He had to be through it, though.
I wasted no more time.
I jolted forward. With my skirts spinning around my waist, I thrust into the tunnel.
Slowly but surely my foyer disappeared until I was stuck in the darkness.
It completely surrounded me.
I couldn’t see through it. I couldn’t even hear through it. For a few seconds, I thought I’d been clocked on the head. There were no sensations, until suddenly there were. I felt something underneath my feet. At first, it was only slightly tangible, but as seconds ticked by, it became stiff and harder until finally I was standing on solid ground.
It was still dark as all hell – or purgatory. I honestly wasn’t sure which realm had the darkest pits, even though I’d traveled to both only this week. I leaned down and trailed my fingers over the ground. I collected dust. Drawing it up, I took a subtle sniff. It smelled like I was in some kind of cave.
Though all I wanted to do was thrust forward and find Sonos – especially considering time was ticking by – I wasn’t that stupid.
Ideally, I would’ve drawn Sonos to myself in my mansion. I hadn’t had enough angel charms. Now I was keenly aware of the fact that I had spent every last one. There would be no more miracles for me unless I created them.
My gut gave a lurch as I continued forward. The portal back into my mansion had completely closed. I didn’t know if I would be able to open it again. Maybe if I ran back to that particular point and concentrated on my foyer, I’d find a way back to it. But there was no way I was going home empty-handed.
I didn’t want to discuss my guilt as I continued forward. It hammered its way up and down my spine as if it were looking for a weakness – some way to shatter my bones and pulverize the rest of me in one quick hit. Because I deserved to be broken, didn’t I?
“I left you behind. I’m so sorry,” there was precisely no vocal force behind my words. I moved my mouth, but that was it. I didn’t even breathe through my lips.
I soon came to a T-intersection. As I ran my crooked fingers over my mouth, I tried to decide which direction to head in. I was keenly aware of every single minute relentlessly ticking by. I swore there was some demon right over my shoulder, counting every second. As each one passed, a thrill of anticipation and total dread shuddered through my belly. It made me stand straighter, but I still didn’t know what direction to turn in.
I clutched my cross. As soon as my fingers shifted around the delicate gold filigree, I felt more centered, but I certainly didn’t know which direction Sonos was in.
“Dammit,” I mouthed. “Why couldn’t the angel charm take me directly to him?”
Maybe it hadn’t had the power. But there was also another distinct possibility that made my gut churn even harder. What if it hadn’t been able to take me directly to him because, yet again, he didn’t want to be found?
As horrible as it was to admit, I could see his point. There was no point in me wasting resources and precious time to find him. It wasn’t... it wasn’t like he could be much use in the final fight. Right?
As soon as I let that goading thought slip past, I grabbed hold of it before it could act like a battering ram on my heart. No. Lilly had already told me I needed hope in order to defeat Hilliker. I had to call on the things from this world he no longer would be able to use. And hope would be one of the most powerful tools. Sonos gave me hope. Even if I’d only realized that in the past week.
I let my hand fall from my cross. I stared from the left to the right. As I closed my eyes, I let my feet decide. They swung to the left. I continued down a darkened corridor – considering every single thing in this tunnel system was completely pitch-black – until I reached a closed-off section. Before I could kick myself for choosing the wrong direction, I frowned and thrust a hand out. Letting my fingers trail over the stone, I sensed not only imperfections in the rock, but tiny little blasting sprites of magic. I concentrated on them, following them down the wall, letting my hand spread all the way out until I had maximum contact with the rock. I stopped in the middle. I could sense something directly underneath my fingers. With nothing else to do, I brought my hand back, formed a fist, and pounded it hard into the wall.
It felt, surprisingly enough, like punching a frigging immovable block of rock. Despite the fact I used magic, for some reason it didn’t count. All I ended up doing was cutting my knuckles on the rough rock.
My eyes exploded wide open in pain, but I sure as heck didn’t scream. I’d been proud of myself for barely making a sound since getting here. Grinding my teeth together and frowning deeply, I touched the wall again. I had used a hefty amount of magic, and considering the truly powerful forces that I could now call on, it should be more than enough to break apart this rock. So why hadn’t it worked?
I brought my fist back again. Before I thrust it into the stone, I thought better of it. I got up close and personal instead. I pressed my face against the rock. I wasn’t about to hug it and stroke it as if it was my only comfort now Sonos had departed me. Instead, I used my every subtle sense to try to figure out what was going on. Though frustration built in me, I sure as hell didn’t give way to it. I’d been giving in to my anger all my life – the kind of anger that had made me lash out and punch anything in sight. It had been what had stopped me from believing Sonos sooner.
Yeah, that very same explosive anger had gotten me out of more situations than I cared to remark upon, but the point was, I now had to control myself.
I smiled ever so slightly as I remembered that was what Sonos had said back in the light bar. Back then, I’d replied that I didn’t need to control myself. Now I threw my heart and mind into the task as I continued to let my hand drift down the wall. Finally I felt something under my fingers. It was this darting energy.
I cracked a grin. “It’s a reverse spell,” I mouthed.
I yanked my hand back, stood a few meters away, and considered it with my head on an angle.
I was running out of time. Every second I wasted with this wall was a second I could use heading in the opposite direction. But it was nigh time I believed in myself and stopped changing my mind halfway through a plan.
Closing my eyes, I finally sensed the directional flow of the magical spell. These kinds of enchantments were what they sounded like. They were charms that allowed one to disperse magical energy in different directions. You could use them – if you were seriously powerful and had a lot of magic backup – to divert enemy attacks. You couldn’t use them on every single angle, and they were exploitable if you knew what you were looking at – but they were pretty good for surprising an enemy and knocking them flat on their ass.
Now I’d seen through it, it didn’t take me long to find the right angle to attack it from. Shimmying up close to the wall again, I found it, and I punched a piece of rock no larger than a quarter. It cracked, and so too did the entire wall and the spell holding it in place. It crumbled around me, and I saw my first light source. From within, these glowing magic mushrooms parted through the rock like fingers pushing through wire.
I frowned. I hadn’t bothered questioning where I was, but now it struck me. I was in a magical mine. Holy hell. I didn’t think there was a single one left on Earth.
Back in the dark old days of magic, magic had been mined. That wasn’t to say that it was a natural resource that bubbled up from the center of the Earth just as freely as molten lava. It was to say that there were certain very powerful magical ores out there. Well, at least there had been. Not anymore. They had been exploited within an inch of their lives. If you wanted magic these days, you had to create it yourself or gather it together from existing charms.
I wasn’t stupid enough to trail my fingers over those magic mushrooms as I shifted on by. Do that, and I would either be zapped or plain killed. Back when these mines had first been discovered thousands upon thousands of years ago, there had been hundreds upon hundreds of deaths. It had taken many centuries before people had understood how to correctly m
ine the stuff. When they had discovered it, the first order of business had been to get rid of all of the old corpses. Some of them still adorned the particularly rich and grizzly mansions of the world. The corpses, after all, had been imbued with their own specialized power after sitting in magical forces for centuries.
I kept myself to myself, my hands firmly in my pockets, my tongue even pressed protectively behind my teeth in case I was going to dart it out and inadvertently lick the mushrooms.
Though I’d already told myself I didn’t have time for this, I was at least a little distracted by the mine. It was my first time down one. I’d read a lot about them, and I’d even seen the videos, but it was distinctly different to be standing inside one. I now knew what accounted for that eerie darkness. Magic, after all, is used to growing in the dark where there are no eyes to see it nor question it.
A few times I stopped when there were small cave-ins ahead of me. I touched nothing. I used only discrete, carefully calibrated charges of magic to get through. Anything else, and I could set off a magical cave in. The ceiling would not come down and squish me flat. I would be nowhere near that lucky. Instead, every single magical object in this tunnel system – which was practically everything – would condense around me and crush me in a tidal wave of force.
It took a long time to shift through that section. Maybe 10 minutes. Maybe 20. It was hardly an hour, but I hardly had an hour, did I? The question of how much time I had left obsessed me as I finally made it through that patch.
My intuition better be right, and I’d better be heading in the right direction, otherwise I had just wasted time I would never get back.
My brow was now slicked with sweat, and as I made my way out into a plain corridor that was thankfully free of any magical ore and mushrooms, my entire body shook.
“Come on, Sonos,” I mouthed, “just be okay.”
I continued down the corridor.
Thus far, it had just been me. I was under no illusion that it would continue to be just me. If Sonos really was here, and I couldn’t see how an angel charm would’ve gotten that wrong, then there would be guards. I met my first one as I rounded a corner.
There was a gnome sitting down on his haunches, sipping from a hip flask.
On the face of it, you wouldn’t think that gnomes were particularly scary things. And to be honest, they weren’t. They just had a unique ability to call something to them. Just as my face paled and I realized how much shit I was in, the gnome spat, swore, dropped the hip flask, and darted to the side with his pickaxe held up high. I spread a hand toward him and sent magic blasts smashing into his side, but I wasn’t quick enough. He’d already wielded his pickaxe. He smashed it against the wall. There was nothing more than a light ping. He barely made any contact, but he didn’t have to.
Without warning, the floor bucked. It happened so quickly and so violently, I had to clamp my hands down and get onto all fours in order to stop from rolling around on the undulating ground.
Something began to pick itself up out of the cracks that appeared through the stone.
The gnome jumped right down into one, but not before it grabbed its hip flask, and not before it stared at me gleefully, this truly violent smile cracking across its lips and making its glistening beard twitch, the gold strands within sending light dancing around this otherwise dark expanse.
I pushed to my feet just in time to see a proper rock warrior pull itself up out of the floor. It was massive. It was a problem considering the ceiling in this section was not high. That didn’t matter – to the creature, at least. It smashed right through. As its head punched through the ceiling, it sent stones scattering down everywhere. I had to dodge every single last one of them, because some of them were full of magical ore.
Once the rock warrior had carved itself a hole in the ceiling, it crunched down, and it screamed. That earsplitting noise could’ve continued through the earth, punched through the atmosphere, and smashed through every single planet in the solar system. If it weren’t for magic, my eardrums would have exploded and taken the rest of my head with them. As it was, I clapped my hands over my ears. Once the scream was done, I pushed forward.
I stared down at the clock on my wrist. The little watch face was busy ticking down every second. I didn’t want to believe what I saw. Half an hour. I had half an hour to find Sonos and get back to Hilliker.
If Sonos were here right now, he would grab me and shove me in the opposite direction. He would stare at me with anger and disappointment filling his eyes. How could I be so stupid? Hilliker had me exactly where he wanted me. His guards would blast through my power and injure me well before Hilliker jumped onto the scene. Then there would be no more fight. Hilliker would just snap my neck and end this.
I was suddenly reminded of what my sister had said. She’d promised me that the only way to truly fight Hilliker was to let him kill me until I only had one life left. Then, regardless of the fact I didn’t have any true magic, I’d be able to call on something he would not be able to fight. I didn’t want to believe it. It wasn’t a plan. It was the exact opposite of one.
Every single person I had met had told me not to let Hilliker kill me again.
But now as I narrowly dodged that rock warrior, I wondered if it would happen, anyway.
I’d already ascertained that Hilliker had to kill me himself. It was obviously something about his hands being around my throat that allowed my magic to spill more freely into the Banished. That being said, I really didn’t want to risk dying at someone else’s hands.
But maybe I wouldn’t have any choice. Just as I tried to dodge in these narrow confines, I slipped. The rock warrior sensed my weakness, threw himself forward, rounded a hand into a fist, and smashed it against the side of my face.
Instantly this ringing pounded through my skull. It was so bad I felt like I had swallowed 10 massive church bells. As they clattered around in my brain, I fell to the side. The rock warrior did not leave it at that. He pounced on me. Literally. As I felt his massive stony form smash down on my chest, I thought my entire body would explode. My magic desperately arced around me as it protected me from the brunt of his force, but it could do nothing when he leaned down and started punching my head, over and over again. My head lolled from one side to the other, grinding further into the stone until I had created a cavity right behind my skull.
I began to see flashes of my life on fast forward. The day Hilliker killed me first. The day I was born. And then this. Over and over again.
I could feel death beckoning. Just as the rock warrior screamed and created a cave-in that sent stones tumbling all around me, I began to feel the light picking up within me.
No, no, no. There was nothing I could damn well do. I was about to die.
The rock warrior clearly knew this. Despite the fact it barely had a face and its only features were slits that led out blasts of the magic within, it still managed a smile. Its lips curled up, and it brought its fist down one last time.
I received one last flash. I thought I saw Sonos. I wasn’t sure if it was a memory or something my brain was creating right on the edge of death. I thought... I thought he was reaching a hand out to me. Behind him, I saw my ballroom. I even heard the music. I reached a hand up, but that would be when the rock warrior smashed it right down.
It was done. I was too injured.
I felt my life slip away from me.
The rock warrior screamed in total glee.
Though I’d been certain that I would need Hilliker’s hands around me in order to feed the Banished, I still felt my resurrection magic leaking out of me even as I was picked up and I floated in the air. My arms spread, and my head lolled to the side, my hair fanning around me. As the resurrection magic spilled through me, repairing my injuries, the resurrection light was siphoned off. I felt it leaking out of my frigging soul. It was like someone had shoved a cannula into my heart.
As it bled down, it seeped into the stone and disappeared through the cracks in the
floor and walls.
As soon as I fell back down onto my feet, the rock warrior threw itself forward. It was clear it was going to continue to kill me. Why stop?
I felt that I had less magic. It was such an obvious sudden and visceral thing, it was as if someone had just chopped off one of my legs.
I tried to bring my hands up and stop the rock warrior with a massive charge of magic, but what I thought would be massive turned out to be only slightly impressive.
The rock warrior smashed into my magical force field and obliterated it. As I spluttered in total surprise, I forced myself to the side. I rolled, came up hard, and tried to dodge past him, but he was way too quick. For a brute that should’ve moved as fast as a mountain, he managed to catch me around the middle. I knew he would throw me against the wall and shatter my frigging spine. There was nothing I could do.
As fear completely pounded through me, I opened my subspace pocket. I didn’t know what I would pull out. I was acting on instinct from the time when I’d had the snow globe. With nothing so powerful to assist me now, I just groped and grabbed the first thing that fell into my hand.
... Which just so happened to be that small turtle I’d stolen from the tunnels. At the time, I’d grabbed it because it had fallen into my grip and my body had thought better than my mind. Now I realized it would screw me over. Sure enough, the massive rock warrior did not blink once at the fact that I had proffered a turtle at it. It didn’t matter that it was jade and carved delicately. The rock warrior just sneered, wrapped its fingers around my middle, and went to crush my head against the wall. But that would be when my grip tightened around the little turtle. My fingers sunk in all the way as fear got the better of me.
Inadvertently, I cracked the turtle’s shell. I didn’t honestly think anything would happen. Though I assumed this turtle had to be valuable, considering where it had been kept, I hadn’t felt any obvious charges of magic. But now the magic within became obvious, all right.
I heard this light tinkle. It sounded like glass breaking – or maybe diamonds dropping on the floor.
Better off Dead Book Four Page 10
