For the Love of Magic

by Natalie Gibson

  The sharp edge of the altar bit into his shins and forearms. Only a little tightening would snap his limbs. He was free, they said, if he simply convinced Maeve to come. They didn’t want him. At first he placated them, telling them he was trying, but when she didn’t show they started hurting him. At first blades sliced through his flesh, held by the man from the bar whose rapid breath belied his obsession for knives. Then a red-hot poker cauterized the cuts. They didn’t want him to die just yet.

  Now whips cracked, leaving stripes of pain across his back. His taut skin split to the muscle. Blood trickled down his sides, to flow through channels in the marble altar. Three strikes came in rapid succession as the knife-obsessed man yelled, “Call her to you.” His face came very close to Aaron’s and he reasoned, “The witches are all gonna die anyway. If you bring her here at least you will live.”

  Aaron clenched his eyes shut and sent his thoughts out again. Stay away from me, Maeve. I don’t want you here. Stay away.

  MAEVE HAD to sit. This was too good to be true. Aaron was hers? Libby laughed and reached over to pat Maeve’s hand but when she touched the stone bracelet her laugh cut off abruptly. Her pat turned into a vice-like grip.

  Nathalia noticed. “What is it?” Libby just shook her head. She was still reading the object. Abbess turned to Maeve and demanded, “Where’d you get that bracelet?”

  Maeve pulled her arm from Libby and covered the adornment with her other hand, protecting it. “Aaron sent it to me. UPS delivered it yesterday.”

  “It’s blood magic,” Libby whispered. “He did it.”

  “Aaron is a SOFE?” Maeve gasped. “No, it can’t be.” Libby was wrong. Aaron wasn’t like that; he hadn’t believed in magic before meeting her. She silently pleaded with Nathalia to argue with Libby.

  Nathalia avoided her gaze as she reached for the bracelet and asked, “What kind of spell is it?”

  Libby shook her head and said, “Manipulation, maybe.”

  The Guardian stepped from the shadows and snatched the bracelet from Maeve’s wrist before Nathalia could touch it. He dropped Maeve’s arm back into her lap and squeezed the bracelet with the other hand. She watched, dumbfounded and heartbroken as his knuckles whitened around the jewelry. He was going to crush her only gift from Aaron.

  “No!” Nathalia yelled.

  Maeve looked up at her friend and began to thank her for saving something so precious to her when Nathalia continued, “SOFE magic must be broken with the four elements.” Nathalia grabbed an empty mug from the nightstand and tossed it to the Guardian. “Here.” She snatched a matchbox from where it lay next to her meditation candles and a bottle of nail polish remover from her vanity. “Bring it to the window,” she barked as she pushed the panes open, letting in the cool evening air.

  She grabbed the cup from the Guardian and he dropped the bracelet inside. She doused it with the Cutex. She struck the match and tossed it in the glazed ceramic. The stones burst into flames so blue they were almost black. Sparking all colors from the spectrum, they emitted a thread of black fume that traveled a different direction than the innocuous usual smoke. That dark tendril reached out toward Maeve. Nathalia tossed a beautiful potted orchid from the windowsill on it. The moist soil put out the fire and cut off the magic’s last grab for Maeve.

  As soon as it was done, the ache in Maeve’s heart was back. The call was a powerful spell and Maeve shot up, starting toward the door. “I need to go to him.” She had said some terrible things to him, in the attempt to drive him away, and she needed to set them right.

  “What? No.” Nathalia set the cup down, but the Guardian made it to Maeve first. That man was fast. “He’s a damn SOFE, Maeve,” she said as the Guardian blocked the door. “He used blood magic against you for Goddess’ sakes!”

  “He used blood magic on me,” Maeve argued, trying to push past the Guardian. “You always assume the worst, especially if there is a man involved. I’m going. You can’t stop me. If you try, I won’t come back.” Nathalia didn’t know the strength of the pull between two matched people. Being separated was killing Maeve and she couldn’t stay away any more. Maeve never turned back to face her friend. She stared at the Guardian, deciding how adamant she would have to be to get around him.

  The Guardian stood solid and said in his train wreck of a voice, “The Holy Father’s contribution is completed. I cannot allow him to harm you.”

  Maeve glared at him through slitted eyes. Aaron was not negotiable. “He is more than just a sperm donor.” She used his name in front of the other women. “Samsiel Maru, Aaron and I are meant to be together. He cannot harm me. What hurts me is being away from him.”

  Libby, the last person Maeve would have expected, came to her aid. She commanded, “Let her go. Resisting the call is dangerous. Guardian, protect her no matter what as she figures out what’s going on with her mate.”

  Maeve pushed past the Guardian. She shoved open the door to Nathalia’s suite where Lucas and JD waited, and proclaimed, “Be right back boys. I’m going to get Aaron!”

  SAMSIEL WATCHED the absolutely ordinary-looking house as if it might come to life and gobble them up. As waves of dark magic slid over the flesh of Maeve’s arms, she understood his apprehension. Something very bad happened inside. Apparently the whole neighborhood felt it because all four of the other houses in this cul-de-sac had “for sale” signs in the yard.

  Maeve tossed out her plan to knock on the door. This wasn’t just a SOFE house and there was no way her Aaron was part of something so evil by choice. Grateful that her ceremony dress was short, she stepped onto the manicured lawn and over the stubby shrubs. Peeking into the window beside the entry revealed a hardwood floor that led to a living room decorated with end tables and Impressionist prints: just as normal on the inside as the house’s exterior. Nothing stirred, so Maeve brazenly walked up the steps and entered uninvited.

  Once she crossed the threshold, the peaceful living room faded away. The floors were stripped down to the bare concrete. Jar-filled shelves lined the walls. Maeve didn’t know what was in most of them but many held dark thick fluid that could have been blood. Others had organs suspended in urine-colored liquid. A woman stood entranced over a boiling pot of muck, the unnatural glow illuminating her face from below.

  Samsiel had the SOFE in his arms before she could sound an alarm. He stared deep into her eyes and then released her. The woman walked right past Maeve, out the door, down the street and disappeared into the night.

  “Blood and violence. We must go.”

  Of course there was blood and violence. This was a SOFE house. “We have to find Aaron first.” Maeve knew he was here, could feel his proximity. The call spell was fortified now that they were so near and she couldn’t have walked away even if she had wanted. Aaron was slightly forward and below them. Without waiting, Maeve strode through the room toward the kitchen.

  The Guardian stayed so close she could feel his body heat. Finding the galley-style kitchen empty, Maeve headed straight through to the basement door at the other end of the long narrow room. Before she could reach it, Samsiel grabbed her arm. Snatching it away from his tingling electrical touch, she turned to find him transfixed at the window over the sink.

  Maeve stood on her tiptoes to see out. A couple dozen people, mostly women, stood in concentric circles around a man that Maeve recognized. It was Michael, the man who had ruined Nathalia’s life, at the center. She scanned the participants and found Aaron wasn’t one. If he was in the basement it was probably against his will. “Come on,” she urged. “Aaron is this way.”

  The Guardian stood, staring, shaking his head. “I must see you to safety, far from this place.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without Aaron.” She looked again at the activity outside. What was Samsiel so freaked out about? “It’s just a moon ceremony.” Witches from all sorts of covens did a variation of it.

  He turned to her then and she took a step back. His eyes flashed, bright as a sparkler on the 4th
of July. It burned her retinas, leaving firework afterimages when she blinked. “I do not believe so. I must halt their progress.”

  “You can stop them after we find Aaron.”

  The muscles of Samsiel’s jaws jumped. Through clenched teeth, he said, “Make haste.”

  Maeve threw open the basement door and started down the steps, leaving Samsiel no choice but to follow her. He closed the door behind them, keeping others out. As the room below ground came into view, Maeve screamed. Samsiel whirled around and clamped a hand on her mouth, moving so fast he caught all but a sliver of sound.

  Aaron lay facedown on a white marble altar in the middle of the dirt room. His extremities were chained to huge iron rings staked into the floor pulling them in unnatural angles. Blood covered deep, black scores in his skin, indicating trauma he had endured. His head was turned toward them but Maeve wished she could unsee his face.

  Samsiel put himself between her and the horror. The giant approached the prostrate man slowly. Gripping the iron band around Aaron’s wrists with both of his hands, he straightened the manacles like they were made of clay. Then he obliterated the shackles binding Aaron’s feet.

  There was no chance Aaron could survive this: Maeve was sure. Red liquid filled the grooves in the altar and pooled in the cisterns on each of the four corners. No one lost that much blood and survived. As if hearing Maeve’s thoughts Samsiel said, “He has only moments.”

  She clutched her stomach as it rolled, threatening to vacate its contents. “Please, Samsiel, we have to get him to a healer.”

  “It is too late, Holy Mother.”

  Dodging around Samsiel to Aaron, she collapsed beside the altar. She ignored the way the gravel dug into her knees and took Aaron’s hand, sticky with drying blood, in her own.

  “I’ll die without him,” she stated without explanation. She could have lived without him before, could have muddled her way through a loveless existence, but now that he’d been given to her, the image of living without was brutal. Her free hand clenched a sharp rock; the pain gave her something to focus on other than the future awaiting her.

  So little kept her whole. Skin was thin, easily penetrated. As hers tightened, she considered how simple it would be to slice through and release herself from this pain.

  Samsiel’s hand closed around hers, pried her fingers open and removed the rock causing her to consider the ease of suicide. “I could deliver him from death,” Samsiel murmured.

  Spinning her head around Maeve said, “Do it.” If he could heal, what was he waiting on?

  Samsiel hesitated. “Ereshkigal’s Law forbids it.”

  Maeve’s religious studies flashed to mind. Ereshkigal was the Mesopotamian goddess of death, queen of the underworld, older sister to Ishtar. Bringing someone back from near-death would fit within her rights to forbid but Maeve didn’t care. “Do. It.”

  Samsiel bowed his acquiescence. The massive man bit his own wrist and held the dripping appendage over Aaron’s mutilated back.

  “What the hell!” Would this night’s surprises ever end? The Guardian used blood magic? She wasn’t sure it could be used for good. Her mind changed as she watched a drip of Guardian blood fall into a groove on Aaron’s back. It sealed and healed as it rolled.

  Aaron took a ragged breath and opened his good eye. “Maeve,” he said, but it came out garbled. “Shouldn’t be here.” His gaze moved from Maeve’s face up to where the Guardian stood over her. “They…want her.” Then his muscles spasmed and he let out an agonizing yell that would have been loud if he’d had air instead of blood in his lungs.

  “Poison,” Samsiel explained. “My blood is ablutionary. It cleanses impurities.”

  A crimson flood purged from Aaron’s mouth and puddled onto the altar. He gurgled as milky froth boiled up out of newly reopened cuts on his back; the poison was being pushed from his body. His back arched, the angle so severe it threatened to snap.

  Samsiel kept Aaron’s head from banging against the altar as the convulsions began. When they ended, Samsiel used the edge of his cloak to gently wipe away the poison.

  This time, when Aaron tried to speak, he choked and coughed, but it sounded dryer.

  “Shhh…”

  Aaron didn’t listen. “…They will kill you…old gods step through when veil cut…reclaim power…”

  Aaron’s face went slack and his eye closed. Maeve shrieked, “Aaron?”

  “What did he say?” Maeve jumped at the stranger’s rumbling voice. She whirled around to see that four large men, dressed in leather cloaks similar to Samsiel’s, had joined them. She hadn’t heard them come down the stairs.

  Samsiel said, “We are under attack, brothers. The Shinar have found a vessel and will attempt to come through.”

  One of the new Guardians spoke to Samsiel in a strange guttural language Maeve didn’t recognize. His voice lilted at the end. A question. Samsiel answered him, “The location of the DakuAhu is only known to one and he has been imprisoned for five centuries.” He gestured toward Aaron. “Drink of the Holy Father. They may already have succeeded in opening a portal.”

  The four Guardians moved toward Aaron and Maeve leaped to her feet. “Get back! No one is drinking from Aaron.”

  Samsiel spoke in the gentlest tone Maeve had ever heard from him. “No one will harm the Holy Father. He is mine…my family. He has my blood.” He gestured to the cisterns, one on each of the corners of the altar. “They require that which he already shed. The ceremony happening must be halted using the same with which it originated.”

  Taking up all four, Samsiel passed out the reservoirs of blood to the newcomers. They drank deeply, draining them quickly. Maeve pressed the back of her hand to her lips. Saliva filled her mouth and she swallowed a few times but her stomach didn’t want it. It flipped in rebellion and she dry-heaved.

  Samsiel turned her from the sight and loosely draped one side of his cloak over her shoulders. When his touch would normally have shocked her, this time it soothed. His humming made her think of children’s laughter and her nausea dissipated. Maeve kept her eyes on the shallow rise and fall of Aaron’s back.

  “You must take this night from them both. It is not safe for them to remember.” One of the others spoke to Samsiel, but Maeve paid no attention. Reaching down she picked a loose flake of dried blood from Aaron’s back, revealing new pink skin beneath.

  Samsiel sighed. His cloak spread out behind him morphing into giant bat-like wings. Carefully he hoisted Aaron onto his shoulders in a fireman’s hold, then wrapped his arm around Maeve’s waist and lifted her feet from the ground as if she weighed nothing.

  Shock registered and Maeve struggled in his grasp. This was so wrong! What in Goddess name was Samsiel? What sort of demon had the Daughters let into their lives? Darkness covered them as Samsiel wrapped his wings around the three of them. Peace washed over her and her struggling stopped. She looked up into Samsiel’s glowing crystalline eyes and knew him as the angel he was.

  She lost herself in his intense gaze. There was a crash above them and debris hit the leathery appendages sheltering them. The night’s events played backward in her mind into a place she couldn’t access. Wind rushed around her and she looked down to see the SOFE house below them, a gaping hole in its roof. She closed her eyes as they flew.

  When she opened them, she stood outside Aaron’s condo. Blinking rapidly she tried to remember getting here. She must have driven from the Daughters’ compound to Aaron’s on autopilot, completely spaced out. Samsiel stood behind her, waiting. Knocking brought no one. Finding the door unlocked, she opened it, heard the shower running, and went right in.

  Fuck you, assholes! I’m going to kick the shit out of you cocksuckers!”

  A steady stream of obscenities started pouring out of Tara Kay’s mouth as soon as the SOFE had magically bound her and had not stopped since.

  “Dry it up,” she commanded the girl crying beside her. Worthless fucking water witches, Kay thought.

  She knew that
tracking spell was in the tea Ingrid had given her, but she had evaded it. Damn it, she was fucking stupid. If she got free, she was going to be less stubborn. Maybe even beg the Abbess to forgive her and take her back. If she ever got free.

  She looked at her legs again. Her feet were sunk down in the soggy earth up to her ankles. Blood saturated the ground in a large circle. It splashed red up on her legs when the girl on her other side struggled. Good for you, fire witch, she thought. At least she was trying something, even if it was futile.

  Tara Kay couldn’t lift her feet from the earth. She couldn’t turn or run or back away. The only direction not magically prohibited was forward, toward that fucking pervert who danced around fighting invisible enemies with a white and red dagger. There was no way she was getting closer to that psycho.

  I’m going to get killed by fucking Don Quixote, she thought.

  A thin trail of light replaced the knife’s trail. A tiny pinpoint of light, resembling a falling star, grew longer and wider. It was beautiful, and it called to her. Tara Kay stood transfixed.

  The gap widened, pulled open from the inside by hands made of light. Tara Kay filled with elation as one hand reached toward her. Then she felt her magic shudder and pulse toward the hand. That thing with the glowing hand pulled, stealing a part of her that was as real as her appendages.

  She shrieked as her ability was torn from her.

  The SOFE standing around the circle guarding them began to scream in horror as well. Their screeches joined those of their captives, creating a symphony of agony. One thought penetrated that sound, filling her mind with the rage of the glowing beings: The Gods of Old wanted what had been stolen from them.