Shadowborn's Terror: Book IV of 'The Magician's Brother' Series

by HDA Roberts

  I was like that for two more days, and they weren't very good ones for me, as you might expect. I like to think I put up enough of a front that Cathy and Bill didn't worry so much, but they both kept trying to feed me, so I couldn't have been that successful (those two normally hang onto food like a starving bear holds onto a fresh salmon, and with the same basic ferocity).

  It was on the evening of the second day that Hopkins discovered that my Magic had stopped working.

  She'd come to host the chess club for the night, and had brushed past me on her way to play a game with Cathy, the only one of us, aside from me, who gave her a consistent challenge. She gasped as we made contact and spun me around to look me in the eye.

  "Ow," I protested weakly.

  She took my hands, which still shook, then used her fingers to open one eye after another.

  "Come with me," she said.

  I followed her out of the room, under the gaze of the other members, trying to look nonchalant.

  "How long?" she asked once we were out in the corridor.

  "How long what?"

  "How long have you been blocking your magic?" she asked, eyes narrowed.

  "Blocking?" I asked, "I'm not."

  "Yes you are; try calling your Shadows."

  I did as I was told... and nothing happened.

  "What?" I said, "How's that?"

  She sighed, "Damn it, Matty."

  "What's happened to me?" I asked, a little worried, though a not insignificant part of me felt that I probably deserved it.

  She shook her head, "You've tied yourself up so tight in knots that you've closed off the top of your Well. You can't draw Magic from it."

  "How do I fix it?"

  "You have to release whatever's got you like this."

  My hands started shaking again.

  "Yes, that's healthy," Hopkins said, gesturing at my hands.

  I stuffed them under my armpits.

  "Talk to me, Matty," she said, squeezing my shoulder.

  I did what she told me, to make her feel better if nothing else. I told her what had happened and she listened. It didn't bring my powers back and the evening ended with Hopkins looking very worried.

  The door slammed open late on Saturday. It must have been about half past six, something like that. I was trying to get some work done, and was making progress. I was learning how to ignore how I felt, to concentrate on better things, but it hadn't stopped the shaking, and it hadn't brought my Magic back.

  Cassandra barrelled into my room, an angry look on her face.

  She took one look at me and winced.

  "Sorry," I said. Cassandra was a Life Mage like Palmyra, a little less powerful, but almost as sensitive and not as able to shield against powerful emotions, I could hide nothing from her in my state, as I couldn't really shield.

  She shook her head and sat down next to me, looking me over very intently.

  "Well, you idiot," she said.

  "I'd protest, but..."

  "But I'm right, you are an idiot."

  "There's that," I replied, smiling a little.

  "It's not like we didn't warn you about bloody Gardenia!"

  "I know."

  "And?" she pressed.

  "And what?"

  "You know what," she said, her eyes narrowing.

  "Really?" I whined.

  "Really."

  I sighed, "And you were right."

  "And...?"

  "Come on, Cassie..."

  "And?"

  "And I was wrong."

  "There, was that so hard?"

  "Nobody likes a know-it-all."

  "That explains your situation, then," she replied quickly, smiling nastily.

  "Walked right into that one, I'll admit," I said.

  She nodded, leaning back, "Lady Hopkins said you've walled yourself off like an idiot, care to explain?"

  "You say that like I know what the hell I'm doing," I replied.

  "Yes, that was assuming a bit much."

  "Hey!"

  "You got thirteen people eaten by demons, Matty."

  I shuddered, feeling sick again.

  "Well, you did," Cassandra said, though there was no judgement in her tone, which confused me enough to keep the nausea at bay.

  She pulled a satchel from her shoulder and extracted a cardboard folder before I had a chance to spiral.

  "Take a look at these, will you?" she said, handing me a series of eight by ten photos.

  "God, what the hell, Cassie?!"

  There were about twenty of them, all of women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five or so. Each picture was of a face, their eyes held open to reveal gaping sockets full of red and black mush, their mouths and noses hooked up to machines. It was a disturbing set of images.

  "This is what you stopped," she said quietly.

  I looked away.

  "I know you, Mathew Samuel Graves, I know that you're desperate to punish yourself for what you've done, but this... this is what your actions stopped. We've had reports from the Healers dealing with these cases. Believe it or not, these were the lucky ones. Habitual users who don't overdose suffer what is defined as a complete moral inversion. Do you know what that means?"

  I shook my head.

  "It means that this stuff corrupts them, Matty, brings out the worst in them, and it doesn't go away when they've had a fix. It just keeps getting worse and worse until the person is simply a grotesque, evil caricature of who they once were."

  She picked up the first picture and looked at the back, "And then there are these poor souls. Anastasia McLaren, twenty-two, was studying to be a nurse, overdosed on Source three days ago, killed her father and two brothers with uncontrolled electricity before the drug and the magic burned out her brain."

  She picked up the next, "Shana Twill, twenty-six; she was a primary school teacher. Someone slipped her a dose of Source on a night out. A week later, she was addicted and crippled three people with chemical burns trying to get enough money to pay for the overdose which made her like this and contaminated two underground wells in the resultant Magical explosion, severely poisoning seventy-three people before it was discovered."

  She picked up the third, but I put my hand over hers and she stopped.

  "I know, Cassie, really, I do. I know that in the grand scheme of things, the good more than outweighs the bad... but it's still my fault that they're gone. It's still my fault that their families have lost their loved ones... and wasn't it you that told me 'two wrongs don't make a right'?"

  She glared at me again, "Don't use my own words on me, that's my thing!"

  I chuckled, "I'll be alright eventually, you know that. It's just taking me a while to get past this one."

  "I'll say, you're being a real little bitch about this whole thing."

  I laughed and she pressed her forehead against mine.

  "You know how I feel about Shadowborn, Mathew; and you know how I feel about Shadowborn taking lives. What happened has not changed the way I feel about you, do you understand?"

  I nodded.

  "Good. When you've stopped being a little girl, come see me and we'll catch up. Until then, your emoting is making you a complete downer."

  I laughed again and she smiled back before kissing my cheek.

  "Hopkins is thinking about this, okay? You listen to her when she comes."

  "Yes, Ma'am."

  "Manslaughter has made you very polite, I'm already seeing the bright side."

  "Do you want me to throw up on you? Because I will!"

  Chapter 12

  She left me then, extracting a promise to call her, and I went back to my homework. To my surprise, I felt... better, just a little, but enough to get me going again. The fact that Cassandra didn't hate me made a big difference; I'd anticipated her being disappointed at the very least.

  I should have had more faith in my friend. She'd understood, both the situation and my reaction to it. That allowed me to start moving forward; to start moving on.


  Sunday was a whirl of near chaos as Bill and Cathy did their level best to completely distract me. I appreciated it, and let myself be diverted with Bill's Doom tournament and Cathy's Keanu Reeves movie marathon.

  The funny thing was that even though I was feeling better in myself, my hands were shaking worse than ever. I was an idiot not to realise why.

  Monday came and I felt happy enough to sink back into routine, the memories not so sharp, and easier to bear after what Cassandra had showed me and told me. One might argue that there should be no difference between being responsible for the death of a drug-maker or an innocent person, but knowing that their choices in life led to so much suffering did make it easier to bear (which made me feel even more guilty, but in a different way; I'm complicated).

  Monday night was a bit of a sticky point for me, though, as it was the Magic class. I stood outside the gym door for a solid twenty minutes. My powers should have come back now that I was starting to resolve my baggage, but they hadn't, and that sent me into a spiral of fear and doubt; what if I'd broken them forever? What if they weren't coming back?

  In the end, I couldn't face finding that out, and I ran like a chicken (though with considerably less speed).

  Naturally Hopkins wasn't going to take that without comment.

  I was reading at my desk when the door opened.

  "You weren't at class tonight," Hopkins said, letting the door shut behind her.

  I turned from my book to talk to her.

  "I couldn't go," I replied.

  "Why?"

  "I..." I started but couldn't finish. I was ashamed of myself in a variety of ways and still feeling so guilty.

  "What is it, Matty?" she said, her voice soft as she knelt next to me.

  This was a hard one, and I didn't want to talk about it; it wasn't even something that I'd even been able to properly articulate to myself.

  "I'm afraid," I admitted, "what if someone else..."

  Again I couldn't finish.

  She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed me tightly.

  "Oh, you poor, sweet idiot," she said, and then stopped for a moment, looking like she was thinking, "Would you come with me for a bit? I need to show you something important."

  I nodded and she stood, offering her hand as she opened a portal and led me through.

  We walked into a graveyard, one of the big ones in Stonebridge. I swallowed hard.

  "It's okay," she said, leading me by the hand. It was dark out, after ten. There were a couple of lights around the perimeter of the yard, not much, but enough to let us see grave markers of every type imaginable, from simple sandstone crosses to small marble mausoleums. It was large enough to need a series of paths, and we were on one of the big ones, making our way to the far end, where there was an overgrown plot with a simple brown headstone, so old that the writing had completely faded.

  She squeezed my fingers as we stood next to it.

  "This is where a woman called Lillian Van Otre is buried," she said before taking a breath, "I killed her."

  I squeezed her fingers, trying to offer comfort.

  "There was a Vampire terrorising Stonebridge in the seventeen-hundreds. Long story short, I destroyed it. Lillian was the woman who lured his victims away from their friends so her master could feed. In exchange, she'd get to keep anything the victims had on them. She was his partner, for all intents and purposes; the Vampire's human servant, like Renfield from Dracula. When the Vampire died, she went insane, threw herself off a roof, broke her neck."

  "That wasn't your fault," I said, "How did you kill her, for heaven's sake?"

  "If I hadn't destroyed the vampire, she'd be alive. Simple as that."

  "But you weren't to know," I argued, "You were only trying to save lives- oh..."

  "There you are," she said quietly, "Now, if you can argue so strongly for me, why can't you accept that the same might apply to you?"

  "I don't know. I can't explain why. I just... I want to take it back and I can't!"

  "I know, I know," she said, holding my hand again, "Look, this is important, you need to really listen to this, alright?"

  I nodded.

  "The life of an Archon is long and complicated. Lives change based on the choices we make. You made a choice and lives ended. If you'd made a different choice, many more may have been. Those men died, and that is a tragedy, but you can't forget that it was their choice to use their lives in a way that led to that end. I'm sorry that what happened hurts you so much, but you are the First Shadow, Mathew. You made a choice to save lives and end a horrific thing."

  She turned me around to look at her.

  "And let's not forget the Demons. They may not be the cuddliest victims in the world, but they were victims. Those Magicians and technicians were leeching sentient beings of their life force. When they were used up, they'd have disintegrated and been sent down below, where their weakened states would have left them easy prey for the other things that live there. I'm not entirely certain about how things work down there, but I can't imagine that's fun.

  "There may have been Demons in that room, but those drug-dealers were the biggest monsters, Matty. At least they got to die painlessly in their sleep, which is far more than the victims of their business can say."

  She stood with me while I processed what she said. I thought about it for a long time, and then I asked myself an important question, one I'd been avoiding: if I'd known how things were going to turn out, would I have stayed away? Would I have let things carry on just to save my own conscience?

  The answer scared me.

  No. No, I would not have stayed away. Because instead of thirteen drug-makers, I'd have hundreds or thousands of innocents on my conscience, not to mention whatever horror Rose and Gabrielle had in mind when they set me on the path that eventually led to that lab.

  I think that's what was really getting to me, that even with all my regrets, I was willing to do it again if I had to; that made me question who I was, and who I might one day become.

  Finally I nodded, taking a deep breath.

  "Good. Now, I'd like you to do me a little favour, can you do that?" she asked.

  "Okay," I said warily.

  "Cast me a Magelight. Just a little one."

  "But-"

  "Don't worry. You can. I know it. You've fallen off the horse and you ran before getting back on it. Cast that spell, because the longer you leave it, the harder it's going to get. For me, alright?"

  I nodded and concentrated. It was the easiest spell in the first spell book, a tiny little construct that converted pure Magic into light. Even the weakest Acolytes could cast it, it was that easy. I could cast it in my sleep, with barely an effort. With my Shadow Magic, I didn't need it, but I still knew how.

  "Take your time, do it right and, above all, relax."

  I nodded and pictured the spell, a construct that looked like a tiny inverted umbrella that held a little shard of pure Magic which was then steadily released as light.

  My hands shook hard as I stretched them out put my Magic into the Spell. It guttered for a second and then flared into bright light above my right palm.

  Hopkins had told me what the problem was, but I hadn't realised just how clenched I'd been, how hard I'd been fighting my Magic. I staggered and nearly fell as what almost felt like a boulder lifted off my soul. Hopkins caught me and held me as I sagged.

  She grinned broadly and yanked me into a hug, patting my back.

  "Never do that again, Matty. Magic is part of who you are. It's one thing not to use it, but walling it off will damage you, it's like wrapping a computer in loft insulation, it fries. That's why your hands were shaking; the feedback."

  "I don't even know what I did," I pointed out, making her roll her eyes. My hands were steady again, though. Thank God, I'd thought I was developing a twitch! Red eyes, facial scars and a twitch; Cathy was a very understanding girlfriend, but that was taking it a bit far...

  The light floated away, a little piece of me, s
hining in the night. The world seemed to pop back into shape, like I'd been looking at it with one eye closed. I felt a little more balanced now, more like me again.

  "How do I live with it, Jen?" I asked after a gentle silence.

  "One day at a time, little brother," she said, kissing my forehead, "You take comfort from the fact that you've made a real difference in the world, and that it's been a good one. You've done your best, and even if it hasn't turned out exactly how you've wanted, you keep trying. That's how you carry on."

  I nodded, taking a calming breath.

  "Okay," I said, closing my eyes.

  My Shadows came from everywhere, almost desperately. They flowed around me, surrounding me and wrapping me up to the neck, whispering soothing things. They'd missed me.

  "Oh, that's just peculiar," Hopkins said, "Even I can hear them, now."

  She squeaked as a few brushed against her before subsiding back into their cracks and crevices.

  Sorry I was gone so long, I sent.

  I felt my connection buzz slightly with... harmony, I think. I knew that Elementals lived in there, but the Shadows themselves were alive too, in a way, or were alive through me, I'm still not entirely sure on that one. But I'd missed the connection, and I'd stuffed it down so far.

  "Oh, that's better," I said.

  Hopkins smiled, "Stupid Shadowborn."

  "Hey!"

  "Don't 'hey' me, you got people eaten."

  "Really?"

  "Too soon?"

  "Just a smidge!"

  "Well, we're going to be holding this over you for a while. Don't feel too bad, we all still remind Kron of the time she took a trip to Sarajevo and accidentally facilitated a little assassination."

  My eyes narrowed, "This wouldn't have been around 1914, would it?"

  "She doesn't like to talk about it," Hopkins warned.

  "How do you accidentally facilitate an assassination?!"

  "She healed the wrong guy, it happens; moving on."

  "Have you ever done anything like that?"

  "Caused the outbreak of a world war? No; I'm clever."

  "I wonder what Killian would say if I asked him that question about you."