by Sarah Biglow
“No, I don’t,” I argued.
“You were born for more than this. You have a destiny to fulfill.”
“I know that. Believe me, it’s been drilled into my head for years. And I appreciate your help, but I’m a cop, too, and this man is a key suspect in a quintuple homicide and I need him to bring down a corrupt FBI agent who also happens to work for the Order. If I can take him out of play, don’t you think that would throw a wrench in their plans?”
“Assume neither this boy nor the agent is a key component to what the Order has planned. Do you know when their ritual is to take place?’
“Obviously it’s going to happen when the eclipse is at its height and the meteor shower is in view.”
“And where?”
“I’m working on it but probably somewhere on the Common.”
“You cannot hope to stop them if you are not there.”
“I get it. I’ll see what he knows. But I’m reversing what was done to him and I’m closing out this case.”
“Be mindful of the price to be paid.” With those parting words, she disappeared, leaving me alone with Kevin in the confines of the protective circle.
“Uh, are you okay?” Kevin’s question made me jump.
“Shit, sorry. Dead relative … sort of.”
“Oh.” He looked at his hands. “You aren’t going to fix this, are you?”
“Of course, I am. I just need to know anything you do about where they’re going to be conducting their ritual.”
“I don’t know anything. All they did was take me to the places where the dark practitioners died and force me to kill people. They didn’t share their plan with me. I wasn’t important enough. Or, I guess, they figured I was expendable.”
Add narrowing down the location of a dark cult’s ritual resurrection to my to-do list. Check. Sweat broke out on my palms and I wiped them on my thighs before motioning for Kevin to stand up.
“Fair warning, I’ve never done this before so it’s going to be a trial and error kind of thing.”
“Some Savior,” he muttered.
My ego wanted to fault him for his remark, but he wasn’t wrong. What had I done to prove myself to be this great champion of light magic? Been born into the right family at the right time with the right gender, that’s all.
“Okay, let’s try this. I’m going to take your hands. I want you to use whatever magic you have and put it out there into the universe, will yourself not to be stone anymore. I’m going to do the same on my end, and, if we’re lucky, it will work.”
If anyone could manage a skeptical eye roll while being made entirely of stone, it was Kevin. Deep down, I understood his apprehension. I’d just said I’d never done this before and I could think of a myriad of ways for this to go horribly pear-shaped for both of us. But if I was going to have any shot at getting out of this situation with at the very least my career intact, I had to give it the old college try.
I let Kevin’s magic bubble up around me, taking in the sharpness of the smell. The question of whether his magic had always smelled like this fought for my attention, but I pushed it down. I would have time for questions later. His hands trembled in mine with the effort and, even though he was presently made of stone, I could see his legs growing weak from the exertion. He hadn’t done anything like this before. In fact, he probably hadn’t used his magic in five years. Time to put on my big girl pants and show him it could be done. The sugary smell of strawberries fresh off the plant bloomed to mingle with the earthier scent of Kevin’s will. I could feel my magic tugging at the edges of his, trying to establish dominance. Kevin’s power flared in response.
“I need you not to fight me,” I said, squeezing his hands tight with mine.
“I’m trying,” he ground out.
I shut my eyes and tried to focus with my other senses, feeling the magic flow around me as the energy it really was. Almost intangible but just solid enough to be manipulated. Like air through a car window on the highway. Instead of pushing the energy toward Kevin, I urged it out. I willed the stone to detach from every molecule in his body, to be replaced with skin and bone, and slowly stone began to crumble beneath my fingertips giving way to rough flesh.
My magic grew stronger, buoyed by some unseen hand keeping me afloat as the magic being expelled from Kevin swirled in the air around us, confined by the binding circle. It had nowhere to go. I squeezed hard on Kevin’s hands again and heard more dust hitting the ground. I didn’t want to risk opening my eyes for fear of ruining the moment and the fluidity of the spell. What I was doing was actually working and my heart fluttered an extra beat in my chest at the realization.
“I don’t feel…” Kevin’s voice grew weak and I couldn’t keep the world shut out any longer.
The visual overload from opening my eyes so quickly made everything tilt and come rushing up to meet me. A bright pop of magic—my own but somehow not—burst around me, cushioning my fall and giving me enough time to right myself and reset my equilibrium. When the world was no longer off its axis and my eyes had readjusted to taking input, I finally saw Kevin’s face. It was ghostly pale and dampened by sweat. His eyes—no longer made of stone—were glassy and unfocused. If I’d just passed him on the street I would have assumed he was just hungover or in need of a fix. The boundary of our protective circle was still unbroken, but my senses knew something was off. They just hadn’t communicated it to my brain yet.
“What happened?” Kevin’s voice still retained some of the gravel from his previous state.
Our hands were still clasped together and I felt the soft skin beneath my fingertips. By sight and touch he was definitely human. He was really Kevin Ellery again, as he’d been before his run-in with the Order. The markers of my magic were stronger than they’d been before and I relinquished the grip on his right hand to center myself with a hit from the sandalwood charm at my throat. My senses came into focus as the remnants of the spells I’d worked were wiped clean. The effects of the spells remained, but I could sniff out the signatures with more ease now.
“Oh shit.” My brain caught up with my senses finally. The only hint of magic I could find was my own. It was as if Kevin’s magic had been erased. But that wasn’t possible. Was it? Fear beat a frantic path through my veins, turning them ice-cold. I looked to Kevin and said, “Try to use your magic.”
“For what?” He sounded tired.
“Anything. It doesn’t have to be big. Just something.”
His face scrunched up with the effort, only serving to add a new layer of sweat to the sheen on his face. I waited with baited breath, searching the air and surrounding space for any sign of his magic. None came. Not even a hint to say it had once been there.
“What did you do?” His body shook and his legs went out from under him.
I wasn’t quick enough to catch him as he crumpled to the grass. I’d need to get him up and moving at some point, but he needed a minute. And I needed help. Time to break the circle. With deliberate movements, I bent at the point where the spell had knotted itself together and I exerted my will, telling it to break. With a sizzle, the spell vanished.
The added sounds of nature and people and cars threw me for a loop. My ears ached from the sounds and my nose stuffed up at the gas fumes pluming in the midnight air. Even the moonlight above and the nearby streetlamps were too bright for my eyes. I could only imagine how sensitive Kevin was to everything. I waited to the count of ten before turning to face Kayla, Jacquie and J.T. They remained where I’d left them in their semicircle a safe distance away.
“You need to check him out,” I said, jutting my chin in J.T.’s direction and pointing to Kevin behind me.
J.T. raised a brow at me but shouldered his medical bag and went to check on Kevin. Kayla trotted after him, concern etched on her face. I stepped out of the bounds of the circle and my body suddenly felt like it weighed fifty pounds more than it should. I tried to shake that feeling as I fell in line with Jacquie.
“He told me
everything. He’s going to give us a formal, signed statement and he’s pointed the finger at someone we thought we could trust as his accomplice.”
“Uh, Ezri…” Jacquie trailed off, but I could see even by the weak moonlight above that she’d gone pale.
“What?”
“Your feet are turning to stone.”
I blinked. I couldn’t have heard her right. She’d said my feet were turning to … stone. I didn’t want to look down but knew there was no other option. So I did and I barely muffled the shriek building in my chest.
“J.T. Help!”
He looked up and his eyes widened to the size of half dollars. Kevin lay on the ground, but I could see the shallow rise and fall of his breathing. Kayla cradled his head in her lap, stroking strands of hair out of his eyes. He’d be okay. My own condition worried me far more. J.T. approached me, circling me once before asking, “What exactly did you do to him?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, when we got here, he was a statue and now he’s not. So you did something.”
I glared at him. “I tried to change him using magic. I mean it had to be possible. The Order turned him to stone in the first place. I told him to use his own magic to help the process along. Everything was going fine and then somehow … it’s like his magic is gone.”
“I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen anyone attempt what you did. Changing someone against their will is never a good idea. But it looks like whatever spell they cast to turn him to stone was tied to his own magic somehow. If you’re right and if his magic is gone, it latched on to the nearest, strongest source it could find. You.”
“As if I didn’t have enough problems this week,” I grumbled.
“I might be able to temporarily reverse it, but I can’t say for sure that it wouldn’t come back in some other way.”
“The original caster could reverse it permanently, right?” I could feel a small ember of hope burning within me.
He nodded. “More than likely, yeah.”
“Great.”
“How is that great?” Jacquie chimed in.
“Because Kevin confirmed that Taggart was his accomplice,” I answered as the feeling of being encased in stone crept up my ankles.
“You were right. But why would he do this? I mean he had to suspect after you survived that Kevin could blow his cover.”
“For all we know, he thinks he succeeded in killing me.”
“Did Kevin explain why he went along with this?”
“Taggart threatened his family and his ex-girlfriend.”
“I never liked her,” Kayla interjected from behind us.
“You knew her?” Jacquie asked.
“The three of us went to college together. At least for a while. Gabby got her hooks in Kevin before I could even tell him how I felt.”
“I’m sorry.” The words felt hollow leaving my mouth.
“You couldn’t have known. But he’s going to be okay, right?”
“Hopefully. And I think they left Gabrielle out of things. I overheard her on the phone when we were at the restaurant and she didn’t know Kevin was around.”
J.T. had managed to rouse Kevin while we’d been talking. Kayla clung to his side, helping him to stand and regain his equilibrium. He looked at her and a genuine smile broke out on his lips.
“Hey stranger,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder.
“Hey.” He took one look at me and went, “Oh. I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I know. It isn’t your fault. If I’d paid better attention then maybe I’d have seen what they’d done to make you stone in the first place.”
“I feel strange.”
“You need some food and a shower. And maybe some rest. It’s been a while since you’ve had any,” J.T. said before I could drop the truth on the kid.
Kevin nodded, his eyes still glassy. Jacquie moved to support his other side and said, “We’ll meet you in the car.” She and Kayla led Kevin away through the park, generating a wide birth from any nosy onlookers or any of the homeless population. Jacquie exuded “cop” even if they couldn’t see her badge and they didn’t want to get snatched up in the dead of night.
That left J.T. and me alone in the middle of the park with my body slowly molding itself to take Kevin’s place. J.T. bent down and pressed his hands to the affected spots on my legs. I felt his magic more than smelled it this time and I drank in the warmth and healing touch. With every fiber of my being I urged my own magic not to fight back, to accept the help for once. Mercifully, it complied. His working had the intended result. The stone disappeared, leaving me normal again. If I thought about it, I could still hear the whispering of the spell in the back of my head—in Taggart’s voice no less—taunting me that it would have me bound with my own magic yet. I silently told him to fuck off.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. I can still feel it there in the background.”
“Come on, we should really get back to headquarters.”
I stayed put. “I’m not going back, J.T. I appreciate what they did for me … what you did for me, but I got what I needed from them.”
“You need rest and sleep almost as much as Kevin. And I know you, remember. When you get focused on something, everything else falls away. Besides the soup, what’s the last thing you ate?”
“I ate when we questioned his ex-girlfriend.” But that had been a couple days ago. I had let myself go in the pursuit of the killers and my own attacker. I was lucky I hadn’t been killed due to low blood sugar and exhaustion. But I wanted to be in my own bed.
“I’ll make you deal. I’ll go home and sleep and get something to eat and I’ll meet you at headquarters in the morning so Jacquie and I can bring Kevin in, okay?”
He looked like he wanted to protest, but his shoulders sagged and his head dipped a little. “Fine. But if you aren’t there by ten, I’m sending a search party.”
“Deal.”
“You’re going to have to come back to headquarters tonight anyway though,” he said as we started back toward the entrance to the park.
“You just said I could go home.”
“Unless you feel like taking a lift.”
“Shit, my car,” I groaned. I hadn’t even thought about it stranded there in the middle of the city. It had probably gotten a ticket and was towed to a lot somewhere.
“We managed to get your car from the scene,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“Oh, thank God.”
By the time we reached the car, Kevin had been secured in the backseat. His hands were free, which meant Jacquie hadn’t put him under arrest. Yet. She was leaning against the front passenger door, keeping an eye on the street and the traffic still managing to come through at this late hour. Time to get everyone situated and some much-needed rest. And after that, kicking the Order’s collective asses.
Twenty-Five
The clock read a little after two o’clock in the morning by the time I’d retrieved my car from Authority headquarters and made the trek back home. The residual bit of Taggart’s magic was there in the back of my head all the while, though it hadn’t reasserted itself. Maybe a little sleep would do me some good after all. I stripped down to my underwear and crawled into bed, snuggling down under the warmth of the layered blankets. The world fell away as I passed out.
Everything was cast in hues of grey, like a black and white movie. Sound was nonexistent or maybe there was nothing to hear. I stood in the middle of an abandoned street. The buildings felt familiar but I couldn’t place them. For a fleeting moment, I feared I was alone and then I felt a presence come up behind me. I turned to greet my new companion, but my mouth hung open in horror at the sight of the man with a blade. His face was too angular to be human, everything so exaggerated that he belonged in a funhouse mirror’s reflection. He sneered at me and waved the knife in my face, taunting me. I wanted to move, but I was stuck in place.
Between one breath and the next we were surrounded and this tim
e the bodies moved to defend me. Women in all manner of dress formed a barrier to keep him and his knife at bay. My shoulders relaxed and my fingers inched out of the balled fists I hadn’t been aware I’d made. He took a tentative step forward and, like fog, the women vanished. One by one he stepped through my defenses until he was again within reach. With one powerful hand on my shoulder, he forced me to my knees and then the blade found its new sheath—my belly.
A pained scream died on my lips. The women rematerialized around me and I watched in silent dismay as one by one they turned to stone. The man laughed, throwing his head back so the sound could only go up into the air. I pressed my hands to my stomach to stanch the blood but none came. Instead, I, too, was made of stone. Only my eyes remained unaffected so that I could watch the destruction he was causing. Statues around me crumbled to dust until I was the only thing remaining with the man. He danced around my immobile body, jeering at me until he finally stopped at my side. With one powerful kick to the sternum, I, too, dissolved into dust.
“No!” I sat upright covered in cold sweat. My hands flew to my stomach, but there was no knife protruding and the fact that I could move my arms meant I hadn’t turned to stone.
I still struggled to free myself from the bedsheets and staggered to the bathroom, flicking on the light with a sweaty palm. The mirror showed a disheveled redhead with dark smudges under her eyes. But everything about her was decidedly flesh and blood and bone. I gripped the edge of the sink to steady myself as relief washed over me. It had been a nightmare no doubt brought on by the trauma that had been heaped on me in the last few days. The details were already beginning to fade, but what I could remember sent fresh chills through my body. Taggart had succeeded in killing me and somehow all of the witches in my bloodline who’d come before me—even though they were already long gone. He’d wiped us out with a simple, well-placed knife and a spell meant for someone else. My chest ached where his heel had struck me and my fingers made contact with the pentagram at my throat. The metal was cool to the touch, but knowing it was still there, still intact, eased my apprehension a smidge.
