by Rainy Kaye
“Enjoy,” he said with a smile. He turned and started to walk away, but then looked over his shoulder at me. His brows pulled together. “You are so similar.”
He headed off, into the trees.
“Similar?” I yelled, leaning forward, as far as I dared with my hands tied behind the trunk. “Similar to what?”
He didn’t reply, didn’t hesitate as he strolled away, disappearing into the trees.
I stared after him, mouth gaped. Had the son of a bitch really just left me tied to a goddamned tree in the middle of a forest outside a plague-infected town? A number of unfortunate fates rolled through my brain, the least of which was being eaten by a bear.
My thoughts shifted to how to get out of here before said scenarios had a chance to play out. My arms were straight out on either side of the trunk, which gave me no leverage to pull or twist my way to freedom. Already, my elbows and shoulders ached. A pinch formed in my neck.
I tried squatting and standing, repeatedly, dragging the rope across the bark, but it barely caught. Not enough to even come close to sawing through.
My thighs ached, so I stood upright and leaned back against the trunk, panting. I tried focusing on my breath, listening as I forced myself to take long slow inhales followed by measured exhales. It didn’t help the panic much. In reality, I only had one hope—that my magic miraculously returned before I died of frostbite out here. Or worse.
Not that my magic would return in time—it rarely did—but if I could find a way to will it back to me, I could singe the ropes. Even as I thought of it, I seemed less excited by my newfound abilities, and more doubtful, like I hadn’t really performed any of these tricks, like they had been a one off, like I had been mistaken. It seemed equally unlikely I had burned ropes as I had formed a magical air bubble in the lake and rose to the surface, unharmed.
It still seemed unreal. Like I couldn’t use my magic for anything beneficial. Like as soon as I performed an amazing feat, I doubted what I had actually done. Maybe if they had been real, maybe if I hadn’t exaggerated my abilities, I might be able to do something about my current situation.
Crunching sounds brought me back to the present, which wasn’t a particularly fun place to be.
Up ahead, a tall shadow moved in the trees.
Please, be Randall.
The figure wove through the trunks, coming closer.
Oh, dear god, please be Randall. Be green tunic guy. Be anyone but…
The mage stepped into full view. His long cloak swept across the snow, and he stared at me through the portholes in his bird-beaked plague mask. The cloak was cinched up around his head, and he wore long black gloves and boots. Every feature of him was obscured, from his face to his hair to his hands.
It was almost as if there was no one underneath that. As if he was just a walking suit of doom.
He took a step toward me.
I tried to shake off the ropes again. I tugged and pulled despite the fiery pain in my shoulders and elbows until a little cry escaped my lips.
The ropes didn’t give.
He continued to storm toward me, leaving heavy footprints in the snow.
I sank partway down, unable to reach my knees to the ground, but unable to fully stand anymore. I hung from the trunk, the world closing in.
The sound of his breathing filled my head.
What would he do to me? The green tunic guy had assumed the mage would have a purpose for me, but what?
I really didn’t want answers to those questions, but I was about to find out.
The mage stopped in front of me. I stared up at him from under my eyelashes, blurred by the teardrops caught on them.
“Please,” I whispered.
I still wasn’t too good to beg.
I had seen what the other mages were capable of, and somehow, they seemed like warmups compared to this monstrosity. Maybe it was because they were safely tucked away in their paintings again. At least, until the seal broke if I couldn’t find the damn vault. Even if I put this mage away, there was the risk he might be able to return, that they all might be able to return again.
Thoughts spun in my head in a frenzy, each less complete than the last.
The mage reached out his hand toward me.
Something dark dropped from the branches above me. It collided onto the mage’s back, and he stumbled backwards.
I jerked upright. Sasmita beat on the mage’s head with her fists as he tried to peel her off.
Blue light pulsed around them. Something told me it wasn’t Sasmita’s magic.
Ah, fuck.
“Get off him,” I screamed, pulling at my restraints.
She released, falling into a heap in the ground, and rolled away. Blue light erupted from him. I turned my head, blinded.
When I looked up again, several trees had fallen, their cracked trunks propped against their neighbors. My tree remained unscathed; his control over his magic was as impressive as terrifying.
Sasmita shoved to her feet. I expected she would be powering up to return fire, but she remained unlit.
The mage jerked around to face her head on.
She turned and bolted past me, around to the back of the tree. Her hand grazed mine, trailing magic it in its wake, and my ropes fell apart.
I swung my arms forward, and fierce pain shot through my shoulders. I dropped to the ground, hunched over.
Now wasn’t the time to be weak, but I didn’t get a say in the matter.
My mind reeled with the realization she had magic, she was able to use it—she had just released my bindings with a little arcane flair—but she was taking the mage on without it.
She wasn’t here to stop him. She was here for his blood.
I shoved my hands against the snow, pushing myself to my feet. I stumbled a few steps toward the mage. He ignored me and approached Sasmita. She stood leaning forward with her hands on her thighs, panting.
I scanned the ground for something to use as a weapon. If there was anything, it was all buried under the snow. I turned my attention higher, trying to find a loose limb on a tree that I could easily pull off and use as a bat, but all were securely attached.
The mage stormed toward Sasmita. She hunched farther, staring up into his face.
My heart beat faster, harder, and I grew dizzy with the helplessness of the situation. Sasmita was going forward with her own plan. Not like I could even try to put him into his portrait because I had no idea where it was. Arthur the cadaver had said the mage had taken it when he had escaped the confines of his painted prison. That gave me nothing to go on. My only option was to turn and flee, but that sort of made me a dick, considering I knew Sasmita wouldn’t leave without his blood even if given the opportunity.
With a grunt, I swept down and scooped up a fistful of snow. I packed it hard, adding more, and then stood and chucked it at him. It nailed him right in the side of the head.
He came to a halt. I could almost see him registering what had just happened. Then, he spun around to face me.
I didn’t have any ideas past that point, just hoped that Sasmita would take the opportunity to get his damn blood so we could run.
A second ticked by.
Then another.
The mage stormed toward me.
Sasmita slipped her hand down her shirt and yanked out the little syringe-like vial held on a chain around her neck. A dark liquid sloshed inside—the blood of the mage of New Orleans.
She charged at the mage, raising the vial, and brought the needle end down on his back.
He swiped at her as he spun around, knocking her to the ground. The vial flung from her hand and landed a few feet away.
She twisted around to reach for it. The mage stomped toward her. I froze, torn between my lack of options. As much as I wanted to get out of here, I couldn’t find it in me to go. Not without Sasmita. She was one of us now, even if we weren’t exactly on the same team.
Without thinking, I rushed the mage. I slammed into his back, knocking him f
orward, toward her. He swung around, flinging me off.
Sasmita kicked hard, ramming her sole into his stomach. Blue magic flared at the point of impact. The mage dropped to one knee. I tumbled off him and bounced right back to standing. She scrambled for her vial, clutching it up with a fistful of snow, as she shoved to her feet.
“Go,” she said, breathless, and then took off into the trees.
I darted after her, struggling on weak legs to catch up. I didn’t dare look behind me. Whatever she had surprised the mage with when she used magic in her kick, he was sure to have already recovered from it. He hadn’t been sentenced to eternal imprisonment in a painting because he was easily subdued.
We were toys to him. That was the only explanation he hadn’t just killed us yet.
Like all toys, we would eventually lose our appeal.
Gasping for air, I came up next to her and matched her pace.
Straight in front of us, the mountain descended in a sheer drop. We could turn back, but it would bring us right back to the mage. Even just veering to the side would give him an advantage. He didn’t need more of those.
“Just keep going,” she murmured.
My heart froze. Blurry white fog overtook my vision.
I had to trust her. She had a plan, which was one more than I did.
My pace didn’t slow as we continued to barrel forward. My foot hit the last step of land, and I was over the edge. I fell through the air. Then my feet slammed into the earth, and I landed in a crouch so hard, my teeth jarred together.
I tasted blood.
The world tipped, and I started forward.
A hand wrapped around my arm, pulling me back.
My back hit something hard. I reached behind me, feeling the cold rock. My vision cleared, and I nearly dropped to my knees.
Sasmita and I stood side by side on a small outcrop jutting into the air. If I had stumbled forward a few paces, I would have dropped off into a ravine.
Arctic wind beat around us, and I let it help hold me against the side of the mountain. My fingers tightened around something. I looked down to find I was holding Sasmita’s hand.
We stood that way, frozen in fear, as ice crunched above us under the mage’s footsteps.
It seemed like forever passed. Twice.
My heart alternated between rapid beats and feeling like it ceased to pump at all. My legs throbbed, and my joints burned.
Still, we did not move, did not breathe.
Somewhere under the wind, silence filled my skull. After a few more minutes passed, I turned my head, neck stiff, just enough to look at her.
She tipped her head back, as if listening, and then nodded. The mage was gone. For now, at least. It was as if his presence had lifted a physical force that had been bearing down on me, that I hadn’t noticed until he had retreated.
Lost interest. The dark witches and mages did not retreat from anything.
Slowly, barely lifting my soles from the tiny ledge, I turned around and tipped my head back to the edge above us. We hadn’t fallen nearly as far as it had seemed, but it was still going to take some effort to get back up there.
Sasmita tapped my shoulder, and when I looked at her, she mimed boosting me up. I nodded.
She crouched down and offered me a step up. I tried to block out that there was no room for error here—just a small slip and I would plummet into the abyss below—as I leveraged myself up on her, one hand grabbing on to the rock side. She shoved me up harder, and I patted my hand on the snow above me, looking for purchase.
I found something hard and dug my fingers past the ice crusted over it. A tree root. I wrapped my hand around it and swung my knee up into the rocks. Sasmita grunted as she heaved me up a little farther. I brought my other leg up and threw it over the edge, hoisting myself backwards, into a roll. I stopped on my back, taking in a few deep breaths.
Then I realized how close I was to falling off the side again. Without daring to sit, I inched my way on my back away from the ledge. When I was on steadier ground, I pushed myself to my hands and knees and leaned forward to peer down at Sasmita.
She lifted her hand up to me.
I scuttled forward and reached over the side. She latched her hand around my forearm, and I put the last of my energy into pulling her up. She pressed her sole against the rock in front of her and, with effort, walk-hopped her way up the short distance to the top. I scooted back, and she came down on her knees in front of me, hard. She bit down a whimper, and together we padded away from the ledge.
After we cleared a few feet, we stood. I brushed snow off my legs and torso, trying to catch my breath.
She pointed past me.
“The ranger station is that way. Randall ran back for help after you were taken. It made more sense for me to come.” She curled and extended her fingers a few times, and then added pointedly, “I should have in the first place.”
I started off in the direction she had indicated.
“You barely even used your magic to begin with,” I grumbled.
She hurried to catch up with me.
“Yeah, I haven’t quite figured out which mage he is, but the one thing I can guess they all have in common is, they don’t respond well to being attacked with magic.” She hesitated before adding, “There’s a thing—something I never learned to do—where they can kind of siphon your magic, amplify it, and ricochet it back. It’s like being shot with your own gun.”
That sounded a lot like what I had done in the final fight with the mage of New Orleans, the way I had managed to throw him off balance to knock him into the portrait.
That couldn’t be right; Sasmita was a better witch than me by far, and yet she couldn’t do it, by her own admission.
I understood my magic less and less.
“You used magic on him when you kicked him,” I said, less to disagree and more to distract myself from the confusion clouding my brain.
“It only works if you can catch them by surprise,” she said, but I barely registered her answer, lost in my thoughts.
Just being able to warm up my coffee and leaving magic breadcrumbs might not have been very useful, but it made sense. I knew I could do it when I had my magic available, and it always worked then. Being able to erect shields that stretched on for miles and create air pockets in water one moment, and then not have any idea how to access those skills again the next was far more unsettling than not having them in the first place.
I really didn’t want to think farther on why Sasmita couldn’t do what I had done in New Orleans. Not yet. We needed to get back to the ranger station, to Randall and Fiona and Ever. We had managed to find ourselves on the wrong side of the men with the tentacle magic, again. That was three for three. Now, I had been marked as bait for the mage, at least long enough that his attention had been drawn to me. I couldn’t imagine any scenario where that worked to my benefit.
To make matters worse, we didn’t have a clue where the portrait was, and without it, we had no hope of stopping him.
The longer I thought about, the more I realized we only had two choices—and in either option, more people would die.
14
As Sasmita and I cut through the edge of town, the dim glow of the moon and sparse streetlights made the tightly packed rows of buildings, the flat peak behind them, and the spattering of trees all the more unsettling. The streets were empty of townspeople, and I had to wonder how many still lived here, and how many were awaiting their funeral.
Snow crunched under my shoes, and I was beginning to hate the sound. My clothes mostly kept out the cold, but the ice under my feet reminded me I couldn’t run fast or far. I just wanted to get the mage back in his prison, but I didn’t even know where the damn painting was.
Arthur had told the man in the green tunic that the mage had taken the picture with him when he’d left. Something told me the mage had intended to keep anyone from being able to put him back. I could only hope he hadn’t destroyed it.
If he had, we were d
one. I couldn’t even open the portals without the medallion I had gotten from the Devourer in New Orleans, let alone figure out another way to imprison a being like the mage without his portrait. I could barely stay from under his feet in this town.
Even if the portrait was around here somewhere, by some miracle, I didn’t have the first clue where to start. I could ask Ever, but chances were, we were in for a long search in every crevice in the surrounding mountains. As we did that, Fiona would continue to go without the help she needed. No hospital was going to be able to undo what had happened to her on the steamboat in New Orleans, and any time I put into searching for the mage’s portrait was time taken from searching for her cure, hoping one even existed.
If it did, it probably wouldn’t be found in this town. We had already seen enough to know they had nothing to offer in that regard. That meant it was time to leave, to follow the trail to the next disaster and see what we could learn that might help her. Doing so, however, meant turning our back on Haven Rock, on our quest to stop the mage.
I didn’t even know who I was anymore, or why I was here, what I thought I was doing. In a good moment, I was on autopilot, in a bubble trying not to think too deeply about what was happening. During the bad ones, my mind, my body, maybe even my soul, flooded with terror.
I just wanted to go home.
If I intended to help Fiona or defeat the dark witches and mages—or, for some goddamned reason, both—then I couldn’t. I had to keep moving.
I wasn’t sure which direction, though.
Something shifted on the sidewalk. I halted, scanning the shadows.
A corpse had been shoved up against a short brick wall surrounding the front garden of a darkened building. Only the moon and a single streetlight lit the area.
The hand twitched. I scowled, searching for bugs or rats bustling around the body, but found nothing. The hand moved again, the arm bending as the body pulled to its feet.
I took several steps back, stumbling off the curb. Sasmita was right beside me.
A few feet away, down the sidewalk, another body rose.
Shuffling noises issued around the darkened street, and I tightly turned my head to watch as the townspeople reanimated.
