by D. D. Chance
I frowned, glancing down at the shoulder strap of the nylon bag for any sort of clarification, but apparently, my Nina-to-backpack connection had been exhausted for the day. I didn’t know who Liam was talking to or about, but I crept forward, holding my breath as he moaned again in obvious pain.
As I finally breached the entryway to the room, I stopped and stared, my eyes going wide.
I’d stumbled into a torture chamber.
Liam hung upside down from the ceiling, his body encased in something that looked straight out of a fourteenth-century dungeon, all leather straps and brutal hooks, sharp barbs, and twisting chains. Twisting being the operative word as Liam hung and slowly swung like a side of beef, his head extended toward the ground, his mouth caught in a rictus of pain, his eyes wide. I wanted to say his name, but once again, words failed me. This time, not because of any magic spell, but my own frozen shock.
Liam stared over at what looked like a raised labyrinth. Black liquid glistened on its surfaces, running down passageways and over and around. In the center of the maze sat a stack of pages. At first, I wondered if it was my letter, but there were far too many pages for it to be that. So what were…
Liam’s low groan caught me again as he continued turning. Now he was staring at something at the far end of the wall that I couldn’t quite make out from where I stood. I edged forward, my hands coming up to secure the bag more firmly against me, sliding it over both shoulders. I didn’t want to run the risk of upsetting the damn thing, but more to the point, this was Liam’s prized possession. Maybe there would be something in it that could help. With that small hope, I peeked around the corner to see what it was Liam was staring at with such dismay.
I drew in a strangled breath.
It was me.
Similar to the suspended net of pain that currently had Liam trapped, another apparatus hung on the wall, a cross of sorts, with stakes and daggers bolted into it. A person hung there—no, an illusion. It had to be an illusion, right? Because I was standing here, and yet the apparition that was hanging on two of the rods looked so much like me that I jerked in pain as a bolt of electricity danced from one rod to the next, visibly going through my body. Not my body, I reminded myself; the illusion’s body. But it still made me wince.
“Tell her,” a voice sounded from another part of the room. I froze, then turned my head slowly, so slowly that I felt like I was moving through concrete. When I finally swept the rest of the room with my gaze, though, there was nothing there. The voice was as ephemeral as the illusion, but I had heard it. I know I’d heard it. It was low, haunting, maybe feminine? I couldn’t tell, and it didn’t repeat itself. It didn’t need to, because with that one phrase, the words bounced from wall to wall to wall, circling round and round as the electricity danced and the apparition’s hair started smoking.
“Stop,” Liam begged, but the echoing command of “Tell her” continued. He sagged in his leather-and-metal harness as I dared to inch forward again. Nothing stopped; no one seemed to notice me. Even the apparition on the wall stared out with nothing but vacant pain in her eyes. Liam focused only on her—on me—as I very quietly and carefully dropped to my knees. I’d just begun crawling forward when he started talking.
“I was going to tell you everything, everything that I found. I just wanted to know it all first,” he gritted out, and I froze again. “I know that wasn’t fair of me. I don’t ask you to understand, but I’ve been hurt by information I didn’t understand before. I didn’t want you to be hurt. No, no, that’s not true. I’m sorry!”
Liam’s voice lifted with an agonized fervency as a new round of electricity rattled through my poor effigy on the wall. That was totally going to leave a mark, but my attention was split now between my own image and the words spilling out of Liam, more quickly now.
“I didn’t want you hurt, but I didn’t care about that as much as I cared about learning the shit I needed to know. The Apocrypha held the truth, it held the answers, I knew it had to. Page after page of how the harbinger would blow the doors off everything, that you were the missing link. You were what we were waiting for, and we’d better hold on to you with everything we had. Because if we didn’t, we were fucked. Better that we kill you the moment we saw you than let that happen. It was all right there, and I should have told you, but I couldn’t. I needed to know. I had to know if you would finally set me free from the trap I was living in, the trap of not being enough. Not ever being enough. And you were. You so were. And I’m—no! Take me—stop that. Stop.”
But whatever was torturing Liam didn’t stop, maybe couldn’t stop, and a new wave of electrical sparks jittered along my now-smoking body on the wall, making Liam struggle more desperately in his snare. I had no idea how he’d managed to get himself into that thing, but as distracted as he was by the operation on the wall, I suspected it hadn’t been a fun process. I inched forward, sliding the bag off my shoulders and bringing it around, squinting up to try to understand how the harness was attached to the ceiling. There was no way I was going to be able to extricate him from that. I only had one shot, and that was…
I rooted around in the backpack, my fingers brushing across all manner of strange items, some fuzzy, some slick, some weirdly gooey. When I finally struck pay dirt, I pulled out the blinking box that Liam had used to shatter illusions before. I didn’t have his magic or his technical know-how, but that thing on the wall was an illusion, and this should stop it. I pressed the button…
My effigy burst into flames.
“No!” Liam screamed.
Whoops.
27
I leapt up, racing around Liam’s harness thing, and, without thinking about it too hard, because my brain would explode if I did, reached up to wrench my fake body off the wall. It was surprisingly solid, and also legitimately on fire.
I flung it away from me, toward the strange, raised labyrinth in the corner of the room. The moment the body crashed into it, I realized the glistening liquid I’d noticed in the labyrinth was oil, and with the addition of a big stuffed burning dummy, it went up like a funeral pyre. Perhaps not the best image for the already-traumatized Liam to be seeing, but fortunately, he was staring at me now, the real me, as opposed to the rag-doll-of-fire me.
“I’m here, Liam, I’m here,” I said as his tormented gaze fixed on me, his horrified eyes peeled open wide. “I don’t know what you thought you were seeing, but it wasn’t me. Look at me. I’m not on fire. I’m not hurt. I’m okay. You’re in a bad way, and I don’t even know what that is you’re hanging from, but I’m good, okay? Are you with me?”
He shook his head, his mouth working, but it took a second before words came out. “I don’t…”
“Focus, sweetheart. I’m right here. Are you with me?”
“Yeah…” He shuddered. “Yeah. I just…”
His eyes cleared, and he looked over at me, then beyond me to the burning pyre.
“Oh my God,” he breathed. “The book.”
I winced. “Sorry about that. But it was either that or watching you spaz out in your little harness of agony. I did what I had to do.” I peered at him more intently. “What is that thing, anyway? And why are you inside it?”
Liam wasn’t willing to completely get with the information-sharing program, unfortunately, but I decided to cut him some slack. After all, he was going to have to do the lion’s share of getting himself out of whatever the hell it was he was in.
He didn’t say anything more for a second, so I pushed on. “Sorry I was a little late to the party. Your pack sort of got snagged up in some magic and it took me a minute to unsnag it.”
He blinked, his eyes clearing. “Really?” The mention of his backpack made him frown. “It’s never done that before.”
“Yeah, well, don’t give it a hard time. We’re all just trying to do the best we can.” He looked at me a little oddly, but then again, he was the one in the harness.
I gestured to it. “You want to explain to me how this is a thing?”<
br />
He grimaced, swiveling a little, then did some move with his arms that seemed to give him a bit more breathing space.
“I have this setup as sort of an exercise room,” he finally admitted. I glanced around at the harness, the rack on the wall, the still-burning oil-slicked maze.
“You ever think about just joining a gym?”
He chuckled, made another small adjustment, and one of his feet emerged from the top of the harness. “When I came in here, I saw you hanging on the wall. I didn’t stop to think that that was impossible, it just seemed so real. I heard a voice tell me it was a new test, that my confusion was simply part of the test, and that I needed to escape the tourniquet if I wanted you to be freed.”
“Tourniquet. That’s what you’re calling that thing you’re in?”
“Yeah. It’s an old magician’s trick from a hundred years ago that no one was ever able to replicate safely enough for public appearances.”
“Uh-huh. So of course you thought the thing to do would be to put it in a cave where you were guaranteed not to have an audience of, oh, I don’t know, first responders.”
He laughed again, a little grimly. “Something like that. Anyhow…” He grunted again, and one of his arms slipped free of the binds. With a quick flip of his wrist, the second arm was freed as well. I finally allowed myself to breathe.
“Anyway, I got into the tourniquet, only things got worse from there. I found myself being asked questions I didn’t want to admit the answers to.” He turned slightly, pausing in his escape routine and grimaced at me. “You heard that part. I’m sorry.”
“Keep getting yourself free. We’ll talk about all that in a minute.” I shut down any further attempts at conversation until he’d loosed the final bond and hung there in open space, clearly gathering his strength to drop to the floor. I couldn’t hold anything in any longer.
“What happened to the illusionist?” I blurted. “Was that who was asking the questions?”
“I mean, it’s gotta be, don’t you think? Even though I never saw him. As soon as he had me strung up, he split. I don’t know where his voice was coming from, but dude didn’t stick around.”
“But where would he go?” I asked. “Up to your room?”
“I don’t think so.” Liam shook his head. “Those wards are pretty good, and getting out of Fowlers Hall is no easy feat. Plus, that level of magic would be tracked. I think he was probably distracted by one of the other rooms, maybe.”
He sighed. “I’ve stashed a lot of books down here when I don’t want anyone to see me reading them, even in my own room.”
“Yeah?” I looked around. “What kind of books?”
“Oh, arcanum, mostly from the Library of Alexandria.”
I rounded him. “The what? I thought that burned to the ground like two thousand years ago.”
“Yeah, well, there’s this magician who lives out in Vegas, and he swiped a ton of its books back in the day without anyone noticing. He sends them to me from time to time.” By now, Liam had loosened the final bond, and with an act of impressive grace, he exited the harness completely, performing a slow assisted somersault in the air, to land lightly on his feet.
Any thoughts of Liam and his arcane books fled my mind. “That was a heck of a dismount, but dude. You’re bleeding from a dozen different places.”
“Hazard of the job,” he said. He reached down for his bag, and I wasn’t surprised to see the thing lean toward him, so subtly that Liam didn’t notice.
“Where did you get that backpack anyway?” I asked. “It’s kind of…sentient, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“I don’t. It has way more magic than I do, and I love it for it.” He laughed, giving it an affectionate pat. “I’ve had it a long time. Tyler gave it to me originally, and when the first one wore out, I took some of its threads and wove it into the next one, and the next one after that. It’s seen me through quite a lot.” As he spoke, Liam liberated a small vial of salve from his pack. When I gestured for it, he gave it to me with an expression of surprise. That expression only intensified as I applied the salve everywhere it looked like he’d been gouged by the hooks embedded into his tourniquet of death.
“It goes a lot quicker with you doing it,” he commented, and I was relieved to see the wounds healing almost as quickly as I applied the ointment.
“This is pretty good stuff,” I commented, a little drily. “You should probably put a patent on that.”
Liam’s smile held a wince. “Nina, I…I’m really sorry.”
He didn’t need to wave at the Apocrypha burning on the pyre for me to know what he was talking about. “You cut those pages out of the book, didn’t you? It was you all along?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That first night after the Run, when Frost mentioned the work, I went looking for it. To be fair, there’d been plenty of pages that’d already been excised, but I figured that wasn’t a bad idea, and it would allow me to review the pages in secret. I should have told you, and I didn’t.”
“That’s all right. It saves me the trouble of reading them. Did you find anything useful? Other than what you already said?”
He shrugged. “I told you the part about you ushering in a new dawn of monster hunting prowess?”
“Yeah, I caught that part.”
“And about the need for us to make sure you stayed on the side of angels instead of monsters so we didn’t have to kill you?”
“Yup, I picked up on that too. I’m thinking you’re probably good on that score.”
“Then you’re pretty much up to speed—oh, except for the part about us needing to have sex as often as possible to ensure your safety.”
I snorted. “Really? You hadn’t gotten to that bit before I caught myself on fire.”
Liam winced. “You’re taking this a lot better than I probably would have.”
“Well, when you start out your life as monster bait, pretty much everything from there is up.” I looked from him to the remaining embers of the burning Apocrypha. “So now what? Should we look for the illusionist? Assume he’s gone and get back to Guild Hall? I’m not sure how we do that, though, other than going around to the front of the building.”
“Yeah.” Liam blew out a long breath. “Honestly? I wouldn’t mind just sitting here for a second. If the illusionist comes back, we’re going to have a fight on our hands, and if he’s really gone, we’ve got a bit of a trek to get to Lowell Library. I’m a little tired.”
I looked at him with new concern. Liam’s sandy-brown hair had fallen over his brow, and his eyes had slipped nearly closed as he slumped against the wall. As familiar as I was with the sight of him bouncing with energy, cracking off quips and jokes and sharp-edged observations, raring to go…seeing him so weary made my heart twist. For once, his long, lean body had gone still, his breathing had become slow and almost labored, and his hands lay at rest on his legs. He looked like someone who hadn’t exhaled in so long that now that he had, there was no more energy to draw breath back in. I held myself tightly in check, not wanting to unwittingly prod him back into action, but desperate to help him at the same time. “Hey. Are you okay?”
“Oh yeah,” he sighed. “I just…need to take a bit of a break.”
He sagged back a little farther, and I tilted my head, lifting my hand to brush a long lock of hair from his brow.
“How long do you usually hang in that crazy harness thing?” I asked.
He chuckled softly. “I recently hit a new record. Six minutes and forty-four seconds, which is a long time to be hanging upside down, in case you were wondering.”
“With sharp jabby things poking into you, yeah. I would think so.”
He smiled a little, and something about that smile arrowed through me, so it was the most natural thing in the world for me to lean closer to him and brush my lips across his. The kiss was intended to be familiar, almost friendly, but the spark of desire that erupted within me couldn’t be denied. The fear and worry and horror of the last
few minutes came crashing back to me all at once, and I pulled Liam to me roughly, holding him close, horrified to hear that I was sobbing against him.
“You have to take better care of yourself,” I whispered. “You treat yourself like you can be thrown away, and you can’t be thrown away. I don’t know what I’d do if I never got to see you again, and I’ve only just met you. You have to take better care.”
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” Liam tried, but he hugged me back just as tightly, and then we were kissing in earnest, my hands in his hair, his pulling up the skirt of my dress, pressing against my skin, the warm, vital truth of him and me together crackling with furious delight.
We made short work of our clothes and even shorter work of virtually crawling inside each other’s bodies, the rush of our connection lighting up the room all over again. That fire was restorative, the energy building upon the base we’d already formed, forging new lines of power between us. I could feel the strength of that connection and knew it was even stronger than it had been before. It built and built and built—and then exploded, my eyes temporarily blinded by the burst of electricity that shot out into the room in all directions.
“Liam,” I said a little shakily what seemed like half an hour later, and he sighed against me, our shared convulsions ebbing away.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “Magic. That’s the gift you’ve given me, Nina, the gift no one else ever could.”
The words had barely died away when a harsh, mocking laugh sounded over us.
“God save me from the fools of Boston’s first families, but I do appreciate the show. It was…most instructive,” it mocked. “If your own family isn’t going to tell you the truth, Liam Graham, allow me to do so. You were not born the runt of the family. If your mother didn’t know it, your father definitely did. Those tuning rods you’ve got stuck inside you aren’t supposed to help you borrow more magic…they’re meant to keep you down. The harbinger just helped you override them.”
We stiffened, and Liam stared at me. I flapped my hands, less freaked out by the bodiless voice than by what it was saying.
