rushed voices spoke back and forth, and obviously some kind of commotion was going on.

  “What’s going on?” I asked again to the most talkative guard.

  “If she doesn’t shut up soon, can I smack her around the head, Timothy?” the female guard asked.

  The other guard—Timothy, I presumed—didn’t flinch. “No. And we’ll explain all you’ll need to know when we’re there,” he told me.

  As I expected, they brought me to the cell in the back. The closer we got, the louder the voices became, with someone saying, “You can’t just sit here and do nothing!” followed directly by “Since I didn’t do it, who the hell did? You should investigate!”

  This was followed by another voice that said, “We are. Just calm down.”

  A sweetly sick smell whiffed from inside the cell, a scent I couldn’t quite place. Something like candy, but sweeter?

  I struggled against the grip of the guards. “Tell me what’s going on, now!” I demanded.

  “Someone died,” Timothy snarled at me. “And we need you to use your powers to figure out how.”

  Someone died? The words sunk in slowly. Died. The smell of… Of blood.

  I resisted the urge to throw up while we crossed the last few meters toward the cell.

  The cell itself looked like a scene from a horror movie. The bed to the right was occupied by a living, breathing inmate who was being restrained by two MMCA agents. The other bed was covered in gore, soaked red and leaking blood.

  My head hurt instantly, overwhelmed by the smell, the massacre. My legs threatened to give out on me. “What is this?”

  The female guard pushed me roughly into the cell. Timothy closed the door behind us. With six people in here, seven if you counted the deceased, it was crowded and claustrophobic, barely allowing me to breathe.

  “This is Lycus,” Timothy said, gesturing at the inmate being held down by the other two guards. “He swears high and low that he didn’t kill his cellmate, Orion.” He turned toward the blood-soaked bed. “But since the cells are locked from the inside out, and no one tampered with the cell door, it seems the most logical option.”

  “Still, we have no idea how he even could’ve done it,” one of the guards restraining Lycus said. “They’ve both been here for years and they seemed to get along.” This guard obviously ranked as one of the more sympathetic ones as well, a stark difference to the female MMCA agent who was still tugging at my sleeve.

  “We want you to rewind time. See what really happe
ned. The corpse is still warm, Lycus heard Orion cry out for help—his words, not mine—and then alerted us immediately. Again, that’s his statement, I don’t particularly agree with it,” the woman said.

  “I…” I licked my lips, trying to calculate the time that must have passed between then and now. “I can’t go back that far, or bad things will happen.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed yet,” the woman said sarcastically. “But bad things already happened. Now, either you do it voluntarily or we force you to.” She conjured up a taser from her uniform pocket. “Choice is all yours.”

  I took a deep breath, turning from the bloodshed to the shaking, pale figure on the other bed. All the clues pointed toward Lycus having caused this, but he seemed so shaken up… It would also be the stupidest murder in the history of murders, since he was practically caught red-handed.

  The female guard rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’m done waiting.” She shoved me towards the bed.

  I gagged at the smell of blood intensifying the closer I got. When the female guard pushed me down on my knees, tears welled up in my eyes. At least in a horror film, you knew the gore wasn’t real, it was just clever make-up and special effects. Here, it was real, and it smelled real, and I was gazing at the remnants of an actual human being.

  “Do it,” the female guard ordered, while she grabbed my arm and unlocked my bracer.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to subdue the headache. I needed my full concentration in order to be able to pull this off. Turning back time when it involved events I was present for myself, was one thing, but turning back time on a scene I hadn’t witnessed myself, took a lot more energy.

  I had only ever been able to pull it off twice before, and I hoped my nerves wouldn’t overwhelm me, with all those peering eyes on me. The clue was that I should only manipulate a small part of the universe: in this scenario, the bed and its surroundings.

  I breathed in deeply and lifted my hands on each side. I pulled at the fabric of reality, of time itself, molding it in my hands until I was able to hold a bubble big enough to cover the bed.

  Still holding on to the bubble, I snapped the fingers on my right hand.

  In the bubble, time rewound, slower than it usually did. The rest of reality stayed the same: like looking through a glass sphere at the fortune teller’s at a carnival, except the other way around. Instead of showing the future, it illuminated the past.

  The gory mess vanished and transformed into the sleeping shape of a young man with brown hair covering most his face. He seemed deep asleep, taking steady breaths. I stopped rewinding, and let the events play out as they had happened.

  First, a dark shadow hovered over him. I pulled at the bubble, making it slightly larger, so we could see where the shadow came from.

  The more I pulled, the more fatigued I became. Especially after the ordeal of earlier tonight, manipulating time was draining, but I had no choice, not with all those guards pressing me to do so.

  Even when I made the bubble big enough to encompass half of the cell, nothing showed except the shadow.

  The shadow crawled on top of Orion’s bed, sitting on top of them. Then, it raised its hands—no, its claws—and dug into his skin. It pulled out something, an organ, and then another, and another, with a strength and fury I had never witnessed before.

  This shadow, whatever it was, killed Orion with the first attack. The other attacks were meant just to amplify the damage.

  I snapped the bubble close, unable to hold the rift in time and space open for any longer. Exhausted, I fell forward, resting on my hands and knees. My stomach heaved, bile rising in my throat.

  “What the hell was that?” Timothy asked his colleagues.

  “I told you I didn’t do it!” Lycus yelled from his position in the corner. “I’ve known Orion for years, he’s my brother, I wouldn’t raise a finger against him.”

  “A shadow…” The female guard contemplated. “No one here has a power like that, not that I know of. The strength of that atrocity, to do something like this…”

  I couldn’t resist it any longer.

  Groaning, I threw up all over the prison floor.

  “You stupid idiot,” the female guard said while she pulled me up. “You’re contaminating the crime scene.”

  “Maybe we asked her to do too much too soon,” Timothy said. If we ever managed to rebel against these guards, I would put that female guard’s head on a pike, but I wouldn’t touch Timothy at all. He seemed like a good guy, all things considered. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll bring you back to your cell.”

  “We’ll relocate you for the night,” the female guard said, to Lycus this time.

  “So, you finally believe now that I didn’t do it?” His voice was strained, and I recognized the hurt in it—I would no doubt feel the same way if I woke up one night and Mica was mauled to death.

  “Well, your powers are nothing like what we saw here,” the guard admitted. “But we’ll get to the bottom of this. Nobody dies on my watch.”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation, because Timothy pulled me along to the corridor, and the voices turned muffled.

  I swallowed hard, trying to keep the nausea down. “Is this… This isn’t common here, is it?”

  Timothy scrutinized me from head to toe, probably wondering if he should answer my question or not. Eventually, he shook his head. “No. Nothing like this has ever happened here, and it will never happen again.” He looked as stern as one of the guards of Buckingham Palace. “We’ll make sure of that.”

  How could the MMCA be so confident that they could handle this, whatever it was? Rewinding time had showed that Orion got attacked by a shadow. Since no one apparently had any powers like this, how could they even begin to figure it out?

  “Don’t worry.” My fear must’ve been written all over my face, because Timothy tried to console me. “Whatever this is, we’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure if I believed him. If they had no idea what they were up against—and in all honesty, I had no clue either—how could they stop something when they didn’t even know what it was?

  And whatever that shadow was… To be able to tear through a human being’s chest, through muscle and flesh, just like that, and pull out their organs, required a tremendous amount of strength.

  Despite Timothy’s efforts to make me feel less afraid, I was terrified.

  When we had returned to my cell, and Timothy locked the doors behind me again, I turned around toward him. “It entered through the locked doors. Did you notice? It didn’t need to open the doors; that means it could enter anywhere, whenever it wants to.”

  “We will handle this,” Timothy said earnestly. “And not a word of this to your fellow inmates, or we’ll be forced to put you in solitary. We’ll explain the news to everyone as soon as we know more.” With those words, he left me alone.

  I turned to Mica’s sleeping form. She was snoring lightly, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I was relieved to hear that sound. Otherwise, her snoring annoyed me to no end, but now it meant she was still alive, and not massacred by a shadow.

  What the hell was that thing? How had it gotten inside this prison, and how was it capable of moving through locked doors?

  As I crawled into bed, pulling the blanket to my chin although it didn’t help against the cold at all, I knew one thing for sure.

  Whatever it was, those MMCA agents were way out of their league.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Repeat that again,” Mica hissed at me. “What happened?”

  I kept my voice to a whisper. Although Timothy the guard had threatened to put me in a solitary cell if I so much as breathed a word of what had happened last night, I wasn’t about to let that stop me from telling my best friend. “Orion was killed. Killed is basically an understatement, his body was massacred until all that was left was a bloody mess.”

  “By a shadow?”

  It was quarte
r to seven, and I had woken Mica up. I hadn’t closed my eyes for the remainder of the night, on the look-out for any shadows trying to sneak into our room. In about fifteen minutes, the lights would jump on and the color on the button to open our cells would jump from red to green, so I wanted to talk to Mica before everyone else woke up.

  “Yes,” I replied. “A shadow that entered through a closed door.”

  “Do the MMCA have any idea who could be responsible?” Mica sat up in bed, kicking off the blankets. “I mean, someone must’ve done it.”

  “Do you know any demi-god with those kinds of powers?” I whispered to her. “I’ve tried to go over all the lore and legends that I know of, but nothing rings a bell.”

  “No, can’t say that I do, but maybe we could check out the library? Or I could ask…” She paused mid-sentence, glaring at me. “I’m still not telling you who it is.” She was referring to her secret love interest, whose name she still refused to share with me.

  “Gah.” I rolled my eyes. “This is more pressing than worrying who you want to date! We need to figure out who is doing this, why, and stop them.”

  “Why are we enrolled for this task?” Mica stretched her arms above her head. “Orion is… was… an okay guy, and he didn’t deserve to go like that, but who made us the detectives in charge of solving this case? The guards will get to the bottom of this, for sure.”

  “Because we could be next.” I got up too and walked over to the sink. My hair looked like a bird had nested in it overnight. I still had a bruise under my left eye, but apart from that, my face looked remarkably better than I had anticipated. “Anyone could be next.”

  “Or whoever did it, really had it out for Orion. No idea why, but it’s a possibility.”

  I gave her a perplexed look, and Mica shrugged. “You don’t have to fall into hysterics. This could be a one-time thing too, rather than a shadowy fiend sneaking into everyone’s cells at night, like a phantom Jack the Ripper. Maybe someone really had it out for this one person.”