The scythes swung toward me in tandem, and I focused my Will. A shield of chaotic golden energy popped around me as the scythes connected with my body. I felt every inch of the cold metal as it entered my body, but the swirling torrent of chaos unmade and mended the wounds as quickly as they were made. I was immutable. Unchanging. Beyond their capacity to damage permanently. The pain was excruciating, but no sooner than I felt it, I was healed while the spell generated paradoxes like popcorn popping in a hot pan. Green and purple energy flashed around me, and three singularities opened up on the floor of the classroom, exploding and knocking down the wraiths.
Gypcie targeted the wraith furthest from the wall, smashing it with a crash of lightning from Mjolnir. It disintegrated, leaving only one wraith in the room.
Mal’un began to laugh, its deep voice reverberating in the room, as it grew larger before our eyes.
“A NAUGHTY TRICK TO PLAY WITH TIME,” it cackled at me. “THE WAGES OF WHICH COME DUE WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM.”
Dread filled me. By interrupting the timeline, had I allowed the wraith to reassemble itself into a more powerful foe?
“Shut your pie hole, you overgrown reflection,” Gypcie seethed as she renewed her frost manifestation. “And eat some lightning.”
She yelled and cast Mjolnir again, striking the wraith repeatedly. It buckled under the damage, and I took that time to dodge out from behind it and head across the room. I nearly stepped on the tin hood on the floor but instead kicked it against the wall. Gypcie was starting to sweat, smoke rolling out from under her feet, while her hair stood out on end from the electricity of her spell.
I faced the wraith and began casting maleficium in earnest. We had to destroy it quickly as we were both starting to feel the effects of the fight. I cursed it once, twice, three times. I could feel the corruption climbing in my blood. I would end this menace once and for all. I tormented it with a few blood spikes for good measure.
I was invincible.
I was…allowing the corruption to turn me into a megalomaniac. My head swam, and I realized that I was dangerously low on blood again as well.
“You may look like the Grim Reaper,” I gritted out between my teeth, “but how about a taste of your own medicine?”
With a flick of my wrist, I cast a blood reap spell at Mal’un, feasting on the flood of power from it. Immediately, I felt a rush of well-being as energy and blood flowed back into my body. The wraith screamed, and black ichor began to drip from its body as the spell stole its animating force. My corruption levels dropped immediately, and I sighed in relief as I returned to a more stable frame of mind. However, that same corruption now infused the wraith, and it seemed to go mad, lunging toward me.
Gypcie once again put her hands to her forehead and cast an ice beam, trapping it in place, the cold from the spell snuffing out her smoldering shoes. She cast fire bolts interspersed with lightning hammers at the ice-bound, brittle wraith. I fractured reality beneath it, the black ichor sizzling as it struck the purple and green cracks. I muttered the words of the curse to maleficium, and the spell began consuming what remained of the wraith’s energy in gulps.
The wraith shrieked, breaking free of the ice, and darted toward the mirror. I raced forward to try to beat it, to break the mirror before it could escape, but it grew smaller and slipped into the mirror’s reflection before I could.
“Gods damn it!” I screamed, smashing the mirror in frustration. Each time the fight took so much of our concentration and effort that we continued to fail to capture it in a photo before it could escape. A flash of light filled the room as Gypcie, phone in hand, took a picture of me standing there pissed off. The look on her face told me that was not the picture she’d been going for. She groaned and rubbed her eyes with her other hand.
We sat there in silence, both calming our breathing and struggling to regain composure.
“Are you hurt?” she finally asked.
I shook my head, doing a mental check-in. I should be hurt, by all accounts, but immutable was one powerful spell. I had regained most of my lost blood by reaping the wraith’s energy, so all in all, I was remarkably unscathed considering the intensity of the fight.
“How about you?”
“I think my eyebrows might be a little singed,” she joked, “and I’ll never be able to wear these shoes in the Rec Center again without leaving black marks on the floor, but I’ll live.”
There was one more classroom with a mirror in this hall—Summoning Theory. We contemplated turning on the spectrometer a fourth time but rationalized that we had a pretty good idea where the wraith had gone after we beat it back in the Familiar Lab classroom and that we might have more success by forcing a quick re-engagement. We hurried across the hall.
The Innsmouth Academy seal was painted on the back wall of Summoning Theory, but otherwise, it looked remarkably similar to the others. Student desks and chalkboards lined the west wall, with the mirror in the back under the academy seal. Windows lined the east wall, and I could see, looking into the room, that daylight was fading once again. We’d been fighting the wraith for hours now. Gypcie and I were both tired and hungry. Neither of us had had any food since the pastry in the Faculty Lounge. I was pissed off and tired of the shenanigans of the Peacock King’s goon. It needed to be gone for good, once and for all.
As if she had read my mind, Gypcie handed me another peppermint candy from her pocket and popped one in her mouth. A teacher’s desk stood on the north wall, and I ran over and placed the spectrometer on it, and moved to the south-east corner of the room, flanking the mirror.
The wraith appeared immediately and hit me with its snare, the scythe looming toward me. Irritation flooded me. This thing was a one-trick pony, and I was getting damn sick of it. I hit it with evulsion, which knocked it down and interrupted its cast. I immediately followed up by fracturing reality, and green and purple cracks spread across the floor. Without intending to, I hit the paradox jackpot, and three singularities appeared below the wraith, each exploding into a cascade of light, damaging it severely. The wraith turned around and fled into the mirror.
I looked at Gypcie, my mouth open. She had a fireball in her hand at the ready. She snuffed it out, ran across the room, and broke the mirror.
“Well, feck it. That was brilliant.”
“What do we do now?” I asked, worriedly. “Was that our last chance?”
“Can you think of any more mirrors?”
I shook my head, then paused with alarm, as I thought further. “There’s the mirror in the Faculty Lounge.”
“We’ve got to go break it,” she said with urgency. “If one of the soldiers approaches it…”
I ran over to the teacher’s desk and grabbed the spectrometer, and we headed for the door. Gypcie stopped me with a hand before I could burst out into the hall. “Just checking for familiars. It’s still clear.”
We hurried up the hall but paused again at the junction. To our right, there was once again a group of familiars loitering in front of the Bingo cola machine. To the left the hall was clear, but that direction didn’t get us where we wanted to go.
“Let’s cut through the library,” she said, and we dashed forward. We curved around the bookcases and headed to the east door. A quick glance told us the coast was clear and we cut across the north side of the foyer until we reached the Faculty Lounge.
“We’re coming in,” I called loudly to avoid startling the guards.
“You’re clear,” a voice said in acknowledgment.
Gypcie and I walked as slowly as we could manage into the front area of the lounge, which actually wasn’t that slow, given our state of alarm.
“We may have a situation,” I explained hastily. The guard on the right motioned us past, and we ran into the back area of the lounge. I looked at the wash-up area and could see Lt. Smith’s beret above the privacy screen.
“Break that mirror!” I cried.
“Now!” Gypcie echoed.
His eyes looked up o
ver the screen at us and widened. To his credit, he listened, and moments later we heard a satisfying crunch of glass.
He walked out from behind the screen.
“Now, you want to tell me what that was all about?” Lt. Smith asked, shaking water off his hands, as he walked toward us. Gypcie quickly explained our concerns, and the lieutenant nodded gravely. “I can see now why you came in here like a couple of bats out of hell.”
“I have a fair amount of experience with combat,” he continued, “and I can see you two are just about at your limits.”
We both protested aloud, expressing the urgency of finding the wraith, but he held his hand up.
“At least grab some food and drink before you attempt to find it again,” he counseled. “You’re young, so I’m sure you think you can go on forever if you need to, but you don’t want to hit a wall mid-fight.”
We couldn’t argue with that, having hit more than one wall already. It was time to regroup. Gypcie plugged her phone in again, and then we both moved to the side table, and each grabbed a pastry and a cup of the John Wayne coffee there. It was still scaldingly hot and, if possible, thicker than when I’d grabbed a cup hours earlier. I gulped it down nonetheless, feeling the liquid burning down my throat into my stomach, which distracted me from the bitterness on my tongue.
“I’d offer to help you girls,” he said. “But I suspect our bullets wouldn’t do you a lot of good against a wraith.”
“We appreciate the offer nonetheless. And this,” Gypcie replied, gesturing with the hand that held her half-eaten pastry, “helps an awful lot.”
I nodded in agreement, my mouth full.
Despite our feeling of urgency, we took some time to rest up and checked in with Carter and Ms. Usher via text once Gypcie’s cell phone had full bars. Ms. Usher mentioned she’d had word from my mother and told me she was in good health and sent her love. She hadn’t heard word from Gypcie’s gran, but that was to be expected as her safe house was not in as frequent communication as Temple Hall. I assured Gypcie that no news was probably good news in this case. I could tell she wasn’t thrilled, but she knew that if something terrible had happened news would have been forthcoming.
After our respite of news, coffee, pastries, and phone charging, Gypcie and I figured the only option left was to turn on the spectrometer again to see if it would lead us to Mal’un. I was worried that we didn’t have many more chances left in the battery, so we watched it closely as it warmed up to make sure we were ready to go when it was.
It took a distressingly long period of time to warm up. The batteries of the spectrometer were definitely on their last leg. We followed the chirp of woodpeckers and the blue concentric circles as it pointed us back in the general vicinity of the library, but veering right toward the northernmost classrooms on the first floor. We rounded the corner and saw that it was leading us to the Media Lab.
The spectrometer, which had been chirping slower and slower, went completely dark. The batteries were dead. If we hadn’t located a place where the wraith would appear, we were now out of luck.
Darkness had fallen, but the hall was dimly lit by the glow of the light at the entrance of the library. We could make out the forms of a group of familiars at the west end of the hall past the door to the Magical Theory classroom, so we skirted as near to the wall on the north side as we could to avoid attracting them and slipped carefully into the lab.
Overhead phosphorescent lights illuminated the portion of the room nearest us but were dimmed on the north side. Most of the north wall of the room was covered with a drop-down projector screen. A student desk in the front half of the room supported a small projector, which was plugged into the wall and projecting a random slide of a tropical-looking swamp, complete with palm trees and jungle foliage. I paused to contemplate just how long that had been left running and what the topic of the lecture was that had prompted it. Ah well, it was the Media Lab and, as the name implied, it had been used to project any number of multimedia presentations in my years at the Academy. Chalkboards lined the east walls as did the rest of the student desks in the room. Behind the door was a set of shelves with a variety of movies, videos, and other items used in the room’s former curriculum.
But most importantly, there was again a standing mirror, sitting on the right side of the middle of the room, next to the desks lining the wall. That was what the spectrometer was leading us to. In the back of the classroom on the right side was the second egress, which led to the east hall, which was filled with student lockers and most likely a garden variety assortment of specters and familiars. We would need to be careful to keep toward the end nearest us to avoid pulling any unexpected problems to us.
We hadn’t ventured much further than the threshold inside the classroom, to give ourselves a moment to assess. This was it. If it escaped again, we were out of chances to find the wraith unless we could find another battery somewhere on the island or a way to power the spectrometer that didn’t involve batteries. I doubted very much that Creed Bros. Hardware Supplies in Kingsmouth proper carried a selection for spectrometers and that was, of course, dependent on us even getting permission to travel there, which, given our discussion with Ms. Usher, was unlikely.
Nope, this was our last chance, and it was important not to screw it up.
Giving Gypcie a nod, I opened the cut on my left hand anew with my athame and moved with purpose toward the mirror.
With the familiar smell of sulfur and a neon yellow streamer of energy, the wraith manifested in front of the standing mirror. It had grown again and now stood upwards of seven feet tall. I gulped at the size of it.
A deep chuckle emanated from the wraith, reverberating off the walls and high ceiling of the classrooms.
“BACK AGAIN FOR ANOTHER LESSON,” it hissed. “YOU CANNOT DESTROY ME. I AM THE SCION OF THE PEACOCK KING. I THRIVE ON YOUR BLOOD AND PAIN. YOUR PITIFUL EFFORTS SIMPLY MAKE ME STRONGER.”
I shuddered as it asserted its message with a force of Will that made terror leap inside me. Goosebumps broke out on my arms and neck. Behind me, I heard Gypcie attempt to contain her gasp of fear.
“MY MASTER IS BEYOND YOUR FEEBLE GRASP,” it gloated, floating slowly toward the middle of the room. “THE BLOOD DEBT WILL BE PAID IN FULL. RUN, WHILE YOU STILL CAN.”
I could feel my legs tense to follow its instruction and asserted my own Will to stand in place.
“This is not your realm,” Gypcie said, venom filling her voice. “You have no power here. You should run instead.”
“SILLY CHILD,” it patronized her in a smug voice, dripping with malice. “THERE ARE ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND MORE FROM WHENCE WHERE I COME. THIS BATTLE YOU CANNOT WIN.”
I could feel despair creeping into my body. The wraith was toying with our emotional responses, trying to dishearten us and defeat us mentally before we began to fight. I stood paralyzed about 15 feet away from the wraith, struggling to control my reactions.
“Then you are disposable!” Gypcie shouted. “And your master has no real need for you. I pity you. You have squandered your eternal rest to be a shadow in Sheol.”
The wraith shrieked in anger and lunged toward us, swinging its deadly scythe in a path before it. Filled with courage at Gypcie’s words, I dodged right out of its way as she laid down her crystallized frost, slowing it. I fractured reality, covering the floor in front of it with purple and green cracks, and then tormented it by casting spikes of blood at its arms and head.
The scythe completed its deadly arc, and Gypcie moved forward to cast fire bolts, her arms twirling as she cast them hand-over-hand with increasing speed. The wraith was nearer to me, and once again the beam of white energy left the end of the blade and snared me in place. Using evulsion, I yanked chaos toward me and broke its cast, then cursed it with maleficium, the spell gulping the wraith’s energy.
It grunted in anger and threw the scythe into the air, where it danced macabre, slicing through Reality. In the gaps, I could see glimpses of a fiery landscape, a burni
ng red and orange desert with an army of molten monsters. I rolled back out of range, as Gypcie continued to hammer it with fire bolts, smoke rolling off her hands.
The wraith threw its arms wide, and it was enshrouded with a golden bubble. Our spells began to bounce off harmlessly, and it laughed and began moving toward us again, the scythe continuing to twirl in deadly arcs over its head.
“What the feck is that?” Gypcie yelled. “It has shielded itself.”
I scowled and called in entropy. The forces of entropic chaos attacked the shield and disintegrated it, allowing us to strike the wraith once more. I smiled with grim glee as my maleficium hit the wraith with renewed strength, corruption filling my veins. Gypcie put her hands to her forehead and struck the wraith with an ice beam, freezing it in place.
It responded by calling in a dark cloak of razors, which deflected our spells back at us. I screamed as the full brunt of my maleficium doubled back on me, my vision swimming under the force of the spell and the magnified corruption. I quickly reaped back the lost energy, doubling down to regain my composure as the corruption in my blood dropped by half. Gypcie grunted and shook her feet to dispel the ice that had started to gather there. She drew her Harmonizers and unloaded her clips into the wraith, the physical attack avoiding the bounce-back of the dark cloak.
The wraith shrieked in pain and bellowed, “COME TO ME! COME TO ME!”
I started with alarm as two familiars ran in through the back door of the room, one missing its arm, the other bearing the markings and ruined face of the Hexbound. I knew those two weren’t out of the fight!
“You cheating bastard,” I yelled, casting evulsion to drag them toward us and knocking them both down.
The wraith flicked its wrist, and a ribbon of blood gushed from its hand, covering the floor in red, as the cloak of razors disappeared.
“Stand back,” I screamed at Gypcie, as the spell splashed my leg, stacking up corruption in my blood again. I fired back with maleficium at the wraith, gritting my teeth, as the dark poison boiled through my veins. Gypcie laid down frost and began striking the one-armed familiar with fireballs and fire bolts, attempting to immolate it. Its skin started to sizzle under the heat of her assault, filling the room with the smell of barbecued flesh. Gross.
To Sir, with Love: An Unofficial Legend of The Secret World (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World Book 1) Page 13
